The report  Pure Dynamite: how Bolsonaro’s Government (2019-2022) Mineral Policy Set Up a Climate and Anti-Indigenous Bomb released on March 27 by the Mining Observatory and Smoke Signal, has been generating debate and resulted in public hearings in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The document, which analyzed the Brazilian mineral policy during the Bolsonaro government, pointed out the existence of illegal favoring to the mining industry, and called into into question the system of self-licensing and mineral exploration in indigenous lands.

The report was featured in more than 350 media outlets, including Agência Brasil, TV Brasil and Miriam Leitão’s column in O Globo, generating reactions from both environmentalists and the mining industry.

On Thursday, April 27, the House of Representatives held a public hearing on the report’s findings, stocking the debate on the Brazilian mineral policies. Participating in the hearing were Daniel Pollack, Superintendent of Revenue at the National Mining Agency (ANM), Maurício Ângelo, Founder and Director of the Mining Observatory, and Rebeca Lerer, founder and coordinator of Smoke Signal.

“There has been a shock indoctrination, with fake news and disinformation, in addition to deregulation (of legislation), equipping of social control institutions, demobilization of control bodies, and criminalization of social movements. We saw a mix of tactics to advance a predatory land use agenda, whether for mining or agriculture, which resulted in increased violence and deforestation,” said Lerer.

The hearing participants contributed with questions about the situation of miners, the proper destination of CFEM (Financial Compensation for Mineral Exploration) resources in the municipalities, and the impossibility of pointing an example of “sustainable mining”. You can watch the public hearing on Youtube.

On Wednesday, May 10, the Federal Senate hosted a debate on the “Pure Dynamite” report and examined the 4 years of climate and anti-indigenous activities carried out by the government of Jair Bolsonaro. The event was attended by several experts, including Maurício Angelo of the Mining Observatory, André Elias Marques, Ombudsman of the National Mining Agency, and Suely Araújo, former president of Ibama and senior public policy specialist at the Climate Observatory, as well as the remote participation of Rebeca Lerer, coordinator of Smoke Signal, and Juliana de Paula Batista. representing the Socio-environmental Institute (SISA).

The main focus of the debate was “mineral denialism” and self-licensing in the mining sector on indigenous lands. In addition, it was discussed that mining represents only about 1% of Brazilian GDP, consumes 11% of electricity, and employs only 200,000 people, many of them in high-risk, outsourced activities. Environmental licensing was another highlight, with pressure from mining companies and industry to include mining in the Licensing Law (PL 3729). The influence that mining companies have on the licensing process was seen as a problem, as they have encouraged dams in an imminent state of disruption throughout the country. The full debate is available on the Senate website.

The 19th Acampamento Terra Livre [Free Land Camp] (ATL) ended on April 26th with a series of major achievements for the indigenous peoples in Brazil. On the last day of the event, attended by more than 6,000 indigenous people from all over the country, President Lula together with the Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Sonia Guajajara, announced the approval of several important policies, including: the ratification of six new indigenous lands, totaling more than 1.5 million hectares; the creation of a new federal agency to protect indigenous lands and resources; and the allocation of $1 billion in funding for indigenous health and education.

Opposition senators celebrated the reading of the request for the establishment of the CPI [Parliamentary Inquire Comissions] of NGOs in the Federal Senate this week. The collegiate will be responsible for investigating the actions of non-governmental organizations operating in the Amazon, with investigative powers similar to those of judicial authorities. The expectation is that the CPI will be used to persecute and criminalize the actions of civil society, as was done in an institutional manner by the Bolsonaro government.

To create memory and help elaborate on the tragedy of mineral policy under the Bolsonaro government, The Mining Observatory [Observatório da Mineração] and Smoke Signal [Sinal de Fumaça] have launched the bilingual report “Pure Dynamite: how Bolsonaro’s Government (2019-2022) Mineral Policy Set Up a Climate and Anti-Indigenous Bomb” an independent production that brings a timeline of the mineral sector and details the dismantling of regulatory bodies, rights violations, scandalous agreements and other measures adopted by the former government to satisfy the mineral market lobby in the country and the world.

