- The Afro-Brazilian community of Quilombo de Bombas in São Paulo state has welcomed a court ruling ordering the state to issue it with a land title to its ancestral territory located inside a state park.
- The ruling is historic because it’s the first time this kind of traditional community whose ancestral territory overlaps with a state protected area will receive a title.
- Government agencies involved in the process have acknowledged that quilombo inhabitants, known as quilombolas, have historically tended to be among the best environmental stewards in the country.
- Despite the win, most of the nearly 500 quilombos throughout Brazil remain officially unrecognized, with only one in eight quilombolas living in formally titled territories.
After winning a historic lawsuit late last year, a traditional Afro-Brazilian community has finally obtained legal recognition of its land located in São Paulo’s Alto Ribeira Tourist State Park, a protected area.
According to legal experts, the decision is a significant win for the Quilombo de Bombas community, one of hundreds across Brazil made up of quilombolas, or the descendants of formerly enslaved people. This particular community, or quilombo, has lived in the area for more than 100 years. Its legal land recognition also sets an important precedent for other communities in Brazil whose territories fall within state protected areas, which are typically barred from human occupation.
The state of São Paulo will now have to title the 3,200-hectare (7,907-acre) ancestral territory in the Atlantic Forest as being under the legal ownership of the community. In addition, the state is required to present a work plan for the construction of an access road to the community, whose territory is also home to threatened species like the golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia) and red-tailed amazon (Amazona brasiliensis).
As part of this process, the state’s land agency, or ITESP, must carry out an updated land survey within six months and begin the land regularization process within 10 years. Failure to meet these deadlines will result in fines.
The decision, handed down Dec. 29, 2023, by Judge Hallana Duarte Miranda of the São Paulo state court, means the Bombas community will now co-manage the territory with the state government’s forest agency, or FF. It also means the community is free to sustainably use the local natural resources as it sees fit, as the area will no longer be a part of the FF-administered Alto Ribeira state park.
“The time has come again for us to work in peace, without oppression,” said Edmilson Furquim, a quilombola leader of the Bombas community. “We know we have other laws to comply with but this ruling will greatly improve our situation.”
‘Strong ancestral connection’ to the land
Alto Ribeira was declared a state park in 1958 in an area that overlapped with the Bombas territory. The rules of use for protected areas meant the inhabitants’ century-old subsistence practices became prohibited by law, leaving them unable to construct new roads, cultivate food in their traditional gardens, or rear livestock. As a result of these restrictions, today the community has no running water, sewage network, electricity, or access to regular medical care or primary and secondary education.
“The overlapping of a fully protected area, as was the case with [Alto Ribeira], on a traditional territory that had already existed there for centuries, is a typical example of backwards and ineffective environmental policy,” said Marcondes Coelho, a socioenvironmental analyst for the transparency and climate justice at the Centro de Vida Institute (ICV).
Quilombolas have a “strong ancestral connection” with the land, which is why they respect it, said Luiz Marcos de França Dias, coordinator of the national education collective at CONAQ, the national association of quilombos.
Quilombolas’ history with the land began in the early 1600s when a group led by an enslaved African princess fled from their captors and established the first quilombo in what is today the state of Alagoas, on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. Over the ensuing centuries, many more quilombos sprang up as Afro-Brazilians found refuge in forests and other landscapes, where they cultivated corn, rice, cassava and other foods to survive on, while also conserving the natural resources around them — a practice many still continue to this day. In the Brazilian Amazon, territories stewarded by quilombolas are considered some of the best-preserved areas of the rainforest and are effective at promoting regrowth of degraded areas, according to a study published in 2022.
Brazil’s national land reform agency, or INCRA, appears to have recognized this with respect to the recent court decision on the Bombas land claim. In a statement to Mongabay, INCRA said that although the area will be removed from the protected state park, environmental conservation will continue throughout the region, “given the agroecological and sustainability principles contained in the ancestral knowledge of these quilombola communities.”
