An Eventful Week in Brazil: Argentine Agreements, Challenging China, and a Major Court Ruling in Indigenous Rights

Brazil and Argentina met this week to re-affirm their economic and political relations. The meeting itself sounded innocuous enough - standard diplomatic promises to "iron out" some minor trade issues over things like import licenses on shoes and textiles (exciting!), as well as Brazil signing a deal with Argentina to help with the recent nationalization of Aerolineas Argentinas.

While that all seems minor enough, the language on China coming out of a business leaders' meeting between reps from both countries during Presidents Kirchner's visit was far more interesting. It's no secret to anybody that China has become a growing power in trade with Latin America. However, not all that trade is good, even for Latin America, as it has also been flooded with inexpensive products that undercut national economies in South and Central America, and reps from that meeting between the two countries didn't pull punches in mentioning China's role in the hemisphere, either commenting:

“The objective now is to fight against the common evil, Chinese products which are sold at dumping prices[...] With bilateral differences back on the right track, we must address the outside enemy."

That's some pretty tough talk there for an issue that hasn't really come up yet. Of course the Argentine and Brazilian business leaders who met have their own interests to defend, and Chinese products no doubt cut into their market somewhat. Nonetheless, even if criticisms of Chinese products undercutting local companies in South America seems fair enough, referring to China as "the outside enemy" raises eyebrows a bit. If this had come from Kirchner's or Lula's mouth, it would be even more shocking and newsworthy, but even as it stands right now, it does hint at future issues facing Latin American economies as they try to increase relations with China without having their own national companies and economies being undermined by cheaper Chinese products.

Also in Brazil, the Supreme Court refused to split up an indigenous reserve half the size of Belgium in the Amazon. White farmers had insisted it was too much land for the twenty-thousand indigenous inhabitants, while logging, mining, and agricultural companies had said the reservation's existence (required in the 1988 constitution) was "an obstacle to growth."

This is a major victory for indigenous rights and the environment in Brazil, and I have absolutely no sympathy for either the farmers nor the corporations. The damage farmers, miners, loggers, and agribusiness have caused in the Amazon is already irreparable, and the cycle probably won't end without measures like the court's ruling. While indigenous people will still obviously need to cultivate the land in ways they seem fit, and while I hate essentialist notions of indigenous peoples as being "in harmony" with the earth, I think it's a fair bet that they will manage the forest in the reserve better than logging and mining companies do - hell, by simply not clearing hundreds of acres a month, they'd be managing the environment better than the corporations. It's also a huge victory for re-affirming indigenous rights in Brazil, which often go unheeded in a society that considers itself a wide spectrum of racial mixture, but which often leaves indigenous peoples out of the equation in the present even while acknowledging their past.

The ruling won't just make all of the entanglements and problems go away. Violence will persist, and even some indigenous peoples don't like the ruling and feel it perpetuates racist stereotypes by trying to keep the indigenous communities "cut off from modernity." Nonetheless, the importance of this legal precedent cannot and should not be ignored, either. The Constitution of 1988 said that indigenous peoples were to get their traditional lands back, and when the businesses and farmers, miners and loggers, pushed and pushed, trying to effectively undo the constitution, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution stands, and the reserves cannot be split up. And that alone is a major step for indigenous rights in Brazil. We can only hope it leads to real gains for the communities, the environment, and Brazil overall.

The Amazon, Indigenous Rights, and A Brazilian General's Complete Failure to Understand the Constitution

Randy points us to this story about Brazil's Amazon policy and brewing tensions. To summarize: a little-known (to the rest of the world) part of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 states that ancestral indigenous lands, including in the Amazon, were to be returned to the indigenous groups within 5 years. While that hasn't happened, Brazil has been making efforts, slowly but surely, to see this happen. However, in the Amazonian region in particular, there has been escalating violence as the government tries to evict people living on lands that are owed, as the constitution declared, to indigenous groups. In order to complete these efforts, the military has been brought in, but apparently, at least one member of the Army in the region is less than pleased with the government's efforts:

"At a raucous seminar on national sovereignty at Rio de Janeiro's Military Club, the head of Army's Amazon command, Gen. Augusto Heleno Pereira, attacked the federal government's indigenous policy as ''regretful and chaotic.'' He even suggested that the army would refuse to remove the settlers."

''The Brazilian army does not serve the government but rather the Brazilian state,'' Pereira said.

Um, no.

Randy is exactly right in explaining how flawed this logic is:

Brazil's constitution calls for all ancestral indigenous lands to be demarcated and turned over to their respective tribes. Pereira serves the Brazilian state and the state is defined by the constitution. A military man who doesn't understand that has no business being in the military.

And it doesn't stop there: when democratically-elected Brazilian jurists wrote a new constitution in 1988 (3 years after the end of the dictatorship), they were especially careful to be explicit and detailed in outlining the military's role within the state, and how the military's role is to defend the functioning of all branches of the state, especially the presidency, regardless of political party. In short: constitutionally speaking, in Brazil, the military can never again (as long as this Constitution survives) overthrow a "government" to save the "state"; any time the office of the presidency, regardless of what party represents it, is threatened, the military's job is to protect the functioning of the executive branch and the state, and not to overthrow it the president and assume control itself.

It's disturbing enough that a high-ranking officer doesn't seem to get the constitutional role of the Brazilian military. But really, this is only one reason Pereira's statements are so disturbing. Back in 1964, when the military overthrew Joao Goulart, they used a similar logic. At the time, as Brazil's economy was struggle and the cold-war ideologies led right-wing forces to believe that anything from the left was "communist," the military decided to overthrow the leftist Goulart and take control of the country. Their logic at the time was that Goulart was leading the country to a civil war (the same phrase that the author uses at the beginning of this Amazonian article, I'd poinit out), and that the only way to "save" Brazil was for the military to "overthrow the government to save the state." Of course, the military then went on to entrench itself in power through 5 presidencies, authorizing torture and the murder of "subversives" and rewriting the constitution not once but twice, all in the name of "defending the state."

Of course, it's unclear if Pereira's opinions and comments reflect any broader military brass beliefs he could be a lone voice within the higher ranks of the armed forces. And I'm certainly not saying that Brazil is on the cusp of another military overthrow of the elected leader and/or a dictatorship simply because the military used similar reasoning to justify its 1964 coup of Joao Goulart and its 21-year-long dictatorship. Any time a military official anywhere in the world says the things Pereira said is disturbing, but given the history of this line of thinking and Brazil's recent history (the dictatorship only ended 23 years ago), Pereira's "logic" is really, really disturbing. I'm fully with Randy on this - Pereira should be kicked out. This won't happen, and he very well may have been privately censured already within the armed forces, simply because many do not want to ever see the military involved in politics again.