Bloomberg Línea — Even in areas already legally recognized as belonging to Indigenous, Afro-descendant and local peoples in Latin America, many people experience land tenure insecurity due to illegal, uncontrolled invasions of their collective territories, sometimes encouraged by antagonistic governments.
The threat was perhaps most pronounced in Brazil, where former president Jair Bolsonaro, on his second day in office in 2019, cut funding to the country’s indigenous affairs agency (FUNAI) and issued an executive order giving Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, which supports the expansion of cattle ranching, greater power over indigenous lands.
To protect their territories, communities have sought action in Brazil’s national courts, as well as at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
This analysis emerges from the report Who Owns the World’s Land?, prepared by international organization Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).
The publication, which also analyzed 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, seeks to be an essential tool for promoting the rights and livelihoods of communities.
Throughout the region, peoples have also had to fight extensive legal battles to protect their lands: in Peru, indigenous communities in the Amazon and Andes filed lawsuits and organized protests to oppose oil and mining concessions that were granted without adequate consultation with the affected communities.
In Guatemala, communities that were granted 25-year concessions in the 1990s, and have since demonstrated a track record of environmental management of their lands, nevertheless had to engage in sustained advocacy to have their concessions renewed.
The defense of community lands also cost the lives of land defenders, more in Latin America than in all other regions combined.
Between 2012 and 2021, 1,733 land and environmental defenders were killed worldwide, and 1,155 (or 66%) of these were in Latin America.
Brazil and Colombia were the two most dangerous countries in the world for land defenders, with 342 and 322 killings respectively during this period.
Legal recognition of land
As a region, Latin America has a long history of collective titling and legal recognition of land tenure rights of Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and local communities.
RRI’s distribution of legal forest tenure since 2002 shows that Latin America has been consistently ahead of other regions in the recognition of community forest tenure rights.
Recognition of communities’ collective property rights is written into the national constitutions of several countries, including Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru.
“That legal certainty of land is definitely a transcendental link in development in the growth of indigenous peoples,” Selvyn Pérez, a K`iche` a Maya indigenous leader and president of the Guatemalan Community Forestry Association Utz Che’, told Bloomberg Línea.
Despite these positive precedents, Latin America experienced considerable threats of reversal during the 2015-2020 period and increases in legal recognition of collective lands were, in many countries, marginal or non-existent.
For Pérez, this situation “is worrisome” because there is talk of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2030 and 2050 targets. “It is assumed that 30% of the conserved forests in the world should at least have legal certainty and in that 30% that the United Nations talks about are the indigenous peoples.”
In the 16 countries analyzed, the area designated for indigenous, Afro-descendant and local communities increased by only 4 megahectares (from 3.0% of the total land in 2015 to 3.2% in 2020).
Success stories in the region
Despite the challenges, there are notable success stories in a number of countries.
A series of landmark rulings in Panama, including an important Supreme Court case, recognized the rights of the Naso Tjër Di Indigenous people to more than 160,000 hectares of land and set a precedent for the titling of indigenous lands that currently overlap with protected areas.
Guyana recognized the Kanashen Amerindian Protected Area, the first of its kind in the country, which covers 3.3% of the country’s area.
In several countries in the region, communities have also won important victories in the courts, but these have not yet translated into changes on the ground.
For example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of territorial claims by Indigenous peoples in Argentina and Suriname, and Afro-descendant peoples in Honduras, but none of these decisions have yet been implemented by the respective national governments.
In addition, despite the many threats to communities in Brazil, several new laws and regulations have been enacted to strengthen women’s equitable land tenure rights in the Amazon and in agrarian settlements.
“There is talk of some successful cases, but if we look at the amount of land that is still in the hands of the states and that belongs to Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afros, we are talking about very alarming data,” Pérez said.
