Introduction

It is increasingly evident to all concerned that Brazil remains a country of contrasts, mounting tensions and unresolved dilemmas. From being one of the most industrialised and technified nations in the Global South, the Brazilian economy is now largely dependent on agribusiness and mineral exports, on other forms of rentism and financial speculation (Trindade et al., 2016). The fragile democracy, slowly reconstructed since 1985 at the end of the military dictatorship, has been under sustained attacks by neoliberal predators and hyper-conservative sectors, who established a strategic alliance to elect an authoritarian government in 2018 (Arsel et al., 2021). After some important social and political concessions (e.g. ethnic university quotas, minimum income to families facing extreme poverty, recognition of the rights of women, children and the elderly, support to local food production and distribution schemes, national sovereignty over vast oil and gas reserves), the last decade has been marked by renewed forms of intolerance, the militarisation of public policies, ferocious protection of private rural property (regardless of its legality and legitimacy) and explicit political manipulation based on religious and moralist preconceptions (Salem & Bertelsen, 2020). At the centre of those disturbing tendencies, there is the oldest and most embarrassing of all national questions: the genocidal treatment of its native population (Normann, 2022). For more than five centuries, since the early days of the Portuguese invasion, national building has been an elitist and colonialist project against indigenous peoples, as well as against enslaved Africans and workers of all ethnic origins. The country celebrated 200 years of independence on 7 September 2022, but there is only limited sovereignty and genuine independence. The politico-economic elite continue to guarantee the subordinate insertion of Brazil into globalised networks (Sader, 2002), whilst the non-white majority of the population struggle to barely survive (Fischer, 2022). In that difficult context, the voice and agency of indigenous peoples represent the most acute challenge to the status quo and the main source of creative politics.Footnote 1

Our aim here is to examine and reflect on the persistent and important element of racism that continues to underpin Brazilian history and geography. An additional goal is to discuss the appropriation and manipulation of ethnic and socio-economic differences according to politico-economic interests. The analysis will make use of academic and literary publications, secondary data and, in particular, a case study on the challenges faced by Guarani-Kaiowa indigenous nation in a context of land grabbing and structural racism. These various forms of qualitative data were analysed through an inductive, thematic approach, which required a critical interpretative procedure from the early process of selecting codes and constructing themes. The research also used narrative analysis to understand how research participants construct stories and descriptions from their own personal experience. The results reveal that not only the tragic and unique but also universalistic socio-spatial experience of indigenous peoples in the Brazilian territory and their struggle to resist constant atrocities tells a great deal not only about the direction of mainstream development, but also about the entrenched anti-difference tendencies of Brazilian socio-spatial relations. Most hard labour has historically been assigned to impoverished non-white workers, whilst success and prestige are associated with white traits, as well as other stereotyped attributes such as hetero, property owner and university graduate (dos Santos et al., 2006). The depreciation of most of the Brazilian society is a self-inflicted degradation fuelled by the supposed superior tastes and better traditions of European and North American traditions. The middle-class strives to copy the prejudices of the more affluent national and foreign groups, often exacerbating manifestations of bad taste and arrogance to maintain a distance from the mass of the population. The habits of the middle-class are today marred by ‘Miami-oriented’ consumerism and the protection of their private assets living in well-guarded buildings or walled housing condominiums (Kopper, 2020; Telles, 1992). Most people continue to daily suffer the long-lasting consequences of slavery and institutionalised discrimination, particularly the hidden, but reiterated humiliation and contempt for the ‘wrong’ skin colour (typically associated with African descendancy) and ‘dubious’ family ancestry (related to native or African lineage). Systematic labour exploitation is facilitated by high levels of oppression and political disorientation (aggravated by poor public education and, in recent decades, the uncompromising operation of Evangelical churches that not only impose heavy financial burden on churchgoers, but often indicate who they should vote for) that obstructs the identification of common ethnic or class circumstances (McKenna, 2020).

The more marginalised among the impoverished social groups tend to remain on the fringes of democracy and the rule of law, in a space where the national state only lately and reluctantly started to pay some attention (as in the case of ethnical quotas in universities and expanded public services). This last category includes the descendants of runaway slaves (called quilombolas), residents in irregular urban peripheries (favelados) and the thousands of indigenous communities all over the country (including a growing number of people who in recent years started to reclaim and reaffirm their indigenous heritage, the ‘resurgent Indians’, or índios resurgidos in Portuguese). A subtle, but lasting, attribute of interpersonal relations and public policies in Brazil is to blame the poor for their poverty. It is common to see slaves reproached for their slavery and indigenous peoples criticised for their insistence on being indigenous (Drybread, 2018). It is a teleological construct that values what is already valued and condemns what has always been scorned, without ever challenging reasons and responsibilities. Descendants of the Portuguese colonisers and other white European migrants, who constitute the majority of the ruling elite, exert power to safeguard deeply rooted socio-spatial privileges (as in the case of cheap domestic and industrial labour, as well as preferential treatment by judicial and state services, even if flagrantly illegal). It all indicates that Brazil stays a country of major paradoxes and unresolved attitudes towards past and present ethnic and class differences. The large working class is daily exploited and compelled to work hard, but it is at the same time considered ‘lazy’ and ‘unreliable’. There are extravagant and expensive electoral campaigns every two years (by and large paid with public money), but very limited space for effective change. The next section explores the endurance of racism from colonial to post-independence times.

