Where the Earth Touches the Sky: The Xavante Indians' Struggle for Land in Brazil, 1951-1979

Abstract

In 1951 landowners and their thugs launched an attack on the Xavante Indians in the village of Parabubu in northeastern Mato Grosso. Parabubu was one of several Xavante villages in the region between the Couto Magalhães and Culuene rivers not yet peacefully contacted, or “pacified,” by the Brazilian government. A seminomadic and warrior nation of the Gê lingustic group, the Xavante had shunned contact with outsiders for a century, killing those who encroached upon their territory (see figure 1).1 Coveting Xavante land, the landowners resolved to “pacify” the Indians as they saw fit. In the raid several Indians were killed, scores were wounded, and houses were burned.2The Xavante would scatter in search of assistance. Some of the communities fled hundreds of miles westward to the Simões Lopes and Batovi posts administered by the government Indian bureau, Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (hereafter SPI). Others would find safety at the missions of Sangradouro and São Marcos operated by the Salesians, who arrived in Mato Grosso several decades earlier to Christianize indigenous people. The landowners succeeded in their endeavors: by 1958 the entire Xavante population of the Couto Magalhães-Culuene region had been driven into exile.Like other Brazilian indigenous groups, the post-contact history of the Xavante has been marked by death, dispossession, and despair. It is, sadly, a commonplace that Amazonian Indians have been the victims of twentieth- century frontier expansion and economic development.3 This article, however, explores a concomitant outgrowth of such trauma: indigenous mobilization, galvanized under Brazilian military rule, to recover ancestral lands. During the 1970s the Xavante waged a relentless battle to reclaim their territory in the Couto Magalhães-Culuene region, since occupied and deforested by cattle ranchers, land speculators, and small colonists.4 Their struggle was not unique; it mirrored that of other indigenous communities who have pressured the Brazilian government to create or enlarge reserves and expel invaders.5 However, the effort at Couto Magalhães-Culuene is rather remarkable because indigenous people entirely banished from, rather than encircled within, pre-contact lands attempted to recover usurped territory.6 This essay revisits the historical stage on which the Xavante battle was fought.Although anthropologists and sociologists have produced illuminating studies of Brazilian Indians, historical research on indigenous people remains embryonic.7 The marginalization of Indians subsequent to the early colonial period within Brazilian historical narrative and analysis reflects the broader tradition in which native Americans have been cast as bygone relics or folkloric curiosities rather than as ongoing products and producers of historical outcomes. The lacuna derives from trends more specific to Brazilian historiography as well. The myth of racial democracy celebrating racial mixture and harmony in lustering Brazilian sociocultural formation, although debunked by researchers, undoubtedly managed to obscure or romanticize the realities of indigenous peoples, as it has elsewhere in Latin America.8 Moreover, for the postcolonial period, historical research has overwhelmingly focused on the northeastern and southeastern regions, due to their political, economic, demographic, and intellectual preponderance in shaping national development. The central-western and northern/Amazonian regions—home to the majority of the nation’s small native population of approximately 300,000—have been given short shrift, rendering indigenous history less visible. In recent years a number of scholars have sought to retrieve the Brazilian indigenous experience from the dustbin of history, revisiting the archives in order to reincorporate the disappeared into regional and national narratives.9This essay seeks to focus further Brazil’s blurred indigenous past, centering Xavante political mobilization within an analytical purview of longstanding interest to historians: the processes of capital accumulation and state formation. Indeed, the incorporation of indigenous populations and territories into the nation-state in the context of Amazonian frontier expansion was fundamental to the growth of Brazil’s regional and national economy and its emergence as a continental power in the late twentieth century. To wit, Brazilian frontier expansion has been marked by contested physical and political terrain, mediated by violence, bureaucracy, and the law.10 As the Xavantes’ struggle will elucidate, the fate of indigenous lands and communities in Amazonia evolved out of the conflicts and negotiations among state officials, indigenous peoples, local elites, peasants and squatters, church leaders, members of civil society and international human rights groups—a dynamic interplay that shifted with the transition from