13 Mar 13 | Americas, News and features
Brazil’s indigenous peoples are increasingly using the internet to fight for their rights, says Rafael Spuldar
Brazil’s indigenous population have gone online to campaign against social injustice in their community – Alberto Cesar Araujo/Demotix
Despite their poor economic and living conditions, Brazil’s indigenous peoples are increasingly using the internet to make their struggle for rights known to the world.
Historically, native Brazilians have been deprived of proper citizenship, first by slavery and the loss of their homeland in the 16th century and, after that, by prejudice, impoverishment, the loss of cultural traces and the disappearance of entire populations. But, the emergence of the internet has allowed Brazilian Indians access to a new era of free speech and civil activity.
One example of their fight to be heard is the campaign against the Draft Constitutional Amendment #215, currently being debated in the Chamber of Deputies. If the amendment passes, it would remove the Federal Government’s power to delimit indigenous lands and pass it to Congress.
Indigenous leaders fear this would strengthen landowners’ powers, who already have a strong lobbying position in Congress and would likely do their best to inhibit the creation of new reservations.
An online petition against the amendment has gathered more than 27,000 signatures.
Their cause also attracted huge support through social media late last year. Facebook users showed support to the Guarani and Kaiowá peoples by adding “Guarani-Kaiowá” to their profile name. The 45,000-strong group perpetually struggle to protect their ancestral province from land-grabbing farmers in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
In January 2013, however, Facebook ordered the additional names be removed, reminding users that they were forbidden from adopting fake names on their accounts.
Access to justice
Considered to be one of the main platforms for indigenous discussion, the Índios Online website is maintained by indian peoples from the states of Alagoas, Bahia, Roraima and Pernambuco.
Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Thydewá, an organisation protecting the rights of indigenous peoples, Índios Online allows “offline” Native Brazilians from all over the country to voice their needs and interact with other users.
According to the president of Thydewá, Sebastián Gerlic, those who feel their interests have been threatened by the website often approach the Justice system to censor its content — particularly regarding videos produced and uploaded by the indians.
Ingigenous Brazilian Potyra Tê Tupinambá ended up in court for her film documenting land reposession in an indigenous reservation in the northeastern state of Bahia. The ongoing lawsuit was taken out by a land owner interviewed on camera. It was a testimony, according to Gerlic, given spontaneously and with no animosity.
“The farmer accused Potyra of transmitting his image on the internet without his permission, and now he looks for reparation,” says the president of Thydewá, who took reponsibility for the director’s legal defence.
The internet was also a strong ally in the indigenous peoples’ struggle against the looting of the natural resources on their reservations. In mid-2011, the Ashaninka people used a solar-powered computer to denounce the invasion of their land by Peruvian woodcutters. This information was passed to authorities in federal capital Brasília, who sent a task force formed by the Federal Police and the Brazilian Army to arrest the invaders.
The Ashaninkas also addressed chief justice of the Supreme Court Joaquim Barbosa in an online petition, urging the Supreme Court to address the problem of tree cutting in their native territory. They demanded financial reparation for the lumbering activities that could reach 15,000,000 BRL (around 30,000,000 USD).
Limited access
Indians usually access the internet through centres maintained by Funai, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation or in LAN (local area network) houses, schools or in private homes. Funai does not have any digital inclusion programme specifically for the indigenous peoples – this responsibility goes to the Ministry of Culture. Through its programme called “Points of Culture”, the Ministry invested more than 1,300,000 BRL (about £447,000) on installing internet connections inside the Indian communities.
Despite public investments, online access has grown far less in indigenous communities than in poorer urban areas. According to a survey led by Rio de Janeiro State’s Secretary of Culture, in partnership with NGO Observatório das Favelas (“Slum Observatory”), 9 out of 10 people living in low-income areas in Rio have internet access.
Brazil has a population of 896,917 indigenous people divided in 230 different ethnic groups, according to the last Brazilian Census from 2010. This represents around 0.47 per cent of the country’s population.
Amongst this populus, access to employment is a problem. According to the last Census, 83 per cent of adult Brazilian indians earn no more than minimum wage (678 BRL a month, about £233) and 52.9 per cent of them don’t have any income at all.
According to the Indigenous Missionary Counsel, an organisation aiding native Brazilian peoples, at least 200 indians have been killed in Brazil in the last decade, mainly because of land disputes.
