MILITARY DICTATORSHIP AND DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES IN THE CONTROL OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE: PSYCHOSOCIAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE FIGUEIREDO REPORT

Resumo

O artigo analisa os registros disciplinares em relação aos povos indígenas, conforme descritos no Relatório Figueiredo, considerando o controle étnico-social exercido durante o período da ditadura militar no Brasil. Nesse sentido, sua possibilidade decorre do trabalho do eixo indígena da Comissão Nacional da Verdade que identificou um conjunto de documentos, dados como desaparecidos desde a década de sessenta. Tais documentos, denominados Relatório Figueiredo, tratam da apuração realizada por uma Comissão de Inquérito sobre as denúncias dos crimes praticados pelo próprio Serviço de Proteção aos Índios contra a população indígena. A opção teórico-metodológica tem como base a genealogia de Foucault, assim como seus postulados acerca de práticas disciplinares. Utilizando-se do Relatório como fonte documental, o artigo identifica as práticas disciplinares utilizadas contra os índios no período da ditadura de 1964 a 1985, evidenciando como o corpo do índio foi atingido pelo poder, enquanto estratégia de controle.

Palavras-chave:
ditadura militar; indígenas; práticas disciplinares; relações étnico-raciais; Relatório Figueiredo

Resumen

El artículo analiza los registros disciplinares en relación a los pueblos indígenas conforme descritos en el Informe Figueiredo, considerando el control étnico-social ejercido durante el período de la dictadura militar en Brasil. En ese sentido, su posibilidad deriva del trabajo del eje indígena de la Comisión Nacional de la Verdad que identificó un conjunto de documentos, dados como desaparecidos desde la década de los sesenta. Tales documentos, denominados Informe Figueiredo, tratan del escrutinio realizado por una Comisión de Investigación sobre las denuncias de los crímenes cometidos por el propio Servicio de Protección a los Indios contra la población indígena. La opción teórico-metodológica tiene como base la genealogía de Foucault, así como sus postulados acerca de prácticas disciplinarias. El artículo identifica las prácticas disciplinarias utilizadas contra los indios en el período de la dictadura de 1964 a 1985, evidenciando cómo el cuerpo del indio fue alcanzado por el poder, como estrategia de control.

Palabras clave:
dictadura militar; indígenas; prácticas disciplinarias; relaciones étnico-raciales; Informe Figueiredo

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to analyze disciplinary records relating to indigenous peoples as described in the Figueiredo report, considering the ethnic and social control exercised during the military dictatorship years in Brazil. In this sense, it follows from the context in which the Commission National Truth, through the work of the indigenous stem, has identified a set of documents, reported missing since the sixties: The Figueiredo report, which deals with the investigation of a Commission of Inquiry on allegations of crimes committed by the very Indigenous Protection Service against indigenous population. In fact, these social control mechanisms are not very well known in Brazil; however, they foster relevant studies and research on the surveillance of conduct seen as deviant. As the aim is to verify the aspects of "source" and "imperativeness" of such disciplinary measures, the theoretical option methodology is based on the genealogy of Foucault, as well as his principles on disciplinary practices. Identifying disciplinary practices used with Indians in the period of dictatorship as described in Figueiredo report will therefore be important to understand how native Brazilian’s bodies have been assaulted as a result of social control strategies.

Keywords:
disciplinary practices; indigenous; ethnic-racial relations; Report Figueiredo

Introduction

The production of this article had as fundamental presupposition the relevance of studying the relations developed between the Brazilian State and the indigenous people, especially in historical occasions in which such dynamics tend to remain even more invisible. In this sense, the chosen emphasis was specifically focused on what happened to the indigenous people during the period of the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985).

The interest of researchers in addressing this important period of Brazilian history has been increasing, especially from studies that point to the fundamental need not to forget what happened. According to the surveys carried out by the "Study Group on the Military Dictatorship" of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), between 1971 and 2000, 214 PhD theses and dissertations were produced on the history of the military dictatorship (Fico, 2004, pp. 40-41), 205 of them having been produced in Brazil and the rest abroad, demonstrating the interest in the subject. The emphasis was on urban social movements (27 papers), themes related to art and culture (27 studies), economics (25 papers), and those related to the left wing and the opposition in general (20 theses and dissertations). One can also find topics related to the press (15 studies), censorship (13 studies), the chronicle of the various governments (11 studies), the student movement (8 studies), and the study of the coup itself among others less emphasized.

