Brazil

We invite you to reflect with an activist who explores resistance processes and the challenges they face, based on her experience with struggles in Brazil. In this reflection, we also invite you to join the collective resistance from your own contexts and spaces of organization. The fight continues and the fight is one!

The Articulação Agro é Fogo, which brings together social movements, organisations and pastoralists who have been working for decades to defend the Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal and the rights of their peoples and communities, has released an open letter.

Since Monday, 22 August, the Turiwara people in the municipality of Tailândia, in the Brazilian Amazon state Pará took back their territory, illegally in the hands of the industrial oil palm company Agropalma.

Peasant families are threatened with eviction by Brasil Bio Fuels (BBF) oil palm plantation company, with the complicity of the state government. This article shows that the much spoken of ‘bioeconomy’ is not ‘sustainable’ and even less ‘clean’. What it does is destroy communities’ territories, just like fossil fuel-based extractive industries have been doing for a long time.

Indigenous, peasant, traditional and Afro-descendent peoples from the Amazon region and Central America call organizations and social movements all over the world to endorse this declaration rejecting carbon projects in their territories.

Behind every tree plantation developed for carbon offsets, there are external agents seeking to profit from increased control over the land. And while they all have the same colonial approach, these plantations can vary widely: they can be large-scale monocultures or schemes with smallholder farmers; they can include exotic species or native species; and some of them may even exist on paper only.

The podcast “Faroeste carbono” tells the story of how Carbonext, one of the largest carbon offset companies in Brazil, convinced quilombola communities in the state of Para in the Brazilian Amazon to sign a contract that restricts their autonomy and food production.

An investigation exposed how carbon credits from three of the largest carbon offset projects in the Brazilian Amazon are linked to a criminal operation.

São famílias da Comunidade de Virgílio Serrão Sacramento no município de Moju (estado do Pará, Brasil) que coletivamente somam forças desde o final de 2015 quando reocuparam o território conhecido pela ação dos grileiros, no qual já fizeram várias vítimas. Desde então, o Acampamento ocupa sua terra com moradias, plantações, produção e fornecimento de alimentos.

Once again the Ka’apor people, through their ancestral organization TUXA TA PAME, has demonstrated its strength, on May 12, 13 and 14. They denounce the atrocities that Indigenous Peoples and quilombola and peasant traditional communities suffer in the hands large-scale landowners, loggers, mining corporations, gold diggers, carbon credit speculators and the agribusiness sector.

Oil palm plantations are spreading like wildfire across the eastern Brazilian Amazon. But local communities are standing up to the palm oil industry’s brutality and sweeping land grabs, demanding the return of their ancestral lands and calling on the authorities to protect them from encroachment and violence.

Brazil’s Small Farmers’ Movement (MPA) has written to the state of Pará’s authorities requesting that they urgently regularize the land tenure of three peasant communities threatened with eviction. The letter has the support of 60 organizations from several countries.