SUMAÚMA Journalism

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Luciana Gatti, principal researcher at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, where she coordinates the Greenho...
13/07/2026

Luciana Gatti, principal researcher at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, where she coordinates the Greenhouse Gas Laboratory, is now Luciana Gatti, pre-candidate running under the Socialism and Liberty Party to represent São Paulo as a federal deputy.

Luciana was harassed by the Bolsonaro administration and attacked by the administration of São Paulo's Bolsonarist governor, Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicanos party). None of this stopped her. “If I were to keep my mouth shut, I would lose respect for myself. And then it wouldn't be worth it to keep living. I decided to honor my values, what I believe, what I think our role is.”

The scientist speaks with the urgency of someone who knows we are running behind. “Congress is deciding that many more Brazilians will die. Deforestation is accelerating climate change, it's increasing extreme events in Brazil", she explains. “It's impossible for us to watch the Congress of the absurd, of ignorance, and stay in our little corner working with science,” she says with exasperation.

She frequently repeats data and facts as if trying to ensure they will not escape the person she is talking to. She is critical of her own profession. “A scientist has to put themselves in a position of giving back [knowledge to society]. Are we doing this? In the area of climate change, this can be a moral obligation – because the people who understand climate change have better chances of surviving.”

Read the full interview with Luciana Gatti by Rafael Moro Martins at sumauma.com
Link in bio.

English translation: Sarah J. Johnson

https://sumauma.com/en/luciana-gatti-o-congresso-esta-decidindo-que-muito-mais-brasileiros-vao-morrer/

The visit of the far right’s expected presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro to Altamira this week is a reminder that t...
16/06/2026

The visit of the far right’s expected presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro to Altamira this week is a reminder that the climate and nature crisis has put extractivism at the forefront of ever more extreme politics.

Less than half a year before the national poll, the son of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a prison term for attempting to stage a coup, is rallying support from loggers, miners, land-grabbers and farmers in one of the mostly heavily deforested areas of the Amazon rainforest.

The choice of location appears as much symbolic as anything else. Given his father’s previous record here, Flávio Bolsonaro was already virtually guaranteed to get a majority of votes in this vast municipality, which is bigger than almost half of the world’s nations. But a high-profile stop here sends a clear signal that if elected, he will give a green light to accelerated destruction in the name of economic growth. That would mean reversing the policies of the current Lula government, which has slowed Amazon forest clearance to its lowest level in a decade and given indigenous representatives more of a say in the heart of government.

Read the editorial written by Jonathan Watts on sumauma.com/en

The gold mine that Canadian multinational Belo Sun plans to install at the edge of the Xingu River, in the Amazonian sta...
08/05/2026

The gold mine that Canadian multinational Belo Sun plans to install at the edge of the Xingu River, in the Amazonian state of Pará, is much bigger than Brazilian regulators have been told, SUMAÚMA can reveal.

On April 14, the company was given a license from the state of Pará to install what would be Brazil’s largest open-pit gold mine, giving it permission to clear 600 hectares of forest. Yet an analysis done by SUMAÚMA of the documents the mining company shared with its foreign investors indicates there could be even greater damage. The company told shareholders it will mine twice as much gold as in its filings to authorities in Pará. This suggests the license obtained now is just the start of a much more aggressive mining plan.

“Belo Sun is telling the government the dam will be much smaller than what it is telling investors. I have never seen such a big contradiction,” SUMAÚMA heard from Steven Emerman, a retired Utah Valley University professor and a mining consultant who analyzes mining projects for non-profit organizations. In 2020, he examined the Belo Sun mine at the request of non-governmental organization Amazon Watch. Emerman was surprised by the documents obtained by SUMAÚMA, which showed different numbers for the license than the ones shared with investors.

If the plans announced to investors become a reality, the Belo Sun tailings dam would be nearly eight times bigger than the Vale dam in Brumadinho. It would be also bigger than the dam that failed in Mariana, Minas Gerais, in 2015, killing 19 people, wiping out 240 hectares of forest, and leaving over 29,000 fish dead, impacting over 600 kilometers of the Doce River.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

By Eliane Brum Belo Sun is moving forward in SUMAÚMA’s home territory. Our team, committed to life, justice, and the rig...
05/05/2026

By Eliane Brum

Belo Sun is moving forward in SUMAÚMA’s home territory. Our team, committed to life, justice, and the rights of human and other-than-human people, has endeavored to understand and expose what is about to happen. And when we understand, parts of us freeze up, because it is too horrifying, too sordid, too cynical. It is deadly.

