Indigenous communities rally against amazon soy transport project that threatens ancient river home

For thousands of years, the Tapajós River has been the lifeblood of Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon. Now, these same communities are fighting to protect their ancestral waters from an expanding commercial waterway that they say threatens their way of life and the environment.

In November, Indigenous groups from the Tupinambá and other ethnic communities staged peaceful protests to draw attention to the environmental and social costs of the Tapajós waterway project. Using small boats, protesters temporarily blocked cargo barges carrying soybeans near Santarém in Pará state, displaying banners reading “agriculture passes, destruction remains.” A week later, Munduruku Indigenous people took their protest to the COP30 climate summit in Belém, blocking the main entrance to demand meetings with Brazilian officials about the waterway’s privatization.

The controversial infrastructure project spans 155 miles, connecting the major port of Miritituba to Santarém, where the Tapajós meets the Amazon River and provides access to Atlantic shipping routes. This corridor has become crucial for exporting agricultural and mineral products from Brazil’s interior farming regions, with cargo traffic surging over the past decade following the paving of the BR-163 highway that links the country’s agricultural heartland to the waterway.

Indigenous communities worry that increased vessel traffic, pollution, and wave damage will disrupt ecosystems and traditional livelihoods that have sustained them for millennia. Their protests highlight the ongoing tension between Brazil’s agricultural export ambitions and the rights of Indigenous peoples to protect their ancestral territories in the Amazon rainforest.