By Adilson Vieira What’s happening at the mouth of the Amazon is not fair play. It’s a full-on press from the old colonial-capitalist scheme, trying to score with the narrative of "energy sovereignty" but playing dirty with the environment and forest peoples. It’s capital’s team stepping onto the field with steel cleats, ready to trample territories where the Karipuna, Palikur, and Galibi have played for centuries with wisdom and resistance. The Lula government, which promised beautiful football with social and environmental justice, is about to make a bad pass to the opposing team. Approving oil exploration in the Equatorial Margin isn’t just a technical error — it’s leaving the field wide open for the oil lobby, which dodges the climate collapse and keeps dictating the rules of the game. Today, unless a court injunction stops it, the ANP will auction 172 oil and gas blocks — 47 of them at the mouth of the Amazon — all while the Bonn Climate Conference in Germany is underway, where countries under the UNFCCC are gathered to discuss, among other things, the end of fossil fuels. It’s not just the president who needs a talking-to. It’s an entire tactical scheme known as "extractivist developmentalism" — a formation that pretends to play for the people but actually plays for the market. It promises goals of social distribution, but ignores the violent fouls committed against nature and Indigenous peoples. As thinker Michael Löwy warns, this model doesn’t fit in the championship of life, because capitalism and the environment play for opposite teams. Talk of “responsible extraction” or “green capitalism” doesn’t fly. And at the mouth of the Amazon, the field is slippery: currents are unpredictable, basic infrastructure is lacking, and the environmental licensing process tramples over local communities who haven’t even been consulted. Meanwhile, Petrobras claims it needs to drill wells to fund public policies. But looking at the scoreboard, we see that only 0.4% of investments from 2012 to 2022 went to clean energy. The rest? Down the fossil hole. It’s like having the best striker and leaving them on the bench. The truth is that Petrobras is still playing as if it's the 1970s, ignoring the new rules of the game (like the Paris Agreement) and scoring only for its shareholders. It’s a public jersey worn to chase private profit — with no transition plan, no new tactics, no intent to change the score. And some remain silent, including parts of academia: scientists who voluntarily benched the truth, afraid of losing funding or positions. What’s at stake at the mouth of the Amazon isn’t just a piece of the map. It’s the kind of game we want to play: will we keep crossing balls into capital’s box, or will we build a team that plays for the people and the planet? Lula needs to stop listening to shareholders and hear the forest’s grandstand. True energy sovereignty must be just, clean, and people-powered — with decentralized generation, popular participation, and reparations for the true owners of this field: the Indigenous peoples. The crowd needs to wake up. This game comes at a high cost — and the usual folks will be left to pay it. Profits will go to the VIP box, while the bill lands on those behind the fence. Enough of cheering for false progress. It’s time to mark tightly, defend the Amazon, and go on the attack. Defending the mouth of the Amazon is playing for the future, for the right of entire peoples to exist, and for a model of society where life is worth more than a barrel of oil. This is a decisive match. And you can’t afford to sit on the bench.