Some Brazilian military voices have recently turned to condemn indigenous lands in Amazonia as a threat to national sovereignty. Under this manifestation (actually, a rhetorical attack to indigenous rights established by a large indigenist tradition), military criticism try to discredit the State indigenist politics as a whole. This article appreciates both the anachronism of these critics regarding the large Brazilian indigenist legal tradition and their affiliation with a more recent authoritarian tradition; but it also observes how discursive elements of this last one (the authoritarian tradition) face the new debate about social regulation, regarding the notion of difference and the meaning of collective rights concerned to it.
Indigenism; Military; Amazonia; National Security