Warao indigenous community faces difficulties in Brazil

In front of Germano Sampaio Square, in Pintolândia neighborhood, in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state, three young people are sitting on the sidewalk, in the shade of a high wall to escape the merciless summer sun. The state is located on the Brazilian border with Venezuela.

The wall surrounds a 15,000 square meter plot of land, with a large shed, some makeshift tents, a dirty ground with gravels, a small adobe soccer field with crooked wooden crossbars, and some covered structures serving as a community kitchen.

This is where six different communities of the Warao ethnic group with 340 people are living. Many of them are children born on Brazilian soil since the group's migration. They fled Venezuela in 2016 and 2017 in search of better life conditions in Brazil and settled on this plot of land. According to them, some already have residence visas in Brazil while others have refugee status.

Those who cross the iron gate see at the entrance a water tank with the UNICEF logo. Some signs also indicate that, one day, that land was once under the tutelage of Operation Acolhida, a project created in 2018 by the federal government to receive, house, and resettle Venezuelans in other parts of Brazil, in partnership with United Nations (UN) agencies, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Since March 2022, however, no more agents of this operation have been seen there. According to the Warao community, they have left and deactivated the shelter called Pintolândia. The coordination of the operation reported that in November 2021, it began to restructure the indigenous shelters to meet international humanitarian standards.

According to the coordination, the shelter was deactivated due to problems of infrastructure, habitability, water, sanitation, flooding, and electrical and hydraulic issues.

Two other shelters - Nova Canaã and Tancredo Neves - were also deactivated and the Warao was offered to be resettled in another shelter called Waraotuma a Tuaranoko. Part of the indigenous community, however, decided to continue there.

Each Warao community is headed by an Aidamo indigenous person, and the Aidamos did not want to live under the administration of Operation Acolhida, with whom they had conflicts over the rules imposed within the shelters.

"We stayed because our children go to school near here. And we were already here before. They said [our situation] would get better, but it didn't. It's another culture, another way of living together. There was no respect for Aidamos. They never consulted us. They never informed us," says Euligio Baez, one of the six Aidamos indigenous people who head the site.

Food insecurity

The choice was not easy. By choosing to stay in the old shelter, they would have the freedom to govern themselves as they did in their original territory, but they would no longer have access to food and security provided by the operation. The situation brought the first big problem for the Warao people. Most of them have no jobs.

The community lives off the sale of handicrafts, collect of recyclable material, and government aid. "Most people here are families. They are parents with four, five children, who have to look for a way to support themselves. I think that the lack of [employment] opportunities can be a kind of discrimination because we are indigenous people," Jeremias Fuentes, an Aidamo indigenous says.

"We have different ethnic groups in the city. You have the East Indigenous, you have the Venezuelans [non-indigenous], the Indigenous from Venezuela, and they are all starving. The food insecurity is tremendous. Here there are several children who were malnourished," says Antônio Carlos Silva, emergency coordinator for the NGO Citizens' Action, which is helping with donations of food, clothes, and shoes.

Despite the difficulties, the Warao people persist with their plan to live in Boa Vista, at least for now. "We want our children to continue studying and to have a better future. It would be good if we had land to plant corn. We would like that. We don't know when we can go back [to Venezuela], but for now, we are here," Norberto Medina affirms.

Deactivation process

According to the coordination of Operation Acolhida, the deactivation process of Pintolândia involved dialogue with the sheltered indigenous communities. "Commissions were created, formed by beneficiaries and representatives of the institutions, in contact with sheltered indigenous people of different profiles and ethnicities, in order to deliberate on the physical space of new shelters, services, protection and mitigation of security risks."

Members of the operation have discussed with the indigenous community about strategies for non-dependence on the shelters through entrepreneurship programs, internalization, financial support or formal employment, a priority aspect pointed out by the population to support their autonomy in Brazil."

Those who wanted to, were able to move to Waraotuma a Tuaranoko, where, according to the coordination, the "facilities are more in line with emergency shelter standards and the needs identified by the communities, with an approach that is culturally sensitive to their particularities, taking into account suggestions made in dialogue spaces." The new shelter is exclusively for Venezuelan indigenous people, “it's not shared with the non-indigenous population.”

Finally, the operation's coordination stated that it remains committed to identifying lasting solutions that allow the indigenous populations autonomy in their life in Brazil. The operation also informed that "the possibility of sheltering and feeding indigenous families in the new Waraotuma a Tuaranoko shelter remains open."