- A study led by an Indigenous organization has found inconsistencies in the planning and licensing processes of the Castanheira hydroelectric project that it warns could alter the course of the Arinos River, one of the last still flowing freely in the Juruena River Basin.
- An area the size of 9,500 soccer fields would be flooded for the dam’s reservoir, affecting a region that’s home to Indigenous territories, small and medium-sized family farms, and the ancestral territory of the Tapayuna Indigenous people.
- The federal government has still not released a statement defining a timeline for the dam’s construction, even though feasibility studies began in 2010; the project is currently awaiting its environmental licensing.
“They are going to flood the Tapayuna people’s history,” says Yaku Suya, a 43-year-old Indigenous leader from the village of Tyrykho, in Xingu Indigenous Park in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. This is where most of Suya’s people were transferred to during the 1970s after experiencing poisonings and flu and measles epidemics when their original home, along the banks of the Arinos River further west in Mato Grosso state, became a target of prospectors seeking diamonds, tropical hardwoods, and rubber.
For many years, the Tapayuna were hosted by villages of other Indigenous groups who offered to protect them. The situation led to a broad loss of Tapayuna culture as their language and traditions were absorbed into those of other ethnicities. Finally, in 2016 the group appealed to Funai, Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs, to reclaim their ancestral territory. But this land, as in the past, remains at threat today, this time from a different type of prospector: developers who plan to build the largest hydroelectric dam in the Juruena River Basin. Proposed for construction near the mouth of the Arinos River, where it flows into the Juruena, the dam’s licensing process has raised concerns due to a number of social and environmental irregularities.
If the Castanheira hydropower project, currently awaiting environmental licensing, finally goes into construction, the effects would be manifold, critics say. They could include damage to part of the territory claimed by the Tapayuna, alteration of the course of the river itself, and impacts that may represent an irreversible outcome to a story that includes several attempts at what researchers consider ethnocide: the systematic destruction of a people’s ways of life and thought.
For seven years, the Tapayuna people have been waiting for a response from Funai, which is responsible for analyzing their territorial claim. Mongabay requested information about the process from the agency, but received no response. In the plant’s licensing documentation, Funai stated that the undertaking wouldn’t result in flooding of the currently established Indigenous territories in the region, where other ethnicities live today, but didn’t provide any details regarding claimed territories and Indigenous people living in voluntary isolation in the region.
Meanwhile, nearby communities fear a series of impacts. “[The dam] will flood the riverbank’s entire history,” Yaku Suya says. “We won’t let this dam happen because we want the river to be free when we take back our land, to keep our traditions. If they block the river, the entire history changes.”
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