Colonialism and the 2020 elections: the tale of democracy and the configuration of currais eleitorais and voto de cabresto in the Pankararu Indigenous TerritoryAbstract
The concept of the democratic rule of law emphasises the proclamation set out in the 1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution: ‘All power emanates from the people.’ But this depends on which people are implied. When referring to the Brazilian people, it has one meaning; when referring to indigenous peoples, it has another. Far removed from our own lived realities, the democratic rule of law in the Pankararu Indigenous Territory, located in the Itaparica sertão, part of the Caatinga biome in Pernambuco state, Northeastern Brazil, resonates differently, especially when it comes to party-political elections. However, there is no doubt that the Pankararu are not the only indigenous people to experience how the deeply rooted colonialism is laid bare in Brazil’s hinterlands during election periods, especially when these elections are municipal. In this sense, what I experienced in the 2020 municipal elections makes quite clear what we could call the modus operandi of local party campaigns, rife with prejudice, racism, blackmail, patriarchy, clientelism and misogyny. My territory is clearly treated as an electoral corral and its inhabitants as captive voters, where women participate in campaigns solely to fill party quotas and yet where one woman dared to run for mayor. The response of the supposed heirs of colonial coronelismo reinforces stereotypes with the aim of perpetuating forms of oppression and domination over my people and over women in general, to the detriment of meeting social, environmental and economic needs.
Keywords:
rights; Pankararu; Party Elections; Electoral Corral (Curral Eleitoral); Vote-By-Vote (Voto de Cabresto)
Resumo
O conceito de Estado Democrático de Direito acentua o que a Constituição Federal do Brasil de 1988 proclama, que “todo poder emana do povo”. Mas, depende do povo. Se nos referirmos ao povo brasileiro, tem um sentido; falar de povo indígena, é outro. Muito aquém de nossas realidades, o estado democrático de direito no território indígena do povo Pankararu localizado no sertão de Itaparica, bioma Caatinga, Estado de Pernambuco, Nordeste do Brasil se reverbera de outra forma, sobretudo quando se trata de eleições partidárias. Porém, há de convir que muito provavelmente Pankararu não seja o único povo indígena a vivenciar como o colonialismo arraigado se escancara nos interiores do Brasil em períodos eleitorais, principalmente quando estas eleições são municipais. Nesse sentido, o que vivenciei nas eleições municipais em 2020 deixa muito claro, digamos, o “modus-operandi” das campanhas partidárias locais regadas de muito preconceito, racismo, chantagem, patriarcado, tutela e misoginia, onde meu território é claramente tratado como curral eleitoral e o voto de cabresto; onde mulheres participam das campanhas apenas para preencher cotas partidárias; onde uma mulher ousou propor-se candidata à prefeita. A reação dos supostos herdeiros do coronelismo de aura colonial, reforça estereótipos visando a perpetuação de formas de opressão e dominação sobre meu povo e sobre as mulheres em geral, em detrimentos à manutenção de necessidades sociais, ambientais e econômicas.
Palavras-chave:
direitos; Pankararu; eleições partidárias; curral eleitoral; voto de cabresto
Democracy on the reservation
I voted for the first time in 1996, a municipal election year. I had never been involved in electoral campaigns except for entertainment purposes. I was uninterested in analysing candidates and proposals. For me, it was all just one big party. My father would tell me who to vote for. But then, one day, I realized that personal relationships were formed around and by elections. Until that moment, I had adhered to a kind of ‘traditional ritual’ for how democracy worked in indigenous territories in Brazil: I voted for whom I was instructed to vote for.
That started to bother me and I began to pay more attention to these people who were sometimes enemies, sometimes friends, and who came knocking on doors on the Pankararu reservation in northern Brazil, every time an election rolled around. In 2006, I began following the electoral campaign, paying close attention to the ‘usual suspects’ who lined up to run for office and to how the participation of Pankararu indigenous people in this contest was conceived and almost ritualistically implemented. It was at this point that I began to understand various dimensions: the concept of the curral eleitoral; why it was useless to support most indigenous candidates; how the needs of a captive electorate were maintained on the reservation; how social fragility was a prerequisite for vote-buying; and how favours were distributed to indigenous people in return for their electoral support, pushing them to vote for this or that candidate, always nominated by people from outside the reservation.
In short, I began to see how my people, the Pankararu, had been turned into political cattle.
This article describes what happened when I decided to act on that realization.
The Pankararu Reservation
The Pankararu Indigenous Lands are spread across three municipalities in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco: Tacaratu, Petrolândia and Jatobá. Controversies exist among the Pankararu regarding this division. Some accept it without question. Others disagree because they believe that Indigenous lands should not be divided up between different municipal administrations. Others still express no opinion because they believe that it will not change anything. None of these indigenous viewpoints matters when the time comes to register to vote. Indigenous people either choose the municipality they want to vote in or - more commonly - they are rounded up and taken to the municipal electoral office by a given candidate. In the later case, the candidate will provide transportation and assistance for those lacking the required documentation. They cover all expenses, provide photocopies of the documents needed for the Voter Registration Form (Formulário de Alistamento Eleitoral: FAE), pay any electoral fines when applicable, and even provide some snacks.
