Between the pandemic and the pandemonium - indigenous strategies into stopping the "cattle herd run" in Brazil

Abstract

This research discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies for indigenous peoples adopted by the Bolsonaro Administration ranging from 2020 to 2022 have been faced by these groups, focusing on the practices developed by indigenous peoples in Ceara. Aiming this, we conducted researches on judicial and administrative processes, brazilian law - both approved and pending approvation by the Congress -, and articles on newspapers. These data are complementary to interviews with Ceara's indigenous peoples' leaders and to information provided by indigenous organizations, nation and state wide. Even in the context of the pandemic, Brazilian Federal Government kept its policies going as a "form of war" against indigenous peoples, consisting of a set of actions by the executive branch, allied with agribusiness and ultraneoliberalism sectors and considering an ideology that accounts the indigenous peoples as incapable and undeveloped. All this arrangement of interests is a project of power and for the country, in which there is no space for indigenous peoples, their ways of life and their supporters. Even though, in this limit-situation between life and death or sickening, indigenous peoples have taken collective actions towards tensioning the institutional power, transforming grief into fight.