Checking in with our partners in Maranhão
Guadalupe Rodríguez, Felipe Duran and Klaus Schenck are in Brazil on behalf of Rainforest Rescue to touch base with our partner organizations. Here is their report on the visits in the state of Maranhão. The final stop on their journey will be the the Peoples’ Summit, which will take place alongside the COP30 World Climate Conference in mid-November in Belém in the Amazon region.
November 1, 2025
We want Tauá-Mirim to be a protected area
“We want to stay in our territory in the rainforest”, explains Rosana from the village of Taim. “The government and companies must put nature and people first. We protect the rainforest and mangroves, the water sources and the nature spirits, the ‘encantados’. Our territory of Tauá-Mirim is the green lung of São Luís.”
What Rosana means becomes starkly clear on the way to Tauá-Mirim. From São Luís, the capital of the Brazilian state of Maranhão on the Atlantic, we drive along a highway through an apocalyptic hellscape. Nothing remains of the Amazon rainforest.
Instead, the road passes ironworks, iron ore terminals and loading ports, an aluminum refinery with vast basins full of toxic red mud, storage and loading facilities for soy, corn and eucalyptus pulp, a coal-fired power plant, storage tanks for gasoline and diesel, enormous halls of the fertilizer industry, mining operations for sand and gravel, huge service stations and truck stops. Everything is littered with garbage, construction rubble, scorched earth and toxic dust.
The consequences of raw material consumption
Brazil is one of the world’s most important raw material suppliers. Our consumption and lifestyle are based on the exploitation of natural resources and of the people who live there. Now the industrial and port belt along the huge São Marcos Bay on the Atlantic is advancing right up to the edge of Tauá-Mirim and threatens to swallow the area. A regasification plant, where liquefied natural gas (LNG) is to be converted back into its gaseous state, is one of the projects planned there.
In the village of Taim, the residents welcome us with fresh fruit and juices, and for lunch they serve rice with fish and açaí porridge. For 22 years, they have been fighting for the Brazilian government to place the 16,000-hectare rainforest and mangrove area of Tauá-Mirim under protection as a so-called Reserva Extrativista (RESEX). In Brazil, this official protected area category combines nature conservation with the rights and customary uses of traditional peoples and communities. In the EU, it would roughly correspond to a biosphere reserve and, at the international level, to a “protected area with sustainable use of natural resources”.
“Our territory of Tauá-Mirim is the green lung of São Luís, the capital of the Brazilian state of Maranhão on the Atlantic.”
The roughly 2,000 families in twelve villages in Tauá-Mirim collect crabs and shellfish in the mangroves, catch fish with small cast nets and fish traps, harvest the fruits of açaí (Euterpe oleracea) and buriti palms (Mauritia flexuosa) in the rainforest, and grow cassava, vegetables and tropical fruit on small plots for their own needs.
Rainforest Rescue is supporting the initiative with the petition “Protect the mangroves and tropical forests of Tauá-Mirim”. Together, we are now considering how to deliver the petition to the government in the coming days in a way that will create the greatest public impact: In the capital Brasília, in São Luís and in the context of the COP30 UN climate conference in Belém, politicians often only react to public pressure and scrutiny.
October 31, 2025
Meeting with partner organizations in São Luís
Today we met with nine of our partner organizations in the state of Maranhão. The Catholic Indigenous Council CIMI made its office in the capital São Luís available to us for the meeting. Together with a total of 22 people, we discussed our joint work, the activities and projects we support with donations, and our ongoing cooperation and strategies.
Our work is successful because we have brought together a network of partner organizations that complement each other well and carry out trustworthy, coordinated and effective work to protect human rights and the environment.
The main threats are the expansion of agribusiness and the mining industry for the export of raw materials, and major energy and infrastructure projects such as the construction of highways, freight railways and export ports.
One issue affecting all the supported groups is the massive use of pesticides – herbicides, insecticides and fungicides – by agribusiness. Aerial spraying by drones and cropduster aircraft is particularly serious because it contaminates large areas. Many of the chemicals used are banned in the European Union because they are considered particularly harmful to the environment or hazardous to health. Our partners say that chemical warfare is being waged against the people to harm them, starve them out and drive them off their land.