All of this occurs automatically. It is mechanical. And it is also deeply colonial. While the people and the scenarios in Pankararu lands have changed over the years, electoral customs have remained basically the same from generation to generation. Even today, in the twenty-first century, they are customs redolent of the cabresto and curral eleitoral practices of the nineteenth century, which still set the limits of ‘democracy’ as it is actually practiced in Pankararu territory today. These are longue durée structures (Braudel 1958) of colonial control, which I must now explain so that the reader can obtain a better understand of how party politics function on and around the reservation.1
Curral eleitoral (plural, currais eleitorais) literally means electoral corral: ‘corral’ as in herded cattle. It refers to a group of people controlled by a political leader who decides whom they should vote for, thus ensuring his or her base of support in elections. It is a form of political manipulation and control. The expression curral eleitoral refers to a common practice in the rural interior of Brazil, where local power has long been centralized in the hands of a few colonels (the title comes from their traditional position within the nineteenth century Brazilian militias). Coronelismo is thus a historical practice in Brazil, especially prevalent during the Old Republic (1889-1930), where coroneis wielded great political power and influence over vast swathes of rural territory by controlling votes, often at gunpoint. It is a form of domination that employed a mixture of threats, subjugation and favours as a means of sociopolitical control. This traditional form of colonial rural domination in Brazil is also known as voto de cabresto or ‘haltered voting.’
The present article examines how the practice - dare I say ritual? - of cabresto / curral eleitoral functions in Pankararu lands today, taking the 2022 election cycle as our basis for analysis. I was present on the reservation, conducting research for my doctoral thesis (Julião 2025), during this election, which came after four years of anti-indigenous policies under the Jair Messias Bolsonaro presidency, followed by two years of severe health crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic. To say that politics surrounding and on the Pankararu reservation (and, indeed, in Brazil) where ‘fraught’ during this period would be an understatement, but I do not intend to dive into the multiple tensions and stresses that framed the elections in the present text. Rather, I seek to show how democratic politics on Pankararu lands are still framed by practices long considered ‘obsolete’ - if not anti-democratic - in modern Brazil. The tensions of the 2022 election simply threw these practices - which are absolutely normative - into sharp relief.
The geopolitical context
The regional economy is the primary political and partisan factor in Petrolândia, Jatobá and, above all, Tacaratu. What these three municipalities have in common are their principal families, who were all part of the historical process of building the towns, mostly during the classical colonial period, given that both Petrolândia and Tacaratu are centuries-old. In Petrolândia, these families stand out due to their inherited or acquired local business power. This power, in turn, provides support and financing for local electoral campaigns. (Figure 1 & Figure 2)
Map of the Pankararu Reservation and its surrounding municipalities. Source: Pankararu Ethnomapping (2014).
Legend for the above map, showing settlement sizes and the jurisdictions of the three surrounding municipalities and how they cover the Pankararu TI. Source: Pankararu Ethnomapping (2014).
Jatobá is a new city, only formally established in 1995. It provided a new home for former residents and merchants of Petrolândia, particularly those displaced when Petrolândia became submerged by the rising waters of the São Francisco River following construction of the Luiz Gonzaga Power Plant by the São Francisco Hydroelectric Company (CHESF). Jatobá’s population also includes people originally from Alagoas and Bahia, since the town is located close to Pernambuco’s southern border with these other states. Social status in the town is still dominated, however, by the engenheiros chefianos, or old engineering families, responsible for the construction work on the hydroelectric facilities.
Tacaratu is faithful to its colonial heritage, still visible in its architecture and in the families of the colonels who founded and still dominate the town. It can also be seen in the way the older people in the town dress in starched linen clothes. The men wear pointed boots and cowboy-style hats and sport prominent moustaches (but no beards). Their hair is slicked back with pomade and parted down the middle or to one side in a fashion that has long been abandoned throughout most of Brazil. The women of the town wear carefully embroidered skirts and blouses, with their hair pulled into a topknot or clipped into a bun. The younger generation born after the turn of the century, or those who have lived in some major city (such as Recife, the state capital), are less attached to these fashions. They have, however, absorbed quite well local lessons on how to treat us, the Pankararu. Almost universally, the non-indigenous residents of the towns - both men and women, regardless of age - see and treat us indigenous people as lazy drunken savages, filthy, poor and ignorant. This view of us is so hegemonic and universally practiced that, to our indigenous eyes, it appears almost inherent and natural.
The first place I registered to vote was in Jatobá. Later, I transferred my registration to Canindé do São Francisco/SE, while I was working in the latter municipality. I brought my voter registration back to Jatobá when I decided to quit work in order to study. During the 2016 municipal election campaign, I transferred my registration to Tacaratu to help out my cousin who was running for city councillor. Unfortunately, I was unable to support his campaign in person because I was in Rio de Janeiro at the time, finishing the second semester of my master’s degree. I only managed to travel north to Tacaratu to vote and returned to Rio the same week. From what I could gather, following the election from a distance, it was a wonderful campaign. My cousin was one of the most voted candidates in Tacaratu and when the results came out showing he had won, we celebrated. I was able to take part in the celebration.
