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Fernando Brancoli and Desiree Poets · Security in Context, 2026 Brazilian Elections series
On June 11, 2026, in Altamira, Pará, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro told an audience of rural producers that from January of the following year “you would work where you want," and that his government would demarcate no further Indigenous land. The same day, in Belém, he promised to change the law so that the minerals beneath the ground could be extracted faster and "distributed to you." Two weeks earlier, on May 28, the US State Department had designated the Comando Vermelho and the Primeiro Comando da Capital as terrorist organizations, at the request of the same family now contesting the presidency. Nothing in that sequence mentions Indigenous peoples by name. All of it lands on their territory. What follows sets out, for readers outside Brazil, the three things that determine how the country's 1.7 million Indigenous people factor into the vote of October 4: where they live, what is being done to them, and which legal categories are being written over their land while the campaign runs.
Where they live. The 2022 census counted 1,693,535 Indigenous people in Brazil, 0.83 percent of the population and close to double the 2010 figure, a rise the census bureau attributes mostly to better enumeration in cities and remote areas rather than to demographic growth. Of that total, 63 percent live outside demarcated Indigenous lands. The image of the Indigenous Brazilian as an inhabitant of the deep Amazon is therefore true only of a minority. A great many live on the peripheries of state capitals, in São Paulo above all, where the Guarani villages of Jaraguá, on the city's northwestern edge, sit on a territory that was homologated in 1987 at 1.76 hectares, the smallest Indigenous land in the country. This was expanded by ministerial ordinance to 532 hectares in 2015, annulled by the Temer government in 2017, restored by court order that December, and re-declared by a new ordinance in 2024. Roughly 540 people live there across seven villages, Nhandeva and Mbya, within sight of the city's tallest peak and its most congested highway. That an Indigenous land can be created, cancelled, and re-created within a single decade, in the largest metropolis in the hemisphere, is a fair summary of what demarcation means in practice. It also explains why the urban Indigenous movement, which organizes across villages and periferias alike, treats the census, the vaccine rollout, and the school system as territorial questions in their own right: who counts as Indigenous when the state allocates services and resources is decided in the city as much as in the forest.
Most Indigenous Brazilians live not on demarcated land but in cities, and there they fall under two security regimes at once: the land regime that the marco temporal decides, and the policing regime that the "recovery of territories" justifies. The two debates this campaign keeps apart meet in the same urban household. São Paulo shows how. The census found 271 of Brazil's 391 Indigenous peoples in the state, more than in Amazonas, and 194 in the capital alone: Pankararu families from the Pernambuco backlands in Real Parque, Guarani in Jaraguá and Parelheiros, and Kokama, Pataxó, and Terena households spread across the eastern and southern peripheries. Emerson Guarani insists that these are communities, not individuals who happen to be Indigenous, with their own forms of organization, ceremony, and mutual obligation, and that the Brazilian state has no category for them. Demarcation does not reach an apartment block; health and education policies assume a village; and during the 2021 vaccination campaign, those living outside the indigenous communities were, in his words, "forgotten by public power." What the city adds is the police. An Indigenous family in Cidade Tiradentes lives under the same police that patrol the rest of the periphery, and when one of its members is shot, the death is recorded as that of a peripheral resident, not an Indigenous person. For much of the Indigenous population, then, the demarcated land and the periferia are not two territories but one address.
What is being done to them. The Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi) published its 2025 report in August 2026. It records 258 Indigenous people murdered that year, up from 211 in 2024, an increase of 22 percent; 215 suicides; 1,024 deaths of children under five, more than half from preventable causes; 169 conflicts over territory in 23 states; and 210 cases of invasion or illegal resource extraction, 58 percent of them inside lands that had already been demarcated. Roraima, with 82 murders, Amazonas, with 47, and Mato Grosso do Sul, with 37, lead the count, which is to say the Yanomami frontier, the middle Amazon, and the Guarani-Kaiowá lands of the soy belt. The report also counts 897 Indigenous territories awaiting regularization, 582 of which have seen no administrative action at all. Two features of the violence are of particular interest. The first is that the criminal organizations now designated by Washington have moved into precisely these spaces: reports in 2026 trace Comando Vermelho and PCC involvement in illegal gold movement from Yanomami land to Amapá, in timber movement, and in the river logistics that connect them. The second is that the state's own response is calibrated by the electoral calendar. The Lula government homologated twenty Indigenous lands in three years, a little over three million hectares, after four years of zero land under Bolsonaro and one under Temer. Lula’s the best record in nearly a decade and yet leaves roughly 62 percent of the country's 1,443 mapped Indigenous lands unregularized, with almost half the pending Amazonian cases stalled inside the Ministry of Justice.
