Twelve Indian organizations - eight from Brazil and four from Colombia,
Guatemala, Chile and Peru - affirmed yesterday in Brazil that the Indian
peoples are still victims of "murders, persecution, invasion and usurpation of
territories and of the environment, racial discrimination, and cultural,
policial and religious domination." The denunciation was made during the
International Conference on Land, Ecology and Human Rights, which ended
yesterday in the Brazilian city of Vitoria, capital of Espirito Santo state.
The objective of the Conference, which was attended by delegates from all
continents on the planet, was to produce a document offering alternatives to
the development model presently adopted. For five days, the 254 participants
discussed the environmental problem in connection with issues related to the
Indians, land reform, human rights and agriculture/livestock production.
Following, the full text of the final document of the Conference:
IN DEFENSE OF LIFE AND PEOPLES
Declaration of Vitoria
The International Conference on Land, Ecology and Human Rights held from
24 to 28 of May, 1992 in Vitoria, Espirito Santo, Brazil, brought together 254
delegates, representing 26 countries from Asia, Africa, Latin America-Caribe
and Europe.
This meeting of the Southern Continents' peoples - represented by their
unions and by their popular, indigenous, religious and political leaders with
the solidarity of the workers from every continent offers to the people of the
world the results of the debates referred to in this Declaration of Vitoria:
1- The cities of the Southern Hemisphere have become human anthills, where
life, work and pursuit of happiness of millions of people are deprived in the
name of speculation and the greed of a few. Our cities are battle fields today,
where millions of people pile up under inhuman conditions, fighting for
survival, being excluded by their governments from the basic services, such as
housing, education, health, transportation, sanitation and even the sacred
right to work. This reality results in the permanent violence of hunger,
prostitution, homeless children and youngs, of increasing racial violence, of
discrimination and physical violence against women, of police violence against
the poor population and the workers, of criminality. Thereby, the cities are
the denial of the right to citizenship.
2- The unbalance between the population of the rural and urban areas -
provoked by the accelerated industrialization process which are centered on
large transnational corporations' policies - cause permanent exclusion of
millions of workers. They are deprived from their rights to work, to living,
education, health, cultural means and life itself. The movements for the
defense of human rights denounce that life has become a cheap merchandise whose
the only usefulness is to produce immediate profit.
3- A society that worsens its contradictions in the name of the elites'
privileges - imprisoned by the capital's logic- condemns indigenous societies
to destruction and to death. In the name of this logic, the indigenous people
of Latin America have their territory taken over and their natural resources
ransacked by powerful national and transnational corporations. In the name of
the capitalist logic, the indigenous territories are flooded by hydro-electric
dams, invaded by timber industries, pharmaceutical and mining companies. Such
destructive projects have change original citizens into "development refugees"
who are forced to migrate to cities. In addition to this their culture has been
invaded and their values destroyed by fundamental sects. After stealing their
land and submitting to wage earning slavery, they also try to kill their soul.
4- The reality of unjust agrarian structure in our countries is found in
the roots of those deep problems presented in this declaration. The capitalist
development model - which concentrates land, income and technology - is
responsible for the degrading of environment and for the brutal exploitation
systems to which millions of workers are submitted to, including the most
degrading of them all: the exploitation of slave work.
The adoption of models guided to meet the logic if current international
relations, provoked major social cataclysm in our countries, such as the
Brazilian rural exodus, which in a quarter of a century has displaced around 30
million people from the rural areas into the cities, creating a social crisis
which denies the basic needs for human living.
The advance of the capitalist model, adopting now the cover of neo-
liberal, forces an international division of the work, turning Southern
Hemisphere Countries into exporters of capital under different means, the
foreign debt being the most absurd one.
5- We declare before the people of the world: It is necessary, possible
and urgent the rupture of the current development standards, as a means of
human survival.
It is the states responsibility to promote participating policies which
guarantee the democratic access to the land, through land reform, to promote
distribution of income, farming production aiming at feeding people, to
promote the administration of natural resources as long as biodiversity and
research on the use of these resources are assured, avoiding any kind of
patents which change vitals discoveries into private business. This should be
done hoping the life of future generations can be guaranteed.
In this way, we, the people of the Southern Hemisphere, will be able to
affirm ourselves, democratically, as nations - even though economically,
politically and culturally differentiated establishing a new development
standard based on sovereign states and self-determination. It is the Southern
countries' responsibility to mobilize themselves in order to guarantee material
resources as well as political will to make changes possible without changes
the speech about democracy will be a scorn.
We, as representatives of the union, popular, indigenous, religious and
political movements of the Southern Countries, refuse to admit that a new wall
be built at the north of the Equator to separate the world of abundance and
wealth from the rest of us, who are 2/3 of humanity condemned to hunger and
misery.
We are convinced that only with the unity of our peoples' struggle
throughout the Southern Hemisphere Continents we will be able to stop the
devastation and poisoning of our planet and stop death itself. We want to state
our commitment joining our efforts with every country's to assure the logic of
life, democracy and human freedom.
Vitoria (ES), Brazil, May 28th, 1992