Opening or paving works in the region are subject to legal proceedings and require prior consultation with indigenous peoples directly affected by the projects.
Accusations of non-compliance with the law range from small intercity roads to large highways, such as BR-319, which connects Manaus (AM) to .
The lack of detailed rules on how the consultation should be carried out in practice is often taken advantage of by authorities to circumvent the legal obligation.
Just holding public hearings, for example, is not enough for local communities to effectively contribute to decision-making, experts warn.
The need to take into account the positions of indigenous people affected by public projects is outlined in general terms in an international treaty signed by Brazil, Convention 169 of the ILO (International Labor Organization) on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.
In Acre, the case of a road of around 80 km showed an attempt by the authorities to use a petition and the sending of letters to Funai (National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples) as sufficient to configure the consultation required by law.
Starting in 2015, under the administration of current federal deputy Zezinho Barbary (PP-AC), Porto Walter City Hall carried out services on the road with heavy machines purchased with parliamentary amendments from then federal deputy Flaviano Melo (MDB), who was also governor of Acre and died in 2024.
Management began promoting services illegally, according to the infraction notice drawn up by Ibama (Brazilian Institute of Renewable Natural Resources).
In 2019, an indigenous leader reported to the Federal Public Ministry in Acre that the road works had invaded the demarcated land of the Jaminawa people of Igarapé Preto, without the local community having been consulted.
The Prosecutor’s Office took the case to court in 2022. In its response to the process, the City of Porto Walter added to the file a notebook page with the words “Authorization from the chief to pass the road within the Jaminawa indigenous land, on July 28, 2019”, with the supposed signatures of 18 people.
According to the city hall, the paper was a petition that represented “a request from the indigenous community for the road to pass close to their village.”
Also defendants in the case, the state of Acre, the Acre Highway Department (Deracre) and the Acre Environmental Institute (Imac) filed a joint defense in the process, pointing to the paper as a document of approval by the indigenous people.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office contested this argument by reporting that the population of the indigenous land was made up of 171 people and only 18 had signed the petition. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the paper “signed by a tiny number of indigenous people, cannot be compared to prior, free and informed consultation, under the terms provided for in Convention 169/ILO”.
The case was judged in the first instance in August 2024. Federal judge Raffaela Cássia de Sousa accepted the Public Ministry’s argument. “The fact of sending letters to Funai or holding meetings with chiefs does not equate to the right to consultation,” he wrote.
According to the judge, consultation with indigenous people must be carried out “in a culturally appropriate way, observing their consultation protocols (if they have them), or observing their traditional ways of collective decision-making”.
The last step of the case in court was the approval of an agreement proposed by the Government of Acre in 2025 by which the state administration committed to carrying out consultation with indigenous people, legalizing the work and compensating the indigenous community in R$500,000.
In the municipality of Tapauá, in the south of Amazonas, the paving of a road that included amendments by senator Omar Aziz (PSD-AM) has not yet had prior consultation completed. In a note sent by his advisor, the congressman stated that the technical responsibility for the work lies with the beneficiary of the transfer.
The project is a section of the AM-366 state highway that affects the populations of two indigenous lands, Apurinã do Igarapé São João and Apurinã do Igarapé Tawamirim.
Upon learning that the public authorities planned to carry out services in the municipality, the Federation of Indigenous Organizations and Communities of Médio Purus (Focimp) decided to take action to develop a consultation protocol for local communities in 2022.
After two years of discussions between the affected communities, in 2024, the protocol was ready and was delivered to the municipal, state and federal authorities involved in the work, according to the chief and farmer José Raimundo Pereira Lima, Zé Bajaga Apurinã, 59, executive coordinator of Focimp.
The , was written in Portuguese and in the language of the indigenous people. The document is a simplified guide that describes how and where the consultation should be carried out.
“The government has to talk to us before building the roads and branches because we will be affected,” the indigenous people say in the document.
However, according to chief Zé Bajaga Apurinã, the paving of the road continued without consultation. Wanted by SheetTapauá City Hall did not comment until the report was completed.
In the same region of the Amazon rainforest, the largest road project is the paving of a segment of around 400 km of BR-319 known as the “middle section”, which has been receiving amendments from several congressmen in recent years.
In November 2024, the Federal Public Ministry in Amazonas filed a public civil action against the Union and other federal bodies to order them to carry out prior consultation with the indigenous communities affected by the work, in addition to paying compensation for moral damages for the alleged omission and delay in carrying out the hearing.
In the case’s initial petition, the Prosecutor’s Office stated that it “tried, for years, to be the mediator in the extrajudicial sphere”, but never managed to get the State to concretely carry out the consultation.
Responsible for the work, Dnit (National Department of Transport Infrastructure) filed a petition in the process saying that it held interviews, meetings and public hearings that fulfilled the consultation requirement.
The Prosecutor’s Office alleges that these measures constituted “an unsuccessful way of bringing the State and the population closer together and aim to create subterfuge for inspection”. The lawsuit remains pending judgment.
Experts consulted by Sheet They say that authorities often take advantage of the fact that there are no detailed rules on the subject to circumvent the legal obligation.
According to Pricila Aquino, lawyer and coordinator of Climate and Latin America at EDLC (acronym in Portuguese for the Legal Center for the Defense of the Environment), clear regulation of consultation would be a way of judicially strengthening the original peoples, as long as it respects the organization of each community.
“We have well-established parameters in international law, but in Brazil there is still no specific law on consultation, which must be prior, that is, before the project is finalized.”
For Ellen Batista, lawyer at Apiam (Articulation of Organizations and Indigenous Peoples of Amazonas), the solution to bringing more protection in cases like this is literacy about indigenous peoples in the Judiciary system. “I’m not in favor of uniformity because there are many of us, there’s no way to put communities in a box”, he states.
According to the two experts, it is common for the municipality to call a public hearing instead of a prior consultation. “This explains why so many works end up in litigation. It is not an excess of requirements, but a structural failure in compliance with the law”, says Aquino.