In this introduction to the themes related to the dictatorship, one can identify the absence of the indigenous issue, which could lead one to believe at first, either that the indigenous people were not significantly affected during this important period of history, or that the indigenous issue carries a veil of broad and lasting invisibility. In 1996, at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Egon Dionisio Heck defended his master's thesis with the theme "Indigenous People and Barracks: Indigenous Policies of Military Governments/1964-1985", in which he emphasized how the principles of the National Security Doctrine were fundamental for the constitution of a new indigenous policy. This assertion shows that the indigenous policy established at that time was in line with state policies, obeying the strategy imposed by the hegemonic groups in command (Heck, 1996, p. 51).

Nevertheless, in spite of the importance of Heck’s influential work, it is fundamental to emphasize that the research on the indigenous issue and the dictatorship only began to be more feasible through the Access to Information Law (Law 12.527, instituted in May of 2012) through which some of the files that were not yet available to the public became accessible. Consequently, the opening of confidential documents produced by military governments has had a major impact on the possibility of further studies and approaches to this period.

The National Truth Commission, through the work done by the indigenous axis, undertook searches for documents that recorded violations of human rights that occurred during the period of the military dictatorship. According to Elena Guimarães (an official of the Indigenous Museum and author of the dissertation Relatório Figueiredo: entre tempos, narrativas e memórias), in August 2012, the archive team of the Museu do Índio received the researcher Marcelo Zelic, deputy director of the group Tortura Nunca Mais (Torture Never Again) - SP. On that occasion, he stated that he had identified, with the film Arara, by Javesco Von Puttkamer, a graduation ceremony of the Rural Indigenous Guard, which aroused his interest in documents on this subject. Thus, Zelic, during visits made in December 2012, checked the boxes that contain processes related to Administrative Inquiries of 1967 and was faced with the signature of Jader Figueiredo, concluding that he was in front of the Relatório Figueiredo (Figueiredo Report), which many considered to have been lost in a fire occurred in 1967.

The Figueiredo Report, in itself, consists of a documentary set known by this designation as being the result of the Commission of Inquiry established by the Interior Minister, Albuquerque Lima, and presided over by Figueiredo, to determine the irregularities in the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (Indigenous Protection Service) - SPI, a state agency responsible for the implementation of the Brazilian indigenous policy between 1910 and 1967. The Report shows that the SPI carried out a series of arbitrary actions that had had great repercussion, leading to one of the most widely publicized denunciations in the national and international media (Guimarães, 2015, pp. 15-16).

The Figueiredo Report, in fact, has real significance for the analysis of the uniqueness of events that compose the relations of the Brazilian State with the indigenous population in the military dictatorship. This text, therefore, intends to be a relevant contribution to an area of ​​studies that has been partly neglected by Social Psychology. In this context, there is a dynamic that is very interesting to psychosocial approaches, because in a given political scenario (late 1960s), it was a discourse to be silenced. In another political configuration, however, from the beginning of the 2010-decade, the same report became a discourse to be divulged, even by the media, since it constituted relevant documentation for understanding an important period of the Brazilian history.

In this perspective, in which different disputes reveal dynamics of disciplinary practices and of control, it is fundamental to acknowledge the processes of manufacture and recognition of these documents, since the relation between the discourse and the social configuration is subject both to impositions and privileges related to a place where interests that affect the organization of the material to be addressed are outlined (Certeau, 1982).

In this context, this article intends to analyze the disciplinary records in relation to indigenous peoples, as described in the Figueiredo Report, considering the ethnic-social control exercised during the period of the military dictatorship in Brazil.

The methodology used sought to problematize the information contained in the Figueiredo Report on the actions carried out by the state structures and agents in favor of the control of deviants among the indigenous population. The analysis of this important set of documents allows, consequently, an understanding of the disciplinary practices used with indigenous peoples through education, in order to operate a control not only over their territories, but also over their bodies.

The allusion to education, as referred to in this article, is situated in the context in which, under Foucault's perspective, the relations of power marked by the disciplinary society aim to produce - be it in the family, in the school, or in other institutions - docile, effective and submissive beings. The issue of education, in this sense, is not limited to the space of a classroom, but it indicates a technique and a process of knowledge/power with the intention of dominating diversity, imposing an order to it (Prata, 2005). The research of the records envisioned, through a perspective based on Foucault, an indigenous individual belonging to the set of powers and knowledge with which he is tensioned and under which it is produced, which makes him the main target of the knowledge-power relationship. It is, therefore, a disciplinary education that refers to a process of socialization that advances beyond the school zone, in line with the policies of intervention and integration of the indigenous populations to the Brazilian national society.

