A controversial project to build a rail line for transporting soybeans and other commodities through Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon may get its environmental license as soon as April.
Prosecutors in the state of Pará, where the line will terminate at the Miritituba river port, have filed a court request for a suspension of the project until prior consultation with the affected Indigenous communities have been carried out.
The request seeks to challenge the project on its economic viability, with prosecutors arguing that without detailed data on costs and compensation measures, there is no way of knowing how the project will impact on public coffers.
This is the first time that prosecutors have highlighted a project’s viability to seek its suspension.
A controversial freight railway line that would cut through Indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon looks set to be approved for construction by the federal government as soon as April, despite a lawsuit pending against it by local prosecutors.
The EF-170 railroad, known as the Ferrogrão, or “Grainway,” is a priority project of the federal government and will run 933 kilometers (580 miles) from the municipality of Sinop, in Mato Grosso state, to Miritituba in Pará state. The call for a tender is expected to be released within the first quarter of 2021, and the project is expected to be granted its environmental license in April.
All the freight traffic between the two cities currently flows through the BR-163 highway, bringing produce from Mato Grosso north to the river terminal in Pará. At present, though, more than 70% of Mato Grosso’s harvest is trucked southeast to the Atlantic ports of Santos and Paranaguá for export. With the railroad, the government aims to avoid this arduous step of the journey, instead sending commodities like soybean and corn to the transshipment terminal in Miritituba and onto ships sailing out to the Atlantic via the Tapajós, Tocantins and Amazon rivers. Aside from grains, the government also plans to transport soybean oil, fertilizers, sugar, ethanol, and petroleum products.
While the railroad is considered vital for grain shipping, the way the federal government is pushing ahead with the project has raised concerns.
In particular, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) in Pará has challenged the government’s failure to seek the free, prior and informed consent of the Indigenous peoples through whose lands the railway would pass. In October, the MPF and five civil society organizations filed a request with the Federal Court of Accounts, the government accountability office, for the precautionary suspension of the privatization process and for the call for tender to be stopped.
Public prosecutor Felipe Moura Palha said the fact that the federal government has violated the Indigenous communities’ right to participate in discussions about the project risks imposing significant economic losses in the future. “This is the first time that the MPF has called on the Court of Accounts to analyze a large project in the Amazon with an eye on economics,” he said.
The MPF says the lack of data on the real environmental impacts of the project means the cost of compensation could be greater than imagined and possibly lead to losses from the public coffers. “We maintain that prior consultation, analysis and the effect on Indigenous communities in the economic viability analysis for the project is essential,” Palha said.
In response to the request filed by the MPF, the court notified the National Land Transportation Agency (ANTT), the federal regulator for railway and highway infrastructure, and Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, to carry out consultations with Indigenous peoples along the route of the planned rail line. But even then, the federal government has played foul, according to the MPF: prosecutors allege that the government’s Special Secretariat of the Partnerships and Investments Program (SE-PPI) tried to improperly entice an Indigenous Munduruku leader to act on behalf of the tribe.
The Munduruku people, with a population of about 13,700 occupying territories along the Tapajós River, have their own political organizations. According to the MPF, the government sought out a single person to be “the speaker granted representation to articulate the interests of his people.” On Dec. 14, the MPF recommended that the prior consultation process also include the project’s impacts on the Indigenous peoples in the state of Mato Grosso who would be directly or indirectly affected by the Grainway. The recommendation was aimed at Funai and IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency.
Indigenous people ignored
Melillo Dinis is a lawyer with the Instituto Kabu, representing 12 communities of the Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó people, including some 12,000 Kayapós. He said the Indigenous people have yet to form an opinion about the Grainway because the project has not yet even been presented to them. Dinis said there are currenty three issues under debate: the right to prior consultation and fulfillment of Indigenous protocol, neither of which were acknowledged by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro; the need for thorough social and environmental evaluation of the degradation, deforestation and growing tensions over territory in the region; and the fact that representatives of governmental agencies affirmed that Indigenous rights would be respected but did not carry out their promises.
“The context that has been presented to us until now is completely disrespectful of Indigenous peoples,” he said. “They have been living here for around 10,000 years. We will fight until the end.”
Dinis noted that the project has been dragged out over previous administrations; the Grainway was proposed in 2016, under the watch of then-president Dilma Rousseff, who was later that year impeached and replaced by Michel Temer. Temer was succeeded by Bolsonaro.
“Before, they would listen to us but wouldn’t pay any attention,” Dinis said of the Rousseff and Temer administrations. “This administration won’t even listen to us. So the outcome is the same.”
