Situation of Indigenous Peoples in Mato Grosso do Sul
+ INDIGENIST MISSIONARY COUNCIL - CIMI
helping to prosper specific economic sectors linked to big capital.
This developmental policy, enriching contractors, logging, mining
companies, agribusiness, tourism sectors and companies of
hydraulic and nuclear power generation can be exemplified by the
works of transposition of the waters of the Sao Francisco River,
the Madeira River Hydroelectric complex, rio Xingú (Belo Monte
HYDROELECTRIC POWER PLANT), the Tocantins River and the
other hydroelectric plants under construction or planned in the
rivers Tapajós, Juruena, Teles Pires and Araguaia, as well as the
construction and duplication of highways. There are more than
500 projects that touch on indigenous territories and generate
impacts on 182 lands of at least 108 people. The communities are
denied the right to give an opinion, to participate in decisions and
to exercise any type of control - in General, rights also denied to
Brazilian society.
The works also benefit, and to a large degree, contractors,
banks, financial conglomerates and speculators of floating capital,
nothing concerned with local impact, since natural resources were
incorporated as inputs to a large global market. Not by chance,
banks and contractors achieved higher profitability in the last two
decades. For all those who do not fit the profile of customers and
consumers, is left the onus, the dramatic deterioration of living
conditions, since the greatest part of public resources is piped to
the CAP; already scarce resources intended for public policy are
restricted in order to ensure unrestricted surplus and reforms
based on pós-neoliberal theses..
In relation to indigenous peoples, not even the meager budgetary
resources (provided for assistance in health, education, sanitation,
disease prevention, land demarcation, among other actions) have
been applied in their entirety, thus demonstrating that the lives of
these populations are not regarded as a priority. It can be said that
the production of this unilateral model of development, based on
the strengthening of economic sectors seen as strategic submits
other segments of the population to the residual condition. Thus,
indigenous peoples and their specific rights are seen as useless,
unadaptable, socially undesirable and unnecessary. It is within
this logic, at the present time, that various pronouncements have
been made in defense of agribusiness, stating the incompetence
of the indigenous communities in the management of the natural
resources of their territories and the enormous potential that
would represent if they were in the hands of those who would
make these lands "in fact produce".
The contemporary extermination Decree has therefore support
in arguments that are at the same time ethnocentric - from the
lens of the dominant and developmentalist - and anthropocentric
- with disregard for the importance of other beings, animals, plants
in favor of expanding agricultural frontiers for the monoculture of
grains, biofuels production, planting of eucalyptus trees, livestock
on a large scale. It is noteworthy that major economic enterprises
impact not only the lives of indigenous peoples, as well as the lands,
waters, forests, threatening the ecological balance.
And there is a high price to pay for the projection of a single
model of economic development which, in practice, strengthens
just large capitalists without due care for the social context. The
deregulation of certain industries, the weakening of environmental
laws, the dismantling of labor legislation, disregarding the
constitutional precepts, the delay in the procedures of demarcation
of the indigenous lands: are deliberate strategies undertaken by
the Government, with consequences for the lives of hundreds of
people.
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