Brazil’s Lula vetoes bill restricting Indigenous land claims

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has vetoed the core parts of a bill backed by the country’s powerful farm lobby that would have limited claims to ancestral lands where Indigenous people have lived by 1988.
“The president vetoed everything that was unconstitutional and not consistent with our Indigenous peoples policy,” his Institutional Relations Minister Alexandre Padilha announced.
The government will retain some parts of the bill in keeping with its Indigenous policy and sign it into law later on Friday, he said.
Brazil’s first Indigenous People Minister Sonia Guajajara, appointed by Lula, said the veto was a big victory for the country’s 1.6 million Indigenous people, who have strived to protect their land rights threatened by the advance of the agricultural frontier into the Amazon region.