democratic to military rule, and from one authoritarian period to another.Under the military governments, the consolidation of state power in once peripheral areas, such as Mato Grosso, dramatically transformed indigenous communities. The primitive accumulation embodied in the attack at Parabubu— countenanced by local and national governments nested within and reproducing capitalist social relations—would give way to systematic federal-backed assaults entailing fiscal incentives to corporate investors, road-building projects, and national security operations. Yet if the basic logic of frontier appropriation persisted, the political rules for indigenous peoples varied significantly. Indians, legal wards of the federal government, endeavored to benefit from fortified state power, enlisting the backing of their beefed up—if untrustworthy— “guardian” to protect their communities. The Xavante certainly were victims of capitalist accumulation on the expanding western frontier, but in manipulating, challenging, and amending the Amazonian developmental policies of the military government, indigenous people may be seen as victors as well.The Parabubu massacre and the surrender of ancestral territory in the Couto Magalhães-Culuene region revealed the shortcomings of the SPI, entrusted with the protection of indigenous communities and lands. Although the Brazilian Constitution of 1946 guaranteed indigenous people territorial possession where they were “permanently located,” several factors impeded effective enforcement. Whether strapped for funds, hobbled by poor infrastructure, undermined by corrupt or ineffectual bureaucrats, or confronted by hostile Indians, the SPI foundered in its mission to defend indigenous communities.11 Furthermore, the federal government faced fierce resistance from local elites under Brazil’s then-democratic political system.State governments were granted dominion over unoccupied public land (terra devoluta) since the Constitution of 1891, and knowingly or unwittingly transacted indigenous land as public land.12 The ambiguous legal status of indigenous lands facilitated such sleight-of-hand: until the federal government reserved indigenous land, Indians were de facto occupants of terra devoluta. Although the SPI regularly appealed to state governments to honor indigenous territory, its cries went unheeded. In fact, jurisdictional overlaps and poorly-defined competences between national and subnational government, such as those concerning indigenous lands, facilitated the bargaining and shifting alliances that undergirded Brazilian democratic politics between 1946 and 1964.13In less economically developed regions, such as Mato Grosso, public (and indigenous) land sales filled state coffers, rewarded political clientele, and cemented electoral support. In 1956 the state governor turned away Xavante refugees seeking assistance who arrived in the capital, Cuiabá, accompanied by a local landowner.14 Indeed, the state of Mato Grosso sold off most of the Xavante land in the Couto Magalhães-Culuene region between 1958 and 1960. A contingent of five Xavante Indians who returned to the Couto Magalhães region from the Salesian mission in 1961 were consigned to a miserable patch of land in their former homeland.15Indian policy would be overhauled by the military government following the 1964 coup in its drive to develop Amazônia Legal (Legal Amazon), an area of over five million kilometers occupying nearly two-thirds of Brazilian territory, including northern Mato Grosso.16 With its sparse population, precarious infrastructure, indefensible international borders, and tenuous links to Brazil’s economic and demographic core, Amazonia was long viewed by military officials as vulnerable to foreign invasion and communist infiltration. To protect and develop the vast interior, national security doctrine prioritized territorial integration through extensive transportation and communication networks, colonization, agricultural modernization, and effective utilization of natural resources.17The expansion of agricultural production into Brazil’s last frontier, the Amazon, was upheld as a springboard for economic growth and industrial output. Indeed, the military championed agricultural “rationalization” as the means to overcome food crises and economic bottlenecks of the early 1960s, promote cheaper food for cities, new markets for industry, and sustained growth through export diversification. Amazonian colonization would further serve to stem increased rural to urban migration while circumventing agrarian reform.18The military’s Amazonian development strategy would entail an alliance between the state and private capital that shifted patterns of surplus appropriation in the region. In 1966 the military enacted legislation stipulating a series of tax breaks and fiscal incentives to corporate investors in Amazônia Legal. Projects approved by the Superintendência da Amazônia (hereafter SUDAM)— the superintendency entrusted with coordinating