Foucault-based analysis procedures have been widely used as a qualitative methodology in Social Psychology research (Foucault, 2013). In fact, analyzing the Figueiredo Report required a methodological procedure that made it possible to perceive the way discourses are crossed by fights, disguises and prey, marking the uniqueness of events. Thus, from the point of view of the interpretation of this socio-institutional dynamic made explicit in the records of the report, it is worth remarking that, with the emergence of disciplinary societies, penalties and humiliations which were previously visible within torture such as public rituals and so-called barbarians, have given way to the detailed disciplining of body, space and time (Foucault, 1986).

The data collected in the document were recorded in identification sheets, and the information was classified according to the type of document, its date, the topic addressed and the fragments that were interesting to the research.

The digitized Figueiredo Report is currently available at the Museu do Índio’s website since, at the request of the National Truth Commission and the Chamber of Deputies, the museum technicians anticipated its digitization - which was already foreseen in the digitization schedule of the SPI, initiated in August 2013. Therefore the documentation is accessible for research (Guimarães, 2013, pp. 3-5). It is the process of nº 448368, whose digitization implies in 30 folders, of which the number 2 is empty, folder number 8 is composed of photographs, and folder number 20 presents, from page 376 to page 443, the Report of Jader Figueiredo on the Commission of Inquiry up to that time. In this way, the citations to the Report will be made by the indication of the volume in which the mentioned record and the respective digitized page are located, in order to unify the reference and enable the identification of the document. The following folders collect documents related to defenses, receipts and some depositions, but no new conclusions can be drawn. What is known as the Figueiredo Report is the set of documents of the Committee of Inquiry, the report itself being in the pages quoted in the twentieth folder. The analysis undertaken in this article focused mainly the data presented up to the Report by Jader Figueiredo, but all the documents of the 30 folders have been read, even though some parts were speed-read. In order to meet this journal's criteria regarding the length of the text, we have worked in this article with the theme of education as a disciplinary practice.

Among settlements and disciplining actions

The immense indigenous population that dominated the Brazilian context when the Portuguese arrived here in Brazil had its main role shuffled, rewritten and erased in the history of Brazil. Authors like Monteiro (1994) and Almeida (2013) estimated the existence of 4 million indigenous people in 1500 in the territory that today constitutes Brazil. Portugal, at the same time, had a small population estimated at 1,500,000 inhabitants (Almeida, 2010, p. 29). It is important to note that the indigenous people, far from being a homogeneous population, were socio-culturally diversified, counting, in some estimates, more than 1000 ethnic groups in the period of colonization (Almeida, 2010, 29). The Portuguese, however, did not consider this diversity, grouping the population according to colonization criteria into two great groups: allies and enemies.

According to Almeida (2013), colonization projects cannot be reduced to the economic sphere, but must be seen as a broader enterprise that includes political, economic and religious aspects. The conquest of the territory could be made using violence and destruction of the social organization of indigenous peoples. However, the colonization project aimed at the reorganization of these peoples in order to reintegrate them into a new social dynamic. The colonial project consisted of an association of the Iberian crown with the Catholic Church, granting the religious missions the task of opening new frontiers, in which the indigenous villages would be integrated. The purpose was to create new Christians and, at the same time, to get new subordinates to the Crown.

An aspect that cannot go unnoticed is that, in order to operate the economic exploitation of the vast lands found, a colonization project in which the indigenous peoples were fundamental was required, through the relations of alliances and/or conflicts. The process of integrating indigenous peoples into Portuguese ideals was carried out especially through settlements, created by means of expeditions that took the indigenous people out of their original territories and reintegrated them into the new settlements, built next to the Portuguese bases, and making the indigenous people perform vital activities for the Crown. Settlements were spaces for the re-creation of indigenous identities (Almeida, 2013).

In colonial Brazil, the Companhia de Jesus (Society of Jesus) stood out from the rest of the religious orders in its integration of the indigenous people into the colony, which enabled considerable political and economic power, making it possible to build a large patrimony by exploiting the work of indigenous people - put into settlements and enslaved - and black slaves. However, although the Jesuits have had an important presence in the national territory, it is also necessary to highlight the course of the Salesians in Brazilian history, since both are cited in the Figueiredo Report.