Prosecutor Palha said there’s no way to stipulate a ceiling on spending on the project without knowing how much to allocate for environmental compensation.
“We are not opposed to development projects,” he said. “Our request is: carry out the prior consultation before claiming that the project is viable so it can be discussed.”
He cited the case of the Belo Monte dam in the state of Pará as an example. A significant decline in the flow rate of the Xingu River now threatens the viability of the dam, raising the prospect of new power plants, likely fired by fossil fuels, needing to be built.
“We want to avoid this situation with the Grainway, having a project already installed that hasn’t been properly planned,” Palha said. “This is why the Court of Accounts is carrying out an unprecedented economics analysis.”
Controversy over the Grainway began in 2016 when it was announced that studies would be carried out to make the project viable. In 2018, Mongabay reported that the Kayapó people had expressed their concern over the potential threats posed by the railway and had written a letter to the ANTT. In it, tribal chief Anhe Kayapó said:
“The Grainway cannot be built without reinforcing controls, protection and vigilance in the Conservation Units and Indigenous Lands [along its route].”
Indigenous peoples worldwide are the victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
Hundreds of Jenu Kuruba people have launched an indefinite protest in the Nagarhole National Park, India, to demand that the authorities stop trying to evict them, and recognize their rights to the forest.
According to India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA), the tribe has rights to live in, “protect” and “conserve” their lands.
The Jenu Kuruba’s rights to their lands should have been recognized many years ago – they first submitted their claims in 2009. But like many tribes across the country, their claims have been ignored.
JK Thimma, a Jenu Kuruba leader from Nagarhole, said today: “We Adivasi [tribal] people know how to take care of the forest and animals and we can do this much better than them. This is what we should fight for. We want the Forest Department to leave and hand over the forest to us, we will take care of the forest.”
The evictions and harassment that the Jenu Kuruba have endured are part of a racist and colonial conservation model that takes indigenous peoples’ land and turns it into protected areas for tourism, accompanied by gross human rights abuses.
The protest comes at a time when dissent is being brutally crushed in Modi’s authoritarian India. The police response to farmers’ protests in Delhi sparked international outrage and many Adivasi activists, such as Hidme Markam, have been arrested and imprisoned for speaking out.
For many years, WCS India has led the call for the relocation of tribal peoples from tiger reserves, insisting these are “voluntary relocations” which benefit the tribes. Yet communities report worse living conditions and a desire to return to their forest, prompting the US government to halt funding for relocations in the name of conservation.
JK Thimma told Survival: “WCS go to the Forest Department and bring officials and come here to tell us to leave.” He added: “We don’t want any money. We want to live free in the forest. The tribes, the forest and the animals are all one thing. If the officials come and shoot us we are ready to die, but not to leave the forest.”
The Jenu Kuruba have lived in and protected the forests of Karnataka for millennia.
They worship the tiger, and their careful management of the forest has ensured a healthy tiger population.
Muthamma, a Jenu Kuruba woman explained: “We’ve lived together with tigers for centuries, we don’t kill them and the tigers don’t kill us. We revere the tiger as a deity; we have a tiger altar over in the forest. The conservationists from the city don’t understand the forest. As long as we’re alive the tigers will still be safe. If we disappear, the loggers and poachers will have free rein.”
Another forest-dwelling tribe, the Soliga, were the first tribe to get their community forest rights recognised in a tiger reserve – which then saw tiger numbers increase far more than the national average.
Survival’s Senior Researcher Sophie Grig said today: “The Jenu Kuruba face constant harassment and threats from forest guards, who stop them from growing their food, building their houses, practicing rituals in their sacred groves or accessing their family graves. All these are flagrant violations of their rights. The Jenu Kuruba are the true conservationists and protectors of Nagarhole’s forests – it’s high time that their rights to live in, protect and conserve their ancestral lands are recognised.”
Indigenous peoples are usually at the forefront of environmental and social justice struggles. They are also the most threatened by violence directed at activists. Deep Green Resistance stands in solidarity with front line activists, particularly indigenous peoples who seek to restore human rights and protect the land and water from harm.
The prominent Adivasi (Indigenous) activist, Hidme Markam, from the Koya tribe, was arrested on Tuesday March 9th, while attending an International Women’s Day event in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh. A video shows her being violently bundled into a car amid protest from other women activists.
Ms Markam, 28, is an anti-mining and tribal rights activist working to prevent the mining of a sacred mountain in south Chhattisgarh and against police brutality and the building of paramilitary camps.
