The River Isn't a Road: Lula's Betrayal on the Tapajós

Since January 22, fourteen Indigenous peoples of the Lower and Middle Tapajós have been blockading Cargill's grain terminal in Santarém, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. Their number has swollen to over 1,200 — Munduruku arriving by boat from upstream, Kayapó and Panará traveling from the Xingu basin, peoples whose territories are separated by hundreds of kilometres united by a single demand: revoke Decree 12,600/2025.

That decree, signed quietly by the Lula government in August 2025, inserted stretches of the Tapajós, Madeira, and Tocantins rivers into Brazil's National Privatization Program. The official euphemism is "maintenance of navigability." What that means on the ground is industrial dredging — tearing up the riverbed across 250 kilometres between Itaituba and Santarém at a cost of R$61.8 million — to allow massive grain barges to operate around the clock. The river as logistics corridor. The Tapajós as Cargill's private highway.

In response, the federal government escalated security at the Port of Santarém to Level II, integrating the Federal Police with the Batalhão de Missões Especiais, an elite Pará state police unit. When protesters on four boats intercepted a Cargill barge on the river this week — jumping into the water, boarding the vessel, unfurling signs reading "O Tapajós não está à venda" — the Federal Police were there. Protecting the grain, not the people.

This is the contradiction Lula cannot talk his way out of.

His government created a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. His government attended COP30 and promised the world that Brazil was the firewall against Amazon destruction. His minister Sônia Guajajara is herself Indigenous. And yet: the decree was signed without free, prior, and informed consultation with the communities who live on these rivers — a clear violation of ILO Convention 169, which Brazil has ratified. The government signed first and scheduled consultations after. As Munduruku leader Alessandra Korap, Goldman Environmental Prize winner, put it: that is not consultation. That is legitimizing a decision already made.

The government's partial concession — suspending the dredging tender — hasn't moved the occupation. "Suspensão não é anulação," the movement has been repeating, patiently, for weeks. Suspension means the project restarts the moment the pressure drops. It is a tactical retreat, not a political reversal.

What's at stake goes beyond the Tapajós. Decree 12,600 is the operational logic of the Arco Norte — the northern export corridor designed to move Brazilian soy to global markets faster and cheaper. In Itaituba alone, a survey by Terra de Direitos found 41 ports in planning, construction, or operation — double the number recorded in 2013 — mostly unlicensed, mostly serving grain exporters, mostly built without consulting anyone. Cargill installed the region's first cargo port in 2003. The infrastructure has been metastasizing ever since.

The Panará people who traveled from Mato Grosso to join this blockade carry a specific history: the Cuiabá–Santarém highway construction killed 66 percent of their population, according to Brazil's National Truth Commission. They know exactly what infrastructure projects without consultation look like in the long run. They are not being nostalgic. They are being precise.

The protesters occupying Cargill's terminal have blocked the BR-163, blocked access to Santarém's international airport, and now boarded a grain barge on the Tapajós itself. Each escalation is a response to government inaction. Each response from the government has been to send more police.

Auricélia Arapiuns, the movement's most visible voice, said it plainly from a boat on the river as police blocked her people from approaching:

"The Federal Police protects Cargill, protects agribusiness, but doesn't protect those who protect the river."

There is nothing ambiguous about that sentence. The Federal Police of a government that ran on environmental protection is guarding the boats of a US agribusiness multinational against the people who have been living from this river for generations. That's not a policy contradiction. It is a policy choice.

The Tapajós is not a road. It is a living system — a source of food, of cultural memory, of ecological balance that extends far beyond Santarém or even the Amazon basin. Every species of fish in those waters, every community downstream, every fishing family whose livelihood depends on the river's health exists in a relationship with the river that cannot be privatized, dredged, or securitized away without consequence.

The movement will continue, they say, until the decree is revoked. Not suspended. Not reviewed. Revoked.

Lula has a decision to make. He can be the president who protected the Amazon, or he can be the president who handed it to Cargill. He is currently trying to be both. That is the one thing, on the Tapajós at least, that the river will not allow.

Auricélia Arapiuns is a leader of the Arapiuns people and spokesperson for the Conselho Indígena Tapajós Arapiuns (CITA), the body representing 14 peoples of the Lower Tapajós.