Sieged by mining and megaprojects, the Munduruku push for land rights in the Amazon

Cruising downstream through the middle region of the Tapajós River, in the right spot, one can see mounted signs that read “Protected area” and warn trespassers to stay out. The signs mark the limits of the Sawré Muybu Indigenous Territory of the Munduruku people, in Brazil’s Pará state.

Almost every year since 2014, Munduruku men, women and children have embarked on long expeditions through the forest to maintain the signs and collect evidence of growing threats to their territory by illegal loggers and miners. In some years, they’ve even had to resort to the use of force to expel the invaders.

The annual expedition is part of an ongoing process dubbed “self-demarcation,” which Munduruku warriors deem essential because even after years of struggle, the Brazilian government still hasn’t conferred official protection to Sawré Muybu.

Today, Sawré Muybu finds itself at a crucial crossroad, flanked on all sides by both illegal extraction gangs and infrastructure megaprojects as the Tapajós River Basin has grown in importance as a corridor to export soy grown in Brazil’s midwest.

Now, after years of paralysis under right-wing governments, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has restarted Indigenous land demarcations, which give land rights to ancestral territories — and the Munduruku of Sawré Muybu in the middle Tapajós are among the next in line.

“We hope that it happens this year still,” Alessandra Korap Munduruku, an Indigenous leader and award-winning environmental activist, told Mongabay by phone. “I am confident that it will happen, not because it is their request, but because of our pressure.”

Earlier this year, Alessandra won the Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes dubbed the “Green Nobel” and awarded to grassroots environmental activists from around the world, for her work to keep British mining giant Anglo American out of Sawré Muybu. Brazil’s current minister of the environment and climate change, Marina Silva, won the same prize in 1996.

The next stage for Sawré Muybu to gain official protection is a declaratory ordinance order from Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Safety. After that, it can be signed into existence by the president. Mongabay sought comment from the ministry on whether the order would happen this year. “The Sawré Muybu IT is still under analysis at the Ministry of Justice, therefore the questions requested can only be answered after this first stage has been completed,” the ministry replied in a statement.

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors recommended that the next stage of the demarcation process begin within 60 days. “The lack of state recognition, through demarcation, of the Sawré Muybu Indigenous Territory encourages the invasion, destruction and appropriation of federal lands [that are] for the exclusive use of Indigenous people,” wrote prosecutor Thaís Medeiros, who filed the recommendation.

Many Indigenous land claims in Brazil have been thrown into doubt this year, with the emergence of the controversial time frame bill, known as marco temporal in Brazil, which was struck down by the Supreme Court but managed to pass regardless in Congress. The bill, which establishes restrictions on new Indigenous territories, was vetoed by Lula, but lawmakers are expected to challenge the president’s decision, throwing a new legal battle into the hands of the Supreme Court once again.

“It’s a very important region for the Mundurukus,” anthropologist Bruna Cerqueira Seixas, who led the research to delimit the Sawré Muybu land, said of the territory. “It’s a region of extreme sacred importance.”

Cerqueira Seixas said that without demarcation, “Their cultural and physical reproduction is threatened.”

Based on her research, Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, approved the studies for Sawré Muybu in 2016. But shortly after, demarcations stalled in Brazil with the impeachment of then-president Dilma Rouseff and the ascension to power of her right-wing vice, Michel Temer.

A few years later, in 2018, the even further-right Jair Bolsonaro won power and fulfilled a campaign promise not to demarcate “one centimeter” of Indigenous land.

In contrast, Lula, who defeated Bolsonaro in last year’s election with support from Indigenous groups, has said he will demarcate “as many Indigenous lands as possible.” In April, he signed off on six territories during the Free Land Camp, an annual gathering of Indigenous peoples in the capital, Brasília, and then two more in September.

Currently, six Indigenous lands are waiting to be signed into existence, 10 are awaiting to be signed off by the Ministry of Justice before they can go to the president, and another 14, including Sawré Muybu, still lack a declaratory ordinance order, one of the final stages of the demarcation process, according to a recent article report by Brazilian newspaper O Globo.

Still, while Anglo American and Brazilian mining giant Vale may have given up on exploration rights for copper and other minerals in Sawré Muybu, other threats remain to the Indigenous territory. Spanning 178,000 hectares (440,000 acres) and home to 168 Munduruku people, Sawré Muybu sits in the middle Tapajós region in the vast municipality of Itaituba, in southwestern Pará.

