“Does Calha Norte provide these amendments for the whole of Brazil?” The question, asked by the mayor of Melgaço (PA), Zé Viegas (MDB), gives a dimension of how far away the resources are directed from the municipality in the interior of Pará.
Holder of the country’s wealth, the locality lives with problems that even affect the city, with the city’s open dump being the most visible facet of the lack of public investment.
In the capital of Amapá, separated from Melgaço by just two municipalities and around 250 km by river, it is possible to have a panoramic view of the abundance of public money allocated by the program. There, where the HDI is high, the renovation and revitalization of the city’s tourist pier, which even has an electric cable car, highlights the fat volume of funds for the political stronghold of the president of Congress, the senator (-AP).
The inequality in the distribution of Calha Norte’s resources is visible to Legal, but has also been quantified in an audit by the Federal Audit Court. The survey reveals that 80% of the resources were allocated to just 10% of the 783 municipalities served by the program between 2015 and 2024.
The details of the data show that 2.5% of the locations received half of all transfers in the period.
According to the audit, the program allocated a total of more than R$4.5 billion in the decade.
The investigation by TCU technicians also shows that those who least needed it were privileged.
Calha Norte funds reached almost 70% of municipalities with high or medium HDI. Data regarding locations with very low or low HDI indicate coverage of just over a third (34.7%).
The Ministry of Defense says it is up to parliamentarians to nominate municipalities to benefit from the amendment funds. The Chamber states that the authors of each proposal can indicate the motivation for their choice. The Senate did not comment.
Created more than 40 years ago by the military for strategic defense purposes in the border regions, in recent years Calha Norte has been transformed into a conduit serving congressmen to direct public funds to their electoral strongholds.
The distortion of the original idea of the program also emerges in the TCU audit: 21.64% of the municipalities in the border area were not served.
When it was created in 1985, the federal project covered 74 municipalities, mainly in the northern channels of the Solimões and Amazonas rivers. Today it serves 783 locations, 589 of which were added between 2016 and 2022.
In addition to the inequality in the distribution of resources, the TCU’s audit of Calha Norte reveals a lack of budgetary and inspection control, a lack of technical criteria, a lack of transparency and a lack of actions linked to the strategic aspect of national defense.
The program suffers from “a lack of detailed, objective and realistic diagnosis of the public problems that the program seeks to address, in disagreement with good practices in the formulation and implementation of public policies”, say the technicians at the court of accounts.
If Calha Norte had in practice prioritized municipalities in the worst situation, Melgaço would certainly be among those served in recent years. Located south of Marajó Island, in the Amazon River delta, in Pará, the location entered the Calha Norte area in 2004, in one of the program’s waves of expansion.
When listening to the residents of the municipality in March, the Sheet noticed the discomfort due to the fact that yet another reporting team went to the city to talk about the “city with the worst HDI in Brazil”. This has occurred since 2013, when the index calculated by the UN (United Nations) was released.
More recent surveys, however, show that the situation has not changed much in the municipality since then.
The , which evaluates service efficiency in cities, shows Melgaço in 5,203rd place among the 5,276 evaluated (around 300 were not analyzed due to an insufficient database).
The worst rates in the locality are in the area of basic sanitation, since there is no sewage network coverage and only 12% of the population is served by a water supply system.
According to REM-F, garbage collection has a rate of 31%, but the Sheet found that the material is thrown into an open dump in the city.
A few minutes by motorbike along a bumpy dirt road separates the center of Melgaço from the landfill. As soon as the wooden houses around the city end, vultures gather on the street signaling the entrance to the landfill.
The garbage is dumped in a waterlogged forest area surrounded by lagoons. There is all kinds of waste: car carcasses, butcher shop scraps, discarded furniture, household waste.
At the time of the report’s visit, two people were working taking portions of the trash to an improvised bonfire among the piles of waste, which reached approximately one meter in height.
According to community leader Ediele Lima da Silva, 30, “all types of garbage produced in the city are thrown there.” “Hospital waste, residential waste, scrap metal, everything. There is no adequate treatment.”
The mayor of Melgaço, José Francisco Viegas Dias, known as Zé Viegas, says that the municipality was the target of action by the Public Ministry regarding this problem and has already acquired land to build sanitary landfills. According to the mayor, the transfer of material from the landfill to the new deposits should take place from July onwards.
After learning about the existence of the Calha Norte program through SheetZé Viegas regretted not receiving resources. “Our management now started in 2025. Until then there was no contact with us, much less any amendments,” he said.
The metropolitan region of the capital of Amapá, which includes the municipality of Santana, is at the forefront among recipients of funds transferred from Calha Norte between 2015 and 2024, according to a survey by the Court of Auditors.
The resources totaled around R$500 million, equivalent to 11% of the program’s overall total, distributed across 215 agreements.
At the top of this ranking are the state capitals Boa Vista (RR), beneficiary of R$415 million, Porto Velho (RO), awarded R$235 million, and Rio Branco (AC), with R$200 million.
In Macapá, it was public money from Calha Norte that allowed the revitalization and renovation of the Eliezer Levy pier (or pier), one of the city’s tourist attractions.
The pier has a horizontal electric cable car to travel the approximately 400 meters between the shore and the restaurant installed at the end of the structure on the Amazon River, but many visitors prefer to make the journey on foot.
After the completion of the works at the end of 2024, senator Davi Alcolumbre’s social networks began to drum drums about the fact that his parliamentary amendments had financed the project.
In one of the videos broadcast by the congressman, a local influencer plays the role of an investigator in action on the pier, who says: “Today I have a different mission. Find out who is the father of the child who is causing people to talk in Macapá.”
It is up to parliamentarians to nominate beneficiaries, says Ministry of Defense
The Ministry of Defense, responsible for Calha Norte until the beginning of 2025, stated that the basic infrastructure works until 2024 took place “entirely through amendments, with parliamentarians being responsible for indicating the beneficiary municipalities and the objects of the agreements”.
“The indication of beneficiary municipalities is the prerogative of the parliamentarians who authored the amendments, and is not the responsibility of the DPCN [Departamento do Programa Calha Norte] select and prioritize municipal entities based on socioeconomic indicators”, according to the ministry.
According to the ministry, the DPCN is responsible for analyzing documentation, monitoring execution, carrying out inspections and demanding accountability.
A Sheet sought out the presidencies and press offices of and of to comment on Calha Norte.
The Chamber’s advisors responded that “the reason for choosing the municipalities benefiting from the Calha Norte Program must be sought from the authors of the amendments, as well as from the Union Budget rapporteurs and from the party leaders in the Joint Budget Committee”.
The Senate presidency and advisors did not comment.