Up until the 2020 election campaign, I was in harmony with all the indigenous leaders I knew, but that year, I disagreed with the chiefs and vice-chiefs about supporting the new municipal administrations of Jatobá and, especially, Tacaratu. I made no statements regarding Petrolândia for three reasons. First, although I was aware of what was happening in the town, I have so far been unable to muster any relational interest in its politics. Second, this lack of interest has discouraged me from formulating any basis for understanding how the citizens of Petrolândia and/or their local political masters perceive us indigenous people. Finally, I have no personal connections to anyone in the town.
Regardless of the municipality, however, when I moved about the region, I made demands about assuming responsibilities in social and economic policies for my people, wherever I happened to be. In Jatobá, I expressed support for someone who was once my high school teacher. He was not an electoral option for the local leaders, so while I declared my support for him, I did not campaign on his behalf.
Why do I refer to Tacaratu as special? Because when I am there, Tacaratu always inspires in me a strong sense of déjà vu. This is reflected in various contexts. The first I mentioned above: how the people of Tacaratu perceive and treat us indigenous folk. Mostly, however, because it is in Tacaratu that one most clearly encounters the practices of curral eleitoral/cabresto being applied to indigenous (and non-indigenous) electorates. The whole package makes me feel like I am witnessing an endless political closed timelike curve (Stockum 1937) with one end of the loop here flapping around in the twenty-first century while the other is firmly anchored in the 1500s. Or maybe it makes me feel like I am reading a horror novel of the type written by US American author Steven King: one of those dark stories where a pokey little town’s dark, secret past always endlessly returns to haunt its present.
Either way, déjà vu.
The relationship of the Pankararu with the Vila de Tacaratu began in the mid-sixteenth century, the wellspring of so many of the circles and cycles that compose Brazilian life. Time is king, as Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil says, and its flow inevitably alters human physicality and changes contexts and scenarios. Some things, however, seem to endure almost forever. From a cultural viewpoint, customs are customs and even if they change, people are reluctant to see them as plastic and contingent. For my part, I am loathe to name names and describe in great detail particularities that in one way or another, mutandis mutatis, have been recurring for centuries. For me, in the context I am describing here, it is irrelevant to point to names if what I am trying to convey are causes and consequences, actions and reactions, sequences and immutabilities. Action is the legacy of our practices: it is not found in who did what, but in what they did. In addition to allowing me to continue my research, my reserved and intentional vagueness allows me to avoid other, bigger problems. What I can say with great confidence is this: from where I stand, I know my cattle.
Five Scenarios of Domination
As Moacyr Palmeira warns us, although it is tempting to view local politics in Brazil as a product of the authoritarianism of small local dictators or even as an extension of factional or party infighting, permanently in a state of confrontation, local electoral processes reveal negotiations, alliances and sometimes surprising agencies, even when they reproduce deeply entrenched systems of domination. Crucially, local politics is embedded in a cycle ‘that is capable of ordering, over a longer period, moments of unity (of exercising domination without public contestation) and of open struggle between contenders for political leadership’ (Palmeira 1996: 42). We can clearly see these two moments of the cycle in the treatment of the indigenous population.
That said, I shall now describe five dispositifs (Foucault 1977) or what I call ‘circumstantial scenarios,’ detailing how the old colonial families in Tacaratu manipulate the indigenous vote. These involve five phenomena:
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The practices of filtering and persuading indigenous people to engage in electoral politics.
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The town’s political rivalries, which reverberate in internal indigenous territorial relations.
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Internal indigenous territorial relations, which reverberate in the city’s political rivalries.
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The seduction of indigenous people to run as candidates for city council.
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The practices of cabresto / curral eleitoral.
The first scenario involves a mapping undertaken to identify specific indigenous people who have greater visibility on the reservation. These could be political leaders or other people of considerable influence. The key thing is to find those Pankararu who know and have a good relationship with the majority of their people. When these potential political actors are found, the emissaries from town sidle up to them, asking for information about some arbitrary matter before turning to social politics and then, finally, party politics. The emissaries ask about local politicians and other candidates. They listen more than they speak, instigating their Pankararu target to oratory (as people say around here). They probe, surround, goad. They speak friendly words and are willing to do favours. They promise benefits that can have a significant impact on the realities of indigenous people. This might be money, construction materials, medical help with treatment or examinations and so on. What is promised varies greatly, depending on the person and their social and/or economic situation. This initial survey allows the emissary from town to identify the greatest needs in Pankararu territory, as well as the degree of internal personalism and political articulation that any given indigenous person can add to a future political campaign.
The second scenario revolves around the hegemony of the town’s founding families, their disputes over local power - economic and coercive - and the relationships that these families have with the Catholic Church, in this case, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Good Health (Nossa Senhora da Saúde), Tacaratu’s patron saint. These days, coercive power is more often only evoked as a potential threat: vague rumours of police occupations, gunshots in the night, perhaps even active military intervention. The possibility of such threats being enacted can never be entirely ruled out, however. There have been dark times when the colonels of Tacaratu have gone to war and electoral disputes were resolved through armed violence, including ambushes and raids. These narratives remain strong and present in the histories of some local families and still reverberate today. This coercive power - even simply its potential - has a considerable impact on the formation of patrimonies and economic assets, and on local political control. It is reflected in the exchange of favours, political appointments and influences - in the courthouse, police station, town hall, town council, rural workers’ union; in other institutions such as post offices, banks and the recently opened office of the National Institute of Social Security (Instituto Nacional da Seguro Social: INSS) and even in churches - and in the functional control of the town.
