Bureaucracy: the euphemism for the end of rights.

On Friday, June 27, 2025, in Araguatins, in the heart of the Bico do Papagaio region, we witnessed a scene that, due to its symbolic density, would merit in-depth study in the annals of Brazilian social sciences. On one side of the platform, President Lula celebrated the "Terra da Gente" program, an initiative that, at its core, seeks to promote social justice through land distribution, a nod to the historical reparation of agrarian conflicts that bloodied that same region of Tocantins. On the other, the host, Governor Wanderlei Barbosa (Republicanos), an ally. Everything was proceeding according to the expected liturgy of these events, until the unspoken, the subtext, the prior agenda of this event, prevailed over the official rhetoric.

Appealing to President Lula, in a disrespectful reference to the rights of the indigenous people present, Governor Wanderlei Barbosa explicitly asked: “I would like to ask you to help us break through this bureaucracy, so that we can obtain the licenses to pave the road from Tocantinópolis to Maurilândia and from Tocantínia to Palmas.” Although the exact words may have been softened by the diplomacy of the occasion, the mere presence of the governor on that stage, flanking the president, gave an air of almost performative dissonance. This same governor, months earlier, as widely reported, publicly declared his intention to proceed, “at any cost,” with the paving of a highway that cuts through indigenous lands, the TO-010. At the time, the imbroglio with Funai and Ibama was treated as a mere detail to be overcome.

This contradiction serves as a starting point: a federal event that aims to be a landmark in land justice serves as a backdrop for the celebration of a political alliance with those who see the constitutional safeguards of indigenous peoples as an obstacle to "progress." It is the materialization of a conflict of worldviews that inhabits the heart of Brazil's formation, and it could not be otherwise with the Lula government and its heterogeneous support base.

In his previous statements on the subject, the governor resorted to a euphemism that has become a kind of mantra in the vocabulary of a certain anachronistic developmentalism: the need to "break the bureaucracy." It is a brilliant rhetorical choice in its capacity for distortion. What is called "bureaucracy," in this context, is not the redundant stamp or the useless queue at the registry office. It is the legal framework that protects the environment and indigenous territorial rights. It is the right to prior, free, and informed consultation, guaranteed to indigenous peoples by Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), of which Brazil is a signatory and which has supralegal status in our legal system.

Treating environmental licensing and dialogue with affected communities as "bureaucracy" reduces citizenship to a mere nuisance. It's a fallacy that seeks to convert rights into privileges, and due process into an obstacle to be removed by the governor's iron will. And here, we enter another fascinating and worrying facet of our political culture. As exposed in classics of Brazilian sociology, such as "Roots of Brazil" by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, our traditional appeal to personalism was also present in the governor's gesture.

The demand is not for a technical debate, for a review of legal frameworks in Congress, or for mediation that reconciles the interests at stake. The appeal, even if implicit in Friday's event, is directed at the president's "sensitivity," at the leader, at the man. It is a re-enactment of the old trope of the benevolent monarch who, with a stroke of the pen, could suspend the rules of the game in the name of a supposed greater good—in this case, the asphalt. It is a logic that corrodes institutions, that disregards the impartiality of the law, and that bets on personal relationships, on cronyism, as a method of governance. It relies on the exception, not the rule.

This leads us to question the very notion of "progress" that underpins such a claim. A road, in itself, is not synonymous with development. It may, in fact, facilitate the flow of agricultural production, reduce logistical costs and, perhaps, generate profits for a sector of the economy. But at what price? What is the cost to the integrity of the Xerente communities' territory, to the preservation of their culture and way of life? What is the impact on the biodiversity of a region already so pressured by deforestation? Development for whom? Progress for what?

Asphalt roads that ignore the forest, its people, and its territories are not a road to the future; they are a shortcut to conflict, socio-environmental degradation, and ultimately, losses that simplistic freight accounting cannot calculate. They generate environmental, social, and international reputational liabilities that will cost future generations much more. This is not ideological rhetoric. There are countless historical and contemporary examples that support this argument.

This episode places President Lula himself at a delicate public crossroads. His government, elected on a promise to rebuild socio-environmental policies demolished by the previous administration and to create an unprecedented Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, is constantly strained by allies who represent the exact opposite of this agenda. It's the dilemma of trying to balance the FIESP (Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo) with the Amazon, agribusiness with land demarcation, extractive developmentalism with sustainability. Lula's silence or response to this type of pressure is always news in itself, a barometer of the power dynamics within the government. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, as our greatest performance artist would say.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to propose a complete reversal of the logic. What if, instead of seeing indigenous communities and environmental protection agencies as an "obstacle," we viewed them as protagonists in planning? The so-called "bureaucracy" of licensing and prior consultation is not an obstacle, but a mechanism for dialogue, a tool for building smarter and more definitive solutions.

The absence of this dialogue does not accelerate progress; it merely paves the way, literally, for authoritarianism and conflict. True sustainable development, the kind that leaves no trail of social and ecological destruction, is not achieved despite traditional communities, but with them.

Instead of a personal appeal to "break the bureaucracy," what one would expect from a statesman would be the defense of strengthening a clear infrastructure protocol in sensitive territories. A protocol that, under the auspices of the Ministries of Indigenous Peoples and the Environment, would condition the release of any federal resources not only on formal licensing, but also on proof that the project was developed with the affected communities. Transforming consultation, currently seen by many as a mere formality to be fulfilled, into an active, creative, and binding stage of policy planning and execution.

This would, in fact, be a step forward. It would mean exchanging the culture of favoritism for a culture of dialogue; the authoritarian shortcut for the patient construction of consensus. It would mean understanding that the true infrastructure project Brazil needs, before any roads, is a solid and well-founded bridge between economic development and the non-negotiable respect for indigenous rights and the environment. The rest is merely a repetition of a past that insists on persisting.