In its thorough and investigative work, Observatório da Mineração closely followed the work that Bolsonaro’s government undertook at the national and international levels to dismantle public policies and sell mining and metal goods. Investigations have shown that his administration promoted legal and infralegal changes that benefited large mining companies, caused the criminal networks of illegal mining to soar, and made institutions such as the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the National Mining Agency totally subservient to vested financial interests. Smoke Signal Socio-Environmental Monitor, which has recorded facts and movements related to Brazilian socio-environmental policies over the last four years, joined Observatório da Mineração to produce this unprecedented report.

In addition to exposing the sophisticated articulations made between the mining market lobby, transnational companies and the federal government behind closed doors in the National Congress, the publication also brings a brief summary of the first measures adopted by Lula’s government and a list with 20 initial suggestions for the recovery of public governance and the reduction of negative effects of mining in the country. 

Click here to read our report in english. Also available in portuguese.

The final report of a external commission of the House of Representatives that is following the investigation of the murder of the Brazilian indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and the English journalist Dom Phillips, in the region of Vale do Javari (AM), was approved. The report calls for the creation of a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPI) to investigate crimes committed in the region, among other measures.

The External Commission of the Chamber of Deputies holds the Brazilian State responsible for not being present in the Javari Valley, which is overrun by international drug trafficking, illegal fishers and illegal mining. The rapporteur, congresswoman Vivi Reis (PSOL-PA), highlighted the “planned omission of the government in favor of organized crime” and the lack of action by authorities in the face of “tragedy foretold”, referring to the potential for conflicts involving various interests in the region.

Norte Energia, the company responsible for operating the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Plant, in the state of Pará, proposed to pay R$ 20 thousand for each fisherman who can no longer work due to lack of fish in the Xingu River since the beginning of operation of the plant, in 2016.

Hundreds of fishermen gathered on Tuesday (22) in the city of Altamira, Pará, to express dissatisfaction with the proposal. They disagree with the number of people contemplated by the reparation, because, according to them, there are at least 4,000 workers affected by the plant, more than double the almost 2,000 fishermen that Norte Energia proposed to attend.

Belo Monte is a project conceived during the military dictatorship (1964-1985) that was on the agenda of several governments until it was made possible by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. The first turbines began operating in 2016. The construction resulted in serious environmental and social impacts in the Amazon.

The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Climate Convention ended early this morning in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

The document with the conclusions of the COP27 creates a specific financial mechanism to compensate poor countries, which are suffering from extreme weather events caused by climate change but have not contributed to its causes. The poorest nations, notably the group of small island countries, have been calling for a Loss and Damage financing mechanism for decades.

However, the usual divisions between rich and poor countries meant that the meeting ended without substantive agreement on what should be the main talking point – how to accelerate cutting greenhouse gas emissions so as to prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5oC this century.

“The creation of a specific fund to compensate poorer nations for losses caused by extreme weather events was a fair advance. But at the same time it is evidence that in some cases the effects of climate change are already irreversible. Therefore, on the whole, the overall outcome of COP27 can be considered disappointing. The final text does not demonstrate the necessary ambition to reach the 1.5 degree target set by the Paris Agreement and the so-called implementation plan is weak and incipient. The greenwashing of countries and companies and the misalignment between science and politics have never been so clear as at this COP”, analyzes Maurício Voivodic, WWF-Brazil’s general director.

“COP27 also disappointed in its treatment of civil society and the absence of a Climate March in the city streets is the greatest evidence of how much the freedom of citizens was curtailed by the Egyptian government”, he adds.

President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) lost the election to Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) by 50.9% to 49.1% of the valid votes. It is the first time that a Brazilian president has failed to win reelection since the end of the military dictatorship.

The former Minister of the Environment, Marina Silva (REDE), who was one of the responsibles for the drop of more than 70% in deforestation in the Amazon during Lula’s administration, is one of the favorites to run the Ministry starting January, 1st.

During the campaign, Lula committed himself to the environmental agenda, to fighting illegal mining on indigenous lands, and to the creation of a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. Politica por Inteiro listed 401 acts of the Federal Executive Branch between 2019 and 2022 to be repealed or revised in order to reconstitute the Brazilian climate and environmental policies.

Brazil’s National Mining Agency (ANM) has taken advantage of a legal loop hole that left the Negro river outside of the protection area of Indigenous Territories to allow mining requests in the region. The situation provoked Indigenous leaders to petition the Federal Justice to annul existing mining requests in July. They claim that they have not heard back from the court. 

