In an impassioned article, LAB author Marcos Colón denounces the double-standards afflicting the mainstream press in Brazil, prompt to condemn those who defend the Amazon, its rivers and people as radicals and vandals, while they hail the confidence, predictability and business-friendly character of projects to dredge rivers and construct massive ports for exporting soya.
Without memory, there is no accountability. And without accountability, journalism ceases to serve democracy and begins to serve the interests that shape the silence.
‘Lula gives in to disorder and halts infrastructure projects’ – Anyone reading this headline on the Folha de S.Paulo editorial without knowing the context would be led to believe that the government has backed down in the face of criminal pressure. But these are not criminals. They are women, young people, children, and elders from the Arapiun, Borari, Kumaruara, and Munduruku peoples of the Lower, Middle, and Upper Tapajós regions, in addition to representatives of the Kayapó and Panará peoples from the Upper Xingu in Mato Grosso and Pará.
They were protesting against the giant river port at Santarém, where the Tapajós river joins the Amazon, and operated by Cargill, who shipped more than 5.5 m metric tons of soya beans through there in 2025.
They remained camped for an entire month, day and night, in sun and rain, on Cargill’s land in Santarém, to express their protest and make their voices heard in unison. Nearly 1,200 representatives of Amazonian Indigenous peoples held a continuous vigil.
These are the ethnic groups threatened by Decree No. 12.600/2025, which brings over 3,000 km of Amazonian rivers into the National Privatization Programme, paving the way for private concessions of strategic navigable stretches of river for agribusiness and other economic sectors.
The decree was revoked by the federal government, but this does not guarantee the definitive resolution of the problem. Much more is required. Recent Amazonian history shows that large projects often return in new guises. The vast Belo Monte hydro-electric dam is a good example. Temporary suspension of a misguided venture failed to break the pattern and the construction went ahead. When one decree is revoked, all too often its crucial clauses are rolled up into a new one that appears soon after.
It is in this context that three of the country’s largest newspapers, O Estado de S. Paulo, Folha de S.Paulo, and O Globo decided to frame the indigenous mobilization as ‘vandalism,’ ‘chaos,’ ‘a racket,’ ‘blackmail,’ ‘disorder,’ ‘truculence,’ ‘brute force,’ ‘radicalism,’ and ‘obstacles to development’.The words are not neutral. They construct reality.
The three not-so-wise men
Since when does occupying spaces to claim a right provided for in an international treaty ratified by Brazil ipso facto become ‘vandalism’? Who decides that the paralysis of a port is ‘chaos’ and not a political act? Why is the interruption of the soya bean market called ‘brute force,’ while the interruption of the vital flow of an ancestral river is never described as ‘violence’? Why is pressure from popular organizations classified as ‘blackmail,’ while pressure from investors is described as promoting ‘legal security’? Why is ‘private property’ portrayed as an absolute good, but the Indigenous right to land, recognized constitutionally, is denounced as an ‘obstacle’?
When editorials resort to this kind of language, they are not describing facts, but defining who is rational and who is irrational, who acts politically and who acts on impulse, who belongs in the public debate and who should be excluded from it.
When Lula’s government revoked the decree, the three newspapers were unanimous in calling the government’s backtracking a capitulation to disorder. But they avoid the crux of the matter, whereby the obligation to consult Indigenous peoples prior to the implementation of any project is not a political concession, but a legal duty. ILO Convention 169 is not militant rhetoric, but a binding norm. Ignoring or weakening this obligation does not strengthen the rule of law, it undermines it.
Words have a revelatory power. When we say ‘a racket,’ the subtext is generally something related to children. ‘Chaos’ and ‘disorder’ evoke moral chaos. ‘Radicalism’ shifts the debate from the legal sphere to the sphere of perceived threat. ‘Truculence’ and ‘brute force’ conjure up the image of an internal enemy, and thus Indigenous peoples demanding compliance with the law come to be framed as the criminals.
Curiously, when sections of the mainstream economy organize pressure, curtail decision-making, condition investments, or blackmail the State, the vocabulary used to describe them is entirely different. No one talks about ‘the racket from the market.’ No one describes the ‘brute force of capital’. The language changes to ‘confidence’, ‘predictability’, ‘business environment’. The asymmetry is flagrant.
Yes, the presence of Indigenous voices in the press has increased in recent years. There are interviews, reports, evidence of symbolic recognition. But when a dispute directly impacts the export model, logistics infrastructure, or agribusiness, the framing changes. Now it is no longer about diversity; it is about obstacles. Tolerance of dissent is conditional and does not apply when money, ports, soyabeans, or other core economic interests are involved.
The constant theme of these editorials is that waterways mean efficient modernization and lower carbon emissions. This may even be a legitimate matter for discussion. What is not legitimate is to treat any challenge to this model as irrational sabotage. Development is not technical dogma, but a political choice. And political choices have a cost, almost always borne by the same vulnerable people and the same distant territories that are excluded from power.
COP left a vacuum
Here enters a second layer, which editorials also ignore: the sequence of events.
The revocation of Decree No. 12.600/2025 was published in the Official Gazette of the Federal Union and signed by Vice President Geraldo Alckmin. The decree, originally signed by President Lula in August of the previous year, included the Tapajós, Madeira, and Tocantins rivers in the national privatization programme, paving the way for private concessions and the intensification of waterway traffic.
