“The World Must Know”: The Kayapó and the Belo Monte Dam

Two photos: an indigenous man in a feather headdress held by an armed police officer, and a woman carrying a small child pushing against a wall of riot shields

Two photographs from the Brazilian Amazon that went viral in 2015, and the much longer story of the Kayapó and the Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River.

In 2015 two pictures spread fast across social media. In one, a man wearing a feather headdress is gripped by an armed officer while other uniformed men run behind them. In the other, a small woman with a toddler on her hip leans her whole weight against a wall of riot shields. Shared together, they were captioned as indigenous protesters being beaten back from the Belo Monte dam.

The captions were wrong about the photos, but right that a struggle was going on. The woman-and-child picture was taken by Luiz Vasconcelos of the Manaus newspaper A Crítica on 10 March 2008, during a police eviction of squatters from private land near Manaus, and it won first prize for General News at the 2009 World Press Photo contest. The man in the headdress is reported to have been photographed at the same eviction. Neither shows Belo Monte. The dam fight itself was real, long and largely lost, and it is worth telling properly.

What Belo Monte is

Belo Monte is a hydroelectric complex on the Xingu, one of the great southern tributaries of the Amazon, in the state of Pará. Rather than one tall wall holding back a deep lake, it uses canals to divert most of the river away from a long loop known as the Volta Grande, or Big Bend, and send it through the turbines of the main powerhouse.

Its installed capacity is 11,233 megawatts, which makes it the second biggest power plant in Brazil and one of the five or six largest hydroelectric stations on Earth. That headline figure is misleading, though. The Xingu swings between flood and drought, and the plant's guaranteed average output is about 4,571 MW, roughly 39 per cent of capacity. International Rivers warned in 2012 that in the dry months it could fall to around 1,000 MW.

Construction licences were granted in 2011, the first turbines went online in May 2016, and the eighteenth and last main turbine was installed in November 2019. The plant is run by the Norte Energia consortium, in which the state-controlled Eletrobras group holds just under half.

A fight that began in the 1980s

The project is far older than the viral photos. The Brazilian government first put forward a dam at this site in the late 1980s as part of a much larger scheme for the Xingu basin; International Rivers calculated that the original five-dam plan would have flooded about 18,000 square kilometres.

The Kayapó, a Jê-speaking people of around 8,600 (2018) who live in villages across Pará and Mato Grosso, became the face of the opposition. Their recognised lands cover more than 11 million hectares, one of the largest protected tropical areas in the world. In 1989 Kayapó leaders, with the activist Paulinho Paiakan prominent among them, organised a multi-day gathering at Altamira, near the planned site. The most famous moment came when a woman named Tuíra held her machete against the face of the electricity company engineer José Antônio Muniz Lopes. The image travelled worldwide, the musician Sting appeared alongside Kayapó leaders, and international pressure helped shelve the plan.

Kayapó men in yellow feather headdresses with bows form a long dance line at an anti-dam protest in Piaraçu, 2006

Kayapó men in yellow feather headdresses, carrying bows, form a long dance line at a meeting in Piaraçu, Mato Grosso, in 2006, where about two hundred Mebêngôkre-Kayapó representatives spent five days discussing Belo Monte and other planned dams on their rivers. Photo by the anthropologist Terence Turner, distributed by Survival International.

Why the river mattered so much

The dam returned in a slimmer design in the 2000s as part of Brazil's Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC), which poured public money into roads, ports and power plants. Its defenders argued that a fast-growing economy needed clean electricity and that hydropower was better than coal or oil.

The people who lived on the Xingu saw it differently. According to International Rivers' 2012 fact sheet, the scheme would:

flood about 516 square kilometres and affect 1,522 square kilometres in total;
divert more than 80 per cent of the river's flow away from the Big Bend;
displace an officially estimated 19,000 people, a figure an independent expert review suggested could be twice as high;
draw more than 100,000 migrants to the region in search of work.

The Juruna and Arara peoples live on the Big Bend itself, and Wikipedia's summary of the project counts more than 25,000 people from 18 ethnic groups who depend on the Xingu basin. The river holds an estimated 600 fish species, some found nowhere else, and an independent panel of experts warned that the reduced flow risked the extinction of hundreds of them. For communities who eat fish almost every day, that is a food question as much as a conservation one.