She is the convenor of the Jail Bandi Rihai Committee, a group campaigning for the release of thousands of Adivasis who have been criminalized, branded as Naxals [armed Maoist rebels] and held, often for many years, in pre-trial detention for speaking up for their rights. She now finds herself in the same situation.
According to the police, she has been arrested for a number of cases filed between 2016 and 2020 relating to Maoist activity. They also claim there was a US $1,500 bounty on her head.
This is disputed by other activists, such as Soni Sori, who said:
“She isn’t a Maoist as police claimed. She has been fighting for the Jal-Jangal-Jameen (water, forest and land) of tribals in Bastar. She had been going to the offices of the Superintendent of Police (SP), and Collector [government official] frequently and met with many prominent personalities … to raise tribals’ issues…Have you ever heard that a Maoist goes to the SP or Collector’s office, meets with the Chief Minister, Governor and reveals their identity openly?”
The police have said that she will be held in custody for 10 days. Lawyers are applying for bail.
Her arrest is clearly meant to send a warning to those who speak out for Adivasi and women’s rights and against mining and state repression. It is another sign of the growing attack on Adivasi rights and democracy in India under Modi’s authoritarian regime. Even in Chhattisgarh – which is not under the control of Modi’s party – the assault against Adivasi lives and rights is relentless.
In India those who dissent, especially Adivasis and their supporters are often branded “anti-national” and are accused of sedition or held under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). In November 2020, 67 activists were charged under the UAPA in just two states. 10,000 Adivasis have been accused of sedition for their role in laying stones at the entrances to their villages engraved with their constitutional rights.
There are grave concerns about the treatment that Hidme Markam will receive in custody.
The event at which she was arrested was to speak out against the sexual abuse of Adivasi women. It was to commemorate the lives of two young Adivasi women who were physically and sexually assaulted by the Chhattisgarh police and subsequently took their own lives.
In the last few weeks Hidme Markam recorded a video message for Survival, in which she describes the way Adivasi women are treated in India. She said:
“They’re being beaten every day, they’re being jailed every day. Every day, wherever our women go, they face the same kind of abuse. The only possible way forward is for all women to be united, for our water and forests, for our lands – to save them from mining.”
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
The Amazônia Minada reporting project has revealed 1,265 pending requests to mine in Indigenous territories in Brazil, including restricted lands that are home to isolated tribes.
Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs, Funai, holds 114 reports of isolated tribes, of which 43 are within Indigenous lands targeted by mining.
In addition to the spread of diseases such as COVID-19 and malaria, mining activity poses health threats from the mercury used in gold extraction, which contaminates rivers and fish.
Indigenous groups have filed a lawsuit with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court against the government, demanding protection for isolated Indigenous peoples.
With much of the world under some kind of lockdown over the past year, working from home has become the default for many. But not for miners in Brazil, who have stepped up their efforts to start exploiting Indigenous territories in the Amazon, including areas that are home to isolated tribes.
Mining on demarcated Indigenous lands is prohibited under Brazil’s Constitution, but that didn’t stop miners from filing 143 requests last year, the highest number in 24 years, with the National Mining Agency (ANM). Of those requests, 71 are for areas where isolated Indigenous tribes live, according to data from Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs. Indigenous activists and researchers warn that isolated groups have no contact with society and are highly vulnerable to any disease brought from outside.
In a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Federal Court last July, the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) and eight political parties denounced illegal mining in areas of identified isolated peoples. They called on the federal government to adopt measures and avert what they called a “real risk of genocide” due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet even as the pandemic was entering its fifth month in Brazil, the lawsuit revealed the government had not implemented any protective measures in several areas that are home to isolated peoples.
The threat from mining, which can bring disease into rural forest areas, becomes tangible when considering the hundreds of requests from mining companies to operate on lands where isolated peoples live. Of the 114 reports of isolated peoples that Funai holds, 43 are within 26 Indigenous territories in the Amazon. These same territories are targeted by at least 1,265 requests for prospecting or mining activities, according to mapping data from the Amazônia Minada reporting project as of Jan. 29 this year.
“Isolated peoples have a strong connection with their environment,”
says Leonardo Lenin, who worked for 10 years with Funai’s unit for isolated ethnic groups, and who is currently executive secretary of the Observatory of Human Rights of Isolated Peoples and Recent Contact (OPI).
“Any invasion has a violent impact on their lives because the land is what guarantees their well-being,” he says.