A legal precedent
The process of formally recognizing the Quilombo de Bombas territorial claim began in 2003, but made little progress over the next two decades. According INCRA, the community in 2005 obtained a certificate of self-recognition by the Palmares Cultural Foundation, a public institution that advocates for Afro-Brazilian culture and is named after that first quilombo in Alagoas. That same year, INCRA initiated the administrative land regularization process. ITESP, the São Paulo state land agency, published technical studies in 2014, but the process remained in limbo since then.
“One of the difficulties of regularization was the overlap of the park with the territory, which would impede INCRA’s sequence of work because … there are particular areas in the territory whose regularization is up to the municipality,” an INCRA spokesperson told Mongabay. In addition, the agency said federal budget shortages meant it was impossible to complete the final stages of land regularization, which include land surveys, a description of the requested area, and the registration of families, among other measures, to conclude titling.
In response to the delay, the Public Defender’s Office for the state of São Paulo filed a civil action against ITESP and other state agencies in 2014. This culminated in last December’s court order for the state to grant the community ownership of its territory.
“The decision is a milestone for the defense of human rights and nature conservation, as it fully recognizes the community’s right to its territory, taking into account, of course, its traditional forest conservation practices,” Coelho from ICV told Mongabay. He added it sets a very important precedent for the territorial rights of traditional peoples and communities, and can have a direct impact on the protection of cultural values, social cohesion, food security, and access to natural resources, among other things.
De França Dias, from the national quilombo association, said that without land titles, quilombos are more vulnerable to invasions and exploitation by mining companies, agribusiness, infrastructure projects, and other forms of natural resource exploitation.
More than 2,000 years to title all Quilombo territories
The glacial pace at which the Quilombo de Bombas’s territorial claim was processed reflects a wider trend. Of the 494 quilombos across Brazil, only 147 have been titled, according to the 2022 census. The census also shows that only one in eight quilombolas lives in an officially recognized territory.
Coelho attributed the slow, bureaucratic nature of the titling process to limited technical and financial resources and a lack of commitment from public authorities, among other issues. Even though quilombola rights have now been recognized by the Brazilian Constitution, Coelho said families still face many challenges. These include structural, institutional and environmental racism, with mining and other extractive projects inching closer to quilombola settlements without their consent, which makes the struggle to obtain territorial rights and access land and basic services even more difficult.
Indigenous communities in Brazil face similar challenges, but the situation is slightly different due to disparities in the territorial recognition process, which, for quilombos, is the responsibility of the Palmares Cultural Foundation, an arm of the Ministry of Culture. As a result of its limited resources, Coelho said it could take more than 2,000 years to title all the quilombo territorial claims awaiting processing by INCRA.
“We still face a serious scenario of slowness in the titling of quilombola territories, and of socioenvironmental conflicts in [protected areas],” said Rafaela Santos, a quilombola from the Amazonian city of Porto Velho and lawyer for EAACONE, the legal advocacy team supporting quilombos in the Vale do Ribeira region where Bombas is located. “This damages the survival, subsistence and existence of the quilombola population.”
Neither the São Paulo state government nor its land agency, ITESP, has issued a statement on the recent court ruling; officials also hadn’t responded to Mongabay’s requests for information as of the time this story was published. The state forest agency, FF, said in a statement that the “compatibility” between protected areas and quilombola territories favored “socio-biodiversity conservation.”
“[FF] has already been undertaking actions together with quilombola communities in the units under its management,” it said, adding that “there should be no antagonism between groups that fight for environmental and climate justice.”
Banner image: Quilombola leaders Edmilson Furquim (Dênis) and Elza Ursulino on the balcony of their home in the Bombas territory. Image by Júlio César Almeida / ISA.
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Citation:
Alves-Pinto, H. N., Cordeiro, C. L. O., Geldmann, J., Jonas, H. D., Gaiarsa, M. P., Balmford, A., … Strassburg, B. (2022). The role of different governance regimes in reducing native vegetation conversion and promoting regrowth in the Brazilian Amazon. Biological Conservation, 267. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109473
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Correction (1 March 2024): The name of the coordinator of the national education collective at CONAQ is Luiz Marcos de França Dias, not Luiz Keto. Mongabay regrets the error.