According to Ferraz (2014), in 1883 the Salesians, a group founded in Italy in 1859 by Don Bosco, came to Brazil. The arrival of the Salesians at the request of various members of the Brazilian episcopate, who wished to change the course of the Catholic Church in Brazil, aimed to further connect it to the Holy See. In order to do so, Brazilian bishops sought religious institutes in Europe, especially in Italy, starting from the period of the second reign. The religious orders, such as the Salesians, carried out a double mission: to evangelize and to educate future generations of Catholics through education. The work the Salesians carried out with the natives in Brazil, however, began only in 1885, in the colony of Tereza Cristina in Mato Grosso, founded by the military, and later in the Salesian leadership. Subsequently, the Salesian activity in education of the natives, children of slaves and Italian immigrants, multiplied in the national territory (Ferraz, 2014).

Parallel to the religious actions, the Figueiredo Report also alludes to another significant disciplinary device: the Indigenous Protection Service (SPI). Founded in 1910, the SPI assumed a positivist perspective, which aimed to replace the idea of ​​catechesis, a function formerly exercised by religious orders in the service of the State, giving rise to the idea of ​​protection that should be guaranteed by the lay state. It was believed that imposing that indigenous people stayed in settlements in reserved areas was the solution that would guarantee the transition of the indigenous state to that of national workers, where the tutelage exercised by the State would ensure the means of coercion of the indigenous populations to enter in the social and political organization of the Brazilian State (Almeida & Brand, 2007). In this perspective, the SPI's work with the indigenous peoples sought integration and submission to the objectives of the national state (Anderson, 2008), a management process that was interrupted (the SPI was extinguished on December 5, 1967), among innumerable denounces revealed by the Figueiredo Report.

The Figueiredo Report

These documents are essential to the analysis of the systematization of human rights violations of indigenous peoples in Brazil during the dictatorship (more properly in the Castelo Branco government and also in Costa e Silva’s, that is, from 1964 to 1968). The Commission of Inquiry, established by the Interior Minister General Albuquerque Lima and presided over by Attorney General Jader Figueiredo Correia, had the purpose of investigating allegations of crimes committed by SPI agents against the indigenous people. Although Jader is identified in several reports on the subject as the attorney general of the republic, in fact, according to ordinance number 154 of July 17, 1967, published in the Diário Oficial (Official Gazette), he was a prosecutor of the Departamento Nacional de Obras contra a Seca (National Department of Works Against the Drought) (Guimarães, 2015, p. 26). The investigations began in 1967 with the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission of 1963, which identified irregularities and allegations of various violations. Jader Figueiredo Correa, therefore, was the author of this Report (Figueiredo Report, Vol. 8, page 50), not in the sense of being the individual who wrote all the records, but as someone whose authorship was mentioned because he was the head of the research process.

Thus, on November 3, 1967, the Commission of Inquiry was established, constituted by Ordinance number 239/67, in order to determine irregularities in the Service of Protection to the indigenous people, as well as to produce testimonial and documentary evidence. Jader Figueiredo stated in his conclusions in the Report that "the indigenous people, who were the rationale of the SPI, became victims of true criminals, who imposed a regime of slavery and denied them basic living conditions necessary to the dignity of human individuals" (Figueiredo Report, Abstract, page 2).

Although the investigations were initially based on the work of the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee for the year 1963, it was not limited to this. The commission traveled about sixteen thousand kilometers, visiting and interviewing several SPI stations, so that the work carried out resulted in an expressive set of documents, with approximately seven thousand pages. The existence of such documentation became public in 1968, during a press conference given by General Albuquerque Lima, in Rio de Janeiro (Davis, 1978, pp. 34-35).

Jader Figueiredo organized, in the pages of the Report, records of crimes committed against indigenous individuals and indigenous patrimony, such as the (individual and collective) murder of indigenous people, prostitution of indigenous women, slave labor, infringement of indigenous labor, alienation of indigenous patrimony and confinement (Correia, 1968, Abstract, p. 6).

The press at the time considered the information presented in the Report as the greatest scandal of the century. The Report had great repercussions in Brazil and abroad (Davis, 1978, p. 35). An interesting aspect that accounts for this repercussion in the academic context is that Brazilian researchers gathered for the XX Reunião Anual para o Progresso da Ciência (XX Annual Meeting for the Progress of Science) in Rio de Janeiro, June 1968, organized a document presented to the president of the republic, Marshal Costa e Silva, with suggestions on several fields of action, including the continuation of investigations initiated on scandals and crimes against the indigenous peoples. They also suggested that the Fundação Nacional do Índio (National Indigenous Foundation), which had been created to replace the SPI, should be led by an advisory organization consisting of sociologists, ethnologists, economists and other specialists, to protect the indigenous population and reverse the great stigma that compromised Brazilian’s image abroad, due to the denunciations of the SPI (Folha de São Paulo, 1968, p. 7).

