Maravi

(PROGRESS, BBC) Quilombos, Ex-Slave Communities, Fight Brazilian Navy for Land
January 10, 2014 Posted by Staff under Land Disputes No Comments

This 2014 excerpt of the BBC, Jan 7, is by Julia Carneiro.

Rio dos Macacos, home to 67 families, is one of Brazil’s quilombos – communities started by former slaves who went to live in hiding, surviving as best as they could by working the land, before forced labour was prohibited in Brazil in 1888.

According to Fundacao Palmares, a government-funded cultural organisation, there are more than 2,400 quilombos across the country.

Many still keep alive the traditions of their ancestors, such as African dance forms and forms of worship.

But even after slavery was abolished, elders say their ancestors had few rights. For a long time, they continued to work the sugarcane fields not for pay, but in return for food and housing.

It was only after the local farms went into decline, that the quilombolas – as quilombo residents are known – were allowed to harvest some of the fields and keep the proceeds for themselves.

But no land was ever formally given to them – an omission which is at the root of at their current problems.

Brazil’s constitution – signed in 1988, 100 years after slavery was abolished – ruled that quilombolas were entitled to the land they had historically occupied.

A navy built a naval base in the area in the 1950, and as the base grew, the area where quilombolas lived shrank. Today, the Aaratu Naval Base is the second largest in the country. One of the oldest residents, Maria de Souza Oliveira, 86, remembers how 70 families were moved to make way for a village built for the families of navy personnel in the 1970s. Nowadays, some 450 families live in the navy village, just across the Macacos river from the quilombo.

Community leader Rosimeire dos Santos Silva says the community has had its crops pulled out. “They harass our children on their way to school. And if we try to work the soil, we’re beaten up.”

See source

Ed. Notes: Ironic, isn’t it, that the institution that’s supposed to defend the people instead attacks them when it wants what the people have. And nobody is going to attack Brazil. What do they want with an expanding military anyway? They could abolish it, as Costa Rica did, as any nation could. Just use geonomics to settle and disputes both within and beyond national borders.

Labels: BRAZIL, LAND RIGHTS

posted by MrK @ 4:09 PM