With regards to the church, Catholicism has always exerted strong social control in this part of Brazil, as we Pankararu can attest, based on the history of our catechization. It is one of the strongest elements in the formation of curral eleitorais and cabresto. The socioeconomic visibility of Tacaratu ‘high society’ triggers a metaphorical appointment, employment and salary communications system - a network of gossip and speculation about who might gain what were so-and-so to win in the upcoming elections. This system becomes electrified, not only among those families with lower purchasing power who live in the town (generally families and/or people from rural areas who have migrated to Tacaratu): it also attracts those who live in rural and indigenous areas seeking manual labour jobs in homes and/or on farms and plantations - the old cheap, quasi-slave labour to which people submit themselves out of necessity. Either through emissaries or directly, the dominant political agents in town begin to probe, sidling up to people on the reservation with the express intent of awakening indigenous people’s interest. I am not saying that the relationships these agents form with Pankararu are necessarily superficial, or that they are never reciprocal. I am saying that, from my very individual point of view, I find it hard to believe that these agents are truly concerned with indigenous lives and well-being. When I meet them, however, I am polite and kind. I observe.
In the third scenario, the effect of these relationships begins to unfold. It is not possible to provide statistics or measure the flow or take-up of indigenous people who seek public or private employment or a referral from the first families of Tacaratu. However, these families spend a lot of time and effort displaying their proximity to their chosen indigenous few in order to arouse the interest of other indigenous people. This leads me to believe that the prevailing unconscious feelings in these relationships are based on the maintenance and/or temporary transgression of a fine line between superiors/dominators and inferiors/dominated. The relationships are superficially premised on reciprocity, shown in apparently banal attitudes such as visiting each other’s homes, waving in greeting and swapping phone numbers. These quotidian social practices strengthen the idea of participation in each other’s social lives.
A very clear example of this kind of behaviour was provided by one of my neighbours, who maintained this type of relationship for quite some time. She was a cleaning woman in the home of a family descended from one of Tacaratu’s first families. In our village, she was seen as someone who enjoyed the friendship of the Tacaratu elite and this relationship drew local attention. During the last election cycle (2022), her employer’s brother ran for the office of town councillor. In the normal course of affairs, this would have resulted in this candidate securing not only the vote of my neighbour, but also those of her family members. It may have even resulted in my neighbour campaigning for the candidate on the reservation. In the event, none of this happened. Neither my neighbour, nor anyone in her family or circle of friends voted for the brother of the woman who hired her. My neighbour is now no longer a cleaner for the woman who used to hire her. Situations like this happen with some frequency.
In the third scenario, internal territorial relations on the reservation have repercussions on local political party rivalries in Tacaratu. Pankararu political groups, specifically the leaders of local collectives, are quite noticeable in this regard. The term leadership denotes the focal points of the aforementioned mapping surveys carried out by politicians from the town. These leaders know their relative importance because they are people who represent and respond to questions of major social impact on the reservation: education, health and territorial issues. Pankararu political groups or their leaders can thus have an impact on Tacaratu’s partisan politics. These indigenous leaders are convinced that they have a degree of intimacy with the town’s first families. This conviction creates and feeds the expectation of political status in partisan disputes, even if it does not exist. This conviction is also an opportune outcome for Tacaratu politicians. Feeding this idea is part of the display of proximity, described above, which is employed to arouse interest among the indigenous population and to convince some people to run for office on a given electoral ticket. Indigenous candidates thus often end up on Tacaratu’s ballots.
Ironically, therefore, rivalry among the town’s first families can result in the people from indigenous reservations having some representation in town elections. This should not be seen, however, as indicating some kind of serious municipal concern for indigenous lives. What do we actually see? Politicians from Tacaratu courting chiefs and other indigenous leaders for their campaigns. They want indigenous people on the ballot to draw in votes. This does not mean, however, that they want to see indigenous people actually elected.
Such was the case of the son of one of our chiefs in the recent elections. This was the third campaign for which he ran but did not win. The belief that the party to which an indigenous candidate is affiliated will provide solid support for their electoral campaign is illusory. This is very far from always happening. Frequently, no support is made available beyond the minimum necessary (flyers, t-shirts and party/coalition flags with the principal candidate’s image, often without the indigenous candidate appearing). In the final analysis, these sorts of political candidacies are more often symbolic of a system whose primary concern is not to elect an indigenous leader to the town council, but rather to keep him and all those gathered around him nicely rounded up in a curral eleitoral: heads to be duly counted come election day. Formally, the system encourages the idea of having indigenous representation on the municipal council. Factually, though, beyond the actual electoral disputes, which are mostly used to form indigenous currais through filtering and persuasion, little interest in indigenous issues is ever shown at municipal level. In other words, being among Tacaratuenses does not make us Pankararu Tacaratuense - except, of course, in the civil registry where we are more potential heads to count come election time.
I now come to the fourth circumstantial scenario: the seducing of indigenous people to run for city council. Seduction is a way of referring to how the politicians of Tacaratu convince indigenous people by concocting a fairy tale, romanticizing their own ancestry and ours via the nefarious story that their indigenous grandmothers were abducted by their grandfathers. This is a common folktale in Brazil, yet no one ever seems to question or even wonder about the underlying story of rape it implies. An alternative local version, recounted by the Tacaratu elite, is that they are descendants of the Pankararu because their grandmothers, who were indigenous, ran away from Brejo,2 the oldest village on the Pankararu reservation, to marry their grandfathers. Notably, these generally fictious stories of kinship are only recycled during the election period.