The petition states that the mining requests stimulate the action of illegal miners in the territories and puts people from 21 ethnicities at risk. Among the threatened people are the Baré, Tukano, Baniwa, Piratapuya, Yanomami, Desano, Wanano, Hupda and Dâw.

“We filed the petition because the most affected will be ourselves, Indigenous peoples. It won’t be the government, it won’t be the corporations, it won’t be the urban populations: it will be us, who are inside the territory”, stated Marivelton Baré, from the Federation of Indigenous Organizations from Negro River (Foirn).

The Federal Public Prosecution Office (MPF) has filed a complaint with the Federal Court against the president of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), Marcelo Augusto Xavier da Silva, for the crime of  slandering the FUNAI’s employees.

Xavier accused in a police investigation several employees of the agency, members of the Waimiri Atroari Association and legal entities of the crimes of influence peddling and perverting the course of justice. After the inquiry was closed, “the president of FUNAI, in revenge, represented himself criminally against the public prosecutor Igor Spíndola, responsible for the closure order. The representation, made to the Attorney General of the Republic, presented three conducts that do not characterize any crime, without evidence or indications of any irregularity,” stated the MPF.

The criminal action filed by the MPF calls for the double conviction of Xavier for the crime of slandering, with a prison sentence of two to eight years and a fine, reparation for the moral damage caused to the victims and to society, with the payment of compensation of R$ 100,000, in addition to the loss of public office.

After the Federal Police confirmed the murder of indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips, protests by employees of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) took the country by storm. Of the 52 units of the agency, 42 hosted demonstrations during the national strike of the category. The group demands the resignation of the president of FUNAI, Marcelo Xavier, the deepening of the investigation into the death of Bruno and Dom, and more security in the Javari Valley (AM), where the crime occurred.

On the same day and in alliance with the movement of public employees, the indigenous movement occupied the streets of São Paulo and Brasília in protest against the postponement by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) of the vote of the “Marco Temporal” [Temporal Landmark], a trial that could define the future of indigenous lands demarcation. The trial was scheduled to resume on the 2nd, but Minister Luiz Fux, president of the STF, announced its postponement indefinitely.

Bruno Araújo Pereira, an indigenista [an indigenous expert], who’s a member with the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), and a British journalist, Dom Phillips, disappeared last weekend on the way from the riverside community of São Rafael to Atalaia do Norte, in the Javari Valley in the Amazon, on the border with Peru. According to information from the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja), which was in contact with the missing, Bruno is under constant threats from loggers, illegal gold diggers, and fishermen in the region.

According to Amazônia Real, Bruno and Dom were the victims of an ambush. An indigenous source interviewed by the portal reports that “around 4 a.m. on Sunday (5), the expert and the journalist warned that they were going to talk with “Churrasco”, president of the São Rafael community association. Days before, they had already crossed paths with another group in a 60 HP boat, a motor considered unusual for navigating narrower waterways (boreholes and streams). This group that crossed paths with them made a point of showing that it they were armed and intimidated them”, says the report.

The news mobilized various indigenous and environmental organizations, which drew attention to the vulnerable context of the region and called for a speedy search. Reports from the region indicate that the government was slow to take action and sent insufficient teams, denying even the support of a helicopter. The Army, in a note, said it had the means to help but was “awaiting an order from the higher echelon”. The search has been carried out largely by indigenous people and Univaja.

The state government of Minas Gerais has granted an environmental license to the mining company Taquaril Mineração S.A. (Tamisa) to build a mining complex in the Serra do Curral, a mountainous region located between the municipalities of Belo Horizonte, Nova Lima and Sabará. The project will occupy an area of 101.24 hectares, equivalent to 121 soccer fields.

The municipality of Belo Horizonte and the Public Ministry of Minas Gerais have filed actions in court to reverse the decision. Activists, social movements and civil society organizations launched the campaign “Tira o pé da minha Serra” [Hands off my Serra], which calls for the installation of a parliamentary investigation commission to investigate the bidding process.

Specialists say that a mining can increase deforestation in the region and compromise the water supply for the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais’s capital.

Members of a rural community in the Para municipality of Anapu are under threat: they have been victims of attacks by hooded and armed men, who burned down two houses. According to the families, the invaders claimed that they were claiming back the land. The community is located in lot 96 of Gleba Bacajá, a region that is the target of dispute between groups of small farmers and the heirs of rancher Antônio Borges Peixoto.

