Unveiling the institutional arrangements in the criminalization of indigenous peoples: the logic of the enemy in the case of the Indigenous People Xukuru of Ororubá

Abstract Violence against indigenous peoples has notably increased in recent years, and its news has been consequent on the violence faced by defenders of their rights. This article aims to explain this pattern of violence, demonstrating how legal uncertainty within the demarcation process encourages indigenous people and landowners to go to war. Through the study of the case of the Xukuru People of Ororubá, we describe two major violent events to demonstrate the set of threats, murders, autonomous retaking of demarcated territory, and institutional violence incidents by the police, Federal Public Prosecutor's Office and FUNAI. We rationalize these facts in a game theory matrix to demonstrate that the legal insecurity of the territory under demarcation leads both sides, as rational actors, to act and use all available resources to defeat the opponent, generating a suboptimal balance. This result leads to two outspreads. First, Brazil's failure to comply with the obligation to provide domestic legal effects allows the courts to adopt a legal thesis that conditions the effectiveness of territorial rights to Funai's budget. Second, an informal institutional arrangement translated into the permanence of the territory with non-indigenous people's rule. It was identified by the set of sanctions that the literature called the enemy's logic, composed of the criminalization of indigenous leaders and human rights defenders, as well as the distortion of purpose in the performance of public bodies. Therefore, this work contributes to the literature of Indigenous Law, Constitutional Law, and International Human Rights Law by offering a causal link between state omission and physical and institutional violence.