Brazil has revoked a presidential decree that placed sections of three Amazonian rivers — the Tapajós, Madeira and Tocantins — under a state-led privatization program. Indigenous groups had protested the plan for 33 days by blockading a Cargill grain port in Santarém in the western Brazilian Amazon.
The decree was a part of a larger infrastructure initiative to create an industrial export route for freight barges carrying soy, corn and other grains from Brazil’s agricultural states in the Cerrado and the Amazon to ports on the Atlantic coast.
For more than a month, hundreds of Indigenous protesters demanded that the government halt the initiative. They raised concerns that the project would damage the rivers and threaten at least 17 Indigenous territories and many more riverine communities.
The protesters occupied Cargill’s terminal in Santarém. Archaeologists say it was built in 2003 on top of a precolonial archaeological site called Porto, a claim Cargill denies. Today, the site is the biggest export terminal on the Tapajós River, with an annual export capacity of 4.9 million metric tons.
According to a 2013 study, bone fragments were identified in a ceramic urn excavated from the Porto site. Records also show the Santarém area was once one of the most densely populated regions in the Amazon, and that many Indigenous people were killed there by European colonists.
“We have to protect this river, we have to protect this forest,” Indigenous leader Alessandra Korap Munduruku said from the port, in a video published after the government’s announcement. “This place is sacred. This place is the cemetery of our ancestors, who were massacred here. And now, they have witnessed our victory.”
The decision to revoke the decree, first approved in August 2025, was published in the Official Gazette, the federal government’s daily legal bulletin, on Feb. 23. The move came after a meeting between the protesters, Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, and Guilherme Boulos, the secretary of the presidency.
“The decision to revoke Decree 12.600 was finalized today. This is a government committed to listening to the people, to workers, to Indigenous peoples,” Boulos said at a Feb. 23 press conference in Brasília.
Banner image: Demonstrators in Santarém, Pará state, Brazil. Image courtesy of Amazon Watch.
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