The categories being written. Three legal instruments now overlap on Indigenous land, and only one of them was made in Brazil with Indigenous peoples in mind. The first is the marco temporal, the thesis that Indigenous rights attach only to land physically occupied on October 5, 1988, the day the Constitution was promulgated. The Supreme Court rejected it in September 2023, ruling 9–2 in favor of Indigenous peoples that their right to traditionally occupied land is original—it predates the Brazilian state and does not depend on proving presence on that date.
Congress answered in weeks with Law 14.701, writing the thesis into statute. The Court rejected it a second time on 18 December 2025, recognizing for the first time the state's own omission in failing to complete demarcations within the five years the Constitution allowed. Yet the same ruling preserved much of the law it was reviewing: compensation to non-Indigenous occupants for the bare value of the land rather than for improvements alone, participation of states, municipalities, and landholders in demarcation procedures from the outset, and a prohibition on retomadas, the reoccupations by which Indigenous communities have historically forced stalled processes to move. The Senate, in the same month, approved a constitutional amendment (PEC 48) to place the temporal thesis beyond the Court's reach. It awaits the Chamber, whose composition the October vote will decide. The second instrument is Law 15.358 of March 2026, the "anti-faction" law, which created the offence of domínio social estruturado, structured social domination, for groups that impose rules on residents and control territory by force. It was written for the favela; its language fits a garimpo. The third is the US Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, which has no effect in a Brazilian court but considerable effect on how the hemisphere's security agencies now describe the Amazon. Classification is jurisdiction. Washington’s label marks the difference in whether an Indigenous land is a place owed protection or hostile? ground to be retaken, and the Bolsonaro campaign has been explicit about which reading it prefers.
The election. Against this, the Indigenous movement is contesting the vote directly. A record 191 Indigenous candidacies were registered for 2026, up from 85 in 2014 and 186 in 2022. The Bancada Indígena organized by APIB fields 56 of them, from 39 peoples in 19 states, 27 of them women, under the slogan Nosso Território, Nossa Vida; Sonia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá, elected to the Chamber in 2022, are running again. The presidential contest, meanwhile, offers a choice between an incumbent whose demarcations are real and slow, and whose Congress has twice adversarial Supreme Court rulings?, and a challenger who has promised in public to end demarcation, accelerate mining, and take "the State off the neck" of agricultural producers, and whose brother spent 2025 in Washington securing the designation that now hangs over the northern states. Two questions run underneath the campaign and will outlast it. One is what the PT years delivered to Indigenous peoples beyond a ministry and twenty decrees, and what they left standing in the statute book. The other is the relationship between Indigenous self-determination and national sovereignty at a moment when both are being redefined from outside: when the same foreign category that a Brazilian candidate requested can be used, by whoever governs next, to treat an Indigenous territory as enemy ground.
Security in Context put these questions to Emerson Guarani, a Nhandeva anthropologist at the University of São Paulo, public-school teacher in Cidade Tiradentes, and organizer across the city's villages and peripheries. The interview, recorded on 16 September 2026, will be published in this series. The vocabulary we accept now will determine the policies that are thinkable later; on Indigenous land, that sentence has been true since 1988.
Sources: Sumaúma (Flávio Bolsonaro in Altamira and Belém, 11 June 2026); IBGE, Censo 2022 (Agência Brasil, Aug. 2023; Terra on ethnic diversity in São Paulo); Wikipédia/Jornal da USP on Emerson Guarani (2021 vaccination statement); Comissão Pró-Índio de São Paulo on TI Jaraguá; Cimi, Relatório Violência contra os Povos Indígenas no Brasil, dados de 2025 (Aug. 2026); O Tempo on CV/PCC and Amazon garimpo (May and July 2026); Agência Gov (Mar. 2026) and Metrópoles (Aug. 2026) on homologations; InfoAmazonia (Apr. 2026) on stalled processes; Instituto Socioambiental on the STF ruling of 18–19 Dec. 2025; Congresso em Foco on Law 15.358/2026; APIB, Bancada Indígena 2026 (19 Aug. 2026); Security in Context, "Designating the Election" (June 2026) and "Words That Travel Armed" (Aug. 2026).
