On February 28, 1985, the Vale do Rio Doce train passed through the Mãe Maria Indigenous Reserve in southeastern Pará state for the first time. Of the 892 kilometers of the Carajás Railroad, 17 are within the territory of the three subgroups of the Gavião Indigenous people: Kyikatejê, Akrãtikatêjê and Parkatêjê.
Cutting through Indigenous and Quilombola lands, as well as twenty-two conservation units, the railroad was built in the early 1980s as part of the Grande Carajás project, launched during the government of João Figueiredo, the last president of the military dictatorship, which started in 1964 and ended in 1985.
The railroad line connects the world’s largest open-pit iron ore mine, in Carajás, Pará state, to Ponta da Madeira Port, in São Luís, Maranhão state. Under concession by Vale until 2057, the railroad still causes inconvenience for the 700 Indigenous individuals who live in Mãe Maria.
“The thin dust from the ore that passes through our land on the railroad has contaminated the lake, the fruits. When we take a fruit, it's polluted. There are many sick women. Ten women who had uterine surgery had everything removed. My cousin had everything removed. She was very sad. She intended to have kids, but now she can't. We believe it [the disease] comes from this [the ore] because we eat the fruit, the animals, and they're all contaminated,” says Adilene Aikrepeiti Ribeiro Airompokre, cacica – the name Indigenous leaders receive – from the Airompokrejõkri Indigenous community.
“This has had a huge impact on our health, food and land. We've lost a lot of trees, and part of our forests have been cut down. It all happened on our Mãe Maria Indigenous land,” she adds.
On the 27th anniversary of the auction in which the company was privatized by the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazilian Social Democracy Party) in 1997, Brasil de Fato is launching a series on the expansion of Vale do Rio Doce Company during the military regime and the consequences for Indigenous peoples who had their way of life destroyed by repression, invasion by big farmers and forced displacement. This first report features the struggle of the Gavião people, in the southeast of Pará state, against the impacts caused by the Carajás Railroad (also known as EFC).
In addition to the Carajás railroad, the Mãe Maria Indigenous Land was targeted by the so-called integration projects, run by the military government, such as the construction of the BR-222 highway and Eletronorte's Tucuruí power transmission line, whose impacts are felt to this day.
"Today, there are cultural activities we no longer do, like fishing. There are no more lakes. And with the arrival of Eletronorte, came energy, and technology. So today, we no longer practice women's singing. Because we used to practice it under the moonlight when it hit the community’s courtyard. Women would get together and sing. That doesn't happen anymore. Because today, the village is all lit up. Nobody sits in the middle of the courtyard anymore. Today, they don't get together anymore because of the technology we have in the community: television, cell phones, the internet,” adds Airompokre.
The Carajás project
Figueiredo’s Grande Carajás project followed the major internalization projects started by President Castelo Branco who, in 1965 and 1966, launched Operation Amazonia and the Superintendence for the Development of the Amazon (also known as SUDAM).
With the slogan “integrate so as not to deliver”, the National Integration Plan, published in 1970, also encouraged the occupation of the region, seen by the military as a “population vacuum”.
According to data from the National Truth Commission, which investigated the crimes of the dictatorship, the construction of roads in the region, such as the Transamazônica, led to the deaths of about 8,000 Indigenous individuals during the government of General Emílio Garrastazu Médici alone, between 1969 and 1973.
Tádzio Coelho, a professor at the University of Viçosa (UFV, in Portuguese), points out that the effective installation of the Grande Carajás project in the second half of the 1970s is a milestone in the country's reinsertion as an exporter of primary products, a process that had already been stimulated by the establishment of the Mining Regulatory Framework in 1967.
“This deindustrialization process was already underway in the 1970s when the Grande Carajás project was set up. And from that, we have various impacts and damages caused by this reinsertion. We're discussing the territorial issue, so it's essential to think about how these people were expelled from their territories during this period,” he explains.
“It's not just Indigenous populations, but also traditional populations in the southeast of Pará. In international terms, in terms of sovereign insertion, we see a subordinate insertion of Brazil into the global production chain, based on these major projects of the military dictatorship,” adds Coelho.
The Carajá railroad is 892 kilometers long and impacts rural communities and iIdigenous territories in the states of Pará and Maranhão / Marcelo Cruz / MAM
From near extermination to fighting against Vale
The Parkatêjê are the most numerous of the peoples of the Mãe Maria Indigenous Land. Contact with non-Indigenous people occurred during the 1950s, resulting in the death of more than 70% of its population.
Before being transferred to the Mãe Maria Land in the 1970s, the people led by “Captain” Krohokrenhum, as he was known, had to resist enslavement in the collection of Brazil nuts by the Indian Protection Service (SPI, in Portuguese) and later by the National Indian Foundation (Funai, in Portuguese), already led by the military.
Today, the Gavião people fights against the railroad duplication, built during the dictatorship. In November 2012, the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) granted an Installation License for Vale S.A.'s mining expansion project in the Carajás National Forest.
From 2013 to 2017, 575 kilometers of the railroad were duplicated in the states of Pará and Maranhão. The duplication increased Vale's annual transport capacity to 230 million tons of iron ore.
“Currently, Vale has a second line, and we see this as an environmental disaster. That didn’t start now. It's a struggle that goes back a long way. Today, they talk about environmental studies, but why didn't they make a study before building it [the railroad]? The area where we used to hunt and fish – they are all dry. It was both a social and environmental impact. And we don't know what it's going to be like from now on, because it was just one line, and now there are two,” says educator Jopramre Parkatêjê, granddaughter of Krohokrenhum.
