September 30, 2022 at 4:19 p.m. EDT
Sônia Guajajara attends a demonstration at the University of São Paulo law school in August. She is running for a seat in Brazil’s congress. (Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post)
RIO DE JANEIRO — For more than two years, Vanda Ortega Witoto watched from her village in the Amazon as Brazil’s chaotic response to the coronavirus brought catastrophe to her people.
“I saw my leader die without oxygen,” said the 35-year-old nursing technician, a member of the Witoto people. “I saw my relatives being buried after no ambulance took them to the hospital.”
Now Witoto, who lives in the remote Aldeia Colônia in Amazonas state, is running for Brazil’s congress.
“We can’t ask for help from the state when we don’t have our representatives, because those who are there are not sensitive to our cause,” she said. “They don’t even know about our existence and have no reason to defend it.”
They sat on the sidelines and watched others — mostly non-Indigenous men — make the decisions and pass laws that have threatened their land and impacted their lives. Now Indigenous women are fighting back.
A record number of Indigenous women are running for office in Sunday’s election — for state legislatures, for congress, for the vice presidency — as part of a concerted effort to increase Indigenous representation in government.
They come from different states, speak different languages and are running with different parties. But many share a common goal: to undo policies of President Jair Bolsonaro that they say have removed protections, undermined their rights and encouraged record deforestation in the Amazon.
The costs of campaigning, a lack of access to information about the electoral process — sometimes even the absence of ballot boxes in their remote villages across the vast Amazon — can make political participation for these communities particularly challenging. Many of the candidacies this year are long shots. But the effort is seen as a necessary step toward eventual representation.
“Under Bolsonaro, Indigenous rights have been totally dismantled,” said Sônia Guajajara, from the Guajajara people of the Arariboia Indigenous lands in Maranhão state.
Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, is running Sunday for a second term as president. Guajajara, 48, who made Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2022 for her Indigenous rights activism, is running for a seat in congress with the Socialism and Liberty Party.
In 2018, Guajajara became the first Indigenous candidate to run for vice president as running mate to Socialism and Liberty nominee Guilherme Boulos. She said mounting attacks on Indigenous leaders and territories and accelerating environmental destruction have led communities to understand that “the Indigenous movement alone was not enough to stop all the setbacks and put an end to this violence.”
Bolsonaro, campaigning for president that year, promised not to expand protected Indigenous land by “an inch” (and has made good on the vow in office).
“In that moment we also understood that he called for a fight,” said Guajajara, one of the candidates seen as competitive.
Witoto’s Indigenous name, Derequine, means “angry ant” in the Witotoan language. Asked if the meaning of her name reflects her current feelings, she laughed. “Yes, we are angry!” she said.
If she wins, she would be the first Indigenous person to represent Amazonas in congress. The state in the center of the rainforest is home to Brazil’s largest Indigenous population.
Bolsonaro vs. Lula: A referendum on Brazil’s young democracy
Indigenous organizations have put forward 185 federal and state candidates in this year’s election. They call it the “headdress lobby.” That’s the most since Brazil started reporting candidates’ races in 2014.
Brazil is home to more than 896,000 Indigenous people of 305 different ethnicities. But Latin America’s largest country didn’t elect its first Indigenous person to office until 1969, when Manoel dos Santos of the Karipuna people became a city councilman in Oiapoque in the northern state of Amapá.
It would take another half century for the first Indigenous woman to win a seat in congress. Joênia Wapichana was elected a federal deputy in 2018.
Witoto remembers the day she visited Wapichana’s office in congress.
“It is a place that seems not to be our place. But it needs to be our place,” she said. “It was not built for us, but we need to get there.”
In April, Witoto joined thousands of Indigenous people to protest a bill that would allow large-scale mining in Indigenous land, which scientists warn would bring environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
She camped in front of congress for five days. No matter how many protesters were present or how loud they chanted, she said, no one seemed to listen.
“We were talking to ourselves,” she said. “There was not a single representative who would let us in to listen to our demands. I said: ‘No, I can’t do this anymore.’ I was tired.”
Adriana Ramos, coordinator of policy programs at the nongovernmental Social Environmental Institute, said the number of Indigenous women running for office this year is in part a result of more women climbing ranks within local and national Indigenous groups and gaining influence among their own people.
“It is a product of a process of empowering women,” Ramos said. “Once they had opportunities to lead these organizations, they showed the capacity to lead and to manage politics, while it also gave them the organizational tools to build the strategy of launching more female candidacies.”
As Brazil’s election day approaches, fear of violence grows
Maial Kaiapó, 34, running for congress from Pará state — one of the Amazon’s most deforested — said the rising threat from land grabbers and illegal loggers added to her sense of urgency.
“It is time for us, Indigenous women, to move and enter the political field,” she added. “Because we are really in the middle of a war.”
She is the granddaughter of Raoni Metuktire, 92, chief of the Kaiapó people and one of Brazil’s most prominent Indigenous leaders. He has fought for the preservation of the Amazon for decades.
In a posted on Kaiapó’s Instagram account, Metuktire endorsed his granddaughter in their native Kaiapó language.
“May she speak for us,” he said.
Gabriela Sá Pessoa in São Paulo contributed to this report.
