Details
The challenge of the ”energy transition" has been taking many forums of discussion in Brazil and around the world, with governments and companies taking for themselves discourses on sustainability. However, little is seen in terms of effective actions that generate the preservation of the planet. On the contrary, the actions taken in the name of combating climate change have generated violations and socio-environmental impacts.
Ailce Margarida Negreiros Alves is a professor at the Federal University of Southern and Southeastern Pará (Marabá Campus) in the Rural Education College.
Larissa Pereira Santos is a graduate student in communication sciences at the Communication, Culture and Amazon Programme of the Federal University of Pará and political coordinator at the Justiça nos Trilhos Association.
Brazil faces growing international pressure to implement a “Just Energy Transition”. But what transition are we talking about, and for whom is it intended? According to different researchers, in fact, what is happening is not a transition, but rather an energy expansion or a diversification of energy supply.
In this scenario, hundreds of communities located in the Brazilian Amazon suffer under mining projects that announce a development that will not be seen or felt by those who live in them. Some examples of mining projects that have reached the Amazon with the sustainable economic development discourse are: Grande Carajás Programme, S11D Project, Onça Puma Mine. The main corporation responsible for them is mining company Vale S. A., which has been present in the Amazon for more than four decades. These large projects exploit mainly iron, but also bauxite, niobium, gold, nickel, copper, etc. And now they are presented in line with the energy transition narrative.
Vale S. A. is one of the largest iron ore, copper, and nickel miners in the world and has been present in Brazil for more than eight decades. The company reinforced the discourse of the energy transition in 2025 by announcing investments of 70 billion reais in five years in the “New Carajás Programme”. According to the company, the goal is to expand copper production “in the Carajás region, a province rich in minerals essential for decarbonization and the global energy transition”.
Vale also states that the programme should “boost the processing of critical minerals to produce green steel (high quality iron ore) and metal for energy transition (copper), which are fundamental for reducing carbon emissions”. The corporate sector categorizes this steel production as “green” because it uses energy sources such as solar, wind, charcoal, and technologies that seek to reduce carbon gas emissions. This does not mean that such projects do not generate impacts on communities or on nature.
Copper exploration in the Amazon is already a reality experienced by communities in the municipality of Marabá, in the southeast of Pará state. According to Bruno Milanez, the Salobo Project mine, which belongs to Vale, is the largest in operation for copper extraction in Brazil. This metal can be used for “to manufacture equipment for the generation and storage of solar and wind energy, electric vehicles and batteries, in electrical networks, and in the production of hydrogen, nuclear and hydroelectric energy”, among others.
According to Fabrina Pontes Furtado, and Elisangela Paim, “the energy transition discourse seems to be part of the logic of socio-ecological modernization of capitalism”. For the researchers, this logic is presented in projects that say they are committed “to defending the environment, facing climate change and fighting poverty”, but are market-based and have technology as an end in itself.
In this sense, companies that already operate in the mining and energy sector, for example, begin to consider “new” forms of production and supply of minerals that meet a global wave of energy transition. “New” here is placed in quotation marks because we problematize such business practices around the exploitation of minerals that are being considered today as strategic and/or critical for the energy transition. “We’re not talking about an energy transition, we’re talking about an energy expansion. Previous types of energy production will continue to exist. But by inaugurating new sources of energy does not mean that we abandon those that already exist”, says Charles Trocate, member of the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (MAM), in an interview with the authors.
Mining never comes alone, it reproduces itself from other fundamental conditions, without which it may not exist with the intensity and power that it represents today.
We note, therefore, the Amazon as a large market of easy profit accumulation, a perspective that has been sustained since colonization: the region seen as pristine nature, without people, a source of inexhaustible resources, and now fundamental to saving the planet from climate change. And the people, so diverse, do not even have the right to self-designation. It is no coincidence that the Amazon is now the venue for the Thirtieth UN Conference on Climate Change, COP30.
Target of development policies based on an agro-export economy, the Amazon becomes the scene of conflicts of all orders: ethnic, cultural and territorial, motivated by the antagonism between ways of life, belonging, identities, relationship with nature and the exploitation models of large-scale projects, such as mineral exploration. According to Edna Maria Ramos de Castro:
What is at stake and now more explicit in government policies — including those of countries in the Amazon region — is the occupation of territories of the Pan-Amazon by the market, this immense region privileged by its tropical forest and rich mineral, hydric and biodiversity potential. These policies consider that the transport infrastructure will allow the physical connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific and, also, the incorporation of new territories into the land market. From this perspective, the region now occupies a central position in Brazilian and South American geopolitics, both by the states that conceive it as a strategic space for integration within a globalized economy, and by the increasing interests of large companies and corporations.
Large-scale projects cause “different violations and forms of disrespect for collective rights, all enshrined in international legislation, such as: the right to adequate food; the right to water and sanitation; the right to health; the right to housing...” all arrive with the same logic of action linked to government powers. In the Amazon, this characteristic of large-scale projects does not change at the climate emergency we’re facing. Many are the scenarios of environmental disasters, catastrophes, destruction of cities, repressions, evictions, expropriations, and seizure of territories.