When we understand, we must join forces so horror does not paralyze us, because we live here. Ever since Belo Monte, we have known a pain that defies description, the pain of seeing islands set ablaze, the river blocked by tons of concrete, animals dying, fish spawning on dry land, and Ribeirinhos damned to death, their suffering labeled with the names of medically recognized diseases. But we know—oh, how we know it—that they are dying of horror. “Everything is dark… I see nothing but darkness… the hole in my life… the hole in my life…,” said João Pereira da Silva after his first stroke and before his second.

Trying to understand how a transnational company like Belo Sun operates is indeed about darkness, a black hole. Anyone can invest in the mining company, which is listed on the Toronto stock exchange in Canada. But we only get a name when the individual or group of investors comes to hold more than 10% of the shares or when they are part of the company’s own management team. Right now, the only shareholder detaining this percentage that appears on company documents is the La Mancha group, an investment advising firm focused on gold and energy transition metals, which also does not reveal its clients. This means we don’t even know the names of our killers.

Read the editorial written by Eliane Brum on sumauma.com/en

It is not a lack of influence on life in the communities of Caxiuanã, as is evident from what the station’s apprentice w...
28/04/2026

It is not a lack of influence on life in the communities of Caxiuanã, as is evident from what the station’s apprentice workers and what teachers say, nor is it a lack of will, as is shown by the effort to continue the research being done by Lola, Leandro, and Kaleb. What threatens the future of the Ferreira Penna Science Station is something harder to tackle: a failure by successive governments to invest in science, especially in the Amazon.

Among roofs in need of fixing, boats that depend on diesel, and experiments that take decades to provide responses, Caxiuanã is surviving thanks to the persistence of the people working and researching there. At a time when the Amazon is at the center of the climate and biodiversity debate, the destiny of a research station deep in the Marajó Archipelago helps to uncover a bigger contradiction: the answers to understanding and protecting the Forest exist, but the efforts to keep searching for them are not always given the necessary means.

In Caxiuanã, the rain keeps falling on the Forest. Now, with the plastic roof from the experiment no longer there, it is again reaching the ground, leaves, and roots with more strength. Yet for science to keep listening to what the water reveals about the Amazon’s future, something more ordinary is needed: money to keep research from grinding to a halt.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

By Plínio Lopes

Have no doubts about this threat. A Canadian company named Belo Sunwants to inaugurate what they proclaim to be Brazil’s...
27/04/2026

Have no doubts about this threat. A Canadian company named Belo Sunwants to inaugurate what they proclaim to be Brazil’s largest open-pit gold mine. Where? In the Amazon Forest. In the biome that creates rain and regulates the climate, the biome already so devastated by deforestation, cattle grazing, gold mining, and monocultures such as soybeans that parts of it are now at the point of no return. But where exactly in the Amazon? In the Volta Grande, one of the Amazon’s most biodiverse regions—the “Big Bend” where the Xingu curves hard for 130 kilometers, a place home to at least three Indigenous peoples as well as communities of Ribeirinhos and small-hold farmers. Why do you feel like you’ve heard this name before? Ever since the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant came onstream in 2016, Volta Grande has made the news quite often because the area has been undergoing ecocide.

As we know, it is not enough to wait for those in charge to do the right thing for the common good—they have to be pressured. For more than a month, Indigenous people occupied the headquarters of the Indigenous agency Funai in Altamira, the hub of the region that would be hit by Belo Sun. Xikrin women brandished machetes, replicating the gesture of Tuire, the Kayapó warrior who fought Belo Monte. In 1989, her image went viral—and delayed Belo Monte by at least 20 years. “Akato Belo Sun!”, the Xikrin shout—“Out, Belo Sun!”

In a struggle that belongs to everyone, leaving Indigenous women to fight this battle alone is not enough, nor is it decent. Where are the rest of the Brazilian people? Where are the Canadian people? Where are the activists of the world? Most battles for the Amazon have been lost—but this one can be won. For that, we need global engagement.