However, as in December 1968 the AI-5 was established, which further hardened the terms of the military dictatorship. Processes were shelved, and the Figueiredo Report was simply relegated to ostracism, which gradually led it to be considered as disappeared, for about 40 years, having only recently resurfaced to the spotlight of the press, during a survey carried out from 2012 by the National Commission of Truth, as previously described.

The analysis of disciplinary practices

The discursive analysis of the documentary records present in the Figueiredo Report allows one to review a series of socio-historical processes in Brazil at the time. One can observe that the search for economic development through the expansion of agricultural production clashed with the daily lives of indigenous peoples on some very significant fronts: on the land issue, on the indiscriminate exploitation of timber, on mining and on the construction of roads. Indigenous populations were being massacred by interests that used the State apparatus as an arm in order to articulate their power (Almeida & Brand, 2007, p. 7). Consequently, among the disciplinary practices studied, the most varied issues are also discussed: discussions about distribution and prohibition of alcoholic beverages, electoral cooptation and purchase of votes in SPI posts (Report Figueiredo, Volume 3, page 72), indigenous lands extorted by political and economic groups; requests from relatives of deputies for possession of expropriated indigenous areas (Figueiredo Report, Volume 16, pp. 16-17), harassment and sexual violence against indigenous women (Report Figueiredo, Volume 5, page 3), and actions of indigenous resistance against the indigenous peoples' torture and beatings (Figueiredo Report, Volume 4, page 12).

Thus, given the impossibility of addressing the content of the set of documents and the extent of these issues, a selection of some records of the Report was made, highlighting disciplinary practices related to education divided into two topics: (a) teaching under responsibility of the SPI; and (b) teaching under the responsibility of the Salesians.

The existence of a set of techniques, as well as institutions that played a role in measuring, controlling and correcting those who did not submit to the normal behavior model, is what made the disciplinary devices function as mechanisms of power and control (Foucault, 1986). In the archives studied, disciplinary practices proved to be active in State organs in their relationship with indigenous peoples, as stated by the former SPI director, Colonel Moacir Ribeiro Coelho - who was the target of numerous denunciations in the Figueiredo Report - in a document of the tutelary body: "we don’t have to be psychologists in order to be able to identify what has been happening with our unfortunate Aborigines, undergoing a slow and constant process of devastation", stressing that it was enough to spend some time with them to "listen to their disappointments and bitterness" (Figueiredo Report, Volume 5, page 129). In this sense, it is fundamental to highlight the value of research through the perspective of Social Psychology on the subject.

A disciplinary education

The Regiment of the Indigenous Protection Service, approved by the Decree number 10652 in 1942 (although later amended), gave the SPI the responsibility to give the indigenous people lessons that were useful to them, implementing the necessary educational measures (Report Figueiredo, Volume 1, p. 158).

In this sense, it is important to emphasize that, in practice, the education that came to be offered to the natives aimed at turning them into instruments for labor. The regiment stated that the SPI Guidance and Assistance Service should lead the indigenous people to work by persuasive means, combating nomadism and inciting indigenous people to acquire a taste for agriculture and rural industries. Therefore, the proposal of education and work ignored the interest of indigenous societies in order to fit them into capitalist patterns. In this perspective, the re-socialization implied in education aimed to operate a disciplinary dynamic so that the natives could become useful in a nationalist and developmental project.

The SPI was founded on June 20, 1910, through Decree number 8072, initially as an Indigenous Protection and Identification of National Workers Service (SPILTN), being subordinate to the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, as a way of indicating that the category of the so-called "indigenous people" would be in transition to the category of "rural workers". This fact denotes that the policy of intervention of the SPI, through education, always aimed to enable the indigenous people to become manpower, being useful for the goals of the State and the private initiative with regard to the training of workers that would later be integrated into the agrarian development of the country (Almeida & Brand, 2007, pp. 2-3).

The protection provided by the SPI, therefore, conceived indigenous people as future rural workers, and thus the Report states categorically that the acculturation of the tribes and the referral of their members to the rural activity was something desirable (it is worth mentioning that in the Report the use of the words "tribe" or "tribes" is frequently used, although for some it is a term considered improper and possibly understood as the designation of a group in a primitive evolutionary stage (Silva & Costa, 2018)). In the 1963 Parliamentary Inquiry Commission, Deputy Valério Magalhães criticized the actions taken regarding indigenous people by stating that the SPI did not bring to the "civilization" any indigenous element that they could relate to, such as a doctor or lawyer, noting that, meanwhile, the Salesians have proved that indigenous people are "recoverable" (Figueiredo Report, Volume 1, pp. 34-36).

