Brazil’s highest court has decided unanimously to accept an appeal from an indigenous forest tribe that has been fighting for access to its original ancestral lands for decades. While lawyers hailed this as a significant decision because it means the Guarani Kaiowá will be able to speak on their own behalf for the first time, it seems unlikely they will ever be able to return to their traditional ways because of the way in which those lands have been developed.
The Guarani-Kaiowa claim to the Guyraroka land was recognized in 2004 and the federal agency that demarcates land began that process in 2009. But the process went slowly, with threats, denied access to land, and agribusiness pressure on the government. In 2014, the court ruled against their land claim on the ‘catch-22’ basis that the tribe had not been living on the land when the Brazilian constitution came into force in 1988.
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