Deciding how to decide: the Munduruku Indigenous Group and political participation in Brazil
The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Tapajos River highlighted. Wikicommons/Kmusser. Some rights reserved.In Latin America, much is said about the
democratic improvements brought about by participatory practices in government.
But there are considerable constraints both to participation and its
effectiveness when it comes to transforming hegemonic models, vested interests
and political power, as exemplified by projects associated with the increased exploitation
of natural resources.
These projects shed light on the limits of
liberal representative democracies and also of recent extra-electoral
institutional participation initiatives: such models do not guarantee political
legitimacy to projects impacting on the local sphere, many of which affect
groups who are ethnically different and who do not feel represented by the
political entities of the state.
We need to construct mechanisms of direct and
effective participation for these ethnic groups that are culturally adequate. “Prior
consultation” (consulta prévia) was
conceived as a promising mechanism to respond to this challenge. Nevertheless,
the social and political organization and the traditional forms of
decision-making of the people consulted must be respected to ensure that prior
consultation does not turn into a bureaucratic space; thus the importance of
the protocols and documents used by these groups to tell the government how they
want to be consulted.
We discuss here the importance of the Munduruku
Consultation Protocol in
the context of the democratization of decision-making regarding extractive
projects[1].
The Munduruku
group consists in about 13 thousand indigenous people who live in more than one
hundred twenty villages along the Tapajós River basin, one of the main
tributaries on the right bank of the Amazon River in Brazil. The Munduruku
people from the region live in three designated indigenous lands (Sai Cinza,
Munduruku and Kayabi) and are fighting for the designation of the Daje Kapap
Eypi territory (Sawré Muybu Indigenous Land). The act of designation represents
the state's formal recognition of the territory's traditional occupation by
indigenous people. For at least four years, they have battled against the
federal government project to install seven hydroelectric plants in the Tapajós
River basin, a development that threatens their territory and way of life.
We suggest that the importance of this participatory experience extends
beyond this case, which can nevertheless be understood as illustrative of how public
decision-making is not simply
something to be imposed by the state but rather constructed in an
interactive form as the conflict unfolds. Socio-environmental conflicts are marked by the limitation of
social participation, because what is projected in hegemonic fashion as
economic development involves a relationship of the exploitation of nature,
understood as a natural resource, and brutal interference with the environment.
The conflict emerges specifically from the collision of this way of valuing the
economy with other factors that are also involved in our relationship with
nature, such as leisure activities, scenery, spirituality, and well-being.
These conflicts also confront varied ways of life and different world views. On
the whole, powerful political/economic interests and socially vulnerable groups
are in opposition.
Historically, such formal arenas of
participation, as management boards and public hearings, have not shown
themselves to be sufficient for handling this confrontation satisfactorily in
the eyes of those involved. But the struggles of a variety of movements, peoples, communities
and organizations have opened new and creative spaces for participation. This
is the case with prior consultation. Convention number 169 of the International
Labor Organization (ILO), created as an international agreement between
countries belonging to the United Nations (UN), formalized the right of
indigenous and tribal peoples to participate in decisions regarding changes in
and use of their territories. Consultation allows groups that might be affected
into the decision-making process.
Brazil,
which is a signatory of this Convention, has never performed a consultation. Following strong political
mobilization endorsed by a court decision, the first consultation must be performed
with the Munduruku people, who have been threatened by the construction of the
São Luiz do Tapajós Hydroelectric Plant, planned for the middle-section of the
Tapajós River. However, performing a consultation does not in and of itself
guarantee participation; it is necessary to open the decision-making process up
and examine its precise terms.
Despite
initial enthusiasm stemming from various institutions implementing new forms of
social participation such as councils, hearings, and conferences, criticisms made
by those directly involved and in the specialized literature are growing significant.
In light of the disappointment with the innumerable participatory processes
existing in Brazil and the experiences of performing consultations in the
neighboring countries, the groups affected[2]
by a wide variety of ventures fear that prior consultation may become a means
of legitimizing ventures, emptied of its potential capacity for
decision-making.
It
is in this context that the Munduruku people call for "deciding how to
decide". They drafted the
Munduruku Consultation Protocol (begun in Brazil by the Wajãpi indigenous people,
in Amapá), in which they told the government how they want to be consulted.
They emphasize that they want to be consulted in their own territory, in
villages of their choosing, and gathered in meetings with the participation of
Munduruku people from all regions of the Tapajós. They also clarify that the
decisions are to be made after a long debate, which shall take as long as
necessary to achieve unanimous consent among the people.