Luísa Pontes Molina is an anthropologist who investigates illegal mining in the Indigenous Munduruku territories in the state of Pará. She warns of the health risks that mining poses to Indigenous peoples. In addition to spreading diseases such as malaria and COVID-19, mines harm the environment. Liquid mercury, used to bind gold particles, contaminates the rivers and fish that Indigenous communities depend on, according to a recent study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and WWF Brazil. The study found traces of mercury in the entire population tested in the central region of the Tapajós River in Pará state, which includes the municipalities Itaituba and Trairão where the Munduruku people live.
Molina says there is evidence of isolated people living in the municipality of Jacareacanga, in southwest Pará, which have not been reported to Funai. That region is also the subject of 106 requests for gold mining that overlap with the protected Munduruku Indigenous Territory. Funai records at least one isolated Indigenous community in this area.
“Many communities of the Alto Tapajós have been reporting of and denouncing illegal mining and other crimes in the region since 2015. This also includes invasions near isolated groups. But despite these reports, Funai’s budget for inspection is cut more and more,” Molina says.
She adds she has tracked cases of illegal mining and public enforcement, and found that,
“in October 2020, just 2,000 reais [$345] were allocated toward monitoring and inspection in the region of Tapajós.” The study is still in progress, but preliminary findings suggest “state neglect in fighting illegal mining on indigenous lands,” Molina says.
The Amazônia Minada project, an initiative of the InfoAmazonia journalism outlet, cross-references the location of mining applications filed with ANM against demarcated Indigenous territories in the Amazon. Its Twitter feed, @amazonia_minada, tracks ANM processes in real time and tweets when a new mining application is filed within a protected area of the Amazon.
18 mining requests for restricted lands
Most of the mining requests are for land within demarcated territories where most of the Indigenous inhabitants have already made contact with the outside world but where some groups also live in isolation. But there are also 18 mining applications targeting four protected areas with the special classification “restricted,” which means they have been demarcated based on the presence only of isolated peoples.
Six of these requests were filed by the company Bemisa Holding, controlled by the Opportunity Group. Its owner, banker Daniel Dantas, was investigated for financial crimes and convicted in 2008 on bribery charges, but was acquitted in 2016 on a technicality. All six of Bemisa’s mining requests are for copper prospecting on Piripkura land in the state of Mato Grosso. Although the territory was declared restricted in September 2008, ANM in the preceding months still granted exploration permits for the company’s six applications, valid until 2012. On Jan. 19, 2021, the Piripkura land became the target of another application for gold mining, filed by the Miner Cooperative of Vale do Guaporé.
The isolated Piripkura people first made contact with the outside world in 1989, when Funai worker Jair Candor encountered two of the community members who had remained on their land after invasions by outsiders. Over the next three decades, there have been 14 contacts with these two individuals. According to Candor’s account in the documentary Piripkura, evidence of traces of their life in the area guarantees the sustained restriction of the land. Any sign of the pair’s track is photographed proof. All the material is kept secret so as not to reveal the location of the area; the two men are believed to be the last members of the Piripkura ethnic group.
Mining giant Vale, responsible for the two biggest mining-related disasters in Brazilian history, in Mariana and Brumadinho, requested access to the territory of the isolated Tanaru, in Rondônia state. Its application to mine platinum came in 2003, three years before the territory was officially declared restricted. However, the ANM system shows the company managed to unblock the application in 2018. There is no record of ANM’s approval of this application.
Last year, Vale announced to its shareholders that it would abandon all its mining applications within Indigenous lands, only to back down right after.
It has more than 200 active applications within Indigenous lands, 62 in areas where isolated peoples live. Two applications are in the land of the isolated Ituna/Itatá nation in southwest Pará, through the company Mineração Santarém Ltda.
Vale has denied having any active mining bids in the Tanaru and Ituna/Itatá territories, saying that the processes “are no longer pursued by the company since 1989.” Although ANM records show 200 applications on behalf of the group and its various ventures, Vale says “most of these processes were dropped by Vale itself, while pending approval by the ANM.” However, application number 886.223/2003 in the ANM registry, which intersects with the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, does not indicate Vale has given up on its request to mine there.
The Ituna/Itatá land spans 1,420 square kilometers (548 square miles), about the size of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city. It was declared restricted in 2011, following three decades during which Funai workers collected evidence of the presence of isolated indigenous peoples. However, the territory is a constant target of miners, landowners, ranchers and politicians. Zequinha Marinho, a senator from Pará, has even requested the end of the restricted status for the Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Territory through a legislative decree, saying there are no isolated tribes in the region according to “knowledge of the facts.”