The much larger Munduruku Indigenous Territory, measuring 2.4 million hectares (5.9 million acres) and home to 6,500 people, is located in the upper Tapajós River region, in the municipality of Jacareacanga. It was demarcated in 2004, but even this official seal of recognition hasn’t been enough to protect it from outside threats: it has the second-largest area of illegal mining of any Indigenous territory in Brazil, according to collaborative mapping initiative MapBiomas.

“Indigenous lands like the Yanomami, Kayapó and the Munduruku of the upper Tapajós River region, these are demarcated and suffer greatly from invasions, [so] imagine when it’s not demarcated,” Alessandra says, referring to the three Indigenous lands worst affected by illegal mining in Brazil.

A historic meeting between the Indigenous Yanomami, Kayapó and Munduruku tribes was the basis for the recent film Escuta: Terra foi Rasgada (Listen: The Land Was Torn).

Itaituba, the municipality in which 90% of the Sawré Muybu territory lies, is ground zero for illegal mining in Brazil, alongside the neighboring Pará municipalities of Jacareacanga and Novo Progresso. A 2021 study carried out by researchers from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) with the Federal Prosecutors’ Office (MPF) showed that, in 2019 and 2020, the three municipalities accounted for 86% of “gold laundering” incidents in Brazil. Prosecutors subsequently called for the suspension of all permissions for the extraction, trade and export of gold in southwestern Pará.

Luisa Pontes Molina, an anthropologist with Brazil’s Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of Indigenous and traditional peoples, said the illegal mining groups operating in the region are highly organized and have lookouts who communicate with each other, informing when authorities arrive to conduct raids.

“These guys are totally connected, it’s a circuit of war, so much so that the leaks of anti mining operations explain this,” she said.

She also said the urban environments of the region are extremely hostile to Indigenous activists.

“There is a generalized feeling of insecurity. The Munduruku can’t just come and go in Itaituba as they please,” Pontes Molina said. “They are constantly monitored within the city.”

Logging and attempted land grabs also affect Sawré Muybu, and in October, Alessandra and others denounced a huge illegal fire inside the territory. At least 1,487 hectares (3,674 acres) of forest had been destroyed in Sawré Muybu as of 2022.

Last year, leaders complained to authorities about the presence of a huge mining dredge close to one of the villages. Long threatened by illegal miners, loggers and palm extractors, Alessandra said that recently there have been men inside marking out territory.

“We imagine it’s because of the Ferrogrão,” she said, referring to a planned railway line for soy harvests from the agricultural city of Sinop to the port of Miritituba in Itaituba.

For its proponents, the Ferrogrão promises increased sustainability by reducing reliance on gas-guzzling trucks to carry the grain while also cutting freight costs, making Brazil’s already vast soy exports more competitive globally.

Critics, however, point out that the construction of the railway will likely increase land speculation and therefore deforestation in the region. Alessandra said she and other Sawré Muybu residents haven’t been consulted, and cited other infrastructure projects, including ports and hydroelectric dams, that would infringe on their territory.

While Anglo American has officially withdrawn its bids to mine copper in the territory, there are still dozens of applications pending to mine gold, diamonds and tin ore in Sawré Muybu. That’s according to official records from Brazil’s National Mining Agency, obtained by the Amazon Mined platform, which monitors mining requests on Indigenous lands and forest conservation units.

While those applications pose a potential threat, very real damage is already being done by illegal gold mining, which uses the toxic element mercury to extract the gold from the ore. In a recent study, researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil’s leading public health research institute, confirmed high levels of mercury in Sawré Muybu residents, Another study is currently being undertaken to determine whether pregnant mothers can pass the contamination onto their unborn children.

For Alessandra Korap Munduruku, the demarcation and full protection of the Sawré Muybu territory can’t come soon enough.

“We need the demarcation,” she said. “Land is life for us, that is life for the future of our children.”

Banner image: Munduruku Indigenous people self demarcate the Sawré Muybu Territorry, in Kay waterfall on river Jamanxim. The Munduruku people have inhabited the Sawré Muybu, in the heart of the Amazon, for generations. Image © Rogério Assis / Greenpeace.

‘I’ll keep fighting’: Indigenous activist and Goldman winner Alessandra Munduruku

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