Sailing for about an hour in the Amazon river’s delta, a flotilla of dozens of boats carrying hundreds of people raised Indigenous concerns about Brazil’s oil and gas, mining and agricultural expansion in their forests.
In Belém’s Parque da Cidade, climate negotiators gather for the first COP hosted in the Amazon rainforest. Outside the conference halls, Indigenous activists demanded outcomes that address threats from agriculture, fossil fuels and mining in their communities.
The activists will meet at the People’s Summit, a civil society event parallel to COP30, which organisers say is meant to denounce false climate solutions. Boat passengers carried signs reading “agriculture passes, destruction stays” and “we are the climate resistance”.
Raimundo Tupinambá, chief of the Pajurá tribe, said that he and his village were there “to demonstrate against the federal government, the state government, and the parliamentarians who are pushing projects that could affect both the environment and us, the indigenous peoples”.
Chief Raoni Metuktire, an Indigenous leader who was recently awarded the highest decoration of Brazilian diplomacy by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for his decades of climate activism, said at the event that these communities shouldn’t be facing the climate impacts they have been experiencing, among them an extreme drought last year that scientists linked to climate change.
“This river where we are could dry up, too,” Raoni said.
Raoni also talked about the recent licenses Lula gave to Petrobras to explore oil off the Amazon coast, saying that projects like that could cause severe problems for the world, “first us, the Indigenous Peoples, but also all of you, all of us will have environmental problems.”
The demonstration happened one day after protesters clashed with security guards as they stormed their way into the COP30 conference venue. When asked about that, Indigenous groups at the flotilla said that they didn’t organise it, but weren’t necessarily against it.
Sailing along the soy corridor
One of the main boats in the flotilla was a vessel named ‘Caravan of the Response,’ a nod to the ‘we are the response’ slogan from Indigenous peoples and had been sailing for a week, having started 3,000 kilometres inland in Sinop, Mato Grosso.
The route is meant to emulate Brazil’s “soy corridor”, a network of roads, railways and waterways designed to move soybeans from inland production areas to ports for export. One of the boats carried a banner reading “agribusiness doesn’t fill your plate”.
The vessel also carried a large banner rejecting the Ferrogrão, a railway of nearly 1,000 kilometres that would become part of the soy corridor and would connect Sinop – Brazil’s soybean capital – to the state of Pará, where Belém is located. The project has been halted since 2021 due to possible environmental impacts. Tupinambá said Ferrogrão is one of his people’s main fights and called its possible construction a “predatory activity.”
If built, the railway would affect at least six indigenous lands, home to approximately 2,600 people, and 17 conservation areas, according to Brazilian media.
Inside the boat, on the first of four floors, activists played music, danced and sold traditional Indigenous food. The top floors were full of hammocks reserved for the people who did the trip from Sinop.
Making the case for rivers
With flags reading “The Arapiuns river talks, we listen”, the group of hundreds of Indigenous activists also sought to raise awareness on the health of rivers in the Amazon region, which experienced severe drought last year.
Arapiuns, a river over 1,300 km from Belém, has a tributary connection to the Tapajós, the fifth biggest of all the rivers that lead to the Amazon River. During the 2024 drought, it dried to its lowest levels.
Jéssica Kumaruara, an Indigenous activist from the region, was on the boat holding a sign that read “the Tapajós River, enchanted dwellings that also sustain us, is asking for help.”
She grew up in the area, and told Climate Home that she and her community will fight to defend their beloved river, “that the government wants to turn into a route for agribusiness”.
“When they kill our river, when they leave it in the forests, they are killing us too. It is a way of killing us and we are here to say that we are not going to stop, we are not going to keep quiet, we are going to fight until the end.”
