Indigenous Activists to COP30: “We Will Fight to the Death”
Indigenous people lead COP30 protests against agribusinesses that “want to take everything.”
Belém, Brazil—A street mural half a block long shows a grim-faced Amazonian warrior, shirtless beneath a headdress of gold and turquoise, aiming a bow and arrow at a distant target. In a science-fiction twist, the warrior wears goggle sunglasses whose lenses flash the white electronic eyes of a video game commando. Behind him, red letters exclaim, “O Futuro E’ Ancestral”—“The Future Is Ancestral.”
The warrior was standing guard as thousands of people marched through the streets of Belém, Brazil, on November 15 to demand that governments gathered at the COP30 UN climate summit across town deliver real solutions to the accelerating climate crisis. Dozens of Tupi people, the main Indigenous nation in northeastern Brazil, shook maracas and danced while fiercely chanting their determination to protect their land. An adjacent group of Indigenous women in face paint, the Association of Forest Protectors, carried a banner declaring in Portuguese, “Without climate justice, there is no Indigenous rights. Without the forest, there is no future.”
Across the world, 80 to 89 percent of people want their governments to take stronger climate action. The marchers in Belém, who included members of left-of-center political parties and trade unions in Brazil and climate activists from around the world, put a human face to this climate supermajority. “Climate Emergency: The Answer Is Us” and “No More Fossil Fuels: The Future Begins Now” read the signs carried by Carolina Garcia and Javier Guillot of Colombia, activists with the Mundo Comun citizens initiative.
A 30-meters-long homemade snake with bulging red eyes floated above the march, hoisted aloft by activists with The People’s Climate Alliance of Brazil. In the Amazon, the snake is considered sacred, a guardian of the forest, but this snake carried a double meaning. In Portuguese, the word for snake is “cobra,” but “cobra” can also mean “to collect money.” In short, the snake was calling for climate reparations. “We came here with the message that we need climate finance for the people living in the Amazon,” said activist Helena Ramos of Brazilian Amazônia da Pé, a grassroots group that helped construct the snake.
The People’s Climate Alliance is a coalition of hundreds of Indigenous and civil society groups that carries on the work of Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper whose assassination in 1988 attracted widespread media attention and made protection of the Amazon a global environmental priority. Now led by Mendes’s daughter, Angela Mendes, the alliance continues to condemn agribusiness interests for clearing forest land to establish soybean and cattle farms. The alliance champions two principles voiced by countless signs at Saturday’s march: “Nothing About Us, Without Us,” and “Ambition, Not Exclusion.”
Indigenous activists are furious at being largely excluded from the COP30 “Blue Zone,” where government negotiators tackle the official agenda. Only 14 percent of the Indigenous leaders who sought accreditation to the Blue Zone were accepted, according to the Coalition of Indigenous People of Brazil, even as hundreds of fossil-fuel company executives roam the halls. Some Indigenous activists took matters into their own hands last week, pushing their way into the main entrance to the Blue Zone and tussling with security guards before being driven back.
It’s not subtle, the way Indigenous peoples lose their land: Outsiders with guns and bulldozers simply come and take it. A new video report by the Amazonian-based news organization Sumauma reveals that agribusiness companies that seize Indigenous land often are backed by millions of dollars of loans from Brazilian and international banks.
“I want to send letters to the presidents of the Bank of Brazil, Santander Bank, the Bank of the Northeast and tell them, ‘We don’t want this,” Carolman Koganon Canela, a leader of the Memortumré- Kanela people in Brazilian state of Maranhao, says in the video. “They don’t respect our culture, our language, our way of life…. They don’t know our history, that our ancestors left us this land.” That history includes a massacre, one Indigenous woman says, that killed so many people, including her grandfather and great-grandfather, that “the river was red with blood.”
Over images of a vast brown plateau empty of even a single tree, captions report that big farms operating in these Indigenous territories received $12.8 million in loans between 2020 and 2024. The loans were used mainly to finance soybean cultivation and cattle breeding, with one big farm deforesting 4,000 hectares (15.4 square miles) of land. The territories had been declared Indigenous land by the Brazilian government, but the process of so-called demarcation is currently “paralyzed,” Sumuma reported, which enables banks to continue providing such loans. The banks involved declined to be interviewed but did send Sumauma a statement saying that they complied with all legal norms.
Conflicts like these are playing out across the Amazon and indeed in tropical forests around the world, notably in Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The resulting loss of forests, whose absorption of carbon dioxide helps offset the global warming generated by burning oil, gas, and coal, helps explain why deforestation is a central issue at COP30. The Tropical Forest Forever Finance initiative put forward by the Brazilian government is aimed at halting deforestation by making forests more economically valuable when left standing than if cut down. In an unprecedented step, 20 percent of the proceeds from the $125 billion endowment envisioned for the initiative are supposed to flow directly to Indigenous people, who peer-reviewed science says are the single most effective protecters of forests.
But agribusiness companies and their financiers remain hungry to exploit the riches of the forests, peer-reviewed science or not. For their part, the Memortumré people are no less determined to protect their land and way of life. “They want to take everything,” Carolman Koganon Canela says of the big farmers. “We’re not going to stop fighting. We will fight to the death. We are not many, but we are fighting to protect our lands and the entire planet.”
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