The environmentally and socially friendly alternative is agroecology: small-scale, diverse agriculture without chemicals, combining agroforestry systems and permaculture.
October 30, 2025
Visit to the Indigenous Akroá-Gamella
Our arrival at the Akroá-Gamella Indigenous people is delayed because we spend a long time stuck in traffic jams at construction sites. Over dozens of kilometers, the highways ruined by massive truck traffic are being rebuilt and widened. Heavy trucks with nine axles and a length of 26 meters haul soy, corn and tropical timber in endless convoys from the interior of the country to the Atlantic ports of São Luís, while fuels, fertilizers and pesticides are transported in the opposite direction.
We only reach the Akroá-Gamella after dark, where they welcome us to their territory with dances and songs. In this way, they attune the forest spirits to our visit. They then call us to join the dance and become part of the group. For Indigenous peoples, the focus is always on collective, not the individual, and decisions are made together in assemblies.
We spend the night in the house of the Indigenous leader Kum’tum in the village of Cajueiro Piraí. It lies on a former large estate that the Akroá-Gamella have occupied. There, in August, they hosted a three-day assembly of the Peoples’ Network (Teia dos Povos) of Maranhão, attended by one thousand participants from various Indigenous peoples and Afro-Brazilian Quilombola communities. Rainforest Rescue supported the gathering with donations.
The next morning we gather for a conversation that begins with a dance and song: “We Akroá-Gamella are among the Indigenous peoples that the Brazilian government’s policies of integration and assimilation sought to wipe out,” Kum’tum reports.
Reclaiming stolen lands
“After a long period of silence, we began organizing in the 1990s. In 2014, the state Indigenous authority FUNAI began demarcating our land of Taquaritiua, but the process has not made much headway. For several years now, we have been reclaiming stolen lands. Land cannot be bought, it does not belong to us – rather, we belong to the land.”
The Indigenous people tell us about the constant attacks, harassment, hatred and violence they face. They too suffer from aerial pesticide spraying. Logging companies plunder the valuable trees, sand and gravel are extracted from the rivers as construction materials, their land is taken over by agribusiness, commercial enterprises and infrastructure projects, and used as a dumping ground for the waste of two neighboring towns.
A questionable visit by the federal police
Then we have to interrupt the meeting. In the neighboring village of Centro do Antero, the Brazilian federal police have appeared with three off-road vehicles and armed officers. We all drive there immediately. The senior officer explains that they have come as friends and that they are following up complaints by the Akroá-Gamella against the electricity company Equatorial. “The company is laying a high-voltage power line through our land without having consulted us and without our consent,” a leader explains.
Doubts soon arise about the intentions of the federal police. They cannot present an operational order, nor are they in a position to collect evidence or take witness statements – they only want to “inspect” the area.
The Indigenous community members discuss among themselves that it is quite possible that the officers are only there to find out how they react, how access to the village works, what the area looks like and who their leaders are. In the end, the officers drive off again to inspect the construction of a gas station that is being built illegally on Akroá-Gamella land.
At the end of our meeting, the Akroá-Gamella serve grilled fish. Then we have to pack our things and return to São Luís – through construction zones and endless convoys of trucks.
October 29, 2025
Healthy diversity instead of industrial monocultures
Together with our partner organization ACESA (Association for Health Education and Agriculture), we travel to the village of Centro da Josina in the interior of Maranhão. At the home of the smallholder farming family of Elizangela and Reinaldo Furtado, we are welcomed with coffee, fruit and fresh juice.
Then we start a tour of the 11-hectare property. “I used to work on a soy farm”, recalls Reinaldo. “But I soon realized how harmful monocultures and the use of pesticides, mineral fertilizers and genetic engineering are for people and nature.”
So he returned to his village and, with advice from ACESA, began to cultivate the land. Today he works with agroecological and agroforestry methods – without chemicals and artificial fertilizers.
He combines the cultivation of annual crops such as corn, cassava and vegetables with bananas, fruit trees, palms and valuable tropical hardwoods, which is highly productive. The different plants strengthen and protect each other and make optimal use of the soil, nutrients and light. There are no monocultures here, and the various crops are constantly rotated. Chickens and fish farming in ponds round out the family’s diet. He only needs half of his small farm to cover his family’s needs and livelihood; the other half lies fallow.