Racism as the Pillar of the Independent Country

Brazil is a country where highly exploitative labour relations evolved closely associated with unrepentant racism and conservative individualism (Aquino & de Assis, 2021). Even when the excesses of racism are verbally condemned, the concreate actions replicate the old stereotypes that, as observed by Hall (1996), reduce people to artificial categories that are imposed in the name of progress (for example the shift of the image of indigenous people as brute, violent beasts to the romanticised version of the noble savage as fairy tale heroes or passive victims). In primary school classrooms, pupils are still taught that the South American colony was ‘discovered’, almost by chance, by Portuguese sailors on their way to India under the command of Admiral Álvares Cabral. The historical date of 22 April 1500 is celebrated in schoolbooks as the ‘discovery’ (descobrimento) of the new territory that was later to be called Brazil. In effect, it was much more a process of concealment (encobrimento) and erasure (apagamento) of the indigenous world in the name of completely foreign values and exogenous socio-spatial relations. The Europeans were armed with horses, guns and microbes, and even had their annexation plan legitimised by the Pope, who ratified the Treaty of Tordesillas and, as a result, split the whole planet between only Portugal and Spain. It was unceremoniously overlooked by the conquerors that the local (indigenous) residents in the continents, disputed between the Iberian crowns, had lived and left their mark in the territory for thousands of years (Martiniere, 1978). The indigenous populations were, thus, allowed by the Church and the monarchs to be subjugated, deceived and displaced, as much as subjected to systematic murder by armed attacks and endemic diseases.

Throughout its history, the country was continually considered a reservoir of quasimythical resources and abundant opportunities, but the typical European approach was to translate it into rapid sources of enrichment and disregard the resulting socio-ecological impacts (Holanda, 2000). To maximise gain and reduce risks, politico-economic goals were well garrisoned by the elite while the ‘populace’, particularly the African slaves and indigenous nations, were deemed inferior and degenerated, even though the economic production largely depended on their labour, land and knowledge. Contrary to the official historiography that despised the contribution of the indigenous labour force, in the first two centuries most work was carried out by indigenous labourers in the same abject conditions that later became associated with African slaves (Woodard et al., 2018). Even with the increasing arrival of captives from Africa from the eighteenth century, indigenous workers and slaves remained a large majority of the national working class. Instead of the conventional narrative, the subjection of indigenous peoples to open slavery persisted regardless of any legal restrictions, given that settler colonists continued to make use of forced labour whenever it was possible and convenient. Different from Roman slaves who were educated and trained to do all sorts of tasks, on the American continent, the indigenous slave was brutalised to an unimaginable level and “reduced to his lowest, little more than an irrational animal” condition (Prado Jr., 1967, p. 317). The prevailing ideas in the early period of Brazilian independence paralleled the opinion about the equivalent experience in North America, when Alexis de Tocqueville understood that “their unforgiving prejudices, their indomitable passions, their vices and, still more perhaps, their savage virtues, exposed them to inevitable destruction” (Tocqueville, 2003: p. 36, emphasis added).

Indigenous slavery, despite being formally illegal, resurfaced in the nineteenth century, accentuating the supposed backwardness of the bondsman because of their non-whiteness (Miki, 2014). The joint reliance and depreciation of slaves was easily incorporated by new cohorts of destitute immigrants who arrived after the national independence in 1822. The majority migrated from Portugal, Italy or Germany, and soon learned the role reserved for them as peasants and low-paid workers but were, nonetheless, encouraged to keep distance and despise the non-white members of the working class (de Sousa & Nascimento, 2008). Liberal and nationalistic ideas nurtured by a highly Europeanised elite certainly did not include the majority of the inhabitants. On the contrary, poor white workers and peasants lived in a limbo condition of being degraded and exploited like the rest of the impoverished population but with the possibility to further degrade and discriminate the non-white on the grounds of their ethnicity. For the vast non-white masses, economic opportunities and the promise of a great future remained extremely restricted and trapped in a vicious circle of discrimination-poverty-more discrimination (Hanley, 2013). In that respect, the miscegenation or interbreeding of whites and less-than-whites was considered throughout the nineteenth century as a serious risk to progress and national development. The already extinct indigenous societies were thought doomed to disappear because of their own faults, while the remaining indigenous nations were despised as inconvenient relics of the past, often idealised and romanticised as a vague element of the growing nationalist sentiment (Dornelles, 2018).

One of the most notorious examples from the Brazilian Romanticist literature was the book The Guarani (its original title is O Guarani: Romance Brasileiro), of 1857, by José de Alencar (1829–1877; congressman, minister and the most important Brazilian novelist of the nineteenth century), where the protagonist is Peri, a man with almost superhuman powers who resembles a medieval knight but is exceedingly submissive and willing to obey a Luso-Brazilian family under attack by other indigenous. Alencar’s romance had huge impact on Brazilian literature and reverberates the impossible love story of the virgin Atala and the indigenous warrior Chactas in the novel Atala René by Chateaubriand (1971) that also had an immense influence on early European Romanticism. Illustrative of elite nationalism was the controversy that took place in a series of weekly articles published by the newspaper O Globo (owned by the republican activist Quintino Bocaiuva and that circulated between 1874 and 1883) involving the celebrated José de Alencar, considered the leading author of the nascent national literature and an important member of parliament, and the young intellectual Joaquim Nabuco (son of the prominent Senator José Nabuco and later a main figure of the anti-slavery movement). Nabuco had recently returned from a trip to Europe (a typical experience of the young male members of the aristocracy) and decided to polemise with Alencar, attacking him for the artificial representation of nature and the peoples of the country. According to Nabuco, Alencar’s books and theatrical plays were nothing but farcical, fraught with incoherent stereotypes, particularly his indigenous characters. Despite the accurate criticism of Alencar’s superficial and erroneous description of the indigenous population, Nabuco’s position was even more Europeanised, elitist and arrogant. In the course of the bitter exchange, Joaquim Nabuco presented what seems his most genuine opinion: “We are Brazilians and not Guarani; the language we speak is still Portuguese” (in Martins, 2010, p. 23). This lengthy but sterile controversy demonstrates the distance of the politico-intellectual elite and the non-white majority of the people, who were marginalised and grossly misrepresented in public debates.