These great-grandfathers several times over, the people who founded Tacaratu, are understood to be the precursors of the town’s first families. When recounting these tales, it is conveniently forgotten that these founding fathers enslaved Pankararu men and women of all ages while illegally occupying the lands of our territory. These are the same men who gave strychnine and other poisons to those they called ‘natives’ and grazed their cattle on indigenous fields. Yet, in the electoral season narratives, all these events are set aside with easy laughter as ‘a minor incident’ and ‘water under the bridge.’ What matters is that these candidates manage to construct kinship with the Pankararu somehow, if only until the elections are over.
Although founded centuries ago, Tacaratu was administratively part of the district of Petrolândia until May 13, 1954, when it was emancipated and became its own municipality. In the entire history of the town as an independent political unit, only two indigenous people have ever managed to be elected to the municipal council: Rosalvo Julião (1992 to 1996) and Celo Pankararu (2016 to 2020).
According to the 2010 census,3 Tacaratu had 22,068 inhabitants and estimates were that in 2020 it would have had 26,106 inhabitants. According to the Superior Electoral Court (Tribunal Superior Eleitorial: TSE),4 the number of eligible voters in Tacaratu is 16,381. If we take these numbers as our baseline, dividing the number of inhabitants by voters, the result would be 1.593675599 inhabitants per vote (26,106 ÷ 16,381). Rounding up, we would have approximately 1.6 inhabitants for each potential elector. Voting in Brazil is mandatory but due to the pandemic, voter turnout in 2020 was 14,022 (85.60%) with 2,359 (14.40%) abstentions. In this election we had 66 candidates competing for the 11 seats in the municipal council: an average of 212.4545454 votes per candidate. However, a councillor needs a minimum of 400 votes to be elected. The party to which the candidate is affiliated can increase the number of votes they receive if other candidates from the same party receive far more votes than the minimum. Such was the case with both the MDB and PSB parties, the majority tickets for the position of mayor during the last election. Finally, the eleven most voted candidates are those deemed elected.
There were two coalitions in the last election. The first represented the incumbent administration, the Frente Popular de Tacaratu (PSB/SOLIDARIEDADE/PSD).5 The second was the opposition coalition, Unidos para Mudar Tacaratu (MDB/AVANTE/PSDB/PROS).6 I will call these Coalition-1 and Coalition-2, respectively. The distribution of candidates in the last election was as follows:
A) In Coalition-1, the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB)7 had a candidate for mayor and 15 candidates for councillor; SOLIDARIEDADE had a vice-mayoral candidate and 16 candidates for councillor; the Partido Social Democrático (PSD)8 had no one standing for office despite being on the electoral ballot.
B) In coalition-2, the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB)9 had the candidate for mayor as well as 16 councillors; AVANTE had the vice-mayor and 15 councillors; neither the Partido Republicano da Ordem Social (PROS)10 nor the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB)11 ran candidates, despite forming part of the coalition. It is interesting to observe the gender balance in this election: from a total of 66 candidates, just 8 or 12% were women. There are 8,296 women in the municipal electorate, compared to 8,084 men, yet we were unable to elect a single woman in this election.
Rounding up the Cattle
We now come to the fifth and final scenario: the organization of currais eleitorais. Although I offer up some quantitative data on the elections depicted below, it is important to emphasize that I am following the path taken by anthropologists Marcio Goldman and Ronaldo dos Santos Sant’Anna. I provide these numbers not to investigate the elections themselves, but rather to provide a backdrop as to how the vote is constructed ‘in its density of individual choice and collective agency,’ as a kind of total social fact (Goldman and Sant’Anna, 1996, p. 14).
What stands out here is the process of seduction via promises that are rarely fulfilled, but which are made with the intention of filling up the electoral pens with as many ‘cattle’ as possible. The main promise made concerns the opportunity for public employment. Those who are elected are rarely candidates from rural or indigenous areas. In general, they are people from the first families or those who have the direct support of these families. These people already occupy high positions in institutions such as the courthouse, the police station, the town hall, the town council, the rural workers’ union, the post office, the banks, the recently built INSS office and even the Catholic church. In this last election, there were seven indigenous candidates running in Tacaratu, none of whom won. Paradoxically, the more indigenous candidates there are, the worse off the Pankararu become since our votes then tend to be split. This reduces the chances of having one or more indigenous representatives on the town council. In terms of sheer numbers, the Pankararu are a considerable voting bloc, making up a good 16% of the municipal electorate. We are 2,701 voters,12 distributed across four villages and nine electoral districts: Brejo dos Padres (4 districts and 1,414 voters), Espinheiro (2 districts and 562 voters), Olho D’Água do Julião (2 districts and 399 voters), and Barrocão (1 district and 326 voters). The Covid-19 pandemic reduced voter turn out during the last election: there were 519 absentee Pankararu overall, even though voting is required by law in Brazil. 1,172 voted in Brejo dos Padres (a deficit of 242 voters); 439 in Espinheiro (a deficit of 123); 319 in Olho D’Água do Julião (80); and 252 in Barrocão (74). Nonetheless, the reservation was and still is one of the biggest voting blocs in the municipality. The data is presented below (Table 1 & Tables 2):
Reinforcing the point made earlier, the problem lies in the quality of electoral support the various parties give to their indigenous candidates. Electoral coercion also occurs in various forms: economic blackmail, bribery, buying favours and more. Moreover, not only indigenous candidates run campaigns on the reservation, of course: others also arrive seeking voters in our territory, as can be confirmed by the electoral statistics.13 As if all this were not enough, these campaigns are expensive and are often backed by large sums of money used to buy votes. This is where the practice of binding voters within ‘electoral pens’ comes in. A curral eleitoral symbolically denotes political control over a given place. A cabresto - literally a halter or bridle used to lead an animal - means to symbolically capture and control a person’s vote. The Pankararu are understood to be a socially confined population, particularly vulnerable to these forms of political control due to the colonial forms of contact, pacification and catechization that have occurred among and to them over the centuries. Indigenous peoples have not only been forcibly tutored to read, write and pray, but also instructed how to vote.
