The criminalization of Human Rights defenders challenges faced by indigenous leaderships

Abstract

The work dealt with the process of criminalization of human rights defenders, focusing, in a special way, on indigenous leaders. The central objective was to answer the question: “How does the process of criminalization of indigenous leaders in Brazil materialize?”. It was carried out through bibliographical research with a qualitative approach, with the specific objectives: to describe the process of criminalization of human rights defenders in the Brazilian context and to analyze how the criminalization process has been materializing specifically in relation to indigenous leaders in the country. It is concluded that the criminalization of human rights defenders is a process that has an intense relationship with historical aspects and manifests itself through countless practices, which involve different social actors and institutions and, in this way, subject individuals to the punitive state power due to the social and political issues it defends. In this context, amid the growing anti-indigenous discourse associated with an anti-environmentalist discourse, there is the criminalization of indigenous leaders, through the misrepresentation of their history and their disqualification, with the Xukuru indigenous people being an important illuminating example of an ethnic group victim of the criminalization process. From the literature review on the subject, serious damage to the guarantee of rights to indigenous people is observed, especially when interpretations related to the idea of ​​integration are adopted by the judiciary.