During the first century after independence, the small circle of Brazilian artists and provincial scholars systematically appropriated the luxurious landscapes and features of the native population for their aesthetic needs, but never really tried to understand, or even personally visit, the remote corners of the country where most indigenous peoples were confined. Emperor Peter II (on the throne between 1840 and 1889) commissioned Victor Meirelles (1832–1903) and other painters to portray the most emblematic events of the national past and the supposed locations where these took place, basically creating, in the large canvases, the official historiography that still prevails today. The musician and conductor Carlos Gomes, also holder of a scholarship provided by the Braganza king, staged the successful opera Il Guarany in the theatre La Scala (Milan) in 1870, with a libretto based on Alencar’s book but even more incongruous and schematic than the novel (Andrews, 2000). At the same time that Carlos Gomes secured his reputation in the most prestigious opera house of the world, with a grand spectacle that was vaguely related to what really happened to the indigenous peoples during colonisation, indigenous communities were being further assaulted, displaced and exploited. The brutality of those attacks was, nonetheless, rationalised in the name of progress and nation building. The father of Brazilian anthropology, the physician Nina Rodrigues (1894), claimed, in a very influential book at the time, that the indigenous population (described in the text as the brasílio-guarany) had no aptitude for civilisation and, even when imprisoned and forced to work for the ‘superior’ whites, would maintain their degenerate ‘nature’. According to Nina Rodrigues, who made use of the overtly supremacist literature, the indigenous person has a much lower comprehension of morality, which is intrinsic and should even justify a tailored penal legislation with attenuated penalties (not as measure of compassion or compensation, but simply because of their supposed deficiency of ordinary understanding of norms and rules).

Such pessimism about the ‘mixing of the races’ was replaced in the first half of the twentieth century by the ideology of ‘racial democracy’ as a positive and central feature of Brazilian society (Schwarcz, 1999). But just like political democracy was then restricted to regular elections controlled by the powerful and with minimal opportunities for politico-economic change (which always depended on the use of force in the shape of political takeovers, as happened in 1822, 1889, 1930, 1937, 1964 and eventually in 2016), racial democracy was evidently defined and operated by the dominant white minority. With the military-republican-positivistic coup d’état of 1889, the mainstream political game was to tacitly disguise socio-spatial differences in the name of formal, liberal liberties. Most ‘Indians’ and ‘blacks’ may have formally become citizens, but they were also expected, as ‘free citizens’, to remain occupied and passive in farm fields, industries, domestic kitchens and urban peripheries. National political affairs and well-paid jobs were certainly not available for the majority, with only a very few notorious exceptions (Salvador & Silva, 2020). If the Afro descendants were associated with the stereotype of fathers of Brazilian music and cuisine, the indigenous peoples were frozen and pigeon-holed in the romantic ideas about primitivism, savagery and closeness to an abstract ‘nature’. Economy, arts and history were not for the poor to interfere, but just to be involuntarily referred to in books, songs and paintings. An acerbic critique of the status quo was provided by Lima Barreto in his main book, The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma (Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma), a pre-modernist text initially published in instalments in 1911. Barreto, a descendant of slaves, tells the story of the ultra-nationalist Quaresma, a civil servant who, among many other eccentric initiatives, demanded that Tupi-Guarani be adopted as the national language. In his opinion, the only true Brazilians are ‘our ancestors, the Indians’. When he opens the door to a visitor, he burst out into tears, leaving the guest perplexed, but then replies: “You don’t have the slightest idea of our national customs. You wanted me to shake hands. That’s not Brazilian. Our natural greeting is to weep when we meet our friends. That’s what the Tupinambás used to do” (Barreto, 2014, p. 26). Quaresma then embarks on an agricultural project to prove the richness and fertility of the national land, claiming that any doubt about its fertility is a lack of patriotism (p. 115). The book is a satiric representation of the elitist and racist attitude of the political and social elites, who resort to violence when necessary to suppress dissent. Policarpo Quaresma is a tropical Dom Quixote, fighting an impossible cause, willing to move history backwards and ridiculously trying to impose mistaken generalisations of indigenous practises. His final days were indeed sad, as the title suggests, with his execution by the military tyrant and the total rejection of his ambitious, but naïve, plans. The accumulation of injustices and racism during the first century of Brazilian independence (1822–1922) continued to affect, and largely undermine, modernist dreams and ambitions.

The Racist Traits of Brazilian Twentieth Century Modernity

If assimilationist policies prevailed during the colonial period before independence and the entire nineteenth century, legislation introduced in 1910 initiated a new phase characterised by indigenous tutelage (Pacheco de Oliveira & Freire, 2006). Through the execution of rigid, positivistic plans that permeated the minds of republican army officers, the indigenous settlements and populations were controlled and uncontacted groups were contacted and ‘pacified’ (Rodrigues, 2019). The new republican regime, post-1889, had removed the central role of the Catholic Church, while the national state took a more direct control (‘tutelage’) of indigenous life and their dealings with non-indigenous neighbours. The official attitudes were extremely negative towards the indigenous population, as in the report published by the Ministry of Agriculture between 1913 and 1917 that described them as reduced to a condition of “brutes, useless to themselves and to wider society, as well as precluding the use of land and natural resources” (Almeida, 2019, p. 140). Such ideas remained rampant in the first decades of the twentieth century and directly informed the creation of the Indian Protection Service (SPI) in 1910 by an Afro-Brazilian politician who, unexpectedly, became president between 1909 and 1910: Nilo Procópio Peçanha. Moreover, SPI proved to be a repressive, inefficient and highly corrupt agency.Footnote 2 Its modus operandi also betrayed the integration and assimilation plans of influential evolutionist anthropologists, notably Lewis Henry Morgan. The indigenist agency was established to mainly allow the indigenous population to be gradually and more ‘humanely’ absorbed by the rest of Brazilian society. It was an authoritarian management of difference in which the characteristics and practices of the indigenous groups were considered obsolete and prone to disappear, although the physical elimination of those groups had become increasingly less acceptable by public opinion.