and executing federal policy in the Legal Amazon—qualified for financing at low interest rates of up to 75 percent of their value by the Banco de Amazônia (hereafter BASA). Up to 50 percent of tax revenues incurred elsewhere in Brazil could be deducted for investment in agricultural, ranching, and industrial ventures in the Amazon; all SUDAM-backed projects established in Amazônia Legal before 1982 would enjoy 50 percent exemption on income tax while those founded before 1972 (later extended to 1975) were completely exempt.19 Between 1968 and 1975, extra-regional interests held 95 percent of all tax-credit options in Amazônia Legal—with São Paulo-based corporations accounting for 60 percent— signaling the extension of industrial and financial capital into the frontier.20The developmental model promoted by the military government unleashed an onslaught on Xavante territory, which lay within Amazônia Legal. Between 1966 and 1970 SUDAM approved 66 projects for cattle ranches in the northern matogrossense counties of Barra do Garças (home to the Xavante) and Luciara alone.21 Furthermore, between 1969 and 1973 the federal government invested heavily in the construction and maintenance of two highways linking Brasília to Cuiabá and Santarém, which facilitated transportation in northern and eastern Mato Grosso.22Yet for investors streaming into Mato Grosso and other areas of Amazônia Legal, the vastness of the region matched its complications: land titles were often imprecise, fraudulent, and superimposed (often multilayered); they were also contested by indigenous people, peasants, and even small towns.23 The military governments, pressured by multilateral lending institutions to regularize rural land titles as a prerequisite for economic investment and growth, would show greater resolve than their democratic predecessors in demarcating indigenous lands.24 Moreover, military officials worried that as long as demarcation languished the region remained prone to social conflict.25Aside from economic and strategic concerns, worldwide condemnation of Brazilian indigenous policy weighed on the military as well. In March 1968, Attorney General Jader Figueiredo publicized an investigation of the SPI that revealed atrocities committed against indigenous peoples.26 Although the military vowed to right past wrongs of the public sector—dismantling the SPI and creating the Fundação Nacional do Índio (hereafter FUNAI) in December 1967—many domestic and international critics of the military’s Amazonian policy were far from swayed. A worldwide uproar ensued, as the foreign press accused the Brazilian government of continuing to practice or condoning genocide. Seeking to “remove the indigenous problem from the headlines of Brazilian and foreign newspapers,” Minister of the Interior Albuquerque Lima met in July 1968 and April 1969 with the Xavante, Bororo, Karajá, and various Xingu communities to reiterate state determination to demarcate indigenous lands.27The president of FUNAI, José Queirós Campos, concurred, but noted that decades-old promises to the Xavante would not be easy to fulfill in the name of justice, economic growth, or foreign relations. Xavante territory had been all but sold off and titleholders showed “systematic opposition” towards FUNAI and the Indians.28 The exiles from Couto Magalhães-Culuene, for example, would have to contend with Fazenda Xavantina, a 109,922-hectare cattle ranch established on their ancestral land by two North Americans who amalgamated eleven properties between 1966 and 1968; in 1969, the fazenda was sold to General Clóvis Ribeiro Cintra, head of a Paraná-based transportation firm, Amurada Planning and Engineering, Inc.29 Furthermore, there were scores of medium- and small-sized landholdings in the region. To recover their lands, the Xavante faced a formidable challenge. So did the state in seeking to balance its commitment to the economic development and occupation of the Legal Amazon with its commitment to reserve indigenous lands.The Brazilian bureaucratic authoritarian regime sought to centralize power and restrict political participation, replacing populist as well as traditional politicians with a cadre of military officers, economists, engineers, and professional administrators entrusted with formulating and executing state policy. Through numerous “institutional” and “complementary acts,” the military strengthened the executive while weakening the legislature, and fortified the federal over subnational governments. In a sweeping fiscal reform package enacted in 1966 (later incorporated into the 1967 constitution), the military government increased the federal share of public service revenue from 63.9 percent to 72.9 percent between 1965 and 1975.30For indigenous people, wards of the federal government, the impact of such reforms was far-reaching. The Constitution of 1967, for example, defined Indian lands as federal territory, preempting the convoluted process (which the SPI faced) whereby Indians