In 2018, Ingrid Sateré Mawé was a candidate for Santa Catarina governor. She says she was previously elected coordinator of the Education Workers’ Union and the head of a national union. All this, she says, helped “build a bridge” to unify non-Indigenous and Indigenous people.
Following the 2022 ballots that elected Sonia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá as federal deputies, she says, she was invited to be a special adviser to the the Bancada do Cocar (Feathered Headdress Caucus) in the National Congress, where she stayed until August 2023.
Gender gap
The increasing representation of Indigenous people in municipal elections is strategic not only for their fight for the fulfillment of their rights overall but also to ensure public services locally, says Cleber Buzatto, of the southern regional coordination of the Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples, an advocacy group affiliated with the Catholic Church.
“There are a lot of public services under the responsibility of municipalities, so obviously having representation in the city hall or city council makes it much easier,” Buzatto says, adding that supervision and political influence are also key to these services being better provided by municipalities to the communities and in a more “respectful way.”
Another strategic factor, he says, is a direct relationship between the municipal elections and the future elections for the composition of state legislative assemblies and the National Congress. “The more Indigenous people represented in the municipalities, the more likely it is that this representation will also be strengthened at state and federal levels in the next 2026 elections,” he tells Mongabay in a phone interview.
However, Buzatto sheds light on some issues and “contradictions” in the electoral system and political parties. “Ideally these candidates should be elected precisely by their allied parties, but in practice this isn’t always the case,” he says, urging ideological political training for candidates. “Unfortunately, there is still a large number of Indigenous people running for office and even being elected by parties that are antagonistic to the collective rights of Indigenous peoples in the National Congress.” According to him, this happens especially in small municipalities where the parties most aligned with Indigenous rights in Congress are minorities, triggering alliances with other parties amid the possibility of election victory.
“The parties need to provide more support so that Indigenous candidates are able to run fairly. In addition, the Superior Electoral Court must guarantee the application of a measure to support Indigenous candidacies through the electoral fund, to level the playing field and promote diversity in politics,” Dinamam Tuxá, APIB executive coordinator for the northeast region and Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo states, says in a statement.
The municipal elections results also showed a gender gap, APIB says. Indigenous women accounted for just one mayor of a total of nine Indigenous mayors elected, four vice mayors of a total of nine, and 36 of a total of 234 councilors.
From the Potiguara people, Ellys Sônia Oliveira Gomes da Silva, known as Ninha, was the only Indigenous woman elected mayor in Brazil. On Jan. 1, 2025, she will govern the municipality of Marcação, in northeastern Paraíba state. She will succeed Eliselma Oliveira, known as Lili, her cousin and the only Indigenous woman mayor elected in 2020.
“The Indigenous people have been oppressed their entire lives, without representation. It’s very important that today we have a woman, an Indigenous manager who knows the needs of our people very well and who will fight for our rights, defending our culture, our language, our traditions. I want to take this not only to Paraíba, but also to Brazil,” Ninha tells local newspaper Jornal da União. In Marcação, all nine elected city councilors self-declared Indigenous: five men and four women.
In Florianópolis, Ingrid Sateré Mawé was elected with the slogan, “For women, for the climate and for the future.” One of the highlights of her government plan is to improve public services, in which women are largely the most users. “We believe very much that if women aren’t doing so well, there is no way the society will do well.”
Ingrid Sateré Mawé says she is aware of the challenges to be faced in the city council but notes that she is prepared to tackle this issue and make the necessary negotiations. “We’re going to have to sit down, we’re going to have to be patient and use something that many other candidates don’t have, which is this ancestral support, because many things we say, many things we do, but we as Indigenous women are fully aware that we are often just an instrument in this process.”
Banner image: After 351 years since its foundation, Florianópolis, the capital of Brazil’s southern state of Santa Catarina, elected its first Indigenous city councilor, Ingrid Sateré Mawé, with 3,430 votes. “This election represents the result of a struggle that has been built for a long time for those of us who are organized as Indigenous women,” Ingrid Sateré Mawé tells Mongabay in a phone interview. Image courtesy of Carol Esmanhotto.
Karla Mendes is a staff investigative and feature reporter for Mongabay in Brazil and a member of the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network. She is the first Brazilian and Latin American ever elected to the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ); she was also nominated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Chair. Read her stories published on Mongabay here. Find her on Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, 𝕏 and Bluesky.