The first decades of the last century were a period of some restricted modernism and controlled social innovation. In his notorious book, originally published in 1933 with the English title The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-Grande e Senzala), Freyre (2003) provided a pseudo-scientific account of the supposed ‘racial democracy’ that resulted from the mixture of Europeans, Africans and indigenous populations. Freyre developed a sophisticated argument about social integration, but beneath an abundant bibliography and lavish quotations, there are deeply racist and class-based preconceptions. It is centred around the supposed innate degradation of the indigenous population and, consequently, their failure to cope with more ‘advanced’ Portuguese society, which was also in itself a degraded colonisation force when compared with the more competent Spanish and English civilisation. The author describes colonisation as the destruction of the ‘equilibrium’ between indigenous men and their physical environment. The indigenous peoples are, therefore, seen as grown-up children, lazy, ignorant and living in a luxurious, wasteful condition. The natives are infantilised and doomed to fade away because of their degraded differences. Influenced by the schematic ‘racial democracy’ of Freyre, a large number of Brazilian sociologists and social anthropologists, from the post-war years, also investigated the clashes between indigenous peoples and other social groups making use of categories such as intercultural contact, assimilation and ethnicity (for example, Cardoso de Oliveira, 1962). It has been described as the study of ‘interethnic friction’, as an alternative to the concept of acculturation, which was one of the dominant themes in the North American anthropology of the 1930s to the 1950s (tacitly distant from the British notion of ‘cultural contact’).

An influential interpretation that considers Brazilian society as something severely split was put forward by Lambert (1970), who argued that in reality there are ‘Two Brazils’, that is, a developed elite that thrives, but is always surrounded by the highly underdeveloped majority of the population. According to this thesis, archaic political and economic elements persist amidst the modernisation flux, as an archipelago of backwardness caused by their inability to become integrated in the superior process of development. However, Lambert and many others have failed to comprehend that such verticalized dualism is, in effect, not a social crack but the actual face of a highly contradictory country that operates according to instrumentalised socio-spatial differences. This operational dualism was demonstrated by Oliveira (2003), in a book initially published in 1973, where it is argued that capitalism in Brazil evolves organically through the reproduction of old relations that preserve the accumulation potential involved in the urban-industrial expansion that is considered new. For Oliveira (2003), the country functions according to a ‘dualist’ socio-spatial logic that maintains a differential movement of accumulation between regions and social groups, in a relentless overall process that leads to the monumental concentration of income, property and power, making it almost impossible to secure changes in favour of working classes. Racial concerns continued to influence public and academic debates during the final quarter of twentieth century, with growing attacks on the ‘scientific’ racism sponsored by right-wing intellectuals and public authorities (including the proposal to limit the fertility of non-white, poor women in the 1980s). It was still common to argue that whites were intellectually superior and would suffer degenerative effects as a result of unrestricted miscegenation (Reichmann, 1999). One tangible consequence of the normalisation of spurious differences was its inscription in the production of uneven rural and urban landscapes. Brazilian urban modernisation produced a polis that is, in practice, the locus of mismatch (desencontro) where violence became both the lingua franca and a commodity to profit from (Silva, 2000).

Following the analysis of DaMatta (1997), it is easier to perceive that Brazil has always functioned as a society in which systematic inequalities are accepted, expected and even cherished. Social life unfolds through a permanent tension between authoritarian and oppressive attitudes of the national elite, with its idiosyncratic reinterpretation of European or North American references, and the creative and malleable practices of the general population in their daily struggle for survival. Rules are negotiable, and their enforcement depends on the status of the individual, exemplified in the expression ‘to the friends, all favours; to the enemies, the law’. In other words, the realm of equality (before the law) is something perverse, exasperating and reserved for those situations when somebody should be punished. DaMatta identifies vestiges in the aristocratic, slaveholder and latifundistFootnote 3 origins of the country; still today, a domestic worker (typically female and non-white) is legally allowed to be paid less than other workers because domestic tasks are considered inferior or unquantifiable. DaMatta (2019) further demonstrates the disturbing crisis at the centre of Brazilian identity with the notorious and popular query “who do you think you are talking to?”, commonly invoked to react against authority; it reminds the speaker and the hearer that equivalences before the law are, in practice, less important than socio-ethnic hierarchies. Those tendencies are constantly reinforced by the exploitative jobs prevalent in the labour market and the elitist priorities of the state apparatus, which segregate non-white communities in degraded spaces, but tacitly maintain opportunities for the white to reach the best universities and top positions of the civil service (Pagano, 2014). Almost all prisoners are non-white individuals confined to the horrendous Brazilian prisons, given that the judges impose an extremely severe, often illegal, punishment on them and tend to be more friendly and diligent to white defendants (Fiocruz, 2020).

The mistreatment of the impoverished majority of the population is only magnified in the sustained abuses committed against the indigenous peoples living in the Brazilian territory. Public policies and private attitudes towards the ancestral nations betray exacerbated forms of discrimination and indifference. That helps explain the difficulty to change the indigenist legislation in favour of the natives themselves. The legal classification of indigenous adults as a sort of degenerate or infantile person (especially those who did not speak Portuguese and lived in relative isolation) persisted for several decades. During most of the last century, indigenous individuals had no right to vote, to be elected, to have commercial businesses or even to have documents and passports, unless they renounced their own ethnic character and adopted a generic Brazilian identity (it became an international scandal when, in 1980, the Brazilian government tried to prevent the renowned Chief Juruna from attending, as its invited president, a session of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal to judge several recent indigenous genocides in the Americas, as graphically described in Juruna, 1982). The previous constitutional texts of 1934, 1937, 1946, 1967 and 1969 had specific provisions for the protection of indigenous areas, but the aim was to give the indigenous peoples the chance to be gradually absorbed by national society. Article 8 of the 1969 text, introduced in the darkest period of the brutal military dictatorship, stated that the federal government had the responsibility to incorporate the ‘Indians’ (silvícolas) into the ‘national communion’. Two decades later, after the end of the military autocracy (1964–1985), the 1988 Constitution, for the first time, recognised ancestral rights and the autonomy of the indigenous nations, which were entitled to survive on their own terms. Article 231 of the 1988 Constitution guarantees the social organisation, customs, languages, creeds and traditions of indigenous peoples should be recognised, as well as their original rights to the lands they traditionally occupied.Footnote 4