When I use the term social confinement, I refer to the absence of public policies and inclusive actions directed towards the indigenous population. Voter registration cards are no guarantee of access to government programs: they are mostly a reminder of the fact that the holder is legally obliged to vote for a mayor. Yet the actions carried out by the municipality in the indigenous territory are basically limited to repairing roads. As for education and health, these are respectively state and federal responsibilities on the reservation, unless an individual is enrolled in the municipal school system or seeks medical help at the local hospital. Programs such as the PNAE (Programa Nacional de Alimentação na Escola / National School Meal Program) and PAA (Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos / Food Acquisition Program) include indigenous people only if there is someone influential who can mediate on their behalf. Given all these factors, political campaigns become the only real moments when indigenous people can try to achieve something via an electoral trade: dignity becomes poverty traded for votes.
Votes are bought with medicines, clinic consultations, medical exams, food, blankets, construction materials, gas cylinders or financial aid for an important trip. Votes are bought with disregard for psychosocial problems such as depression and alcoholism; by ignoring problems linked to physical disabilities; with exemption and lack of commitment to reservation issues because ‘that’s a federal responsibility.’ Votes are bought by temporarily meeting individual needs while systematically ignoring structural and social ones. The cattle are literally led by their noses to the pens by the promise of a handful of feed, while the lands all around the pens are green for grazing.
This is a vicious cycle that has become so commonplace, it has been naturalised. I have seen this happen time and again and it hurts.
A lot.
In the Corrals
I came to these conclusions after following the 2020 electoral campaign for mayor of the town of Tacaratu. I was someone well-liked in political circles on the reservation and had full approval for my activist work in setting up and maintaining anti-Covid sanitation barriers on the reservation’s borders. As I mentioned above, I shall refrain from naming names or expressing any opinion about the actions of any given indigenous leader in this scenario. However, in June, when the emergency basic rations for the reservation arrived from the Federal Government, my relationship with certain leaders began to deteriorate. I was aware of the discussions between FUNAI - the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples, which serves as the executive agency responsible for implementing indigenous policy within the Brazilian government - and the Ministry for Women, Family and Human Rights regarding the purchase of basic rations for all of Brazil, and I disclosed this information on the reservation. I have no idea why this disclosure bothered people, but from that moment on I ceased participating in internal discussions about the maintenance and organisation of the sanitary barriers we had put up around the reservation as an anti-Covid measure. Furthermore, I did not allow any candidates or prospective candidates to pass through the barriers when I was minding them. I made it clear that absolutely no one who was not indigenous was getting into the Pankararu reservation during the pandemic. Complaints soon reached the ears of indigenous leaders who questioned me about my actions. I justified my refusal. Under no pretext would I let anyone who was not Pankararu pass into the reservation while Covid-19 was still raging.
From June to September, coalitions and candidates were forming in the three municipalities and my cousin ran for re-election as a councillor in the opposition coalition in Tacaratu, along with three other indigenous people (two men and one woman). In the meantime, my brother-in-law, who had been pressured to run for council office in the government coalition, was hesitant to enter the primary race. He feared the consequences for political division in our family if we later broke off our initial political support, as had been the case in the last election in 2016. He also had no financial resources with which to fund his campaign. He only ended up accepting his candidacy on the day of the party congress, when the state deputy he helped elect in the 2018 campaign (and who was supporting then then-mayor, José Gerson da Silva) invited him to the plenary. Despite feeling embarrassed and suspicious, my brother-in-law ended up becoming a candidate.
Washington Ângelo de Araújo, the opposition candidate, had been the current mayor’s vice-mayoral candidate in the last campaign and my cousin is his son-in-law. During the first two years of Mayor Gerson’s term, the relationship between everyone was very friendly. The political differences between the mayor and the indigenous leaders, as well as between the mayor and his vice, were small and only grew gradually. Eventually, however, they became huge and apparently insurmountable. I am unaware of the reasons for the conflict between the mayor and his vice, but the mayor and the indigenous leaders are involved in a series of serious and mutual accusations. The leaders accuse Gerson of embezzling funds for works in the indigenous territory that were never carried out. Gerson, in turn, accuses the leaders of accepting bribes to provide space for the construction of works announced during the campaign, as well as charging ‘fees’ for each repair activity undertaken on the reservation and for participating in events. According to Gerson, on several occasions, he asked the leaders to identify and cede the areas where the multi-sports gym and health clinic for Jitó village could be built, acknowledging that, since it is federal land, the municipality could not simply buy the property. He was supposedly met with demands for bribes to release these lands. The indigenous leaders, in turn, deny these accusations, dismissing them as slander and defamation.
