We from the Alert against the Green Desert Movement express our solidarity with the special and courageous action of our Tupinikim and Guarani friends, who occupied yesterday the administrative centre of the industrial complex of Aracruz Celulose, in order to claim concrete and clear responses about how and when the demarcation and validation of the demarcation (“homologação”) of 11,009 hectares of indigenous lands will be put into practice, lands that were invaded by Aracruz in the 60ies.

 

We denounce the harmful way in which Aracruz Celulose yesterday, by means of a press release, reacted to the occupation, affirming that the Indigenous had broken gates, invaded the installations and attacked the private property, besides having coerced employees of the company. However, indigenous children and elderly, men and women, carried out a peaceful and happy movement, but very firm in its aim: the immediate demarcation of their lands.

 

It is important to remember that on the place where today Aracruz produces its cellulose, an indigenous village existed called Macacos, a place where families lived with their livelihoods, surrounded by their ‘wealth’: the rivers and the atlantic forest. It is important to remember that all of this was destroyed with the invasion of the Aracruz Celulose company.

 

The indigenous communities neither claim the Macacos village back, nor all their lands, estimated in 40 thousand hectares that they used to occupy before Aracruz arrived. However, they do not give up 18,070 hectares of lands, already identified as indigenous by the FUNAI, and considered essential for the physical and cultural survival of these peoples. These lands need to be fully and urgently demarcated.

 

It is now the responsibility of the Federal Government to pay off an historical debt with the Tupinikim and Guarani Peoples, and with all the indigenous peoples in Brazil, decimated during almost 500 years and today still obliged to struggle in order to guarantee the demarcation of a small piece of land, compared to the size of lands that these Peoples used to occupy. We hope that the arrival of the President of FUNAI, Mércio Pereira Gomes, announced for today, can solve the present-day conflict of the Tupinikim and Guarani with the Aracruz company and that, once and for all, conditions will be given to these Peoples to build up their autonomy and liberty in fully demarcated lands.

 

Vitória, 7 October 2005

Alert Against the Green Desert Movement/Espírito Santo