The payment of a lifetime monthly “toll” for the passage of more than 10,000 Vale wagons and 217 locomotives through the Indigenous territory was an achievement of Krohokrenhum and the Gavião people even before the inauguration of the railroad, in the 1980s. At the time, the Indigenous people didn't just accept the compensation of 56 million cruzeiros (the Brazilian currency of that time) paid by the mining company in 1982 due to the destruction of the native forest full of Brazil nut trees.
In 2015, Vale broke the agreement that guaranteed the transfer to the Indigenous associations of the Gavião people. The mining company began to fail to meet part of the monthly payments to the 21 villages in Mãe Maria. Affected by the COVID-19 crisis, the Indigenous people had to give in to pressure from the mining company.
Kokrenhum, an Indigenous leader, signs agreement with Companhia Vale do Rio Doce authorizing the Carajás Railroad to cross Mãe Maria territory / Cynthia Brito
The transfer supposedly guarantees Indigenous people access to assistance, health, education, promotion of productive activities, surveillance and territorial protection.
“I believe that Vale is trying to take away our rights little by little, even if we negotiate. Because [for instance] we have a health agreement. Vale has monthly funds that go to associations, and it has a health agreement. But a lot has been cut. Dental treatment isn't complete. It's basic: extractions and fillings. So, these are basic things that you can find at Sesai [that’s a reference to health centers managed by the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health], which also serves the Indigenous people here. Since Vale is a large company, it has to treat us better, because when its wagons pass through here, they are long. You don’t see the end of it,” says Jopramre.
Between November 2004 and May 2016, the ANTT (National Land Transport Agency) recorded 26 deaths and 124 accidents along the Carajás Railroad.
“The more it expands, the more ore it will take out crossing our territory. It's a 'partner' in quotes because if it gives us the resource, it crosses through this land. Therefore, it's not a partnership: it's its duty to cross through the area. If Vale didn't pass it on, would it give us the resource? It wouldn't,” she added.
“Today, on our land, there are several [Indigenous] peoples who are afraid that one day Vale will end. And how are they going to live? How will they stay? Because they're used to it, to the resources. But those of us who understand know that [we] can survive without Vale. Because we've survived for a long time. Vale doesn't mean anything to me,” adds cacica Adilene.
Shareholders benefited from Carajás structure
The discovery of Carajás led to a transition in the production structure of the then Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, with the introduction of open-pit mining, larger drills, excavators and dynamite. All of this replaced the predominantly manual workforce, as seen in Minas Gerais state in the 1950s.
In May 1997, most of the then state-owned Companhia Vale do Rio Doce was acquired by shareholders for BRL3.3 billion (US$650,4 mi). Professor Tadzio Coelho explains that private capital benefited from various public policies on extraction, transportation and processing infrastructure introduced by the military government with the Grande Carajás project.
According to him, Brazil's indebtedness caused by the investments in the Carajás Project went beyond the dictatorship period and into the country's re-democratization reality. It was only in the mid-1990s, when it was on the verge of being sold, that Vale profited from its exploration in Carajás.
“It's no longer a Brazilian company; it's a multinational company based in Brazil. That means that the ways of controlling and influencing the company's operations are even more restricted, even more limited than they already were. On the one hand, there is the privatization of the gains generated by public investment and, on the other hand, a reduction in the company's forms of control. It becomes a multinational that no longer concerns national interests, sovereignty or the country's autonomy. Then, Vale went through, let's say, a second privatization process under the Temer government [from May 2016 until December 2018] when there was a new shareholders' agreement,” explains Coelho.
“Today, Vale has an extremely fragmented shareholder structure and huge investment funds such as BlackRock, which controls a large part of the company's shares. So, today, Vale is more about these foreign investment funds than it is about the Brazilian population and the Brazilian government,” he adds.
Vale owns most of the outsourced companies operating in the port region and on the Carajás Railroad
Currently, it is the expansion of the Carajás operation that guarantees Vale's position among the five largest mining companies in the world. In recent years, the company has broken consecutive profit records: R$95.9 billion in 2022 and R$121 billion in 2021. In 2023, Vale's net profit totaled US$ 39.94 billion.
In the second quarter of 2023, Vale's iron ore production grew by 6% compared to the same period in 2022. The increase, according to the mining company, was driven by the record production of the Carajás complex, which grew by 2.9 million metric tons.
Exploitation that was not interrupted even during the biggest health crisis in the country's history. During the pandemic, Canaã dos Carajás, at the heart of Vale's operations, recorded higher rates of COVID-19 infections than many of the country's capital cities, especially among workers.
“Today we find a Brazilian mining model that is extremely anti-grassroots and harmful to the environment, destroying people and their way of life. This model has various characteristics and features inherited from Brazil's civil military dictatorship,” says Tádzio Coelho.
The other side
Brasil de Fato contacted Vale to hear from the company about the facts reported. In a statement, it said “The licensing process for the Carajás Railroad Expansion Project, which neighbors the Indigenous Land by 18 km, complied with all current regulations and the company’s commitments, including free, prior and informed consultation, with the participatory production of the Indigenous Component Study and its Basic Environmental Plan,” both of which are currently underway.
It also stated that it “collaborates with the health of members of the Gavião Indigenous Community in the Mãe Maria Indigenous Land by providing a complementary health service, the primary responsibility of which lies with the government”. This collaboration takes place through “a private operator based on self-management”, which maintains a network of professionals to provide dental services. “This service is regulated by public authorities, represented by the National Supplementary Health Agency (ANS, in English), which defines a list of consultations, exams and treatments, called the List of Health Procedures and Events, which complementary health services are obliged to offer,” says the note.
Edited by: Nicolau Soares