In theory, current constitutional text reinvented Brazil as a ‘multicultural’ nation state where difference and interethnic tolerance should define social relations. The 1988 Constitution was approved in an optimistic context of redemocratisation and recovery of socio-political rights after the long and vicious military dictatorship. There was then great expectation with the decision to finally respect and meaningfully engage with the indigenous population beyond massacres and assimilationist policies. A number of undeniable achievements and concessions were secured, as the recognition of the political voice and organisation of local, regional and national representative associations, the creation of newspapers and websites to give visibility to their demands (some adopted indigenous languages, in addition to Portuguese, Spanish and English, to convey their message), and the demarcation of some new indigenous reservations. There were more university and school opportunities, including programmes tailored for specific ethnic groups, and the growing election of indigenous representatives as councillors, congresspeople and city mayors. However, even an advanced legal code could not produce direct and immediate social changes. What has prevailed, since the 1990s, is a coordinated pressure to incorporate the indigenous population via individualist, market-based assimilation strategies (Pokorny et al., 2021). The myth of the ‘national communion’ was replaced by the new folklore of entrepreneurialism that in fact fosters renewed attempts to extract resources, exploit labour and manage political dissent. The crucial and more sensitive problem, as always, is the recovery and protection of ancestral areas, which were largely unobserved by the state apparatus (despite all legal provisions).

The major contradictions of a long process of elitist modernisation, since the early twentieth century, and the lack of genuine democratisation of civil society, notwithstanding the formal achievements in the text of the 1988 Constitution, led to an institutional rupture in 2016, which was followed by the appropriation of government positions by hyper-conservative politicians and members of the military (Akkoyunlu & Lima, 2022; Bin, 2022; Valle, 2022). The consolidation of a proto-fascist regime in 2018 demonstrated the demobilisation of the political opposition and the profits that can be earned from the systematic attack on social movements (notably the indigenous movement) and capture of public assets and state funds (Carnut, 2021; Ricupero, 2022; Webber, 2020). The convergence of rentism and reprimarisation has depended on the instrumentalisation of differences according to politico-economic priorities. Not only Brazil, but also Latin America, is notoriously known for its high levels of inequality, violence and indifference for the condition of the majority of its (low-income, non-white) domestic population. Those trends reflect ingrained disputes and the difficulty to overcome intolerant practices and undemocratic values through official politics and an exclusionary rule of law. Sánchez-Ancochea (2021) has demonstrated that racial discrimination in Latin America has contributed to income inequality and has also resulted from it; the author argues that it is actually difficult to differentiate between social and income inequalities, with roots in the processes of colonisation that terribly affected indigenous peoples and African slaves brought to America. Nonetheless, the question is much deeper than inequality of assets and earnings but concerns the quality of inequality and the meaning of inclusion, including important moments when equality is part of the process to hide injustices. Hegel (1977) already cautioned against overly relying on quantitative assessments of difference because it tends to ignore the connections between individuals (for Hegel, there is no reality which is not individuality’s own nature and doing). What is required is a ‘comparative reflection’ and qualitative assessment of individuals who are self-related and should be able to assess themselves beyond the widespread, biased conclusion that what there “is all good” (Hegel, 1977, p. 241). If there is something that is not going well nowadays in Brazil, it is certainly its agribusiness sector (one of the best expressions of rentier capitalism and the plunder of the commons described by Standing, 2021).

Racism and Indifference Cultivated by Agribusiness

The Brazilian economy, since the 1990s, has become increasingly deindustrialised and reliant on the export of primary commodities, especially those produced by agribusiness farmers. Although agribusiness requires new production technologies and innovative managerial approaches (largely controlled by financial capital and agroindustry companies), it also overhauls the conservative, extractivist and rentist basis of the national economy that has prevailed for centuries (Sauer et al., 2018). The rigid management of ethnic and class differences through top-down integration has been replaced, since the final years of the last century when neoliberalised agribusiness became the main economic sector, with the also perverse and destructive manifestation of indifference towards the specific needs and the accumulation of injustices, violations and illegalities (Ioris, 2019). Instead of addressing the serious problems caused by government irresponsibility and multiple law violations, the intention of many politicians is to renew the attack on the 1298 indigenous lands that were so far identified in Brazil, aggravated by the fact that 829 of those have some form of irregularity in their demarcation and 536 were abandoned by the government for years, as in the case of the many pending demarcations (Eloy Terena, lawyer and anthropologist of the Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation (APIB), personal communication, September 2021). The country has gone through an accelerated deindustrialisation and growing rentism in the last few decades (especially its ability to extract rent from the state and society alike due to skyrocket interest rates and intimidating loaning conditions), together with the reinforcement of old agrarian oligarchies and sustained through police violence and paramilitary, mafia-like squads (the so-called militias) that target peasants and indigenous communities (Ioris, 2016). The economic activity that best represents the complex instrumentalisation of long-lasting differences amidst growing indifference is now the agribusiness cluster of soybean production and export.

Soybean has become the main Brazilian commodity, cultivated primarily in large private properties in the centre of the country with the use of intense chemicals and electronic technologies, which generates very few jobs, pays almost no taxes (when exported) and leaves behind a legacy of socio-environmental devastation (Ioris, 2017). Its main function is to generate dollars from the export of grains (increasingly to China), with very limited contribution to the local economy beyond the momentary enrichment of landowners. Soybean production has flourished and helped insert the indigenous agenda in the limited arena of representative, neo-oligarchic Brazilian regime, which is increasingly perceived as a demoncracy and can be better understood as a concrete example of the ‘Iron Heel’ described by London (1908). The ‘narcissism’ of the agribusiness sector, beyond minimal parameters of social inclusion and the rule of law, is a clear expression of an abstract universalism that equally disrupts places and localities all over the world. The self-reassured superiority of agribusiness is constantly nurtured by the ideological negation and coordinated action against social inclusion and basic rights. What happens in Brazil basically reproduces the similar experience in other societies organised according to the indifference that permeates settler capitalism. If the indigenous peoples “had been recognized, there would have been no real frontier on the continent and no open spaces to fill. They existed outside the [North American] Constitution as its negative foundation: in other words, their exclusion and elimination were essential conditions of the functioning of the Constitution itself” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 170).

