Amazon tribes turn the tables on intruders with social media
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 rainforest. 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 had never seen a dredge operating in this area of the Xipaia people’s territory, let alone one this massive; it resembled a floating factory.
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 The Associated Press has reviewed. “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 rainforest areas that, until recently, had no means of quickly sharing visual evidence of environmental crime. A fast-expanding 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, landgrabbers 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.
“When used properly, technology helps a lot in real-time monitoring and denouncing,” said Nara Baré, head of the group Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon, in a telephone interview. “The external pressure to make the federal government act in the Xipaia territory was very important. Technology has been the main tool for that.”
Connectivity is not only enabling whistle-blowing on social media. Brazil’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office has set up a website to register reported crimes and receive uploaded visual material. Previously people in remote communities have had to make the long and expensive trip to the nearest city that has a federal prosecutor’s office.
Xipaia territory is part of a pristine rainforest area known as Terra do Meio (Middle Earth) that is dotted with dozens of Indigenous and traditional river communities. Internet connection there was rare until mid-2020, when a group of non-profits, including Health in Harmony and the SocioEnvironmental Institute, financed installation of 17 antennae throughout the vast region.
Priority was given to communities with either health centers or market hubs for the production and sale of forest products, such as Brazil nuts. Signal can be painfully slow, especially on rainy days, yet it has connected people who were previously off the grid, and is enough for photos and videos to trickle out of the forest.
“The strategy was to improve communication and avoid unnecessary trips to the city,” said Marcelo Salazar, Health in Harmony’s Brazil program coordinator. “The internet makes it easier for health, education, and forest economy issues.” Fighting environmental crime was an added benefit, he added.
Four out of five Xipaia communities are now connected. Karimaa, the village where the barge was first spotted, has had internet since July 2020. Just three days after installation, when a teenager injured his head, a city doctor was able to assess his condition using photos sent over WhatsApp. That avoided a costly, complicated medevac during the COVID-19 pandemic.