Oakland, CA – The federal agency tasked with land reform policy in Brazil, INCRA, has reduced the area of a settlement created 22 years ago in the Para state to make room for gold mining, according to the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo. The negotiation, settled with a contract signed recently with the Canadian company Belo Sun Mining Corp., was revealed last week.
Belo Sun’s mining project aims to be the largest open-pit gold mine in the country installed at the edges of the Xingu River, an area in the Brazilian Amazon just below the dam of Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, which already suffers from the massive impacts of the dam operation. Since the beginning of the licensing of the mining project in 2012, Belo Sun has faced numerous lawsuits which call for the cancellation of its licenses and the suspension of the process due to the various gaps and irregularities attached to the development of the project. Experts assert that the project is not viable, and could mean the death of the Xingu river.
The agreement states that INCRA will reduce an area of 2,428 hectares of public land in a region where around 600 families live. In exchange, it will receive a farm located more than 1,500 kilometers away, some work equipment, and a share in Belo Sun’s earnings.
“This negotiation not only contradicts INCRA’s constitutional mandate – which is to allocate areas for land reform, not mining exploitation – but it was also done without the participation of the residents who live in these areas, who were not informed about any of this,” said Ana Carolina Alfinito, lawyer and Legal Advisor for Amazon Watch, one of the organizations that make up the Alliance for the Volta Grande, created to support the defense of life and dignity in the region and its permanent protection against infrastructure projects.
In fact, residents in the region were taken by surprise, as they were not informed by INCRA that there was even a negotiation happening. “My father has 100 hectares of land in this area that they want to reduce. Nobody discussed this with me, nor my father,” said Idglan da Silva to the newspaper. “It is a horrible situation, we are stunned. We cannot sleep at night. No one has said what will happen to us.”
“I have lived here in the Ressaca settlement for 24 years. They never came here to give any information. There is a rumor here that we are going to have to leave,” says Eduviges Ribeiro de Souza. “We are afraid of losing our house. There are ten families living on my plot of land. It’s a land reform plot.”
The situation is made worse by the fact that Belo Sun has been accused of illegally buying public land in the same area. A 2013 civil suit, ruling pending, alleges that the company has acquired a series of public estates in the region, through irregular transactions. An ongoing criminal investigation has been opened to look into claims that Belo Sun has purchased plots of land that belong to the federal land reform program. At least 21 land plots from families settled in the area were negotiated directly by the company and the residents, according to recent research by a study group from the Federal University of Para.
“In practice, INCRA is regularizing land grabbing. The agency is using the company’s illegal activities to say that the families are not in the plots anymore and that, therefore, the area is no longer used for land reform,” said Elisângela Cortez, Federal Public Defender, in an interview to Estado de S.Paulo. She declared that her office is going to file a suit in the Federal Court to ask for the annulment of the contract. “It is clear that this contract is null and void and has to be canceled. There was no consultation with local families. We got reports from several residents who were not consulted. There was no publicity for what would be done. The fact that there is not a single formal act by INCRA determining the elimination of a part of the settlement is also noteworthy,” said the Public Defender.
The Alliance for the Volta Grande do Xingu, an international coalition with nine organizations who work in defense of communities protecting their land and rights threatened by Belo Sun Mining Corp. has denounced the case to the United Nations and European Union representatives, and to the company’s investors. “The process of transfer of Federal land of the Ressaca settlement and its traditional, riverine and land reform residents subverts the principles of agrarian reform inscribed in law by conceding public and inhabited land to the private interests of Belo Sun mining,” their statement says. “We wholly contest, therefore, the contract and the attempt to erase and silence the settlers and territory of the Ressaca settlement.”
Organizational members of the coalition include: Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, Amazon Watch (AIDA), Earthworks, International Rivers, Instituto Socioambiental – ISA, Mining Watch, Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre and Rede Xingu+ are part of The Alliance for the Volta Grande do Xingu.