It is worth questioning, however, what was considered to be the recovery of the indigenous population, since the statement of this Deputy clearly shows the disciplinary character of the given integration policy. That is, it shows the approach that the reform indigenous individuals were the ones who underwent the developmentalist project assumed by the military, becoming a labor force available for the tasks required by the dictatorship in relation to the social political project of a country, according to the perception that a productive citizen should be, for example, a doctor or lawyer.

There are examples of how the Interior Ministry sought to integrate the indigenous individuals into projects, such as putting them in charge of building roads. In 1966, in the region of Yauaretê, a mission of military and civil authorities proposed measures for the use of approximately 3,000 indigenous people from the Alto Rio Negro, outside Salesian organizations, in the construction of the 5th Battalion construction highway. The Interior Minister, Albuquerque Lima, while encouraging and accompanying investigations into crimes committed against indigenous peoples, supported the discourse of accelerated occupation of the Amazon. In this context, the indigenous issue gained greater importance, becoming controlled by the Army. Therefore, the indigenous peoples of the region were integrated into projects, such as road constructions. This project of occupation and development of the Amazon occurred within the framework of the "Brazilian miracle", which was first implemented by Delfim Neto, Minister of Finance from 1967 to 1974 (Heck, 1996).

The concept of an education as a disciplinary practice also appeared in one of the items of the program presented at the intervention of the Minas Gerais Military Police in the Maxakali operation, which had the purpose of appeasing the conflict between indigenous and ruralists. The ideal intervention to be implemented by the Military Police service at that time consisted in rebuilding the rural school, bringing together both the children of indigenous people and the children of those who were considered "civilized" through sport, and literate the indigenous children so they would be able to communicate well in Portuguese. The interest of the Minas Gerais police in education also revealed the ideal of a disciplinary practice that sought to assimilate the indigenous in the national culture, and had the learning of the Portuguese language as a fundamental element of the colonizing process.

The SPI was founded favoring a positivist perspective, aiming to replace the idea of catechesis (a function formerly exercised by religious orders at the service of the State), giving rise to the idea of an education that should be guaranteed by the lay state (Almeida & Brand, 2007). However, the activities of religious missions with indigenous peoples trace back to the history of the formation of Brazil, as we have mentioned earlier in this article. Thus, the distinction of the analysis presented below, in two topics, will allow a better definition of the theme.

Education under the responsibility of SPI

An interesting viewpoint on the functioning of teaching in SPI can be extracted from the testimony of retired civil employee Nelson Perez Teixeira (Figueiredo Report, Volume 3, page 210). The role of teachers (formerly teaching assistants) was generally attributed to the wife of the man in charge of the Indigenous Post. These women, whose remuneration for the SPI supplemented the income of the family, taught the indigenous people to do manual work, how to cook, and they also introduced them to the alphabet. There was, however, no planned structure for the administration of education to the indigenous population. Professor Eva Fortes de Lara, an employee of the SPI as a pre-primary and elementary school teacher, explained that she taught what she knew and without any specific program, having had up to 40 students from 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades, all studying together, in the same classroom (Figueiredo Report, Volume 11, p. 185).

The SPI was accused throughout the Commission of Inquiry of having personnel in its staff that prepared and taught indigenous people to work as servants in the home of farmers and other authorities. The indigenous girl Cajabi, daughter of Tanupan, was found, according to reports collected by the Commission, working in the house of a judge. And the same had happened with other indigenous people, brought to farms and brothels by an articulated group that acted in the SPI.

An emblematic episode of the actions taken with the purpose of disciplining the indigenous peoples occurred in the indigenous school in the region of the 6th Province. On March 23, 1964, Professor Violeta Tocantins, who directed this school, sent a complaint to the head of the 6th Regional Inspectorate, José Baptista Figueiredo Filho, in the following terms:

Mr. Flavio de Abreu became a true dictator at that post. He is an irritable, irritating and inflexible person. His attitude towards the indigenous was one of intolerance and hostility, even towards the infants who were my students. For it was not infrequently that he entered my classroom, spitting and wringing his nose, imposing his dictatorial regulations, but what annoyed me most was when, on his order, the pupils skipped class in order to perform tasks that only the adult indigenous should be performing. The minor Aprigio Marivoto, in 1962, had only a few days of classes, because he was taken months away from the school to travel under Mr. Flavio de Abreu’s orders. I had, therefore, a heated discussion with Mr. Flavio, claiming that the school period was sacred ... someone very close to Mr. Flavio told me that he did not like Rosa [an indigenous girl] because she had been chosen to go to the Santa Teresinha ranch owned by Mr. Flavio de Abreu, in the company of Mr. Seabra, a civilized worker, as cook and lover. (Figueiredo Report, Volume 18, pp. 68-69)

