Since 19 August 2024, the Turiwara indigenous people of the upper Acará River in Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, reoccupied their territory invaded by the oil palm monoculture company Agropalma.
Agropalma filed a lawsuit accusing the Turiwara of being the invaders. The Pará courts initially granted Agropalma's request, but then proposed a negotiation afterwards, where Agropalma did not want to accept the Turiwara's proposal to remain in the area, where former villages and cemeteries are located until the federal government carries out studies and demarcates the indigenous land. Agropalma insisted that the Turiwara are the invaders.
The Turiwara fear for their lives due to the presence of company guards and other heavily armed people, frightening them. A decision from 17 October, 2024 (available here), by a higher court in Pará again agreed with Agropalma's argument, asking the police to immediately remove the occupiers of the area. The higher court decided arbitrarily because the judge didn't even want to analyse the requests from the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office and the Pará Public Defender's Office to take the case to the Federal Court, the competent body in Brazilian justice system to analyse issues involving indigenous peoples.
It is worth noting that the same area is being used by Agropalma and the Biofilica company to make profits with a forest carbon so-called REDD project, and there is ongoing research by Agropalma with licences granted by the federal government on the potential for bauxite mining.
On 29 October, a report was released, the result of a research of over five years, which proves once and for all the traditional occupation of the territory by the Turiwara and Tembê Peoples, completely disqualifying the court decision that considers the Indigenous Peoples as the invaders (available here)
Finally, the Turiwara denounce the sluggishness of the Brazilian federal government through FUNAI, the federal Indigenous Affairs Agency, which was only once in the area in 2023, after numerous requests from the indigenous people. It issued a report in August 2023 pointing out the need to set up a working group to identify the indigenous territory for subsequent demarcation of the land. However, since then the Brazilian federal government has done nothing to fulfil this request, and is also responsible for the enormous risk of violence against the Turiwara if the police complies with the decision of the judge The Turiwara who have retaken their territory have repeatedly reaffirmed that they will not leave, not least because it was Agropalma who invaded.’
For more information on this and other struggles in the Acara Valley, see here.