Paper short abstract:

From the analysis of judicial decisions of state courts of justice, the article discusses the use by the brazilian state of its penal system as an instrument of ethnic deconstitution of indigenous populations for the expropriation of lands and its inclusion into the agroindustrial production system

Paper long abstract:

The indigenous question in Brazil has always been an agrarian issue, indissociable from the economic purposes sought by the agrarian policy adopted in each political period. If in past times the conversion of "brave indians" into "meek indians" was carried out for the purpose of expanding colonial occupation over brazilian territory, the state treatment given to indigenous people today seeks to create means that enable the incorporation of their lands into the production logic of agroindustrial capitalism. In order to do so, it is necessary first to deconstitute the "indigenous land" and make it just "land", which, in turn, requires that the ethnic specificity of the indigenous being who inhabits it be disregarded. In this sense, the deindianization operated by the penal system is an inseparable part of the ethnocide machine of the contemporary brazilian state. Through this operation, although the indigenous person does not lose his/her ethnic self-identification, there is a kind of ontological transfiguration of the legal status used by the state to exempt itself from recognizing and enforcing indigenous rights, especially land rights. From an arbitrary judicial approach on who is indigenous or not, based on assumptions of a cultural essentialism clearly aimed at the inevitability of complete assimilation, it can be argued that the criminalization and imprisonment of indigenous people in Brazil currently serves this purpose as a neocolonial policy to eliminate indigenous identities, with the ultimate goal of opening up lands of traditional occupation to agroindustrial exploitation.