BRASILIA (Reuters) -Brazil’s Congress on Thursday overturned a presidential veto that had struck down the core of a bill to limit Indigenous land claims.
Indigenous groups had supported President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s veto, while the bill had the backing of the powerful farm lobby.
In a joint session of both chambers, lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to annul Lula’s veto against establishing a deadline limiting claims to ancestral lands where Indigenous people had lived by 1988.
The issue is expected to be decided by the Supreme Court which ruled in September that the deadline was unconstitutional.
Lula, who created the first ministry of Indigenous peoples when he took office in January for a third term and has vowed to recognize pending land claims, vetoed the core parts of the bill in October.
His veto was seen as a big victory for the country’s 1.6 million Indigenous people, who have strived to protect their land rights threatened by the advance of the agricultural frontier into the Amazon region.
The number of land conflicts has increased with Brazil’s rapidly expanding agriculture. Indigenous communities across the country claim land that farmers have settled and developed, in some cases for decades.
The core of the bill that Lula had vetoed sought to establish in law a cut-off date for new reservations on lands Indigenous people did not live on by Oct. 5, 1988 when Brazil’s Constitution was enacted.
The caucus representing agribusiness in Brazil’s Congress argued that the bill would ensure greater legal security of farmers’ land ownership, curtailing land conflicts.
Groups of protesters from some of Brazil’s 305 tribes, wearing feathered headdresses with painted faces, danced and chanted outside Congress in support of the presidential veto. Leaders warned that the legislation backed by the farm lobby would lead to more violence.
Among the protesters, Indigenous Peoples Minister Sonia Guajajara told Reuters she was hoping Lula’s veto would stand because the deadline threatened claims to ancestral lands that are vital for the survival of Indigenous culture in Brazil.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle and Isadora Machado; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