In February 2020, an anthropologist linked to the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro was arrested for entering the Ituna/Itatá protected area without authorization. He had tried to block an intervention by the federal environmental agency, IBAMA, to remove cattle from the land. In November 2020, the Federal Public Ministry in Pará (MPF-PA) also recommended the suspension of an expedition by Funai. According to the agency, any entry into the area should only be allowed after the removal of invaders who had occupied the Indigenous land and who presented a threat to the life and security of public officials as well.
“You have to leave the Indigenous people in their territory, but that doesn’t happen. What we usually see is permissiveness from the state,”
says a Funai official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The Ituna/Itatá lands, for example, are being taken over by squatters. Precisely because they are isolated, these people will not be vaccinated. The precaution with them must be permanent in regard to COVID-19 and any other disease that a miner or squatter can transmit,” the official says.
Denialism and indifference
In July 2020, when Indigenous organizations were already counting nearly 400 Indigenous victims of COVID-19, APIB and eight parties filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Federal Court to force the government to protect Indigenous peoples. Justice Luís Roberto Barroso ordered emergency “situation room” meetings: one for Indigenous peoples and another specifically to monitor regions of isolated peoples and peoples of recent contact.
The meeting on measures for isolated peoples was coordinated by the Institutional Security Cabinet (GSI) of the president’s office, and denounce as “mild” by Beto Marubo, a representative of APIB and leader of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja).
“By calling on the Supreme Federal Court, we hoped to end the denialism of the Bolsonaro government, but it is clear that this has not happened and will not happen,” Marubo said. “The situation room meetings are coordinated by GSI members who have no idea how to protect an isolated Indigenous community. In practice, they are indifferent.”
At the end of July, with Brazil on track for the most COVID-19 deaths after only the U.S., the GSI admitted in a petition to the court that eight Indigenous lands did not have any kind of barrier to prevent people from entering. Three of them are home to isolated peoples: Alto Rio Negro (in Amazonas state), Alto Turiaçu (Maranhão), and Enawenê Nawê (Mato Grosso).
Eight months since APIB filed its lawsuit with the court, and with the COVID-19 death toll among Brazil’s Indigenous people at more than 1,000, the Bolsonaro government has presented no protection plans that Indigenous organizations, medical experts from Fiocruz, and other associations have been able to approve. Three versions have been rejected by Justice Barroso, and a fourth is under consideration.
Indigenous rights activists warn the scenario may only get worse, citing a bill proposed by the Bolsonaro administration that aims to allow mining activity on Indigenous lands. This bill, known as 191/2020 , was shelved last year by Rodrigo Maia, the speaker of the lower house of Congress at the time. But there are fears that it will be revived under the newly inaugurated speaker, Arthur Lira, whose campaign was supported by Bolsonaro.
On Feb. 15, Bolsonaro told supporters and the press during an event in São Francisco do Sul, Santa Catarina state, that “we have to regularize” the exploitation of Indigenous lands. He said it would be “very good because Indigenous people are no longer people who are living isolated, but they are integrating more and more into society.”
That same day, Mongabay requested clarification from the federal agencies ANM, Funai and GSI; as well as from Bemisa Holding. We received no responses from any of them by the time this report was originally published in Portuguese.
UPDATE
On February 15, we asked for a response from Bemisa on the processes mentioned in the report, but there was no feedback. After the publication of this article on March 17, the mining company wrote to Mongabay and informed that in 2011 it asked to waive the six requirements at Piripkura Indigenous Land, in Mato Grosso state. However, all processes are still active in the ANM system and on behalf of Bemisa.
This report is part of Amazônia Minada, a special project of InfoAmazonia with support from the Rainforest Journalism Fund/Pulitzer Center.
This story was first reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and published here on our Brazil site on March 2, 2021.
Upon the Proposed Mining of “Thacker Pass, Nevada”. A poem by Sarah Gar, a visitor to the land of the Paiute and Shoshone people and the sagebrush creatures.
It’s quiet here.
And I’m not talking
about experimental silence,
American guru silence,
or any sleek human site
that seeks inner peace
(and other noise)
to drown out the drawing-down
and drying-up of every sacred thing.
I’m talking about silence
of lands beyond witness,
a silence embedded and embedding,
the one nestling in the nighthawk’s cries
and cradling these words.
Tall sagebrush touches it —
4 feet 33 millimeters
of branching space,
where voice and silence
play by listening,
weaving water and light
without worrying who
appears as what
before whom.
It’s as if nothing can be said
to arrive or leave in wild places.
Even our breath cannot be said
to enter this place
where it meets other selves
always here and already inside.
But when Grandmother comes,
wakes the fire with practiced taps,
the flames flare in reminder
of whose Spirits keep this place.