The indigenous nation more severely and systematically attacked by agribusiness in Brazil are the Guarani-Kaiowa living in the State of Mato Grosso do Sul along the border with Paraguay. The Guarani-Kaiowa are the second largest indigenous nation in the Brazilian territory and, over the last five decades, have been displaced, exploited and massacred due to the advance of large private properties and agribusiness production into areas grabbed by the national state and by frontier settlers (FIAN, 2013). The great majority of the Guarani-Kaiowa ancestral land—around eight million hectares—was lost to development but it is now being disputed with landowners and the authorities, typically involving great animosity and systematic violence (Ioris, 2021). Because of the strong and proud sense of their differences, the Guarani-Kaiowa have offered effective resistance and creatively challenged mainstream trends (Ioris, 2022a). The response of the police and private militia maintained by the farmers has been inclement. The Guarani-Kaiowa have suffered terrible genocidal violence for many generations, aggravated since the late 1970s when they initiated a campaign to recover their sacred family areas (called tekoha in the Guarani language). Dozens of indigenous leaders, elders, youngsters and children have died in recent years and continue to die almost every week, as regularly reported on the website of the Indigenist Missionary Council (https://cimi.org.br). In May 2022, during the preparation of this paper, as a result of the mobilisation of Guarani-Kaiowa families to recover the tekoha Joparã in the municipality of Coronel Sapucaia, near the old reservation of Taquaperi (with 3300 people living in terrible conditions and squeezed in only 1777 hectares), Alex Vasques Lopes, 18 years old, was murdered but the authorities never bothered to investigate the crime. A month later, in an area called Guapo’y, the indigenous protesters were expelled from the land by farmers (without any judicial authorisation) and Vitor Fernandes, 42 years, was also assassinated. In the following weeks and months, other members of the Guarani-Kaiowa communities continued to be shot and killed (as Vitorino Sanches, 60 years old, also killed in Guapo’y in September 2022).

Another very effective anti-indigenous strategy in Mato Grosso do Sul has been the spread of prejudices that help to maintain the Guarani-Kaiowa apart and humiliated. As recounted in the annual report of CIMI (2021) on violence against the indigenous peoples of Brazil, in August 2020, two presenters of the Radio Grande FM of Dourados mocked the fact that desperate Guarani-Kaiowa regularly search for food in household rubbish bags left on the street pavement. One of the broadcasters affirmed that ‘Indians’ are worse than cats ripping the bags and that the best solution was to add an even more intense stench to protect it from the ‘attack’ of the impoverished indigenous families (CIMI, 2021, p. 31). These sarcastic remarks aired by the local radio were denounced by Guarani-Kaiowa leaders to the local police (notícia-crime) but were promptly dismissed by the police investigators and are unlike to result in any condemnation because of the very convenient excuse of the ‘right to free speech’ (not by chance, it has been increasingly invoked by neo-fascist groups associated with Bolsonaro’s political project to cover incitements to racist violence). At the same time that the desperate situation of many indigenous families is laughed at, politicians and business leaders offer them the single option of becoming undifferentiated Brazilian citizens. Instead of a valued and decent indigenous existence, there is an expectation that they give up all claims and accept the same subordinate condition of other poor Brazilians. From the perspective of those in power, to be indigenous is a nuisance and an aberration. Bolsonaro himself stated on 23 January 2020 that “the Indian is evolving, is more and more a human being like us” (índio tá evoluindo, cada vez mais é ser humano igual a nós) (G1, 2020).

Particularly in peripheral agribusiness production areas, such as Mato Grosso do Sul, the indigenous population continues to be systematically assaulted and still considered an obstacle to progress and economic growth. Indigenous families, even those living in reservations, are always subjected to new rounds of land grabbing, as through the renting out of land that should be used only by the indigenous community. In the difficult concrete context of their multiple struggles for land and for socioeconomic opportunities, ethnicity is even more deeply interwoven with socio-economic struggles and the need to forge alliances with other segments of the working class (Ioris, 2020). These chaotic reservations encapsulate the fundamental and contradictory pressures of instrumentalised difference (as degraded individuals, the lowest in the social scale) and pervasive indifference (the practical impossibility of being an indigenous person with minimal levels of life decency). The main reservations were established by the abovementioned SPI, from 1910, to accommodate indigenous families and dispersed groups, which were considered a perennial threat to the growing urban and rural population in the early phase of agrarian capitalism. Their locations did not have any specific ancestral relevance for the indigenous population but were pinpointed by the government according to exogenous criteria, particularly the proximity to towns and industries where the native workers could be employed (Ioris, 2021). Under massive pressure, the reservations were the main refuge for hundreds of Guarani-Kaiowa families, as well as members of other indigenous nations and also for many Brazilians and Paraguayans who improperly occupied plots of land in the reservations. The reservations effectively represent a bureaucratic answer of the positivistic Brazilian State to the perceived ‘Indian question’, which was taken as a major ‘inconvenience’ and obstacle to the advance of economic frontiers.

The reservations actually became a useful stock of labour, including domestic and industrial employees, but have been mainly a deposit of ‘human waste’ (those who were displaced from areas grabbed and transformed into private farms). The highly problematic indigenous reservation of Dourados offers not only the most concrete demonstration of intricate social interaction, but also the highest levels of ethnic-related violence. Located near the city of Dourados, it is now the most turbulent indigenous reservation, not only in the state, but also in the entire country (it is now a focus of drug trafficking, alcohol related aggression and street violence.). Because of rapid urban expansion and land speculation, the reservation has actually become a suburban neighbourhood in the periphery of Dourados and is increasingly surrounded by high-income gated communities that count on private security and have walls around the entire perimeter. The Dourados reservation, in particular, is a real socio-political time-bomb, a main epicentre of socio-spatial friction that reverberates the pressures and failures of agribusiness-oriented development trends. With more than 12,000 inhabitants in 3474 hectares, the population density of the Dourados reservation is staggering: a mere 1.46 hectares per family, totally insufficient for the basic household subsistence, let alone the maintenance of traditional indigenous practices. There is a vast number of small shops, garages and public service offices, which give the visitor a disturbing image of a shambolic urban fringe (Almeida, 2019). In the 1960s, the area was divided into individual family lots, as a crucial step of the assimilationist plans (but against the wish of the indigenous residents), under the assumption that it would stimulate a more entrepreneurial attitude (to some extent, the extended families tried to stay together in adjacent lots but growing interpersonal tensions because of the spatial fragmentation). In addition to territorial violations and labour-related abuses, there is a systematic undermining of the most basic right to food, water, health and nutrition. In a survey conducted among Guarani-Kaiowa families, Franceschini and Burity (2016) found that 81.8% of children under 5 years were living in moderate or serious food insecurity conditions.