Read the editorial written by Eliane Brum on sumauma.com/en

Zé Roxo, as José Pereira de Araújo was known, was a Black man, tall and thin, with dark eyes and dark hair, whose light ...
14/04/2026

Zé Roxo, as José Pereira de Araújo was known, was a Black man, tall and thin, with dark eyes and dark hair, whose light voice had a smooth tone. Over his lifetime, he worked as a carpenter, a farmer, and a fisher to help feed his family. Zé was a dreamer, a leader beloved by the people of Belo Monte 1, a village in Anapu, a municipality in the Middle Xingu region. After he passed away, a square, the first in the community, was named in his honor: José Pereira de Araújo – Zé Roxo Square. It has a playground, a slide, see-saws, exercise equipment, gray benches, colorful trash bins, and a statue made of cement and washed sand.

The statue is of a fisher. There is a peacock bass on the line of the black rod he holds in his hand. His skin is white, pale, grayish. Black lettering on his left sleeve spells out a word in English: “fishing.”

Initially, the idea was the monument to the fisher would represent the community. A decision was later made to name the square after Zé Roxo. His son, Ilcinei Bento Ferreira, hoped the monument would show his father with his granddaughter. But the statue of the man has nothing to do with Zé. Even the color of his skin is different.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

“Lula is wrong to give in to blackmail by Indigenous groups” reads the headline of the editorial published by the news d...
17/03/2026

“Lula is wrong to give in to blackmail by Indigenous groups” reads the headline of the editorial published by the news daily O Globo. “Lula gives in to lawlessness and halts infrastructure projects,” says the Folha de S.Paulo headline, while O Estado de S. Paulo labels the government “cowardly.”

Brazil’s three major papers were responding to the decision by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party, to revoke a decree authorizing technical studies related to private concessions of waterways on the Tapajós, Madeira, and Tocantins rivers. The reversal was a victory for 14 Indigenous peoples of the Amazon who for over a month had been protesting the privatization of these rivers in Santarém, Pará, camped out next to the port terminal belonging to US multinational soy giant Cargill. Companies that have transformed the largest tropical rainforest on the planet into fields for soybean monoculture want to privatize these waterways to facilitate the shipping of their production.

In the penultimate paragraph of their editorials, both O Globo and Folha offer a similar caveat. O Globo, Rio de Janeiro’s main paper, says: “Representatives of Indigenous peoples have every right to oppose a government decree and present their demands. There is no reason the terms of the project should not be discussed. This is healthy for society. But it is intolerable to invade property and practice vandalism against companies that are vital to the success of Brazil’s thriving agribusiness sector.” According to Folha, São Paulo’s leading paper, “It is legitimate for traditional communities to demand prior consultation and express their concerns with food security and the ecosystem. However, these demands should be submitted through democratic channels and not by threatening assets vital to agribusiness.”

There are many ways to interpret these quite similar editorials by Brazil’s three major papers, which are also surprising because the tone is a few notches more shrill than their usual liberal content.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

By Eliane Brum

Back when he was a kid, in the 1980s, Aildo Viana dos Santos, 49, used to play with his friends along the Trombetas Rive...
10/03/2026

Back when he was a kid, in the 1980s, Aildo Viana dos Santos, 49, used to play with his friends along the Trombetas River, in Oriximiná, in western Pará, Brazil. But at the sight of a strange boat, they would all run into the woods. Mistrusting strangers is a good night mum mum memory that has been reproduced for generations. His nineteenth century ancestors’ worries came from the various incursions by troops from what was at that time the Empire of Brazil, sent to recapture enslaved Black fugitives. During the business-military dictatorship (1964-1985), his parents watched as their territory was usurped by the government and handed over to mining companies. His and his children’s generations are suffering the consequences of Nature’s destruction. And his grandchildren see their culture and way of living with the Forest being threatened – without ever being listened to.

With an eye on expanding the company’s mines in the Trombetas River region, the home to 15 Quilombola communities, the Mineração Rio do Norte mining company employs practices that can relativize a fundamental right, enshrined in a treaty signed by Brazil: free, prior, and informed consultation and consent of the populations affected by any project with socioenvironmental impact. The company, which has operated in the region since 1979, wants to expand its mines and, to do this, it promotes measures that would not fulfill a fundamental precept of the International Labour Organization Convention 169, of which Brazil is a signatory. And it has relied on consent from federal agencies. Those were the findings of an investigation done by SUMAÚMA with the support of the International Center for Journalists’ Disarming Disinformation initiative.

In visits to the region’s Quilombola and Ribeirinho communities, in August of this year, our reporters saw how the presence of this global mining company, in which Switzerland’s Glencore, Great Britain’s Rio Tinto, and Australia’s South32 hold shares, harms Forest preserved over centuries by local populations.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

By Hyury Potter

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