Even in “deserted” places
dry soil knows to gather
soft and firm around water,
forming delicate strata
to nourish roots
and catch the drifting seed.
We, too, know to gather,
asking if we are also this place,
and if so,
how we can return.
To get here
we must track ourselves
by species memory,
a long way back,
to when losing one’s way
first became possible.
We trace back to the end’s beginning,
when the volume had to rise,
to create an endless diversion,
to mask the pesky screams
of women and slaves.
Yes, we tracked ourselves,
even did a blood spatter analysis.
A few facts emerged to tell us:
We are the losing and the lost.
There’s nothing lonelier than empire, and nothing stranger than killing one’s beloved.
These facts cleared the room.
Even history couldn’t erase them.
The clock ticked.
Corporations continued to cut down the ancient ones.
And so we rose, rotating and revolving
pulled forward by the falling-apart feeling
which is love.
This must be love because,
as sung by Paiute and Shoshone,
danced by pronghorn and coyote,
this place would hold forever,
streams passing
through trouts’ gills,
sun glancing off scales
and into eagle’s eyes
as she watches over.
Past and future
would nest together,
quiet as grouse eggs,
speckled and constellating,
in tacit reference to each other.
Birth and death would spiral together,
strong and fragile as pyrg shell,
and we would learn again
to listen and to hold
this language,
the spinning of the silence
that found us first,
soft as jackrabbit,
buried as bones,
strong spines of sage
and mountain song.
As a former English professor from the East Coast, Sarah now focuses on writing and activism in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry grieves patriarchal and colonial violence, summons reverence for the natural world, and upholds matriarchal cultures which cherish life.
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
Featured Image: Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In February, IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency permitted Belo Monte mega-dam operator Norte Energia to drastically reduce flows to the Volta Grande (Big Bend) of the Xingu River for at least a year. That decision reversed an earlier ruling to maintain much higher Xingu River flows and the fishery — as legally required.
The flow reduction will leave 70% of usually-flooded forest dry this season, causing massive fish mortality and diminished reproduction, experts say. Community group Xingu Vivo Para Sempre denounced the decision as “a death sentence for the Xingu” and demanded IBAMA’s and Norte Energia’s presidents be “criminally prosecuted.”
Norte Energia has funded projects to mitigate the reduced flow, collecting and dropping fruit into the river for fish to feed on, and releasing captive-bred fish. But scientists say these approaches are unscientific and will likely be ineffective, and can’t make up for the loss of the river’s seasonal flood pulse, upon which fish depend.
Residents say the government has spread misinformation, telling Brazilian consumers that their electricity bills would go up if Belo Monte released more water to maintain the Xingu’s ecosystem — something Norte Energia is obligated to do. At present, water levels on the Volta Grande have not been restored.
Bel Juruna, of the Juruna (Yudjá) Indigenous people, points her camera at the Xingu River, beside which she lives in Mïratu village in the Paciçamba Indigenous Territory on the 130-kilometer (81-mile) Volta Grande (Big Bend), in Pará state, Brazil.
The video shows a shoulder-high, light-colored waterline streaking a dark exposed boulder. Just days before, that boulder was mostly submerged and the river ran at a much higher level, but its flow has been drastically, suddenly, intentionally, and possibly illegally, reduced — threatening the Xingu’s fishery and the people who depend on it for food and livelihoods.
On February 8, Belo Monte mega-dam operator Norte Energia received permission from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, to immediately reduce river flows to less than 13% of normal — shifting the water to the dam’s electricity-producing turbines. This dramatic flow reduction was completely unanticipated by riverine Indigenous and traditional peoples, Bel’s video shows the effects: canoes with outboard motors stranded on dry rocks, aquatic vegetation exposed to the air.
“These plants are usually on the bottom [of the river]; they are water plants. And because the water won’t come [here] any more, they’re all going to die,” Bel says.
Norte Energia’s action comes during the piracema, a time of year when fish should be traveling on seasonally rising waters, deep into the flooded forest to feed and spawn. The government’s water reduction decision effectively closes the door on this reproductive window — an opportunity that comes but once a year.
“The Volta Grande will turn into a cemetery. A cemetery of fish, a cemetery of dead trees,” Bel says.
Norte Energia’s Hydrogram B permitted
In the second week of February, Norte Energia diverted more than 85% of the Xingu’s normal flow away from the Volta Grande, where thousands of Indigenous and traditional fisherfolk live. The company’s diversion to the Belo Monte dam reduced river flow abruptly from early-February speeds of 10,900 cubic meters per second (m3/s) to 1,600 m3/s. (The historical average flows before the dam was built were 12,736 m3/s.)
