Brazilian Supreme Court votes to uphold Indigenous land rights

Sept. 22 (UPI) -- Brazil's Supreme Court voted to uphold Indigenous land rights in a pair of rulings hailed by activists.

In a 9-2 vote in Brasilia, the court rejected a move to keep Indigenous communities from making claims on land they had not physically lived on in 1988.

"Long live Indigenous resistance," Eloy Terena, an Indigenous attorney and a senior official at Brazil's Ministry for Indigenous Peoples, said on social media.

The two justices who voted in favor of the so-called "time marker" rule were both appointed to the high court by former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

The court also favored restoring territory to the Xokleng people, from which they were evicted, which now establishes a precedent for hundreds of indigenous land claims in Brazil.

Anthropologists have detailed how mercenaries were hired to brutally drive the Xokleng from their ancestral lands. The Xokleng now live on the Ibirama La-Klano lands with two other indigenous groups.

The groups officially were granted the rights to 37,000 acres of the land in 1996 but continued to argue claim to the land they were driven from. The tobacco growers and farmers occupying the Xokleng ancestral land said they had been working it for years and should be forced to move.

The rulings wer seen as a rejection of Bolsonaro, who fought to curtail the rights of Indigenous people during his time leading the government. He sought to turn over much of the land claimed by those groups to the timber, mining and agriculture industries to boost Brazil's economy.

Legislators who remain loyal to Bolsonaro have fought efforts by the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to support Indigenous rights, including blocking powers of the environment ministry.