A Kayapó elder, quoted by Survival International, summed up the campaign's message: "The world must know what is happening here."

Kayapó men in feather headdresses with clubs dance at a Belo Monte protest while camera crews film

Kayapó men in feather headdresses, holding clubs, dance at a demonstration against Belo Monte while television crews film. The photo is credited to Greenpeace and Survival International and dates from the protests of around 2009, when the dam's licensing was being pushed through.

Protests, courts and consultation

Large Kayapó-led protests in 2008 and 2009 delayed the project but did not stop it. After Norte Energia won the auction to build the plant in April 2010, the veteran Kayapó leader Raoni Metuktire warned: "There will be a war so the white man cannot interfere in our lands again." The war he meant was fought mostly in courtrooms and on the river banks.

Brazil's federal prosecutors in Pará filed at least ten civil lawsuits against the project. Judges suspended the auction, the licences or the works several times between 2010 and 2016, and each time a higher court overturned the ruling. One of the strongest decisions, in August 2012, halted work because indigenous peoples had not been properly consulted; the Supreme Federal Court reversed it within two weeks.

Internationally, the key moment came in April 2011, when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asked Brazil to suspend the project until it had held a free, prior, informed and culturally appropriate consultation with affected indigenous peoples, and to protect isolated groups from disease. Lack of that consent, guaranteed under international labour and human-rights standards that Brazil has signed, was the campaign's central legal argument. Construction continued.

What happened after the dam was built

Mongabay sent reporters to the Xingu in late 2016 and early 2017, after the plant had started generating. Their findings matched many of the warnings:

Estimates of people displaced ranged from at least 20,000 (International Rivers) to 50,000 (the local movement Xingu Vivo).
Flow along the Big Bend had fallen by about 80 per cent, and Juruna families said the fish they relied on had moved into deeper water or disappeared.
Altamira's population jumped from about 100,000 to 160,000 during construction; when the work ended, tens of thousands of jobs went with it, and violence and health problems followed.
Compensation paid to indigenous groups was linked to alcoholism and feuds, and a federal prosecutor sued Norte Energia for "ethnocide", an accusation the company denies.

Cost figures vary widely depending on the date and what is counted. Mongabay used about US$6 billion, International Rivers more than US$16 billion, and recent tallies including transmission lines approach US$18.5 billion. Next to the Big Bend, a Canadian company's plan for Brazil's largest industrial gold mine, Belo Sun, was halted by a federal court in December 2017 for lack of indigenous consultation, and the dispute over it has continued since.

Common misunderstandings

"The photos show Belo Monte protesters"

They do not. They come from an eviction near Manaus in 2008, hundreds of kilometres away. Using them in 2015 made a real story look staged to people who checked, which helped no one.

"It would flood nine million hectares"

That number circulated widely but is far too high. The engineered reservoirs are measured in hundreds of square kilometres, not tens of thousands; the deeper damage comes from drying out the Big Bend.

"Hydropower is automatically green"

Dams produce little carbon once they are running, but in the tropics flooded forest can release methane, and the social cost of moving river communities is easy to leave out of the accounts. Belo Monte has become a standard case study for that debate.

How to follow and support the issue today

The Kayapó and their neighbours still face illegal gold mining, logging and pressure on their territories, and leaders who speak out have been threatened. Reliable ways to keep informed include Survival International, International Rivers and Brazilian outlets such as the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA). Reading the original reporting, checking that photographs are captioned correctly before sharing them, and supporting organisations led by indigenous people themselves all do more good than passing on a dramatic image with the wrong story attached.

Sources: Wikipedia: Belo Monte Dam; Wikipedia: Kayapo people; World Press Photo: Luiz Vasconcelos, 2009 General News; International Rivers fact sheet, May 2012; AIDA, 4 April 2011; Mongabay, February 2018; Survival International: Belo Monte. Photos: Luiz Vasconcelos / A Crítica; Terence Turner / Survival International; Greenpeace / Survival International. Story first circulated via True Activist.

More from the archive: