Legacies: Event on Violence in the Amazon Includes ‘Local Perspective’ and Promotes Networks of Researchers

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November, 2024 – Under pressure due to conflicts over the use of land and illegal activities, the Amazon region exhibits rates of violence well above the Brazilian average, with a negative impact on both the population and biodiversity. The lethal violence rate in the region is 32 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, which is roughly 40% higher than the national average (23 deaths per 100,000), according to the latest study “Cartografias da Violência na Amazônia" ("Maps of Violence in the Amazon Region"), published in December 2024 by the Brazilian Public Security Forum. Furthermore, violence and criminal factions have expanded into smaller cities, with these groups present in at least 260 of the region's 772 municipalities.

Based on these data, as well as various Pulitzer Center projects (such as those carried out by RIN Fellows Hyury Potter and Bram Ebus) that focus on forms of crime in the Amazon, the special module “Mercados ilegais e violências na Amazônia: histórias de garimpos, grilagens, tráficos e desmatamentos" ("Illegal Markets and Violence in the Amazon Region: Stories of Illegal Mining, Land Grabbing, Trafficking and Deforestation") was produced by the Pulitzer Center in partnership with the Federal University of Amazonas. The event ended with a series of five other training modules called “Amazônia no Antropoceno: reportando o presente e discutindo o futuro da floresta" ("Amazonia in the Anthropocene: Reporting on the Present and Discussing the Future of the Forest"), which was also organized in 2022 and 2023 by the Pulitzer Center together with five Brazilian public universities located in the country’s northern region. 

By bringing together voices from different regions of the Amazon in the special module, it became clear that the violence faced by local communities is a commonplace thing, the result of a development model that, supported by the state and regional authorities, perpetuates a cycle of exploitation in the territories. Land grabbing, the abusive use of pesticides, deforestation for the extraction of timber and the spread of illegal mining are all key problems, highlighting the historical repetition of predatory practices. 

“Listening to the testimonies of people from the Amazon regions provides us with an extremely rich experience of life, struggle and resistance. It's important to give a voice to those who are at the forefront, on a day-to-day basis. In order to trace out new paths we need to think about this new way of discussing, of reporting more critically. Philosophies, ideas and solutions will come out of the Amazon region, whether they are from the universities, collectives or peoples,” declared the Pulitzer Center’s program manager Maria Rosa Darrigo, the event's organizer, at the end of the module.  

Having lived under threat for years, Maria Ivete dos Santos, who is the president of the Rural Workers' Union of Santarém, in the state of Pará, describes her routine. “The territory where I live is my way of life, where I can find everything that I need to be happy. From 2007 to 2017, I was in the protection program. Think about the impact that something like this has on a person's life. At that time there were gunmen who had been hired to kill me. When you talk about the program, it's not everything we imagine, that it guarantees you physical and psychological protection. You have no idea where you get the strength from to continue. But we must continue because we have a territory, we have life. It's our culture, our food that we produce in an agro-ecological way,” she explains.  

Santos took part in the round table on Visions of the Tapajós together with Hyury Potter, a journalist and Pulitzer Center Fellow, and Sara Pereira, coordinator of FASE Amazônia, a non-governmental organization that works with regional development projects and alternatives, such as agro-extractivism and cooperativism.  

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Two other panels dealt with the views of the Brazil-Colombia-Peru triple border and the Brazil-Venezuela region. The first one of these featured Bram Ebus, a journalist and Pulitzer Center Fellow; Almerio Wadick, from the Conselho Inidigenista Missionário – CIMI (Missionary Indigenous Council), and Yura Marubo, legal advisor to the União dos Povos Indígenas do Vale do Javari (Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley), moderated by Professor Fábio Candotti. Júnior Nicácio, legal adviser to the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR); Raphael Alves, photographer and Pulitzer Center contributor, and Rodrigo Chagas (UFRR) all took part in the second panel, with the journalist Rosiene Carvalho moderating.  

For Candotti, from the Federal University of Amazonas, who helped organize the special module, discussions about violence in the Amazon have been marked by a dominant perspective that crime in the region can be attributed to the expansion of criminal factions from the country’s Southeast region.  

“When you give voice to leaders, especially women, journalists and researchers who are at the cutting edge of the process, you highlight a situation that is a lot more complicated, involving everything from local actors to state policies that contribute to the perpetuation of this violence,” declares Candotti, who is the coordinator of the "ILHARGAS-Cities, Policies and Violence" research collective — which is considered to be a reference in studies of this kind.  

Each of the training modules, which took place in different cities in the states of Pará, Amazonas and Acre, dealt with a topic of interest to the region, with repercussions throughout the Amazon, reaching more than 800 university students in total. The aim of the training sessions was to generate high-level debates about social, environmental and climate problems based on the experiences of the peoples of the Amazon region, coming up with possibilities and responses to the different crises that the forest is experiencing, listening to and learning from knowledge from different sources.  

“The event allowed us to get closer to journalists who are investigating local issues and who can provide us researchers with an additional point of view. On the other hand, we were able to contribute to studies that academia is producing. Furthermore, in my case, the debates helped provide material for an article published by Ipea, which gave the topic even greater visibility,” adds Candotti.  

In April, the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) included in its knowledge archive the article “Muito além das facções: uma agenda de pesquisas sobre ilegalismos, violência e Estado na Amazônia ("Far Beyond the Criminal Factions: A Research Agenda on Illegal Practices, Violence and the State in the Amazon"), which along with other items, discusses how local violence is thought of by discourses originating outside the region, especially when diagnosing the “absence of the state” and the “expansion of factions”.  

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A similar result was achieved by Rodrigo Chagas, a professor of social sciences at the Federal University of Roraima, who also took part in the special module. “As well as strengthening ties with journalists who were at the event, we networked with researchers such as Professor Candotti. Listening to the territories’ leaders was fundamental to helping us get a better understanding of what takes place in the communities, rural unions and other parts of the Amazon region,” says Chagas.  

A senior researcher at the Brazilian Public Security Forum, Chagas says that he will shortly be publishing an article about a series of interviews with leaders from the Médio Juruá territory, in the state of Amazonas, dealing with drug trafficking and the illegal animal trade. The conversations were held during the researcher's trip to the region, as a result of an invitation following the event.  

“Initiatives such as this one from the Pulitzer Center are fundamental for sharing knowledge, particularly in a region where funding for research is still precarious or almost non-existent,” says Chagas.  

Various perspectives — The aim of the course was to provide students with information and discussions to help them make a critical analysis of the challenges faced by local people who think, live and work in the Amazon region in the light of the spread of illegal extractive economic activities and the growth of armed violence.  

“The idea was to bring together a diverse group of knowledge producers for a dialogue about local situations. Listening to them, we realized that there is an intertwining of violence between the regions, ranging from historical conflicts to illegal markets such as the fish market. By including a local perspective it opened up unnoticed fronts for discussion,” explains Candotti. 

Check out the round tables here. You can also read reports regarding crimes in the Amazon region produced with the support of the Rainforest Journalism Fund (RJF). Through the Pulitzer Center, the RJF supports original reporting projects about tropical forest issues around the world, including deforestation and climate change.