Brazil indigenous group clashes with police

Brazilian indigenous protesters clashed with police outside the National Congress building in the capital Brasilia on Tuesday. The police cracked down on the demonstration with tear gas bombs and rubber bullets against hundreds of Indigenous protesters. The indigenous responded with arrows and spears to end what started as a peaceful protest.

Members of nearly four dozen Brazilian Indigenous tribes who have camped close to Congress hoped to persuade legislators against a bill that would open up vast portions of their land reserves to logging and mining.

The vote on the highly controversial measure was postponed again to Wednesday, but it is unclear if Congress will proceed with the measure.

Illegal mining and logging have caused increasingly violent clashes between indigenous tribes on reservations and illegal operations, flaunting the restrictions on commercial exploitation on tribal lands.

The level of violence has prompted Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's government to deploy the army and police forces to reservations.

Several incidents have resulted in the death of illegal miners and local indigenous people in clashes in recent months.

The conservative president has been outspoken about his desire to legalize mining in indigenous territories – which is not allowed under Brazil's constitution – and to promote development in the Amazon.

In the past, the country's Supreme Court has ruled against efforts to open indigenous reserves to commercial interests, ruling the reserves are inviolate and off-limits to commercial development.

The current Bill, PL 490, is aimed at marking 1988 as the cut-off date for establishing indigenous reserves, which activists say would ignore the ancestral nature of indigenous claims on reservation lands and violate legal restrictions on development in the reserves.

The new cut-off date would allow the Federal Government to ignore current boundaries created before 1988, opening millions of acres to commercial mining and logging operations, something activists have vowed to oppose.