would be granted permanent and inalienable possession of their lands only after disaggregation from terra devoluta by local state governments. Furthermore, a 1969 constitutional amendment nullified deeds issued to Indian land and denied property indemnification to the titleholder.31 FUNAI’s broader legal jurisdiction, greater infrastructural capability, and stronger financial muscle meant that the demarcation of Indian lands would no longer depend overwhelmingly on the caprice of local politicians compromised by electoral deals and vested interests. Like the federal agencies entrusted with rural development, colonization, and road building, FUNAI embodied the growing hegemony of the state over the Amazonian frontier (and the countryside in general), and its efforts to foster capitalist growth and social consensus through bureaucratic administration.32For indigenous people, the state’s increased presence in the countryside penetrated like a double-edged sword. The Estatuto do Índio, adopted by the military government in 1973, obliged FUNAI to delimit all indigenous land within five years. The law, however, also sanctioned the relocation of Indians by presidential decree for the sake of “national development,” and allowed the state to contract third parties for mining on indigenous land.33 By promoting private investment, colonization, and transportation networks in the Amazon, the military would intensify invasion and environmental degradation of indigenous land. Indeed, the subordination of FUNAI to the Ministry of the Interior, which spearheaded the economic development devastating indigenous communities, spoke volumes. But in championing demarcation of indigenous territory and streamlining the process, the military state broke political ground for Indians to stake their claims.34 That the new and ambiguous rules of the game, then, might redound to the Xavantes’ benefit depended, in no small part, upon indigenous forbearance and ingenuity. For as the ongoing battle waged over indigenous reservations during the decade of the 1970s illustrates, the Xavante had something very different in mind than landowners or the state regarding the fate of their territory.In 1969 the Ministry of the Interior had allayed fazendeiros’ fears in the county of Barra do Garças by outlining plans for future Xavante reserves: “FUNAI is clarifying that in accord with the thought of the Minister [of Interior], the areas to be reserved for the Indians … will not prejudice the property of third parties, especially where there are agricultural/ranching and industrial properties.”35 That same year, in a meeting with representatives of the Association of Amazonian Entrepreneurs, Minister of Interior General Costa Cavalcanti declared: “the Indian has to remain with the minimum necessary.”36Expanded state power in Mato Grosso resulted in the decree of five Xavante reserves in 1972. And just as the military had promised, the indigenous territories were inadequate in size and quality. The Xavante at Couto Magalhães, for example, received 23,000 hectares of poor land. No territory at all was reserved for communities whose traditional lands lay nearer the Culuene river. From their once extensive homeland in the Couto Magalhães-Culuene region, the Xavante had received a pittance.State officials placed faith in “scientific processes”—technological uplift and the lure of the market—to persuade the Indians to set aside land claims. In a report to superiors in October 1971, FUNAI encarregado José Carlos Alves waxed ecstatic about the “advanced process of assimilation” of the community of seventy-six Xavante residing in the Couto Magalhães region under “chief ” Benedito Loazo (who had led back the original five Xavante in 1961). Alves celebrated the Indians’ proficiency in Portuguese, their Catholicism, and their artisanal work. Although he mentioned that “armed conflict” had nearly erupted between the Indians (“who say that they were here first in the area”) and the employees of the neighboring Fazenda Xavantina, Alves brushed aside indigenous territorial concerns. Instead, he called for a school to train Xavante men in mechanics, carpentry, and construction and women in sewing. With an optimism bound to please his superiors, he concluded “these Indians are exceptional and all FUNAI can do to invest in them will be sufficiently profitable and will yield one further happy initiative for FUNAI.”37But state officials and ranchers who hoped that the Xavante would resign themselves to territorial and legal confines would be woefully disappointed. In November 1972, 150 Xavante from the São Marcos mission relocated to the newly created reserve at Couto Magalhães. Alarmed by the hemorrhaging of the mission community, a FUNAI official, Reginaldo Flores, accompanied by a Salesian and a Xavante leader from Sangradouro, unsuccessfully coaxed the Indians to return.38With the Couto Magalhães reserve engorged by the exiles’ return, the Xavante faced a crisis in food supply and