SÃO PAULO — When Alessandra Korap was born in the mid-1980s, her indigenous village nestled in the Brazilian Amazon jungle was a seclusion haven. But as she grew older, the nearby city of Itaituba, with its bustling streets and commercial activity, drew ever closer.
It was not just his people who felt the invasion of non-indigenous outsiders. two older federal highways it paved the way for tens of thousands of settlers, illegal gold miners and loggers to enter the region’s vast indigenous territories, which cover a forested area roughly the size of Belgium.
The influx posed a serious threat to the 14,000-member Munduruku Korap people, who spread throughout the Tapajós river basin, in the states of Pará and Mato Grosso. Soon, illegal mining, hydroelectric dams, a major railway and river ports for the export of soybeans choked their lands, lands that were still fighting for recognition.
Korap and other Munduruku women took responsibility for defending their people, overthrowing traditionally all-male leadership. Organizing in their communities, they orchestrated demonstrations, presented compelling evidence of environmental crimes to the Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Police, and vehemently opposed the illicit deals and incentives offered to the Munduruku by miners, loggers, corporations, and politicians without scruples seeking access to their lands. .
Korap’s defense of its ancestral territory was recognized with the Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday. The award honors grassroots activists around the world who are dedicated to protecting the environment and promoting sustainability.
“This award is an opportunity to draw attention to the demarcation of the Sawre Muybu territory,” Korap told The Associated Press. “It is our top priority, along with expelling illegal miners.”
Sawre Muybu is an area of pristine rainforest along the Tapajós River covering 178,000 hectares (440,000 acres). Official recognition of the land, or demarcation, began in 2007 but was frozen during the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, which ended in January.
Still, the Munduruku people celebrated a victory in 2021 when British mining company Anglo American stopped trying to mine inside Brazil’s indigenous territories, including Sawre Muybu.
Studies have shown that indigenous-controlled forests are the best preserved in the Brazilian Amazon.
Almost half of Brazil’s climate pollution comes from deforestation. The destruction is so great now that the eastern Amazon, not far from Munduruku, has ceased to be a carbon sink, or net absorber of the gas, and is now a carbon source, according to a study published in 2021 in the nature magazine.
Korap, however, knows that land rights alone do not protect the land.
In the neighboring Munduruku Indigenous Territory, illegal miners have destroyed and polluted hundreds of kilometers of waterways in search of gold, despite the fact that it was officially recognized in 2004.
Now the new government of Brazil has created the first in the country Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and more recently mounted operations to drive out the miners. But Korap remains skeptical of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She sees his actions as contradictory, noting that while he advocates for the protection of forests, he also negotiates trade deals with other countries to sell more of the country’s main exports, beef and soybeans, which are the main drivers of the deforestation in Brazil.
“When Lula travels abroad, he sits with rich people and not with defenders of the forests. A ministry is of no use if the government negotiates our land without recognizing that we are here,” she said.
Other Goldman Environmental Prize winners this year include:
— Tero Mustonen, Finnish university professor and environmental activist who led the purchase of peatlands damaged by state-sponsored industrial activity.
—Delima Silalahi, a Batak woman from North Sumatra, Indonesia, who organized indigenous communities across the country to defend their rights to traditional forests.
—Chilekwa Mumba, a Zambian community organizer who fought for and won compensation for residents harmed by copper mining in the UK Supreme Court.
—Zafer Kizilkaya of Turkey, a marine conservationist and conservation photographer who established Turkey’s first community-managed marine protected area in the Mediterranean.
—Diane Wilson, captain of a US shrimp boat that won a landmark case against petrochemical giant Formosa Plastics over the dumping of plastic waste on the Texas Gulf Coast.