Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada

Outcry as Brazil Congress overrides president to revive anti-Indigenous law

• Brazil’s Congress has pushed through a new law that includes several anti-Indigenous measures that strip back land rights and open traditional territories to mining and agribusiness.
• It includes the controversial time frame thesis, requiring Indigenous populations to prove they physically occupied their land on Oct. 5 1988, the day of the promulgation of the Federal Constitution; failure to provide such evidence will nullify demarcated land. The decision provoked outrage among activists, who say the new law is the biggest setback for Indigenous rights in Brazil in decades.
• Both President Lula and the Supreme Court have previously called the measures in the bill unconstitutional and against public interests, and Indigenous organizations announced they will challenge the law.
• Brazil’s Congress has pushed through a new law containing a series of anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental clauses, overruling President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s previous veto of some of the bill’s most harmful passages. Activists have lambasted the decision, saying it drastically strips back Indigenous rights and poses a threat to the future of the Amazon Rainforest and other Brazilian biomes.

Indigenous advocates reject Chile’s new draft constitution ahead of vote :chile-cool:

Sunday’s referendum will be the second time in as many years that Chileans have voted for a revised constitution.

For more than a decade, architect Julio Ñanco Antilef has campaigned to rewrite Chile’s constitution, a relic from when General Augusto Pinochet ruled the country as a military dictator.

But now, as Chile prepares to vote on a new draft, Ñanco Antilef finds himself in a paradoxical position: hoping to keep the old version in place. “It’s not that we are defending Pinochet’s constitution. It’s just that this proposal is worse,” he told Al Jazeera in a recent interview.

A member of the Democratic Revolution party, Ñanco Antilef was one of the few left-wing representatives to participate in the Constitutional Council that drafted the new version, which is set to go before voters on Sunday. Rather, it was Chile’s far-right Republican Party that led the drafting process, holding 22 of the council’s 50 seats.

The result, critics say, is a draft that favours right-wing priorities at the expense of historically marginalised groups, including Chile’s Indigenous peoples. “It is tied to a business model and favours individual interests rather than collective ones,” said Ñanco Antilef, himself of Indigenous Mapuche descent.

Now, he and other Indigenous Chileans are pushing for voters to reject the draft constitution, even if that means the country will be stuck with the Pinochet-era version for the foreseeable future.

“We are 13 percent of the population,” said Alihuén Antileo Navarrete, a Mapuche lawyer elected to represent Chile’s Indigenous peoples on the council. He argues the draft constitution deliberately “excludes” Indigenous voices from government.