PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva walked up the ramp of the Presidential Palace arm in arm with Cacique Raoni, one of Brazil’s most prominent Indigenous leaders, he was carrying high expectations from traditional communities. 

Raoni’s presence at Lula’s inauguration in January 2023 was one more sign of the latter’s commitment to Brazil’s Indigenous peoples and a relief for the end of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. In his four years in charge, from 2019-2022, Bolsonaro didn’t recognize the demarcation of a single new Indigenous territory, and empowered criminal groups invading existing ones. 

The new administration made some significant changes, starting with the creation of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, led by Sônia Guajajara. Another respected Indigenous woman, Joênia Wapichana, took charge of the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, Funai. At the same time, environmental agents were back on the ground fighting illegal gold miners and loggers. 

One of the Indigenous communities’ great demands, however, was the demarcation of territories that had been waiting for decades in the Brazilian bureaucracy. Even before Lula took charge, a technical group created by the newly elected administration and composed of Indigenous leaders and civil society representatives identified 13 Indigenous areas to be homologated in his first 100 days in office.

“These territories were ready to be homologated, all that was needed was for the president to take his pen out of the drawer and sign,” Juliana de Paula Batista, a lawyer at Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), an NGO that advocates for the rights of Indigenous, Quilombola and extractivist communities, told Mongabay. “All that was needed was political will.” 

But it took Lula longer than 100 days to sign off on the whole batch. On Dec. 4, nearly two years after his inauguration, the president finally approved three new Indigenous lands, bringing to 13 the total since he took office. “If one day they ask me what my legacy is as president, I’ll say, ‘the guy who authorized the most Indigenous lands in this country,'” Lula said at the signing ceremony. He also promised more to come in his next two years in office. 

Despite achieving the goal of 13 homologations, one territory is still pending from the initial list, since one of those demarcated by Lula wasn’t on the list. The missing one is the Xukuru-Kariri Indigenous Territory, home to the Xukuru-Kariri people, in Alagoas state, in Brazil’s northeast. Lula had promised to homologate the territory by mid-December, but missed that deadline. 

In an email to Mongabay, the president’s office stated “the issue is still under discussion between the federal and Alagoas governments,” and that “the Federal Administration is working to finalize the process soon.”

Lula attributed the delays in part to the controversial marco temporal bill, a piece of legislation passed by the agribusiness caucus in parliament that set a cutoff date for establishing Indigenous territories: under the legislation, only claimant communities who can prove they occupied their territories in 1988, when Brazil’s Constitution was approved, can go through the demarcation process. 

Though ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2023, the legislation was approved by parliament just days later, in a legal clash that led to the paralysis of many demarcation processes. “We don’t want to promise you something today and then read in the newspaper tomorrow that the courts have ruled against it. The frustration would be greater,” Lula said in April 2024, referring to the legal uncertainty created by the marco temporal. 

For the ISA’s Batista, however, Lula’s difficulty in negotiating with a highly conservative National Congress also played a major role in this delay. “There was great expectation that things would move faster,” she said. 

Demarcating Indigenous lands is key to Lula’s goal of bringing the deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon to zero by 2030, since those territories are the best-preserved parts of the rainforest. It would also help consolidate Brazil’s role in the fight for climate change, especially as the country prepares to host the next United Nations climate summit, COP30, in 2025 in the Amazonian city of Belém. 

According to the ISA, there are 261 Indigenous territories waiting to be formally recognized, with the process usually taking more than 30 years to be completed.It involves many steps, including extensive studies, the physical demarcation of the territory, and homologation by the president, which ensures the exclusive possession of that land for the community. How quickly each step can be concluded, however, depends mostly on the willingness of the government in power. 

“The political issue is the main obstacle to demarcation,” Batista said. “But there is also a lack of resources to put technicians in the field to carry out the identification and delimitation studies.”

The demarcation process for the Morro dos Cavalos Indigenous Territory, one of those homologated earlier this month, began in the 1990s. In the ensuing decades, the Guarani Mbya and the Guarani Ñandeva peoples living in the area continued to suffer from invasions of their land and prejudice.  

“From the moment the demarcation process began, we started suffering persecution, especially from politicians,” Kerexu Yxapyry, the leader of the territory, told Mongabay. “There were lots of articles in the local media about the ‘Paraguayan Indians.’ They said that we had been brought from Paraguay by Funai and let loose on the highway,” she added, referring to misinformation deliberately spread in the state of Santa Catarina, where the territory is located.

Morro dos Cavalos is located on the Atlantic coast of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil. It’s a location long coveted by real estate developers, who have sought to get rid of the community. “I suffered many death threats. At dawn, I would hear people shooting at my house,” Yxapyry said.

Now, she said, she hopes her people can finally access public policies denied them for decades by the Brazilian state, such as education, health care and security. “The homologation legitimizes this territory as the traditional territory of the Guarani people,” Yxapyry said. “For us, this is the moment of freedom when we can walk through our territory with greater security.”

Banner image: On Dec. 4, 2024, Brazilian President Lula signed the homologation of three Indigenous territories, bringing to 13 that he’s demarcated since taking office in January 2023. Image courtesy of Ricardo Stuckert/Office of the Brazilian Presidency. 

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