health care. In December 1972, the post chief at Couto Magalhães, whose model Indians had been praised a year before, fretted over their dissatisfaction with the new reservation:At the other Xavante reserves, communities went on the offensive as well. Using their well-honed hunting skills, men carried out strategic attacks on fazendas to evict invaders and to pressure the government to safeguard or enlarge indigenous reserves. For example, at the Sangradouro reserve, Xavante men raided two ranches that continued to graze cattle inside the reserve.40 Likewise, at the Pimentel Barbosa reserve, the Xavante looted goods from fazendeiros who refused to vacate the newly created reserve.41 These raids, while exploiting fears of Xavantes’ bellicosity, hardly represented indiscriminate acts of violence or unbridled rage. Cognizant that fazendeiros outgunned Xavante communities, chief Apoena at Pimentel Barbosa instructed warriors never to cause bodily harm, but merely to inflict material damage.42 Indeed, Manuel Pereira Brito, president of the Barra do Garças city council, told the state governor, that the Xavante “go around affirming that they are proceeding in this way, so that the foreign newspapers, through their headline news, pressure the Brazilian government to resolve the problem of their reservation lands.”43Whereas the Xavante had once secured their territory through sheer force, two decades of forced subordination to Brazilian society dictated a new strategy to reclaim land: political mobilization. Ceded rudimentary political and geographical terrain by the military government, the Xavantes’ greatest challenge loomed in reshaping state policy. Its solution lay in besieging the military through bureaucratic pressure, direct action, moral appeals, symbolic violence, and domestic and international alliances. Its solution lay in engaging and legitimizing the power of a state utterly repudiated only two decades earlier.If the Xavante of Couto Magalhães believed that their lands reached to “where the earth touches the sky,” opponents admonished FUNAI otherwise. Lest they had forgotten, General Clóvis Ribeiro Cintra, head of Fazenda Xavantina, sent a stern letter to the Ministry of the Interior in 1974 recounting a deal that he had struck two years earlier with then-Minister Costa Cavalcanti and FUNAI President Bandeira de Mello.In a mutual agreement, the ranch had ceded 5,000 hectares to enlarge the Couto Magalhães reservation then under study. This would allow FUNAI to appease the small Xavante community residing in the area. In return, the ranch received a certidão negativa, a document vouching that the bearer’s land did not encroach upon indigenous territory, allowing access to SUDAM fiscal incentives. Although the certidão negativa was designed to safeguard indigenous land rights, in practice its indiscriminate bestowal rewarded military clientele in the Legal Amazon and served as a source of bureaucratic graft. FUNAI’s award of a certidão negativa to the Fazenda Xavantina conformed to a steady pattern: between 1969 and 1977 FUNAI would issue 23 to titleholders whose lands lay within Xavante pre-contact territory in the Couto Magalhães-Culuene region.44Fazenda Xavantina profited from the arrangement: by 1979 the ranch would boast approximately ten thousand head of cattle pasturing on 6,750 hectares of pasture and one thousand hectares of rice harvested. Over three hundred kilometers of internal road had been constructed and more than four hundred kilometers fenced. Brush was razed, replaced by administrative buildings and residences, a dormitory and food hall, brickyards, silos, warehouses, sawmills, sheds, corrals, and an airstrip. Employees ranged between fifty and two hundred and their families, depending on seasonal demand.45Furthermore, according to Xavantina’s owner, as part of the agreement FUNAI had promised to block future Xavante migration to the reserve. Those already at Couto Magalhães were to be congregated at “Chief” Benedito Loazo’s village.46 Fazenda Xavantina’s insistence upon concentrating the Indi-ans under Benedito Loazo, whose village lay twelve kilometers from its administrative buildings, had little to do with concern for maintaining communal harmony. Rather, it reflected efforts to buttress the authority of Loazo, paid monthly “protection” money by Xavantina to dissuade the Indians from attacking cattle or demanding territorial annexation.47Whether refusing to vacate land encompassed by the Xavante reserves, restricting the Indians to small parcels, or thwarting new arrivals, fazendeiros in Mato Grosso would not readily surrender privilege. Wealthier landowners certainly had more options: appeals to influential friends in the government addressed the matter from the top; co-opting indigenous leaders tackled the problem from the bottom. Fazenda Xavantina also relied upon paternalistic gestures, offering to construct a clinic and provide medicine, ceding 38 alqueires to the Xavante to plant rice and corn, and