Indigenous people are leading COP30 protests against agribusiness that “wants to take everything.”
Belement, Bstamped— A half-block-long street mural depicts a grim, shirtless Amazonian warrior beneath a gold and turquoise headdress, aiming a bow and arrow at a distant target. In a sci-fi style, the warrior wears sunglasses whose lenses reflect the white electronic eyes of the video game commando. Behind him, red letters read: “O Futuro E' Ancestral” – “The Future of the Ancestors.”
A warrior stood guard as thousands of people marched through the streets of Belem, Brazil, on November 15, demanding that governments gathered across the city for the UN COP30 climate summit find real solutions to accelerate the climate crisis. Dozens of Tupi people, the main indigenous people in northeastern Brazil, shook maracas and danced as they fiercely chanted their determination to defend their land. A nearby group of indigenous women with painted faces, the Association of Forest Defenders, carried a sign reading in Portuguese: “Without climate justice, there are no indigenous rights. Without forests, there is no future.”
All over the world 80 to 89 percent of people want their governments to take stronger action to combat climate change. The marchers in Belem, which included members of Brazil's center-left political parties and trade unions, as well as climate activists from around the world, put a human face on this climate supermajority. “Climate emergency: the answer is us” and “No more fossil fuels: the future begins now,” read the signs carried by Carolina García and Javier Guillot of Colombia, activists of the civil initiative Mundo Comun.
A 30-meter homemade snake with bulging red eyes floated above the march, raised by activists from the People's Climate Alliance of Brazil. In the Amazon, the snake is considered sacred, the guardian of the forest, but this snake carried a double meaning. The Portuguese 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 a message that we need climate finance for people living in the Amazon,” said activist Helena Ramos of Brazil's Amazônia da Pe', a grassroots group that helped build the snake.
The People's Climate Alliance is a coalition of hundreds of indigenous and civil society groups that continues the legacy of Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper whose murder in 1988 attracted widespread media attention and made protecting the Amazon a global environmental priority. The alliance, now led by Mendez's daughter Angela Mendez, continues to condemn agribusiness interests for clearing forested land to create soybean and cattle farms. The alliance stands for two principles voiced by countless placards at Saturday's march: “Nothing about us, without us” and “Ambition, not exclusion.”
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Indigenous activists are furious that they have been largely excluded from the COP30 Blue Zone, where government negotiators discuss the official agenda. According to the data, only 14 percent of Indigenous leaders who sought Blue Zone accreditation were accepted. Coalition of Indigenous Peoples of Brazileven as hundreds of fossil fuel executives roam the halls. Last week, some Indigenous activists took matters into their own hands, pushing their way to the main entrance to the Blue Zone and fighting with security guards before being driven away.
There is nothing subtle about it, how indigenous peoples lose their land: strangers with guns and bulldozers just come and take it away. New video report from Amazonian news organization Sumauma. reveals that agribusiness companies taking over indigenous lands are often supported by millions of dollars in loans from Brazilian and international banks.
“I want to send letters to the presidents of the Bank of Brazil, the Bank of Santander, the Bank of the North-East and tell them: “We don’t want this,” Carolman Coganon Canela, leader of the Memortumre-Canela organization in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, 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.” The story includes a massacre, according to one Indigenous woman, that killed so many people, including her grandfather and great-grandfather, that “the river was red with blood.”
Above images of a vast brown plateau devoid of a single tree, captions report that large farms operating on these indigenous territories received $12.8 million in loans between 2020 and 2024. The loans were used primarily to finance soybean and livestock farming, with one large farm clearing 4,000 hectares (15.4 sq mi) of land. The Brazilian government has declared these areas as indigenous lands, but the so-called demarcation process is currently “paralyzed,” Sumuma reports, allowing banks to continue to provide such loans. The banks involved declined to be interviewed but sent a statement to Sumauma saying they were complying with all legal regulations.
Similar conflicts are unfolding throughout the Amazon and even in tropical forests around the world, especially in Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The resulting loss of forests, whose carbon dioxide absorption helps offset global warming caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal, helps explain why deforestation is a central issue at COP30. The Tropical Forest Forever Finance initiative, launched by the Brazilian government, aims to stop deforestation by increasing the economic value of forests when they are left intact rather than cut down. It is expected that 20 percent of the proceeds from the initiative's $125 billion endowment will go directly to indigenous peoples, who are the single most effective protectors of forests, according to peer-reviewed scientific research.
But agribusiness companies and their financiers remain eager to exploit the forests' wealth, whether the science is proven or not. For their part, the people of Memortumre are no less determined to protect their land and way of life. “They want to take everything,” Carolman Coganon Canela says of large farmers. “We are not going to stop fighting. We will fight to the death. There are not many of us, but we are fighting to protect our lands and the entire planet.”