Once the candidates were announced and the coalitions formed, we began the political campaigns. The night after the coalition ceremony, we were at my brother-in-law’s house. He, my sister, his father and other relatives and friends were talking about the event and how we would run the campaign amid the pandemic and without any funds. Jokingly, people started calling me ‘the councillor’s advisor.’ We laughed a lot and, initially jokingly and later seriously, I ended up taking on the role of advisor for my brother-in-law’s campaign, recognising that he was extremely shy and feeling panicked about everything that was happening, including all the accusations that were flying about. In the first meeting of the official committee that I attended, there were five other Pankararu in addition to me. We decided that for this joint endeavour, I would be the spokesperson for the reservation.
As expected, we were received in the general coalition with all the customary distrust and prejudice I outlined above. When I introduced myself, everyone who was not a Pankararu was surprised about my academic background and activist work. The general coordinator of the campaign, amazed, told me that he had not expected to find a native of such calibre in his campaign because our ‘forest people appearance’ had left him incapable of imagining that one of us could rise so far in life. Quite naturally, this man began to describe, loudly and clearly, how he perceived my people, speaking in an offensive tone about the disagreements between the mayor and our leaders, using the accusatory terms he had employed previously. I immediately rebutted him. I also said, loudly and clearly, that I would not allow anyone to make any negative or prejudiced comments about my people. If anyone were to speak, it would be us among ourselves and that was it. If they spoke ill of us elsewhere, they should not let me hear about it because if they did, they would also hear my response. They were surprised once again. The campaign manager said that he had always known the Pankararu to be a ‘gentle people’ and I did not need to get worked up. I said that I was quite calm and that he had no wish to see me when I was upset.
In the end, we understood each other and I was invited to join the committee responsible for the campaign of Sandra Regina Vieira de Souza Alencar, the candidate for the successor to the executive branch of Tacaratu, the first woman mayoral candidate in the history of the municipality’s party politics.
The internal political rivalry described above was not limited to disagreements and mutual accusations between the mayor, his former deputy and indigenous leaders. When it came to supporting a woman as mayor of Tacaratu, there were countless questions about Sandra’s ability. People attacked her morals and dignity by accusing her of being the mayor’s mistress. They diminished her competence because she was a hairdresser. They attacked her personal life because she was a widow and had raised her two children on her own. They questioned her current marital status because she had remarried. There were times when I did not position myself as an advisor or as one of those responsible for the campaign, but simply as a woman. It was a campaign that went beyond party politics, becoming a struggle against sexism, misogyny, prejudice and racism.
Unfortunately, the indigenous leaders not only supported the opposition candidate, they also used their influence to prevent any electoral campaigning on the Pankararu reservation by the incumbent, using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext. They used their status to force the population to vote for their candidates for mayor and councillors. They used misogyny to attack Sandra’s campaign, attributing the ban on entering Pankararu territories to her, and they also attributed to her the political differences they had with the current mayor. It became so bad that every time Gerson or Sandra mentioned wanting to visit the reservation, we stopped them precisely to avoid further conflicts. It reached the point where we were watched 24 hours a day by drones flying over our homes.
The campaign was fierce even without rallies, motorcades, marches or crowds. Everything was dispersed in the name of Covid-19, which was not actually the reason for the dispersal. Sandra tried to establish herself as a strong candidate, but the campaign against her was morally violent. In terms of the final electoral numbers, Sandra received 577 fewer votes than Washington, as shown in the tables below (Table 3 & Table 4):
The elections are now long over, but their effects are not. It takes time for internal relations on the reservation to ‘normalize’ because there are those who take electoral campaigns too literally - once an enemy, forever an enemy. Blood ties and bonds of affection prior to these episodes acquired the relational temporality of a handshake: everything becomes superficial. Speaking for myself, I became an enemy of the local indigenous leaders to the point that it interfered with my field research, affecting me so much that I came to think that at any moment they might send out notices to all the spaces I frequented, declaring that I am no longer a representative of my/our people.
Before the elections, I was allowed to investigate the documentation about Pankararu that had been held at the old Indigenous Post, built in 1940. After the elections, I was prevented not only from accessing these documents, but also from searching in those of the CR Baixo São Francisco. At the time, FUNAI’s headquarters in Brasilia had ordered the collection of all documentation that was available in the Indigenous Posts, and I was unable to analyse any of the records about my people in relation to the SPI/FUNAI. We do not know where this documentation ended up. Some people who had previously agreed to give me an interview still refuse to even speak to me today, since we ‘differ politically.’
After all these years, I finally had the opportunity to observe at first hand an electoral campaign in the municipality of Tacaratu, Pernambuco. This came about because I was convinced that a woman would be a good mayor: ‘Who is this crazy woman who dares to challenge the entrenched coronelismo of Tacaratu?’ I asked myself. At our first meeting, which occurred at the party coalition convention, when I went to greet her, my first question to Sandra Regina was: ‘Woman, are you sure of what you are doing?’
