Brazil court orders recognition of Indigenous land and apology for historic atrocities

In the forests of northwestern Mato Grosso, the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna people have been fighting for more than half a century to return home. That fight may finally be over.

A federal judge in Brazil has given the government 24 months to formally recognize the traditional territory of the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna. The ruling, issued on June 11 by Federal Judge Pablo Kipper Aguilar in Diamantino, also orders the government to issue a public apology and pay 10 million reais — about $2 million — in collective moral damages for decades of violence and forced displacement.

"It has been a very difficult journey," said Yaiku Suya Tapayuna, a leader of the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna people. "It is a decision we have dreamed about, and we are now celebrating this victory."

The court's decision draws on evidence of atrocities stretching back decades. In 1953, the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna suffered a massacre that included armed attacks and deliberate poisoning. A 1967 report from Brazil's dictatorship era documented how a nearby rubber business left a sack of sugar laced with arsenic on a riverbank for the community to consume. In the 1960s, another poisoning attack followed — this time with meat laced with tick poison.

The violence did not stop there. In 1969, a government visit organized by the federal Indigenous affairs agency brought influenza into the community. Survivors later described the horror to national media: "Indigenous corpses decimated by the flu across the forest, and children nursing from the breasts of their dead mothers."

After surviving these attacks, the survivors were forcibly removed from their land. According to accounts from 13 Indigenous individuals presented as evidence, the government loaded survivors onto trucks typically used for animals, drove them to the city of Cuiaba, and then flew them about 400 kilometers — roughly 250 miles — east to the Xingu Indigenous Park. They were falsely promised the move was temporary. "They told us we could go because we would soon come back to get our things and return to our land," the group recalled. "But they deceived us."

In 1976, the government stopped recognizing the Tapayuna reserve as Indigenous land, claiming the territory had been abandoned. Shortly after, the state began issuing private land titles for the same land.

Federal Judge Aguilar cited a parliamentary inquiry commission that described the violence against the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna as genocide — a deliberate campaign to expel them from their homeland.

Wetaktxi Tapayuna, president of the Tapayuna Indigenous Association, sees the ruling as a turning point. "It gives me great joy to see this trajectory of our people, with generations fighting for our traditional territory and its demarcation, hoping to live once again on the land where our relatives were left," he said.

Now the Kajkwakratxi-Tapayuna wait to see whether the government will honor the court's order — and whether, after more than 70 years, they can finally go home.