Several records indicate that Flavio de Abreu, head of the Couto Magalhães post in the State of Mato Grosso, handed over a Bororó indigenous girl named Rosa as payment for the construction of a clay stove on his Santa Terezinha ranch. The man who built the stove (named in the report only as Seabra) had chosen Rosa among the indigenous girls who attended the school run by Violeta Tocantins. In the Figueiredo Report, this complaint also appears in the testimony of Juracy Cavalcanti Batista Ferreira:

On the occasion of the choosing of the indigenous girl Rosa, Mr. Flavio de Abreu and Seabra visited the schhol and, after having the indigenous girls stand, Seabra made his choice; Immediately Mr. Flavio delivered the indigenous girl Rosa ... Seabra, indigenous worker, upon completing the work he was rendering to Mr. Flavio Abreu, returned the indigenous girl Rosa; at the time she was delivered, Rosa was 11 (eleven) years old. (Figueiredo Report, Volume 8, p. 230).

In another testimony on the same case, a Bororó indigenous girl (from the self-proclaimed Boe community and identified in the record made by the Commission of Inquiry as "Adalgisa de Tal") stated that she remembered what had happened to Rosa: she was given as a form of payment for the construction of a clay stove. She remembered that because she was in the same classroom on the day of the event. She stated that Flavio de Abreu had ordered the teacher Violeta Tocantins to suspend the class, authorizing Seabra to choose one of the indigenous girls. According to Adalgisa, "Seabra chose Rosa, a Bororó indigenous girl who studied at the school, because she was looked more mature " (Figueiredo Report, Volume 8, p. 233). For the indigenous peoples, the school space could also be a space where danger was imminent.

Education under the responsibility of the Salesians

The educational actions taken by the Salesians are clearly mentioned in the Report. A statement in the 1963 Parliamentary Inquiry Commission mentions the Salesian mission in Alto Rio Negro (Upper Negro River):

I passed by a tributary of the Alto Rio Negro, traveling to some extent in a very watery stretch. I arrived at nightfall. The next day the priest invited me to attend the beginning of classes. We arrived at more or less 7 a.m. In the school building there were about 300 indigenous students. This was on the border with Colombia. I am very emotional and very patriotic, as we all should be. They asked me to raise the national flag. When I picked up the halyard, the children intoned the National Anthem. There were some flaws, especially in their pronunciation, but that moved me deeply. Right next to Colombia, in the middle of the Amazon jungle! I spent six days there. I went to the settlement, which was already established: the indigenous people were being alphabetized and sent to the settlement already literate. (Figueiredo Report, Volume 3, pp. 113-114)

This type of disciplinary practice is presented, in records of deputies cited in the Report, as efficient for the purpose of indigenous integration with the nationalist ideals that were being defended and disseminated by the military. The registers are explicit: "The SPI, strictly speaking, does not seek to call the indigenous people to civilization. Its aim is not only to domesticate them: it is to bring them as a useful element to society" (Figueiredo Report, Volume 3, p. 112). The disciplinary condition that was sought was that the indigenous people not only submitted to the control of the State, but also become useful for the social, political and economic structure of the national state.

The analysis undertaken in the research, however, also showed that there was eventually resistance among indigenous people against such disciplinary practice. Ismael da Silva Leitão, an SPI official who worked in the 8th Regional Inspectorate, having been subject of an administrative detention during the period of the Committee of Inquiry, informed in his testimony dated October 23, 1967 that Xavante indigenous people (identified according to the document, although the self-denomination of this group is a'uwe) had attacked a Salesian mission in the Rio das Mortes, in Mato Grosso (Report Figueiredo, Volume 8, p. 115), which allows us to identify elements of tension and hostility of indigenous people in relation to the religious mission.