‘No. But we need to try to make a change,’ Sandra replied.
And so I said, ‘Count me in.’
I cannot describe how overwhelmed I was by Sandra’s response. So many things went running through my mind, but her response about needing to try to make a change touched me deeply and inspired several ideas.
‘What are sisterhood and empathy?’ I then asked myself.
Perhaps the touch of our hands as we greeted each other, the look in our eyes, the timbre of our voices, provoked me to leave a zone that had, until then, been comfortable for me. ‘Suddenly,’ I was coordinating an election campaign for my brother-in-law. ‘Suddenly,’ I was sharing and developing proposals for both my brother-in-law’s and Sandra’s campaigns.
Between following the Tacaratu municipal elections step by step and contributing to Sandra’s campaign, I experienced firsthand the system I described above. I saw the disgusting ways in which electoral campaigns affect people’s dignity. I began to see the dismantling of services and the denial of social rights as part of the oppressive force that keeps my people in a vegetative state of political illiteracy. Modern democracy in Brazil repeats, recreates and reinforces structures of coronelismo and patronage established since the nineteenth century in indigenous lands. Pankararu is certainly not an exclusive case. With everything I experienced in my territory during the 2020 elections, however, I believe - and must believe - that one day we will learn to vote for people committed to social and environmental equity, promoting the guarantee of rights and access to justice for all, but especially for ourselves, Brazil’s indigenous peoples.
References
- BRAUDEL, Ferdinand. 1958. “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée”. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 13(4): 725-753.
- FOUCAULT, Michel. 1977. “The Confession of the Flesh”. In: Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1980. pp. 194-228.
- GOLDMAN, M. and R. dos. S. SANT’ANNA. 1996. “Elementos para uma análise antropológica do voto”. In: Marcio Goldman and Moacyr Palmeira (eds.), Antropologia, Voto e Representação Política Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa, 1996. pp. 13-40.
- JULIÃO, Cristiane Gomes. 2025. Ação Política Indígena no Brasil Contemporâneo: Enfrentamentos na Luta por Direitos Tese de Doutorado, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional, UFRJ - Rio de Janeiro.
- PALMEIRA, Moacyr. 1996. “Política, Facções e Voto”. In: Marcio Goldman and Moacyr Palmeira (eds.), Antropologia, Voto e Representação Política Rio de Janeiro: Contracapa , 1996. pp. 41-56.
- SOUZA LIMA, Antonio Carlos de. 1995. Um grande cerco de paz: poder tutelar, indianidade e formação do Estado no Brasil Petrópilis: Vozes.
- STOCKUM, W. J. van. 1937. “The gravitational field of a distribution of particles rotating around an axis of symmetry”. Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh, 57: 135-154.
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1
The official term in Portuguese is Terra Indigena (TI) or ‘Indigenous Land.’ For the purposes of the present article, we have translated this as ‘reservation,’ an administrative form more familiar to English-language readers. We caution readers, however, that TIs and reservations are similar in concept but also very different in terms of their juridical--legal structures. For more information on Brazil’s indigenous administrative system and the formation of state indigenous policies and administrative structures in Brazil, see Souza Lima (1995).
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2
Full name, Brejo dos Padres.
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3
IBGE Census 2010. Available at https://cidades.ibge.gov.br/brasil/pe/tacaratu/panorama. Consulted 1 Jun. 2021.
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4
Available at https://www.tse.jus.br/eleicoes/estatisticas/estatisticas-eleitorais. Consulted 1 Jun. 2021.
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5
Tacaratu Popular Front.
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6
United to Change Tacaratu.
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7
Brazilian Socialist Party.
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8
Social Democratic Party.
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9
Brazilian Democratic Movement.
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10
Republican Party of the Social Order.
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11
Brazilian Social Democracy Party.
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12
Available at https://www.tre-pe.jus.br/eleitor/titulo-e-local-de-votacao/consulta-aos-locais-de-votacao-de-pernambuco. Consulted 1 June 2021.
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13
Available at https://www.tse.jus.br/eleicoes/estatisticas/estatisticas-eleitorais. Consulted 1 June 2021.
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Data Availability Statement:
The data set that supports my reflections is available in my doctoral thesis (Indigenous Political Action in Contemporary Brazil: Confrontations in the Struggle for Rights [Ação Política Indígena no Brasil contemporâneo: enfrentamentos na luta por direitos]. Doctoral Thesis. Rio de Janeiro: Rio de Janeiro: National Museum/UFRJ, 2025), accessible at: http://objdig.ufrj.br/72/teses/957523.pdf.
Edited by
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Dossier Editors
Gersem Luciano Baniwa (gmapolero@gmail.com | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5222-9339)Luiz Eloy Terena (adv.luizeloy@gmail.com | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9073-6086)Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima (acslima@mn.ufrj.br | http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5260-236X)
The data set that supports my reflections is available in my doctoral thesis (Indigenous Political Action in Contemporary Brazil: Confrontations in the Struggle for Rights [Ação Política Indígena no Brasil contemporâneo: enfrentamentos na luta por direitos]. Doctoral Thesis. Rio de Janeiro: Rio de Janeiro: National Museum/UFRJ, 2025), accessible at: http://objdig.ufrj.br/72/teses/957523.pdf.
