Tribes turning to social media to defend lands
RIO DE JANEIRO — It was dusk on April 14 when Francisco Kuruaya heard a boat approaching along the river near his village in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. He assumed it was the regular delivery boat bringing gasoline for generators and outboard motors to remote settlements like his. Instead, what Kuruaya found was a barge dredging his people’s pristine river in search of gold.
Kuruaya, 47, motored out to the barge, boarded it and confronted the gold miners. They responded in harsh voices and he retreated for fear they were armed. But so was he — with a phone — the first he’d ever had. Back in his village Karimaa, his son Thaylewa Xipaia forwarded the photos of the mining boat to the tribe’s WhatsApp chat groups.
“Guys, this is urgent!” he said to fellow members of his tribe in an audio message. “There’s a barge here at Pigeons Island. It’s huge and it’s destroying the whole island. My dad just went there and they almost took his phone.”
Several days’ voyage away, in the nearest city of Altamira, Kuruaya’s daugher, Juma Xipaia, received the frantic messages. She recorded her own video with choked voice and watery eyes, warning that armed conflict was imminent — then uploaded it to social media.
In a matter of hours, word was out to the world.
The episode illustrates the advance of the internet into vast, remote rain forest areas that, until recently, had no means of quickly sharing visual evidence of environmental crime. A fastexpanding network of antennae is empowering Indigenous groups to use phones, video cameras and social media to galvanize the public and pressure authorities to respond swiftly to threats from gold miners, land grabbers and loggers.
Until now, Indigenous communities have relied on radio to transmit their distress calls. Environmental and Indigenous rights groups then relayed these to the media and the public. But the nonprofits have been maligned by Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who advocates legalizing mining and land leasing in protected Indigenous territories. He has castigated the organizations as unreliable actors, out of touch with Indigenous people’s true desires and on the payroll of global environmental do-gooders.
Video and photos coming directly from Indigenous people are harder to dismiss and this is forcing authorities as well as the public to reckon with the reality on the ground.
In addition to sounding the alarm, four villages used WhatsApp to quickly organize a party of warriors to confront the miners. Painted with urucum, a local fruit that produces a red ink, and armed with bows, arrows and hunting rifles, they crammed into a small boat, according to Juma Xipaia. By the time they reached the location where the barge had been, however, it was gone.