On February 8, IBAMA president Eduardo Fortunato Bim signed an agreement allowing Norte Energia to implement the company’s so-called Hydrogram B, an artificial hydrological regime that will remove 73% of normal annual Xingu River flows from the Volta Grande.
The socio-environmental consequences, say experts, will be catastrophic. Hydrogram B “will cause the end of the cyclical, ecological phenomenon of the [annual] flood pulse, which guarantees fishes’ and turtles’ access to their feeding areas. There will be high amounts of mortality and, in those [aquatic animals] who survive, loss of nutritional condition,” Juarez Pezzuti from the Federal University of Pará wrote in an email to Mongabay,
Turtles, of “extremely high cultural significance” to the Juruna and other riverine people, “will no longer be able to accumulate the energy necessary to produce eggs. The number of times they lay eggs and the number of eggs per nest will be drastically reduced.”
In a note to Mongabay on Hydrogram B’s effects, Norte Energia states, “There is no technical-scientific proof, nor any indications at present, that the flow [regime] practiced by Belo Monte can cause mortality of fish or turtles,” citing “robust monitoring.” Independent scientists allege Norte Energia’s monitoring studies are flawed.
Lorena Curuaia, a leader of the Curuaia people, of Iawá village, sent Mongabay audio commenting on IBAMA’s decision: “This is absurd. Once again, we see the fauna, the flora, totally threatened, especially all the biodiversity. We know that the normal flow of water on the Volta Grande and the whole Xingu Basin doesn’t work that way.
“So they are assaulting nature again. To do what?,” she asks. “To generate energy, to generate financial gain for them, unfortunately leaving biodiversity to the wayside? We are indignant.”
The leader demands, “We want a response from IBAMA itself, saying why they accepted this from Belo Monte.” IBAMA did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Norte Energia’s studies on Hydrogram B rejected as faulty
In 2009, IBAMA’s technical team rejected Norte Energia’s extreme low flow Hydrogram B proposal as being unable to maintain life on the Volta Grande, something the Belo Monte dam operator is legally mandated to do. In December 2019, IBAMA ordered Norte Energia to study alternative hydrological regimes.
But when IBAMA reviewed the new studies, submitted in December 2020, they found that Norte Energia had only presented an analysis of Hydrogram B versus the historical natural flow, and had offered no alternative flow plans. This limited comparison made it impossible for experts to analyze alternative hydrological regimes, says Pezzuti. Agreeing with that assessment is Camila Ribas of the National Institute for Amazon Research and the American Museum of Natural History, after she had access to the studies.
Consequently, on February 2, 2021 IBAMA’s technical team rejected Norte Energia’s studies as “faulty” and incomplete.
What should have happened next, says Ribas, is Norte Energia should have had to redo its studies, addressing IBAMA’s critiques, and then resubmit. Until then, IBAMA’s “provisional hydrogram,” with higher river flows — in place since April 2019 — should have continued.
Political pressure on IBAMA and misinformation
But IBAMA allegedly received intense pressure from other ministries within the Jair Bolsonaro administration, lobbying it to reverse its expected upcoming decision to maintain provisional hydrogram water releases to the Volta Grande. For two months, IBAMA had signaled that Norte Energia would have to return significant amounts of water to the river to prevent further ecosystem harm.
Meanwhile, Ribas recalls that the Mines and Energy department and the electricity agency ANEEL “leaked supposedly internal documents” to the press, claiming that if IBAMA ordered Norte Energia to divert less water from the Volta Grande, then Brazilian consumers’ electricity bills would jump dramatically in cost.
That claim, according to Ribas and Pezzuti, is false.
According to Pezzuti, “The company claimed [Belo Monte’s] non-production of energy would make it necessary to produce energy by activating thermoelectric plants” to make up an energy shortfall, which would supposedly greatly raise costs. But, he says, Norte Energia had presented outdated data on Brazil’s hydroelectric reserves, giving a false picture of Brazil’s current hydroelectric energy potential.
In fact, in the current rainy season, Amazon hydroelectric reservoirs are full. “The majority of hydroelectric plants [in Brazil] have a good level and flows, and so less energy [coming from] Belo Monte won’t generate the [electricity] deficit that’s being threatened by the press and the government,” says Pezzuti. Norte Energia did not respond to Mongabay’s question on this matter.
Political interference and an environmental crime?
Apparently, IBAMA president Bim contradicted his own technical team’s conclusions to strike the February 8 agreement with Norte Energia’s president, Paulo Roberto Pinto, allowing the company to immediately implement Hydrogram B.
