"Mine of blood - Report on the Belo Sun mining project", 29 June 2023

...ARTICULATION OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF BRAZIL - APIB, an indigenous organisation representing and defending the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil, through its legal counsel, presents the technical report on the Belo Sun mining project in the Volta Grande do Xingu region, in Pará, which is one of the main threats to the Environmental Rights of Indigenous Peoples on their lands recognised by the Federal Constitution of 1988.

...[O]ur objective with this document is to dispute a technical and political narrative that places indigenous peoples at the centre of the debate on mining, as we have witnessed several violations of fundamental rights resulting from this economic activity....

...[I]n the context of climate change to which we are subjected, it is essential to reconsider the economic development model chosen by our country....

...[T]he installation of Brazil's largest open-pit gold mine in the heart of the Amazon rainforest is evidently unfeasible, since the Volta Grande do Xingu region, as well as the traditional communities that subsist on resources from the Xingu River, are already experiencing a serious humanitarian crisis resulting from the impacts of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant....

...If it proceeds, the mining project in question will certainly jeopardise the fulfilment of the climate agreements assumed by Brazil, undermining once and for all its alleged environmental protagonism. There is a flagrant violation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and it is clear that Belo Sun did not fulfil the environmental protection requirements throughout the environmental licensing procedure of the project, and the works were embargoed by the judiciary....

...Thus, it is necessary for the Brazilian State to make a change in its neo-developmentalist policies, as they have proven to violate Human Rights, especially of indigenous peoples, and it is no longer tolerable to watch episodes that go back to a recent history of genocide and ethnocide caused by these enterprises....

...[A]... Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil vehemently repudiates the Belo Sun mining project, as it will benefit a small group of rentier capital market investors at the cost of ecogenocide, destroying the Amazon rainforest and condemning the Indigenous Peoples and other traditional communities of the region to misery, making it impossible to maintain traditional ways of life and violating at once their Rights to Autonomy, Self-Determination, Food Sovereignty, Health, Land, Housing and Territory...

(Translated by the BHRRC)