When the defendant is the State: revisiting the Panará compensation action in light of the right to memory, truth, reparation and accountability for non-repetition
Panara, compensation claim, reparation, transitional justice, military dictatorship.
This research addresses the condemnation of the Union and Funai in the early 2000s by the Brazilian judiciary. Conviction that forced the defendants to pay 4 thousand minimum wages in compensation to the Panará indigenous people. This compensation action and subsequent conviction was due to the moral and material damages caused by the action and omission of the State at the time of contact with these people in the early 1970s, when the BR-163 was opened and the subsequent removal of these people to the Xingu Indigenous Park. This process, from contact to removal, in less than 2 years, claimed the lives of more than 170 Panará. The research intends to revisit this compensation action from its beginning in 1994 until the partial victory in court in 2000. A paradigmatic action in which an indigenous people achieved success against projects carried out by the Brazilian state during the period of the military dictatorship. The research will investigate how the reparation was implemented as a compensation action and demarcation policy for part of the Panará territory, emphasizing, mainly, the incompleteness of the compensation as a transitional justice, recently incorporated into the debate. Considering, however, the originality and the context of the action, which did not have many other examples to reference, we will approach this context through collaborative research with the Panará leaders themselves, also bringing historical documents, some parallels with other actions that seek justice for other indigenous peoples of Latin America who were victims of the dictatorship, and interviews with agents involved in the process, as well as the advances achieved through the work of Brazil's National Truth Commission and its recommendations regarding violations of the human rights of indigenous peoples in the context of military dictatorship.