Bim is thought to have circumvented IBAMA organizational procedures and overruled his own director of licensing Jônatas Souza da Trindade, who should have made the decision, notes Pezzuti. In a note to Mongabay, Licensing General Coordinator Régis Fontana Pinto stated, “The decisions pertinent to the application of the Belo Monte [dam] hydrogram are taken in the purview of IBAMA’s president, though supplied with information by the technical team, by me as General Coordinator, and by the Environmental Licensing director.”
This agreement directly violates Article 231 of Brazil’s 1988 constitution, Pezzuti says, which states that hydroelectric plants can’t impact Indigenous lands. It also appears to violate international conventions such as ILO 169, ratified in Brazil as Decree 5,051, which protects traditional activities such as fishing as essential for cultural preservation. Further infringed regulations may include Law 11,346 ensuring Nutritional and Food Security, Law 9,985 protecting “the natural resources necessary for traditional populations’ subsistence,” and Decree 6,040 guaranteeing “traditional peoples’ access to natural resources for their physical, economic, and cultural reproduction.”
Concerning projected losses to the diets of Amazon fisherfolk, Lorena Curuaia told Mongabay, “No company has the right to take away another’s dietary sustenance. The fisher people’s culture is fish. To remove their food, is to remove their life.”
On February 18, dozens of fisherfolk organizations, all members of the Xingu Vivo Para Sempre association, formally demanded Eduardo Fortunato Bim and Paulo Roberto Pinto be “criminally prosecuted” for environmental damages resulting from IBAMA’s decision.
“In my understanding, if the president of the environmental organ takes a decision that contradicts the technical position of the institution itself, he is failing in his duty. He is committing a crime in failing to act in accordance with his function, which is to protect the environment,” Pezzuti states.
In a note to Mongabay, Norte Energia states, “There is no crime practiced — since there do not exist any environmental damages, but rather impacts [already] predicted” in the environmental licensing stage. In 2020, federal judges and IBAMA’s team documented that impacts of the dam, characterized by IBAMA as “grave and irreversible,” were greater than projected during licensing.
Norte Energia offers mitigation plans
In its February 8 IBAMA agreement, Norte Energia also committed $R 157 million (US$ 28 million) to river flow mitigation plans. Three projects were approved: to send teams to collect fruit and leaves from the forests that should have been flooded, then throw these into the reduced area of the river where fish are trapped; to build floating platforms with bushes for fish to feed from; and to breed fish in captivity and then release them into the Xingu.
Pezzuti rejects the plan as scientifically unproven: “It’s an absurd pseudo-project, impossible to be executed on a scale that compensates for the [absence of] flooding of tens of thousands of hectares.” He notes, “The first two [projects] aren’t based on any kind of precedent,” and the raising of fish in captivity in the hopes of repopulating the river “already has proven to be ineffective in several studies.”
Alexander Lees, of England’s Manchester Metropolitan University, concurs that these are unworkable solutions, “a waste of money” better spent on maintaining the ecosystem.
“Messing around with chucking fruit into rivers or floating trees is just throwing money away,” says Lees. “It just looks like good publicity,”
Bel Juruna says Norte Energia’s present efforts are ineffectual. “There are lots of companies [contracted by Norte Energia] here that go around, visit, hold meetings, but despite that, there aren’t any projects from the [original] Basic Environmental Plan that are working here.”
Pezzuti explains that Norte Energia’s fisheries mitigation plan was “signed off on by professors employed by public research universities, contributing to this scientific makeup, as if there were a solution for the tragedy that Hydrogram [B] will cause.” However, he adds, independent researchers, not paid by Norte Energia, “experts in fish ecology and aquatic turtles… vehemently protested… this bizarre proposal,” as did “IBAMA’s analysts, who rejected it” on February 2.
Ribas adds, “The research Norte Energia and its consultants do is already directed toward a certain end goal.” She believes that the company-contracted researchers’ finding that Hydrogram B is viable resulted from a conflict of interest which, she says, might explain why the firm’s experts didn’t present analysis of alternatives. “That’s not science,” she says, but Ribas is concerned the Brazilian public will accept the flawed research as valid.
What’s needed, she concludes, is independent monitoring. Ribas and her fellow scientists are seeking funding to monitor the effects of Norte Energia’s Hydrogram B on the Volta Grande in 2021.
As for the Juruna people, Bel Juruna says they will endure:
“We will be here. We want to resist in this place, fighting so that we, too, won’t turn into a cemetery in our village.”
This article was published in Mongabay on the 8th March 2021. You can access the article here.
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