Last week, Amazon Watch had the honor of accompanying the young Indigenous leader Beka Saw Munduruku to the United States to confront Cargill, a corporate giant responsible for the destruction of her people’s lands and violations of their rights. As the largest agribusiness company in the world, with sprawling operations in the Brazilian Amazon and the neighboring Cerrado biome, Cargill’s reckless practices drive an ever-expanding wave of deforestation, pollution, and violence against local communities like the Munduruku.
The emerging menace of the Ferrogrão railway mega-project, pushed by Cargill to reduce grain export costs, would cut the eastern Amazon in two, and it has inspired fierce Indigenous resistance. It is not a stretch to contend that Cargill’s business model, and that of its competitors, pose an existential threat to the future of the forest and its peoples.
Last week was the first time a Brazilian Indigenous leader took their message directly to Cargill’s U.S. headquarters. Beka was chosen by Munduruku leadership to appeal to the Cargill-MacMillan family, approximately 20 people who own 88% of the company, rather than to its executives who have repeatedly failed to honor their own promises to eliminate deforestation and rights abuses from their supply chains. The Cargill-MacMillan family is the fourth richest family in America, with more billionaires than any other family on Earth.
On Thursday, Beka hand delivered her letter to security outside of Cargill’s Minneapolis offices, demanding that the family use their outsized influence over the company and directly intervene to put an end to its disastrous practices. She was denied access to the building, and frankly it was appalling that an emissary who traveled 4,000 miles to deliver an urgent message from her people would be treated with such dismissal and disrespect.
Her letter begins:
My name is Beka. I am 21 years old. I live on Sawré Muybu Indigenous territory in the Amazon forest in the state of Pará, Brazil.
I have come to the United States to ask the Cargill-MacMillan family to stop the destruction of our land. My people are called the Munduruku, which means “the red ants.” We are 13,000 strong, divided into 160 communities. Life is simple here. We plant, we harvest, we create. We learn by watching our elders. This is how we learn the riches of our culture: our stories, our forests, our animals.
We defend our lands not just for our people but for all of humanity.
Your company is harming our collective future. We have lived here in the heart of the Amazon for over 4,000 years. But now our world hangs by a thread.
We have been fighting against Cargill for a long time. It has been devastating. Your executives tell us that Cargill is a good company, that they have pledged to end the destruction of nature. But this is not our experience.
In every region where Cargill operates, you are destroying the environment and driving out or threatening the communities who live there.
You must cease the destruction of our forests. You must stop expanding into our territory. You must stop selling commodities from lands stolen from Indigenous peoples. You must stop the murder of the defenders of these lands.
The full letter can be read here.
