Spensy Pimentel
Reporter - Agência Brasil

Alto Xingu - By the end of 2006, the government should reach a total of 100 homologated indigenous territories during the current presidential term, according to an estimate made by the president of the National Indian Foundation (Funai), Mércio Pereira Gomes. "Up to the present, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has already ratified 54 areas. Ten more homologations should be signed by the end of this year," he says. Gomes participated last Thursday (25) and Friday (26) in the Kuarup ceremony, to honor the illustrious dead, in Ipatse, a Kuikuro Indian village in the southern part of the Xingu Indian Park, in Mato Grosso.

Gomes says that, for the process of recognizing Indian lands to be definitively concluded in Brazil, there are still around 160 territories left altogether (100 in the process of being demarcated and 60 still in the phase of being identified). When it is all done, the president of the Funai estimates that 12.5% of the country's territory will officially be considered indigenous land. "No other country in the world has this. No other Latin America country has a 95-year old republican Indianist tradition as we do. Even Mexico, which has 12 million Indians, only recognizes 5% of its territory as indigenous," he affirms. According to Gomes, Brazil currently has 440 thousand Indians, distributed among 220 nations that speak 170 different languages.

The president of the Funai judges that this amount of land "is neither a little nor a lot; what there is is an imbalance." He recalls that 95% of the homologated indigenous lands, in terms of area, are located in the Amazon region, and he says that only one more territory with a large extension, the Tombetas-Mapuera territory, containing 3.97 million hectares in the state of Amazonas, is expected to be demarcated. On the other hand, he points out that an indigenous territory that has been the object of a property rights struggle for 70 years, the Caramuru-Pagaguassu area in Ilhéus (BA), should shortly be homologated in favor of the Pataxó tribe. Gomes says that area was demarcated in the decade of the 1930's and that the Military Police of Bahia used the 1935 Communist Uprising as a pretext for combatting the head of the Indian Protection Service (SPI) post responsible for the demarcation.

Translation: David Silberstein