On April 22nd, dozens of indigenous people, mostly from the Pataxó population, occupied the historic city center of Porto Seguro (BA) in a protest against president Jair Bolsonaro, who was in town attending an official event to honor the 522nd anniversary of the arrival of Portuguese colonizers to Brazil. Footage from the protest showing indigenous people marching and chanting against the president went viral. 

A  few days later, also in the south of Bahia, Pataxó people manifested in front of the mayor’s office of small town Pau Brasil due to police violence. On April 19th, military police officers beat up Priscila Muniz and her husband as they were leaving a public event. 

Two army officers have been identified as the responsible for a network of 14 fake profiles and nine Facebook pages, as well as 39 Instagram accounts, used for attacking NGOs and environmentalists and spreading lies about the Amazon and environmental issues in Brazil.

The information was shared by the company in its quarterly report on threats made by users. “We cannot share many details of how our investigation reached the military. The more we share, the more these networks are able to hide. We use technical and behavioral signals,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of global security policy, told the newspaper Estado de S. Paulo.

After two years of happening online due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Acampamento Terra Livre 2022 (Free Land Camp) begun in Brasilia. The camp will last until April 14th. The Indigenous People of Brazil Network (Apib), one of the organizers, estimates that the meeting will gather about 8,000 indigenous people, with representatives of more than 150 different ethnic groups of Brazil.

The focus of the mobilization is on confronting the anti-indigenous agenda of the Bolsonaro government and the “death projects” in Congress. Among the priority agendas are the fight against the bill 191/2020, which authorizes the exploitation of indigenous lands, bill 6.299/2002, known as the “poison package”, which makes more flexible the use of pesticides in the country, bill 2.633/2020 and bill 510/2021, on the regularization of illegal land occupations, and bill 3.729/2004, which changes the rules for environmental licensing of enterprises in Brazil.

On Apib’s website it is possible to check the full schedule of the meeting, and contribute with donations.

Six Brazilian civil society organizations presented to the international community a denunciation of the risks involved in the bill 191/2020, which authorizes the economic exploitation of indigenous lands.

In the speech read at a meeting at the United Nations by Gustavo Huppes, from the NGO Conectas, also representing the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), the Maíra Institute, Kowit and the Climate Observatory, the group stated that the proposal “is a direct attack on indigenous peoples and an outright violation of the constitutional right to their territories and the international obligations assumed by Brazil, such as ILO Convention 169.”

Bill 191 had its urgency regime approved by the House of Representatives on March 9 and it might go to a vote without going through the House committees, in the first half of April.

The Federal Supreme Court (STF) has set aside March 30 for the trial of seven lawsuits with socio-environmental themes, signed by opposition parties. According to the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, the initiative to close a “green package” is led by the ministers Cármen Lúcia and Rosa Weber, with the support of the president of the STF, Luiz Fux. The movement comes after the Act for the Earth, which brought together, on March 9, artists, activists, indigenous leaders, along with thousands of people, in front of the Esplanade of the Ministries in Brasilia (DF), against the set of bills being considered in Congress that threaten the country’s environmental policy.

The actions are about fighting deforestation and fires, protecting the Amazon, air quality standards and environmental licenses. With the exception of ADI 6148, filed by the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), which questions the resolution of the National Council on the Environment (CONAMA), all the actions have opposition parties as authors, with the support of NGOs that participate as amicus curiae (friend of the court), offering subsidies for a technical opinion on the agenda.

In 2022, the non-governmental and non-profit association Rede Sementes do Xingu [Xingu Seed Network] has reached 15 years of activity in forest restoration through the collection and marketing of native seeds of different species. So far, they have totalled 292 tons of collected seeds and 7.4 thousand hectares recovered. Besides the collection and distribution of seeds, the group’s objective is to value the autonomy of traditional peoples and cultures.

Formed by indigenous peoples, family farmers and residents of towns located in Amazon and Cerrado savanna territories in the state of Mato Grosso, the Network has 568 collectors distributed in 21 municipalities, including 16 rural settlements and 26 villages from three indigenous lands.

Last year, in partnership with the Socio-environmental Institute (ISA), the story of the Xingu Seed Network was told in the virtual reality documentary “Forest Makers”, which was previewed at the 26th United Nations Climate Conference (COP26).