From the outset, the Indigenous peoples of Tapajós denounced two central points in this initiative — the environmental and social risks of the project and, above all, the absence of the ‘free, prior and informed consent’ of the potentially impacted communities.
At COP30, which took place in the Amazon region, global attention focused on climate issues and local communities called on the government to take action against the waterways. The government announced a ‘round-table of dialogue’, but it failed to materialize.
The COP produced images, commitments, speeches, and letters drafted after lengthy negotiations. But, for many of the region’s Indigenous peoples it also left a vacuum, void of practical consequences. While ecological transition was being discussed in the official pavilions, the project to transform ancestral rivers into corridors for commodities remained on course.
The Indigenous movement occupied the Cargill terminal in Santarém, where the company that established the first grain port in the region in 2003 is now one of the main operators of soya transport on the Tapajós river. I have been following the progress of this company in the region for over fifteen years.
I am not speaking in abstract terms. I speak from what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have filmed. The socio-environmental impacts of this expansion were documented in my film Beyond Fordlândia (2018), which showed the consequences of a logistics model that transforms the forest into a corridor for merchandise, without considering the impact on the health of communities. At the time of filming, many residents were afraid to speak publicly about the increasing number of cancer cases but this is now difficult to ignore.
The occupation of the terminal did not come out of nowhere. It is a response to a pattern that has been repeating itself for years, with public discussion on one side and project implementation on the other. Consultation with communities has long been treated as an inconvenient formality, always postponed and never prioritized.
A moral inversion
Moreover, it reveals an invisible limit to what is acceptable to ‘liberal opinion’. Indigenous peoples are celebrated when they produce symbols, when they evoke ancestry, when they occupy cultural spaces, when their phrases circulate as inspiration. But the moment they directly confront the flow of merchandise, when they interrupt the logistics infrastructure of soya, they are classified as a ‘problem’. Indigenous protest becomes ‘disorder’.
It is hard not to perceive the moral inversion. Temporarily interrupting the operation of a port is treated as civilizational disorder. Dredging a river to make it into an export route is presented as planning. Defending the life of the river is ‘radicalism’. Submitting the river to the logic of commodities is ‘modernization.’
What is most revealing is how this language slips effortlessly into editorials – that is, texts that represent the institutional position of newspapers. When journalism adopts language that criminalizes resistance and normalizes logistical expansion, it ceases to merely inform. It arbitrates legitimacy. It decides who may speak, how they may speak, and ultimately what policies they can adopt without being treated as a threat.
The question thus becomes inevitable: what kind of journalism calls the defence of a river and a territory ‘brute force’, while treating the engineering that threatens those same rivers and peoples as ‘rational’ and ‘necessary’? What kind of journalism claims to be a guardian of the rule of law while giving little importance to prior consultation and turning the act of demanding compliance with the law into ‘disorder’?
This is not merely a semantic error; it is the repetition of a historical vice. Much of Brazil’s mainstream press supported the 1964 civil–military coup and, decades later, on the 50th anniversary of the coup, published editorials acknowledging that error. These included Folha de S.Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo, and O Globo.
At decisive moments, Brazil’s dominant press has often chosen the side of economic stability and institutional order over voices that challenge power structures. They rarely side with those who struggle to protect their way of life, cultures, biomes, and ancestral heritage, but instead back the economic interests that feel threatened when traditional peoples claim their constitutional rights. By choosing words that criminalize the struggle for life, yesterday’s logic is repeated: delegitimize those who resist and normalize those who represent power.
Freedom of the press is a democratic pillar. But this freedom is not a license to defend dehumanization. If the exercise of a constitutional right is described as disorder, it clearly infringes the commitment to democracy.
What is at stake is not merely a decree. It is the power to name, and, by naming, to legitimize or delegitimize. Perhaps the most uncomfortable question is not why the government backed down, but another: what idea of country is being defended when the defense of life is labeled as disorder?
If fighting for prior consultation, for territory, and for the river is disorder, then one must ask: order for whom, and to what purpose? It is not merely a problem of language, it is a question of project. And it is here that institutional journalism reveals its limit: when life interrupts logistics, democracy becomes an inconvenience.
I reflected on the intersection between journalism and the politics of memory in an article analyzing the film Secret Agent. I argued that the function of journalism is to go beyond merely documenting facts; it must confront its own lapses of historical memory. Narrative control and forced amnesia are not phenomena restricted to fiction. They are traits of a journalism that avoids confronting its past and, in doing so, compromises its own public function. That Brazil’s dominant press is biased is nothing new. What is rarely admitted is that it also chooses to forget, and in forgetting, teaches its readers to forget. This is not a neutral choice.
The journalism of today must be more than competing against deadlines and algorithms; it must confront its own history so that the present can be understood honestly. When it refuses to do so, it not only erases the facts, but also helps sustain the narratives that legitimize power. That is why rethinking journalistic memory is not an academic exercise but an ethical demand. Without memory, there is no accountability. And without accountability, journalism ceases to serve democracy and begins to serve the interests that shape the silence.
Marcos Colón is the Southwest Borderlands Initiative Assistant Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He has also produced and directed two feature documentary films that represent diverse perspectives on humanity’s complex relations with the natural world: Beyond Fordlândia(2018) and Stepping Softly on the Earth(2022). He is the author of The Amazon in Times of War ( Practical Action Publishing & Latin America Bureau, 2024) La Amazonía en tiempos de guerra (Planeta, 2025) and the organizer of Utopias Amazônicas (Ateliê, 2025).