contracting 22 Indians to plant grass for pasture.48Containing the Xavante, however, proved elusive, as the Indians would resort to direct action and bureaucratic lobbying. In December 1973, a group of 34 Xavante left the Batovi region where they had relocated twenty years earlier and returned to their pre-contact territory near the Culuene river, on the western side of Fazenda Xavantina. Under the 1972 decree, the government had failed to create a reserve for the Indians in the Culuene region. The untoward resurrection of the Xavante alarmed landowners and squatters who had since settled there, as well as FUNAI officials who pressured the Indians to turn back. In a telegram to headquarters, the FUNAI delegate in Cuiabá spoke of the Xavantes’ intention of resettling in Culuene despite the “innumerable times they were already alerted of the irregularities of such behavior.”49 Impressing upon FUNAI officials their refusal to budge, the Xavante at CulueneXavante leaders from Culuene went to Brasília to plead their case at FUNAI headquarters. The agency’s Director of General Operations, Colonel Joel Marcos, groping for a solution, allowed the Xavante to stay at Culuene until harvest time in mid-1974. Whereupon, he offered to transfer them, with their consent, to another Xavante reserve (Pimentel Barbosa) located on the Rio das Mortes. The plan never materialized. It was not solely that the exiles were inextricably bound to their ancestral homeland. After all, not all of the Xavante from Batovi returned to Culuene. Rather, the bitter factionalism within the Xavante nation and a history of longstanding enmity against the community at Pimentel Barbosa militated against relocation. More importantly, FUNAI exercised restraint in allowing the Xavante to stay at Culuene; certainly other indigenous groups, such as the Kreen-Akarore (Panará)—forcibly relocated to the Xingu Park in 1974 to clear the way for the construction of the Santarém-Cuiabá highway—received much more heavy-handed treatment.51 Darcy Ribeiro’s observations underscoring the diversity in the historical experience of Brazilian indigenous groups according to regional and economic variations, then, remain most pertinent.52With a foothold established in the Culuene region, the Xavante welcomed new arrivals. In March 1974, four families from the Paraíso post (near Simões Lopes) migrated to Culuene and, soon thereafter, the entire village at Paraíso returned. With the population in the Culuene region numbering 360 by May 1975, the yearning for secured territory augmented, and the Xavante stepped up their pressure on FUNAI to demarcate a new reserve.The prospect of another tax-exempt indigenous reserve in their state rattled Mato Grosso elites. Local officials denounced the incursion of federal authority onto “their” domain (although they had welcomed the federal incentives that brought investment to the state). The Barra do Garças city council declaimed that the county risked becoming one big “indigenous park” with the creation of another reserve for the Xavante, the state’s largest indigenous group. The mayor of Barra do Garças, Valdon Varjão, complained to President Ernesto Geisel in May 1975 that the creation of a reserve at Culuene would discourage prospective investors given the disregard shown by the government towards “legal” titles.53Formal appeals to federal officials were, in fact, merely one strategy to thwart the creation of a reserve. To the Indians and local FUNAI officials, ranchers bragged of assassins in their employ.54 As a final recourse, Mato Grosso politicians and influentials relocated 80 squatter families to an area in the Culuene region. Challenging federal intervention on behalf of the Indians, elites cast themselves as the local defenders of the rural poor—many of whom had been expelled from their very fazendas to begin with. By pitting squatters against the Xavante, fazendeiros sought to reap the spoils of a war of attrition. By June 1975 there were 350 squatters living within the area of the prospective Culuene reserve.Yet the power of Mato Grosso influentials to dictate matters in their backyard through violence and clientelism had waned somewhat since the attack at Parabubu. In July a joint commission of federal officials from FUNAI and the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (hereafter INCRA) visited the “atmosphere of great tension” and advised the squatters to withdraw.55 To galvanize federal initiative, the Xavante, with the acquiescence of the post chief, grabbed headlines by destroying a wooden bridge providing access to the squatter settlement and barring access to supply trucks.56In April 1976 the FUNAI-INCRA commission submitted its final report outlining the borders of the Culuene reservation. The Indians had approved the boundaries of the proposed 51,000 hectare-reserve, yet their alacrity puzzled government officials. In conferring with the Xavante, the commission was “well aware that they would not demand the totality”