Closely related to party politics and micropolitical disputes is the speedy expansion of neo-Pentecostal churches in the reservation (more than 100 Christian churches are now in activity, which brutally squeeze and undermine the practice of the traditional indigenous religion and the legitimacy of the shamans). Protestantism was brought to the reservation in 1928, when the Cauiá Mission, of Methodist persuasion, was established by religious missionaries. Until the 1970s, the number of protestant converts was relatively small (around 15% of the total population), but with the expansion of Evangelical churches in the last four decades these have incorporated more than half of the local population. Since 1990, most neo-Pentecostal churches have an indigenous pastor or at least an indigenous deputy-pastor (Chamorro & Combès, 2015). The level of fragmentation is staggering, and most churches end up having fewer than 30 members (in average, there are 50 believers per church). New evangelical churches constantly arise (especially because of the relatively straightforward and succinct training to become a pastor) and some even adopt syncretic names in an attempt to evoke indigenous sensibilities (e.g. Chants of Solomon Indigenous Pentecostal Church, or Igreja Pentecostal Indígena Cantares de Salomão). On the other hand, despite the common bad image of the neo-Pentecostalist movement (frequently associated with high levels of political alienation, the commercialisation of faith and the election of right-wing politicians), the conversion of new indigenous believers is more complicated than it seems. First, many indigenous communities have chosen to organise their local churches from the perspective of a religious resistance, a reaction that was aimed to avoid religious exploitation on the part of non-indigenous priests (including the more traditional influence of the Catholic Church). Second, in a context of great social turbulence and serious economic uncertainties, the church is a source of moral guidance and collective support, which cannot be minimised (Pereira, 2016). Third, and more interesting, Christian theology and the church rituals have been impacted and partly transformed by indigenous religiosity (although to same extent it may also offer an opportunity to boost shamanic practices disguised as Pentecostalism, as in the ritual of ‘speaking in tongues’, supposedly an incorporation of the ‘language of angels’ but in effect a moment of indigenous ecstasy). Different from Pentecostal churches outside the reservation, it is common to see their lively religious celebrations that take most of the night, resembling the traditional indigenous practices that involve intense nocturnal dance and music. Likewise, it is possible to infer that today’s pastors are largely neo-shamans who act to preserve, even unconsciously, some important elements of Guarani theology and cosmology.

Gender issues are also directly connected with spatial, labour and religious processes of change. In a condition of displacement and systematic violence, domestic life and male–female differences among the Guarani-Kaiowa could no longer conform to the traditional configuration, although the household nucleus and the extended family survived and even thrived during the last century. Family relations were, in effect, the best chance they had to continue with their sense of humanity and their valued ethnicity. Leaders of the Guarani-Kaiowa have creatively mobilised their wisdom and knowledge obtained from the close relations with the non-indigenous people, exactly to differentiate themselves and produce new patterns of behaviour but always primarily through the strength of the family networks organised around household fires (fogos), primarily managed by women (Pereira, 2016). This clever and concealed cultivations of alterity, including elements of their old religiosity and family networks, are extremely important for the support and encouragement of relatives especially during difficult times and under the attack of farmers. At the same time, in recent years, there have been more frequently reported cases of household disputes between spouses, including incidents of domestic and sexual violence in Guarani-Kaiowa families. This situation suggests a deterioration of traditional forms of indigenous authority, behavioural changes due to new social habits and also moral degradation caused by the miserable material situation (Cariaga, 2015). It is a delicate topic shrouded in silence, where abuses are often covered up because of the patriarchal power of the husband and the vulnerability of wives and children. Because of the need to cope with the simultaneous oppression of a racist society and of indigenous patriarchy, the Guarani-Kaiowa women have been encouraged to seek jobs outside the community and increasingly take roles previously reserved for men. In that context of trying to be different to remain what they are (and want to remain), there are at least opportunities to learn and react in the best way they can.

Indigenous Resistance and Creative Reactions (Despite Everything)

In subordinate regions dominated by socio-economic forces imposed and controlled from elsewhere, as in the case of Mato Grosso do Sul, there is a constant ingress and revitalisation of practices that already marked the consolidated politico-economic centres elsewhere. Agribusiness requires significant chemical, genetic and biological inputs, but its main element is the indifference for the unique features of old and new farming areas, as much as for the social characteristics of those working in production or the taste and needs of consumers. The proclaimed qualities of the agribusiness-based regional development are rationalised on the grounds of its better adapted production practices and superior rationality. That paves the way to the attempt to eliminate any pockets of difference and resistance challenging its importance, especially the resilient indigenous population that constantly defies agribusiness superior status. According to Lacan (2006, p. 98), aggressiveness is preeminent in the contemporary world because in everyday morality it is usually confused “with the virtue of strength. (…) Darwin’s success seems to derive from the fact that he projected the predations of Victorian society and the economic euphoria that sanctioned for that society the social devastation it initiated on planetary scale.” Commercial farmers and their closest partners and allies insist, and seem to neurotically believe, in the self-evident contribution of agribusiness for the regional and national society, which nurtures, in Lacanian terms, a tension between the geometric (apparently logical) configuration of the economy and the kaleidoscopic, fractured order of interpersonal relations and subjectivities. Even the mighty defenders of agribusiness cannot conceal mounting impacts and inconsistences. As alerted by Lacan (ibid), “if a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.”

