- segueapororoka
- Feb 7
- 3 min read
By Elielson Almeida, journalist and member of Pororoka
Improvised tents, stretched banners, people taking turns for weeks. For Indigenous peoples in western Pará, this is not a celebration. It is a vigil. On the National Day of Indigenous Peoples’ Struggle, the word “struggle” appears as destiny. On the Tapajós, it carries another weight. It is neither a metaphor nor a political choice. It is a daily imposition.
This is a situation Thaigon Arapiun, a young leader from the Lower Tapajós, knows well. Not because he chose to be in it, but because the territory pushed him into this position. “We don’t want to be in constant struggle, fighting all the time. That’s not it. We know the danger we face — our lives, the lives of those who come to the struggle. Every time we expose ourselves, we know we are putting ourselves at risk. But the way things are imposed on us, there’s no way to stay out,” he says.
This statement does not diminish the importance of the struggle. It exposes the absurdity of having to fight continuously just to guarantee the basics. For Indigenous peoples, struggle was never a heroic calling. It was a response to violence, erasure, and constant threat. “The struggle is what ensured we are still here. It’s what prevented many peoples from being completely forgotten or wiped out. But it also exhausts us. We’re already kind of saturated. Saturated with having to study defense strategies all the time, when we wanted to be studying other things, living other experiences. We also want to live,” Thaigon stated.
This exhaustion permeates the camp, where peoples from the Lower and Middle Tapajós resist to defend the river from a new cycle of threats. Alessandra Munduruku is among them. She recalls that the Tapajós is not just a landscape. “People like to come here, take pictures of the beach, the beautiful river, the birds. But they don’t see that behind this landscape there is conflict, there is violence, there is struggle. It’s a project of death. And those of us who live here are treated as if we were obstacles,” she said.
The occupation at Cargill opposes Decree No. 12,600, which authorizes concession studies to turn the Tapajós into a commodity at the service of agribusiness, without consulting the peoples who depend on the river to survive. On February 4, Indigenous peoples occupied the Santarém airport for nearly an entire day. The occupation ended without an agreement.
After more than two weeks of pressure from traditional peoples, the Federal Government backed down and announced the suspension of dredging. But for those who remain on the front line of the struggle, the demand continues to be the full revocation of the decree.
The decree threatening the Tapajós, according to Alessandra Munduruku, does not come alone. It paves the way for a set of projects that have been accumulating for decades and advancing over the territory. “It’s not just the dredging of the Tapajós River. There’s also Ferrogrão, waterways, hydroelectric plants, more mining on our lands,” she says.
But the impact is not limited to changes in the landscape. It affects the functioning of the river itself. “Are we just going to watch the river being polluted, the places where the springs are, where turtles are born, where fish are born?” she asks. For Alessandra, what is at stake is not only the present, but the continuity of life that depends on these waters.
Perhaps the most honest question on this day is not how Indigenous peoples continue to struggle, but why they still need to struggle. What Thaigon Arapiun and Alessandra Munduruku express is not resignation. It is something simpler and more radical: the desire to live. And living should not require heroism.
