Brazil Indians Win Historic Court Case
From Environmental Defense Fund
September 15, 2000
WASHINGTON -
(15 September, 2000 -- Washington) A federal appeals court in Brasilia today decided that the government must compensate the Panará Indians in Mato Grosso and Pará states in the Brazilian Amazon for damages and losses they suffered when a road was built through their land in the early 1970s. Some 80% of the Panará died of diseases introduced by outsiders due to the project. The decision, upholding the 1997 federal district court decision in the case, marks the first time that the courts have held the government liable for failure to carry out Indian protection laws. The approximately 200 Panará are to receive more than $500,000 in damages.
"This historic victory means that indigenous groups whose rights were abused have recourse," said Environmental Defense anthropologist Stephan Schwartzman, who has worked with the Panará since 1980. "It also means that these peoples can hold their government accountable in the future."
Numbering perhaps five million when Portuguese explorers first arrived in 1500, Brazil's Indians were reduced by wars, slaving and above all diseases to some 200,000 by the mid-twentieth century. The Panará were among dozens of indigenous societies violently affected by the military government's development programs in the Amazon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Panará were officially contacted by the government only after a road had been cut through their territory in 1973. Most of the Panará died of diseases brought by outsiders, and in 1974, 79 dispirited survivors were removed from their traditional land and sent to a distant reservation. On the verge of cultural - and physical - extinction, the Panará regrouped, and over the next 15 years slowly reasserted their independent identity.
In 1991, a group of Panará revisited their traditional lands for the first time and found that a large part had been reduced to a malarial moonscape by the Brazilian gold rush and occupied by cattle ranches.
They also found that the headwaters of their most important water source, the Iriri river, remained intact. The Panará sought the support of environmental and indigenous rights groups, the Instituto Socioambiental, the Rainforest Foundation and Environmental Defense and reoccupied the area, interrupting its illegal subdivision for sale by a group of ranchers and speculators. In 1993, the group sued the government for recognition of their land rights and for losses and damages suffered. The Minister of Justice declared the 1.2 million acre area theirs in 1996. The 200 Panará currently live in the village of Nansepotiti, in their traditional lands.
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