For more than ten years, ACESA has also been working with women in the village. They make use of the stands of babassu palms in the area. Their fruits, seeds, trunks and fronds have a very wide range of uses – from food to cosmetics, medicine, handicrafts and building materials. The fruits are pressed for oil and processed into flour for human consumption. The shells are used as charcoal for cooking and for handicrafts, the fronds for roofing and the trunks for timber.
“In the past, we were ashamed of being babassu collectors. Now we are proud of it,” explains the farmer Maria Senhora.
Ten women from the village have joined forces for this work, meet weekly and jointly process and sell the harvest and the products they make from it. “We now also use the leaves of the banana plants. We use them to make the covers of notebooks”, says her colleague Dona Oneide. They have arranged their products on a table in front of the house.
“We have helped the women become visible and independent,” says Didí Alves of ACESA. His organization works in the area in almost 30 villages in six municipalities. The most serious problems there are pesticide spraying, land grabbing by large landowners and agribusinesses, and the destruction of water sources.
October 28, 2025
We will not be beaten by agribusiness
The people from the village of Alegria in the interior of the state of Maranhão gave us a warm welcome. It lies in the municipality of Timbiras, a region where the Amazon rainforest transitions into the Cerrado savannahs.
For four years now, Rainforest Rescue has been supporting the village’s smallholder farmers through our partner, the Pastoral Land Commission CPT. Altogether, CPT works with around 360 families in twenty communities in the municipality of Timbiras.
“We have been working in the area for four years, thanks to donations from Rainforest Rescue,” explains Antonia Calixto of CPT. “First, together with the residents, we drew up maps showing the locations of the villages and how the land is used. This is vital for taking action against land grabbing and illegal deforestation.”
The first logging and agribusiness companies and land speculators had arrived in the region a year earlier. They began felling valuable tropical trees such as ipê and massaranduba and buying up land. They cleared the plundered remnants of forest using slash-and-burn. Then they planted tropical pasture grass, capim. In a few years, they will likely sow corn or soy there. Further south, in the municipality of Balsas, soy monocultures are already spreading everywhere.
The chemical warfare against the people must end
“A pesticide drone flew over me and sprayed me with agrochemicals. The poison burned my skin”, explains a smallholder farmer, showing us his damaged skin. “Since then, I have been unable to work or earn a living.”
What the people tell us is horrific. They say that agribusiness is waging chemical warfare against them. Aircraft and drones spray the landscape with chemicals. Everything is poisoned and dies: the trees, the corn, the banana, cassava and vegetable crops of smallholders, the water sources and streams. The apparent goal is to force people to give up, drive them off their land and buy it up cheaply, then turn it into cattle pastures, soy monocultures or eucalyptus plantations.
Because the municipality has now banned aerial pesticide spraying, drones now fly under cover of darkness. It is practically impossible to film the drones or to prove who is flying them and who is behind the chemical attacks. The people have filed complaints with a number of ministries and authorities, but the spraying continues. The smallholders suspect that judges are complicit with agribusiness.
Yet they do not want to give up or be driven away. Their cooperation with CPT, our support and our visit give them hope. With legal advice from CPT, the people of Timbiras have sued the agribusiness company Maratá for land grabbing. They have succeeded: a court ruling returned 1,700 hectares of land that the company had violently taken from them.
After a shared lunch of fish, beans and rice, they gave us a woven basket of local products as a thank-you gift: babassu biscuits, babassu flour and soap made from babassu oil, and necklaces of babassu shells and forest fruits.
To round off the day, we walked together into the rainforest that the residents have conserved. There they show us a spring that continues to flow and provide clean drinking water even now, in the middle of the dry season.
Agro e Fogo network, Catholic Indigenous Council CIMI Maranhão, Pastoral Council of Fisherfolk CPP, Pastoral Land Commission CPT Maranhão, Justiça nos Trilhos, RAMA – Rede de Agroecologia do Maranhão network, Agroecological Women’s Network, Study Group on Development, Modernity and Environment GEDMMA, Tauá-Mirim Initiative