COVID and Conservatives Are Threatening to Dismantle a Key Occupied Protest in Rio

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Dressed in T-shirts, jeans and no facemasks, the two congressmen stood outside the wire fence around the grounds of Rio de Janeiro’s former Indigenous Museum, now an occupied protest. Peering in, they hurled a mix of insults and threats, calling the area’s inhabitants “urban trash.”

“This time, they came unarmed and they didn’t come in,” said 60-year-old Urutau Guajajara, a professor of indigenous languages. He was referring to a 14,300 square meter plot just feet away from the massive Maracanã football stadium.

The area’s current occupants hope to turn the grounds into a multi-ethnic indigenous university. “We don’t want a museum of physical things, we want a living museum,” said Guajajara’s wife, Potyr, referring to the Indigenous Museum that now sits downtown. “There are no indigenous human beings there, only photos.”

But caught between a raging pandemic and multiple levels of far-right government, those plans now stand at risk. The catastrophic damage dealt by COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro and a sustained wave of conservative politics place the area’s residents in danger of new expulsion, and the historic site’s future in question.

“This is an extremely dangerous moment,” said Marize Guarani, president of the Aldeia Maracanã Indigenous Association (AIAM) and former Aldeia occupant.

“[President Jair Bolsonaro] hates indigenous people,” said Guarani. In a speech in 1998, then-Congressman Bolsonaro lamented that Brazil’s cavalry had not been “as competent as the Americans, who had decimated their Indians in the past, and now, no longer have this problem.” Upon taking office in 2019, he vowed not to grant any new land to indigenous peoples.

Rio de Janeiro state congressman Rodrigo Amorim, a Bolsonaro ally and one of the Aldeia’s two visitors last week, has called for Aldeia Maracanã to be turned into a parking lot or a shopping mall, adding “whoever likes Indians can go to Bolivia.” Guajajara recalled that Amorim had called the area a “crackland,” and had entered the grounds in a bulletproof vest in early 2019, accompanied by plain-clothes policemen from his cabinet.

“We had children, elderly and people in wheelchairs here,” said Potyr, recalling 2019’s incident.

In a note to the press, Amorim’s office wrote that the state congressman had visited the location on September 29 to verify reports of stolen electric and telephone wiring. Citing executive reports on precarious living conditions within the grounds, Amorim expressed concern for the wellbeing of its inhabitants. The area could instead hold “new tourist attractions for the city,” said the note.

When VICE News visited the site in early October, it was home to five families, a mix of Guajajara, Xavante, Puri, Ashaninka, and Kariri ethnicities. None had fallen sick with COVID, said Potyr, adding that a recent testing campaign from the city government returned negative results from all occupants. “They wanted to be able to say we were infected, to be able to say ‘Let’s get them all out of there,’” she said.

Once the site of the first indigenous museum in all of Latin America, the area had lain abandoned for decades following the museum’s relocation to downtown in 1978. It wasn’t until 2006 that a diverse mix of indigenous peoples organized, descending on the gutted structure and turning it into a collective occupation. It would serve as an educational space for indigenous culture from 2006 through 2012, receiving visits from academics from around the world.

Then, in the lead up to the World Cup, the governor at the time, Sérgio Cabral, currently serving a 294-year sentence for corruption and money-laundering, planned to demolish the building to make space for a stadium parking lot. He later backtracked, and mayor Eduardo Paes agreed to register it as a cultural landmark, protecting it from demolition definitively. The Aldeia’s occupants, though, would be evicted, and resettled in temporary housing miles away as the government prepared to restore the building.

Unsure of the government’s commitment, the group resisted consecutive attempts at removal, buckling only when swarms of military police arrived at the site at 3AM on March 22, 2013. Surrounding the building in armored trucks and riot gear, they forcefully ejected the Aldeia’s occupants. “They came ready for war. We didn’t have a single weapon there. It was ridiculous,” said Carlos Doethyró Tukano, then-chief of the Aldeia.

The group split in two. One group maintained dialogue with the government, accepting eviction on the condition of the creation of a State Council for Indigenous Rights and an Indigenous Cultural Center, to be constructed at the Aldeia.

But Guajajara and a smaller group didn’t believe that the government would fulfill its promises, and dug in, returning to occupy the site in 2016. His collective, known as Aldeia Rexiste (a play on the Portuguese words for resist and re-exist), now occupies the space in hopes of constructing an indigenous-managed multiethnic university.

But living here is rough.

The government removed all running water, sewerage, and electricity after the 2013 evictions. A truck now stops by once a month to refill a donated water tank, and a group of biologists have helped the group construct dry toilets. Subsistence comes from sales of locally grown fruit and hand-woven crafts. “Selling artisanal crafts is really our only means of survival,” said Guajajara.

The government eventually made good on its promise to create a state-level Indigenous Council, inaugurating the body, CEDIND, in 2018. Guarani, a member of the council, praised its makeup for including representatives from both urban and rural indigenous populations in Rio, state organs, as well as local universities. “I can’t think of any other council that has all of that,” she said.

The long-promised cultural center, however, has yet to appear seven years later. Tukano, now co-president of CEDIND, remains skeptical of the government’s financial excuses. “They spent R1.5 billion [$270 million] revamping the Maracanã soccer stadium,” he said. “We only needed five million to refurbish our building.”

Until the cultural project that the occupiers dream of materializes, the Aldeia remains at-risk. Their hard-won landmark status protects the building from demolition, but does nothing to impede changes to its interior.

“It bothers people to have, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which is called the cultural capital of Brazil, a building that speaks to and shows the negation of our rights as indigenous peoples,” said Guarani.