Despite the insistence that agribusiness exports are the undeniable proof of progress, the sector maintains persistent attacks on what is considered different, particularly the native inhabitants of the land. It suggests two main things: first, agribusiness cannot dispense with the neo-fascist cultivation of enemies to justify its operation. Second, indigenous (as well as non-indigenous) ethnic and socio-economic differences continue to be instrumentalised, as a requirement of processes of exploitation and political control. There is in place as self-indulging conceptualisation of agribusiness fields as a ‘victorious space’, in economic and technological terms, but it is really a teleological discourse of the superiority of Western society and the limitations of non-Western people. However, the teleology of agribusiness contrasts with the lived, dynamic and non-teleological spaces of indigeneity. The presence of indigenous groups is not a synecdoche of the agribusiness economy, but a reality that profoundly contrasts with the agro-extractivist logic. This opposition between indigeneity and neo-colonial agribusiness is not given in advance, but it is projected by the political-economy trends of regional development. Agribusiness in frontier areas like Mato Grosso do Sul evolved in a terrain of presumed universality and essentially positive socio-economic contribution, but in effect it is a productive activity that really evolved within a gap. In Hegelian terms, the appearance of agribusiness is something that emerges in the ontological gap that separates the real from itself. It is the appearance of a gap, a fallacy, a perennial insufficiency. To discuss the gap between real and appearance, Žižek (2006) makes use of the materialist argument that maybe man (i.e. people) exists because God is not fully Himself, in other words, because there is something not really divine in him. Given that “there is the Particular because the Universal is not fully itself” (Žižek, 2006, p. 107), the particular is evidence of the gap in the universal. In the case of Mato Grosso do Sul, the presence and agency of the Guarani-Kaiowa is proof that agribusiness is not only recent and incompetent, but unable to bridge the gap between its Real and its appearance of supposed universal gain (Ioris, 2022b).

The agribusiness-based economy represents a foremost proof of the bounded rationality of hyper-capitalist societies as compelling evidence of something much deeper and very disturbing, which can be summarised as the formidable erosion of social, spatial and ecological differences in the name of mass agri-food production and maximum profitability. Local, traditional and ecologically identifiable food has been largely replaced by only a few species and a handful of varieties, whose selection is normally determined by packaging and processing needs rather than by nutrition or consumer demands. Likewise, farming and agriculture are progressively separated from knowledge, tools and practices that had been accumulated and used by previous generations according to specific, place-relevant conditions. The vicious tendencies of the capitalisation of agriculture were long ago denounced by Thoreau (2016, pp. 31–35) when he observed that the “farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself… men have become the tools of their tools.” Globalised agri-food systems have come to be dominated by large corporations, which control a large proportion of the market exploiting indigenous knowledge and community resources in the name of profit and private accumulation (Shiva, 2020). The economic orthodoxy teaches that scaling up is a route to reduced financial costs, improved efficiency and greater profitability, but in practice scaling up is a sort of conveyor belt, driven by decisions, policies and interests throughout the food system, that carries businesses in a certain direction because there seems to be no alternative path to profitability and credibility with investors.

Despite all the difficulties and the sustained racism that underpins the production of the regional space of Mato Grosso do Sul, the resistance and agency of the Guarani-Kaiowa shortcuts the linearity of time-as-economic-growth to the profundity of time-as-lived-differences. It all demonstrates the ultimate failure of conquest, land privatisation and now agribusiness, given that the illegal dispossession of land and the absurd suffering involved only enhanced the importance of their cherished, sacred differences. There is certainly no stable, uncomplicated ‘other’ in that convoluted geography, but always an ‘impure’ different character in need of its own other, which leads to perennial search and the prospect of freedom. The socio-spatial experience of the Guarani-Kaiowa and of hundreds of other indigenous peoples around the world vividly demonstrates the political importance of their thinking about and in relation to difference. Echoing the pillars of Hegelian ethics and dialectic, indigenous peoples prioritise difference in the world and consider the present as a step towards not only a more unified but also more diversified society. A sign of reason is to realise that there is definitely no ontological opposition between rich socio-spatial differences and the resulting, open-ended unity across places and scales. Difference is at the centre of manifold interactions that produce space, and it is also the precondition for effective change, democracy and freedom.

Conclusions

The previous sections offered an investigation into the persistence of racism and the controversial meaning of being socio-ethnically different in the Brazilian society. Making use of historical and literary texts, it examined multiple strategies to oppress and exploit marginalised social groups and contain grassroot reactions. The basic argument is that over time the instrumentalisation of difference consolidated a powerful geography of indifference towards the condition of subordinate groups considered to be bearers of derogatory differences. The complexity of difference, turned into indifference, cannot be ontologically dissociated from the realities of power and ideology. If difference, as much as diversity and multiculturalism, has become a buzzword in the early twenty-first century and is often used by postmodern authors to criticise privileges and power associated with ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and other socio-spatial qualifiers, it cannot be taken as a reified category, something simply descriptive and contained in itself, but the manifestation of unfair patterns of interaction between nations, groups of people and individuals. At the centre of those controversies is the existential synergy between ethnicity and class, what is hardly new but continues to require a proper intellectual and political reaction that is both anti-racist and rooted in anti-capitalist critiques. Lived and perceived ethnoclass differences are more than a descriptor or a post factum evaluation, but they are a field of interaction and contestation.

In the second part, it was also considered the ongoing genocide of the Guarani-Kaiowa indigenous people in the centre of South America because of unrelenting racism. The Guarani-Kaiowa are the second largest Brazilian indigenous nation and, over the last five decades, have been displaced, exploited and massacred due to the advance of large private properties and agribusiness production into areas grabbed by the national state and by frontier settlers. The great majority of the Guarani-Kaiowa territory was lost to mainstream rural development and disputed with landowners and the authorities, typically involving great animosity and systematic violence. Although Brazilian agribusiness requires new production technologies and innovative managerial approaches (largely controlled by financial capital and agroindustry companies), it also overhauls the conservative, extractivist and racist basis of the national economy that has prevailed for centuries (strongly reinvigorated and expanded by reactionary administrations from 2016). On the other hand, the ontology of the indigenous persona under straining circumstances involves the constant reclamation of group features bequeathed from the past that are actively renovated to play an important role in terms of resisting and coexisting with the advancing agribusiness. The socio-spatial agency of the Guarani-Kaiowa and of hundreds of other indigenous peoples around the world vividly demonstrates the political importance of their thinking about, and reactions to, persistent racism.