11 Mar 13 | Digital Freedom
The debate over the direction of the web has just started, and contradictory messages that need careful scrutiny are emerging from governments and corporations alike, says Kirsty Hughes
This article was originally published on Open Democracy, as a part of a week-long series on the future digital freedom guest-edited by Index
(more…)
01 Mar 13 | Brazil, Uncategorized
A thirteen-year old Brazilian girl claims she has faced death threats through a Facebook community page she created to denounce problems in her school.
Isadora Faber created Diário de Classe (or “Classroom Diary”) in July 2012 to “show the truth about public schools,” as she writes on the page description, leading her to become an internet celebrity and a teen champion of free speech through new media.
Isadora filled the page with updates on life at Maria Tomázia Coelho School in Florianópolis — capital of the southern state of Santa Catarina — addressing problems in the school including exposed wires, damaged doors, transparency issues and improper teaching practice.
On 17 February, Isadora alerted her 581,000 subscribers to a message published on Diário de Classe’s wall that demanded the fan page be deleted, or Isadora and her classmate Lucas Alves — who also posts content on the website — would end up “with a bullet right on their foreheads”. The children’s parents were also threatened .
The apparent death threat was posted under the profile of teenager Bruna Meneises Silva, which is believed to be a fake one and has been deleted since. Police authorities asked Facebook to provide Bruna’s IP address, so they could trace the person who posted the message.
Isadora’s mother Mel Faber told Index her daughter would never feel intimidated by the threats. “Isadora responds the opposite way. When she’s threatened, she gets more compelled to go public and face her attackers. But I can’t say if that happens because she’s so young and incapable of measuring risks.”
Last November, the student posted a picture of her injured grandmother after her house was allegedly stoned, possibly in retaliation to the Facebook page.
On 22 February, Isadora was ranked by Financial Times in a list of 25 outstanding Brazilians in areas including politics, social work, business, sports, arts and entertainment.
22 Feb 13 | Brazil
In an appeal on 20 February, a judge ruled that a banned blog that criticised Brazil’s most influential daily newspaper should remain offline. The case has been deemed by critics as an example of judicial and financial harassment by big Brazilian media companies and high-profile people over their critics.
The blog — named Falha de S.Paulo — was created in 2010 to criticise newspaper Folha de S.Paulo for its coverage of that year’s general elections. A satirical take on Folha (meaning “paper”), the content of Falha (meaning “fail”) imitated the newspaper’s design and text style.
Folha filed a lawsuit against Falha, claiming the blog’s logo, content, pictures and text font imitated its graphic design, confusing web users. Besides that, the paper accused the bloggers of benefiting financially from the website.
By the end of September 2010, a judge had demanded the blog be removed and imposed a daily fine over its authors. Falha’s creators appealed, but the decision was maintained on Wednesday by another judge from the São Paulo State Court.
“It’s not a simple thing (to appeal), both STJ (Superior Tribunal de Justiça, or High Court of Justice) and the Supreme Court won’t accept any case. But we’ll study which way we could appeal. We intend to go to the highest courts”, said one of the blog’s creators, Lino Bocchini, to Rede Brasil Atual agency.
Pressure in court
Some see this case as an example of an ongoing trend in Brazil — powerful people and companies putting financial pressure on their critics by simply going to the courts against them.
“Politicians, business people and other powerful personalities found that they can silence their critics by filing lawsuits”, says journalism teacher Marcelo Träsel from PUCRS University in Porto Alegre.
“To take a lawsuit to its very final stages can cost tens of thousands of reais. One that’s involved in a scandal can create a juridical torment to its critics, if one has the financial means to do that,” he says.
“These people don’t even need to win in court. Only to impose financial damage to a whistle-blowing blogger, for example, would probably make him shut up. I believe that’s the main threat to free speech in Brazil in a near future, and I believe that cases like Falha de S.Paulo will grow in number.”
The practice of filing lawsuits to remove defamatory content from the internet also disturbs Google Brazil’s Public Policy & Government Relations Senior Counsel Marcel Leonardi.
“Internet gives you the possibility to immediately respond to anyone, and in many different ways, like posting videos or creating hyperlinks. In this case, the most intelligent way to reply to criticism would be to have an online presence, though which one could inform and reply to critics in one’s own virtual space,” he says.
In Leonardi’s opinion, Brazil will remain one of the top countries in the world in terms of digital content removal — as stated in the latest Google Transparency Report — unless this “culture of lawsuit” is somehow overcome.
Concerns about Brazil are shared by watchdogs such as Freedom House, which states on its 2012 Freedom on the Net report that actions taken by judges and other public agents could represent “a possible barrier to free speech and a means of removing content deemed undesirable.”
Last year Falha’s case was brought to Frank de la Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression. While visiting Brazil, he said the situation was “terrible”.