It is important to highlight that mining never comes alone, it reproduces itself from other fundamental conditions, without which it may not exist with the intensity and power that it represents today. A large-scale project is the junction of several other required assets for the production and reproduction of capital: agribusiness, Infrastructure construction projects (railways, highways, ports, dams, waterways, etc.). Hence comes the massive migration of the male workforce and, as an offshoot, poverty, conflicts, violence, population increase, various disputes. It is the contradiction of what they call progress and sustainable development in the Amazon.
Continuous Exploration at All Costs for the Energy Transition in Pará
The state of Pará occupies a central position in discussions on climate, mining and now for the energy transition. Geography, biodiversity, the existence of traditional peoples and communities, as well as ways of life and resistance to the impacts of large-scale projects, make the state a landmark in the environmental discussion. That is why the COP30 is being held in Pará.
Located 458 kilometres from where the conference will take place, Marabá is a municipality in southeastern Pará with 112 years of existence, a population of 266,533 people and a total area of 15,127,872 km² (ten times larger than the city of São Paulo). As a resident of the city (one of the authors), the region is seen as an icon of exploitation in colonial standards due to the extractivism of rubber, animal skins, nuts, wood, gold, iron and now minerals of the energy transition.
In the early 2010s, the Salobo Project, a copper mining operation by the company Vale S.A., began operating in Marabá. At the same time, other minerals began to be exploited legally or illegally, a very common practice in Pará. In addition to sucking from nature every product that interests the market, mineral extractivism in capitalist standards shows no concern for life diversity.
The Salobo Project is located within the Tapirapé-Aquiri National Forest, a region known for the encounter of two important rivers, the Tocantins and the Itacaiúnas. The latter is in the vicinity of a dam built for containing tailings from the copper ore washing. Thus, a considerable negative impact is the tension and fear people have with the possibility of breaking the dam near the Itacaiúnas River.
Another important spot of extraction of ore in the city of Marabá occurs in the region of Negro River, where manganese is extracted, under the responsibility of the company Buritirama (outsourced to Vale S. A.). This has been discussed by various sectors of civil society, given the risks, disruption, and insecurity that affect daily life and the right to come and go of those who live in that region. Dust, mud, risks of accident, risk of the tailings dam breakage and internal conflicts are part of the list of mining impacts in this region.
This criminalization of people who resist the negative effects of mining is a common strategy used by third-party miners, service providers, and Vale S. A. itself.
In the thirteen years of mineral exploration by Buritirama company, many problems arose, starting with the difficult access to the villages that already existed on the outskirts of the manganese extraction area. After the mining activities began, there’s no longer any security to travel with any type of transport: car, motorcycle or bicycle.
On 20 February 2025, we held a conversation with women from areas affected by manganese exploitation in Maraba. According to them, in addition to the fear of traveling on the roads and or going elsewhere when needed, the company establishes a real terror in the community. Fear is installed once there are lawsuits against leaders who denounce these impacts.
This criminalization of people who resist the negative effects of mining is a common strategy used by third-party miners, service providers, and Vale S. A. itself. Currently, in the Negro River region of Maraba, thirteen people are being sued by the company. Those who feel the pains of the inhabitants are curtailed and persecuted. There are already many men and women penalized with lawsuits, denounced by companies that act under the logic of predatory extractivism in the Amazon. This practice has been adopted to intimidate people and ensure company’s permanence in mining regions. “The ongoing socio-environmental deregulation has been accompanied by various forms of violence, which go hand in hand with processes aimed at depoliticizing and criminalizing the affected, movements and groups engaged in resistance to mining, as well as critical researchers.”
Another serious problem is the increase in child and youth prostitution in regions with mining activities. These are areas with a strong male presence, the main workforce of these projects. Feminist literature speaks of “re-patriarchalization of territories” given the choice of companies to attract a large contingent of men to their crew of workers. Some consequences are: sexual violence, child prostitution, early pregnancy, significant number of single mothers, etc.
A report by Correio de Carajás newspaper from 2019 states that “an inquiry was established to investigate the increase in child prostitution in the Negro River road region, mainly in the villages of União, Santa Fé and Três Poderes”. The União village, with approximately 30 years of existence, is one of the busiest in the Negro River region. There are over 3,000 residents. Of those, a large part are male workers of the Buritirama mining company. The Correio de Carajás also affirms: “In the village, which has about 1,000 employees of the mining company Buritirama and its contractors, there are five brothels — three of them recently opened. Officially, only adult women work at the establishments, but residents and some merchants recognize that there are minors who are offered for selected clients.”
When talking about the particular impacts on women’s bodies, the example above may be the most cruel, but it is not the only one. There are other studies on minerals of the energy transition and violation of women’s rights in Brazil that reinforce this context. “The overload of domestic work and family care resulting from health issues caused by the projects, the violation and exploitation of the bodies of women and girls, the delegitimization, disqualification, and denial of women as political subjects, and the appropriation of gender issues by extractive corporations demonstrate how gender inequalities are reinforced by these types of investments.”
The cases aforementioned show that the mining activity happening in the Amazon is far from being something else. The manganese exploration by Buritirama company and the copper exploration in the Salobo Project, in Marabá, give us enough elements to reflect on the socio-environmental impacts of the exploration of so-called strategic minerals in the Amazon. Still, it allows us to reflect on the processes of resistance, denounces and mobilizations that still save many territories from the expansion of mining, which can be seen as a destructive activity. From the observed experiences, there is no way to establish a link between mining and sustainability, nor between mining and just energy transition.
Translated by Ana Júlia Guedes.
