SÃO PAULO, Brazil (AP) — When Alessandra Korap was born in the mid-1980s, her indigenous village in the Brazilian Amazon jungle was a haven of isolation. But as she grew older, the nearby city of Itaituba, with its bustling streets and commercial activity, drew ever closer.
His village was not the only one feeling the intrusion of non-indigenous outsiders. Two major federal highways led the way for tens of thousands of settlers, illegal gold miners and loggers to the region’s vast indigenous territories, which cover an area of forest about the size of Belgium.
The arrivals posed a serious threat to the Munduruku people of Korap, a group of 14,000 people scattered throughout the Tapajos River Basin, in the states of Para and Mato Grosso. Soon illegal mining, hydroelectric dams, a major railway and river ports for the export of soybeans choked their land, land for which they were still trying to win legal recognition.
Korap and other Munduruku women took responsibility for defending their people, upending traditional male leadership. They organized their communities to orchestrate demonstrations, presented evidence of environmental crimes to the Federal Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Police, and steadfastly opposed incentives and illicit deals offered to the Munduruku by unscrupulous politicians, corporations, loggers, and miners who wanted access to to his land.
Korap’s work in defense of his ancestral lands was recognized Monday with the Goldman Environmental Prize. The award recognizes grassroots activists around the world dedicated to protecting the environment and championing sustainability.
“This award is an opportunity to draw attention to the demarcation of the Sawre Muybu territory,” Korap told The Associated Press. “That is our top priority, along with expelling illegal miners.”
Sawre Muybu is an area of virgin forest along the Tapajos River, which extends 178,000 hectares (440,000 acres). Official recognition of the area, or demarcation, began in 2007 but was frozen during the presidency of far-right Jair Bolsonaro, which ended in January.
Still, the Munduruku celebrated a victory in 2021 when British mining company Anglo American gave up trying to work on indigenous lands in Brazil, like Sawre Muybu.
Studies have shown that forests controlled by indigenous peoples are the best preserved in the Brazilian Amazon.
Almost half of the climate pollution in Brazil comes from deforestation. The destruction is already so extensive that the eastern Amazon, near where the Munduruku live, has ceased to be a carbon dioxide sink to start producing that gas, according to a study published in 2021 in the journal Nature.
Korap, however, knows that land rights are not enough to protect it.
In the neighboring Munduruku Indigenous Territory, illegal miners have destroyed and polluted hundreds of miles of river to search for gold, even though it gained official recognition in 2004.
Now Brazil’s new government has created the country’s first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, and recently launched operations to oust miners. But Korap remains skeptical of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. Her actions seem contradictory to her, and she points out that while she defends the protection of forests, she also closes deals with other countries to sell more beef and soybeans, the country’s main exports and major drivers of deforestation.
“When Lula travels abroad, he sits with rich people and not with defenders of the forests. A Ministry is useless if the government negotiates our land without acknowledging that we are here,” she noted.
This year’s edition of the Goldman Environmental Prize also recognized other people:
— Tero Mustonen, university professor and environmental activist from Finland, who led the purchase of state-sponsored peatlands damaged by industrial activity.
— Delima Silalahi, a Batak woman from North Sumatra, Indonesia, who organized indigenous communities across the country to defend their rights to traditional forests.
—Chilekwa Mumba, a Zambian community organizer who has fought before the British High Court to obtain compensation for residents harmed by copper mining.
—Zafer Kizilkaya, from Turkey, conservation photographer and maritime conservationist who established the first community-managed protected area in the Mediterranean.
—Diane Wilson, captain of a shrimping boat that won a landmark case against petrochemical giant Formosa Plastics over a plastic waste spill on the Texas Gulf Coast.
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Isabella O’Malley contributed from Philadelphia.
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