The aspects up for discussion and the means
of conducting the consultation take the Munduruku's way of thinking into
account. They do not want to be simply focused on the problems of the pariwat (the word in the Munduruku language
referring to non-indigenous people), but rather on their own demands. They want to coordinate the meetings,
as they have their own participatory systems, and children, young people and the
elderly are also part of these.
They demand respect for their conception of
time and their social dynamics, and, finally, they claim the final word on the
proposed measure. It is important to mention that the Munduruku's acts of
resistance infringe upon many institutional boundaries of legality, but these
practices cannot be criminalized since they are legitimate traditional political
forms.
The constitutive process of deliberation
involves many other elements that go beyond rational decision-making, as
imposed by our democratic mechanisms. The gestures, expressions, and
experiences of feelings and moralities that play a role in the public dynamics
of the decision are as important as the rational basis of the argument. Rather
than insults to well-being and democracy, direct actions and other forms of
expressing
different reasoning, as well as those roles played by the Munduruku people, can be understood as what Giorgio
Agamben calls "counter-apparati" (or desecration of the apparatus),
as they reveal the circumstances in which democratic mechanisms become inadequate,
or authoritarian and violent. One cannot consult an “apparatus” that
organizes acts in terms of binary oppositions such as legitimate/illegitimate,
tolerated/criminalized.
Plush-crested jay on the Tapajos River. Flickr/Rennett Stowe. Some rights reserved.It is equally important to include other forms of agency,
like the participation of nature as a "natural agent", for example.
The construction of nature in a social, spiritual and aesthetic dimension based
on local cosmologies needs to be possible in these arenas. The observation of
changes in the dynamics of water or in the behavior of fish, as well as
nature's other forms of expression,
may introduce significant evidence for making the decision. According to Paul
Little, the natural agent can be considered a type of actor that participates
in environmental conflicts and, thus, changes the processes of collective
action. But this process needs to be open beyond the natural forms of agency
understood by the western model and to consider the multiplicity of knowledge
and meanings recorded in any one space. The Munduruku protocol calls attention
to the importance of traditional knowledge in the identification and
questioning of environmental impact (“Because we are the ones who know about
the rivers, the forest, the fish and the land”, as the Protocol says) and
rejects compensation for damage to the environment based on ethnocentric thinking.
The
Munduruku people are giving the government an opportunity to act differently.
Inclined to maintain resistance to the project that threatens them, they
delivered the Protocol to the government in February 2015. The government has
two options: respect the decision (and the means of deciding) of the Munduruku
or resume the authoritarian and antidemocratic way in which it has been
treating culturally different groups.
As
Jacques Rancière reflects, affirmation of equality is a precondition for the
exercise of politics and democracy. In the face of otherness, there is no
democracy in processes regulated unilaterally by the norms and institutions of
the state. The Munduruku people hope that the government will not once more behave
“like the giant anaconda[3],
which slowly tightens, wanting people to lose all their strength and to die
without air”. Meanwhile, they have made it clear that the struggle will not
cool down any time soon.
[1] In the current Latin American context, extractive projects were
defined by Eduardo Gudynas within what would be a “neoextractivist” model,
which is characterized in part by the large-scale exploitation of natural
resources for the production of commodities that stock the international market
with grains, minerals, petroleum etc. These projects involve a high-impact
chain of production (running the gamut from extraction itself to transport)
that uses the natural resources to the point of their exhaustion, taking the
territory of indigenous peoples, people living near rivers, fishermen, and
farmers, among others.
[2] For a bit more than a decade in Latin America in general, we have
observed a growth of movements entitled “affected” emerging from environmental
conflicts created by development mega-projects whose impact on local populations
is dramatic. The most common ventures are mining, large hydroelectric plants,
gas pipelines, ports, etc.
[3] Sucuri is a species of cobra that lives in South America. The
metaphor with the government is due to its size (its length can reach 10
meters) and to the way it attacks its prey, circling the body, suffocating it
and breaking its bones to then eat it.
How to cite:
Oliveria R., Losekann C. (2015) «Deciding how to decide: the Munduruku Indigenous Group and political participation in Brazil», Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements, 2 June. https://opendemocracy.net/cristiana-losekann-rodrigo-oliveira/deciding-how-to-decide-munduruku-indigenous-group-and-political-