Another episode, in another location, can also be highlighted. In his testimony to the 1963 Parliamentary Inquiry Commission, General Vasco Kroff de Carvalho (who served in the Amazon region) stated that in 1961 he received a request for help from the Salesians because they were being attacked and natives from the region of the Vale do Rio Negro were burning their chapels. Defending the priests, he declared:

I shall refer, first, to the part of the border near the Rio Negro. For about fifty years, the Salesians have been catechizing this region. The Congressmen are aware of this, since the Salesians are subsidized annually by the National Congress and perform extraordinary work there. They are made up of Salesian priests, not all Brazilians, much of them Italian, but there is something different from what has happened and is what is still happening with missions of other religions. They exercise and practice this catechesis. They exercise and practice this catechesis using the Portuguese language. When they do not know the language, they learn before going to these regions. The indigenous people learn our language with them. I had one of the greatest emotions of my life the day I arrived in Juaretê, at the end of northeastern Brazil, and was received there by the indigenous people. The Catalina plane descended on the field built by the mission itself, and upon landing, the indigenous people were in formation, singing the national anthem, as they may not have happened in other schools. The work of the Salesians in this region is extraordinary and the indigenous people did not need anyone else. (Report Figueiredo, Volume 4, p. 85)

The testimony of General Vasco Kroff allows us to identify some of the disciplinary characteristics present in Salesian schools directed at the indigenous population. The exaltation of the Portuguese language as more important than different languages used by the natives implies the denial of indigenous knowledge and the privilege of the Portuguese language established as the national language. Performative procedures such as having the indigenous people in formation singing the national anthem, present as disciplinary practices aimed at framing the natives in a national civic culture. The action of imposing in the indigenous people the figure of an idealized Brazilian was seen as noble, as thought by the agents of the state that had the power. There was also the aggravating issue of indigenous people on the frontiers, which was seen by the military as a matter of national security (Figueiredo Report, Volume 4, pp. 85-86).

There is another record that deserves to be mentioned: in the documents raised by the Commission of Inquiry there is a contract dating from 1964, valid for 15 years, with the presentation of an agreement between the SPI and the evangelical parish of Lieutenant Portela, authorizing the religious organization to implement teaching and health actions directed at the indigenous population. What is striking, however, is that the document authorized the religious mission to build a building for a school and a ward in the indigenous lands, as well as a house for the teacher. All these buildings would be entirely under the responsibility of the evangelical parish of Lieutenant Portela (Figueiredo Report, Volume 15, p. 207).

Thus, in a complaint to the Committee of Inquiry, Helio Jorge Bucker (head of the 5th Regional Inspectorate) reported that the Salesian Missions had the habit of registering in their own name the indigenous lands where they placed their facilities, under the justification of providing assistance. Helio Jorge Bucker also highlighted the fact that the Xingu National Park had been invaded by innumerable colonizing companies, such as Imobiliária Ipiranga, Empresa Colonizadora Rio Ferro, Casa Bancária Financial Imobiliária S/A, Consórcio Industrial Bandeirante de Incentivo à Borracha S/A and Companhia Pan-americana de Administração, among others, highlighting in the complaint the Colonizadora Rio Ferro Ltda. which, contrary to a federal decree, sold more than half of its grant to Japanese immigrants. The appropriation of the indigenous lands was a movement that integrated many groups, from the Salesians to the big companies (Figueiredo Report, Volume 16, p. 225).

Final considerations

The Figueiredo Report exposed the structural corruption experienced in the SPI frameworks, crossed by the interests of large economic groups and national polics, which used the Indigenous Posts to meet the demands of loggers, cattle ranchers, miners, but also the construction of roads to safeguard border control and the interests of a State that was submitted by the developmentalist agenda. It has been discovered that the 30 volumes of documents, which make up more than 7000 pages, do not constitute a homogeneous voice. On the contrary, they showed disputes and clashes, as they contain the records of an earlier Parliamentary Inquiry Committee (1963), minutes of meetings, handwritten letters, telegrams, testimonies, and old administrative inquiries. However, the advent of the Figueiredo Report illuminated by the media spotlight, whether in 1968 or in 2012, has revealed interesting possibilities of analysis.

Education was the privileged space in which disciplinary practices were exercised, either in the intervention of religious missions or in education in the Indigenous Posts, which aimed to transform the indigenous people into labor to attend to the interests of economic groups, elites and those who were put in charge of exercising power.

In this analysis, it is evident how much the contemporary history of the indigenous people in Brazil has been ignored by society, silenced by the State and managed by the mechanisms of power. Through the Figueiredo Report it was possible, even if limitedly, to have access to the testimony of indigenous people, who were mentioned by name not only in the individualization operated by the disciplinary power, but also to present the report of their multiple relations with the society that aimed to subjugate them.

We expect that with this article the report, which had been silenced and partly forgotten, may once again emerge, bringing the history of the oppressed, of the indigenous people who were disciplined, exploited, tortured and killed in the context of the military dictatorship.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 Dec 2018
• Date of issue
  2018

History

• Received
  18 Nov 2017
• Accepted
  30 Sept 2018