Discourses and Practices of/in Developmentalist Policy of Brazilian Military Dictatorship: Eects on Indigenous Peoples
Abstract
During the Brazilian military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985, there were several attacks on the rights of indigenous peoples. The Comissão Nacional da Verdade – CNV ascertained that forced displacement from their lands, torture, imprisonment, rape, genocide practices were some of the violations committed by the Brazilian government, in association with business and rural sectors, against indigenous peoples. This work focuses on violations related to land dispossession and forced removals of indigenous peoples from their territories and the effects on the indigenous communities affected in the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship, which
were registered in the CNV Report (Brazil). The objective is to analyze, in projects of this State of exception, discourses and practices that supported the territorial dispossession policy and its effects on the affected communities, with focus on the discursive mechanisms that motivate indigenous resistance in the struggle for the right to the territory. The work argues that the issue of territory involves power relations that go beyond the merely political, as it needs to be treated in their cultural and symbolic aspect, which has been disregarded in the State of exception, due to its political and economic project. In addition, we show the relationship between territory and indigenous communities as constitutive of the identities of these people and, therefore, the usurpation of the territory by the State, in the analyzed context, constituted a serious violation of the rights of indigenous peoples.
