Legislated Genocide, Coloniality of Power, and Territorial Rights: A Critical Analysis of Law No. 14,701/2023

Abstract

This article critically examines Law No. 14,701/2023 from a historical, legal, and decolonial perspective, seeking to understand its structural effects on the rights of Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Drawing on the notion of the coloniality of power, developed by Aníbal Quijano, it argues that this legislation introduces temporal and evidentiary criteria that are incompatible with the constitutional nature of Indigenous territorial rights. Such provisions do not merely produce isolated effects; rather, they operate as forms of structural normative violence by institutionalizing precariousness and territorial insecurity as regular components of the legal system. In this context, the article proposes the analytical category of legislated genocide to describe processes of social, territorial, and cultural elimination enabled through legal means, without the necessary use of direct violence. The study engages critically with contemporary debates on the juridical administration of life in Brazil, drawing on the contributions of Ailton Krenak, Eloy Terena, and Joênia Wapixana, and mobilizes the historical analogy of the witch hunts as an interpretive tool, not by establishing factual equivalences, but by identifying recurring patterns of legally sanctioned subjugation. It concludes that Law No. 14,701/2023 places significant strain on the foundations of the democratic constitutional order inaugurated in 1988, infringes upon Indigenous territorial rights, and reintroduces colonial logics into the Brazilian legal system.