The native Brazilian people Guarani-Kaiowá have become victims of the colonization in the hands of white people for hundreds of years. Today they survive the misery and the violence and they fight to recover their land. This is the story of a community who fights to take back the traditional territory of Ñanderu, which is coveted by rich landowners, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.
In 2015, the São Francisco River, in Brazil, reached its lowest flow rate in history. The drought and the contamination are made worse by the reckless use of the river water. Facing this scenario, the "vazanteiros" - traditional people who survives by fishing and cultivating on the river banks - who had originally been cast out from Lapinha and Pau Preto, their communities, are now taking back their places. They defend their right to live by the river banks, in harmony with the Old Chico (a nickname for the São Francisco River): they consider themselves to be the guardians of the river.
The picture-perfect scenario by the entrance of Rio de Janeiro has suffered with the contamination of the city's sewers for many years, and is today a dangerous and polluting industrial park. Transformed into the backyard of the oil industry, the Guanabara Bay is today an area in dispute. On one side, there are the scientists, the fishermen and the activists. On the other side, there are the gigantic oil companies and the neglect with the area's basic sanitation. The Soccer World Cup and the Olympic Games have come and gone, and the waters at the Guanabara Bay are still polluted and agitated.
There was a time when there were no fences and no limits on the Brazilian cerrado in the north of the Minas Gerais state. It was a "general land", for everybody. The "gerais", in Portuguese. In this area, the people, the "geraizeiros", picked fruit, pieces of wood and medicinal herbs, raised their cattle, made their farms, their orchards, their homes. By the end of the 80's, the community of Vereda Funda, in Rio Pardo de Minas, saw their lifestyle crumble down when the government handed these public lands to the monoculture of eucalyptus trees. The cerrado was deforested. River springs dried down, streams stopped flowing. For more than 20 years, there was a fight for the right to the water and the land, which ended in a victory for the community people, who know work to rebuild their original place.
The Chapada do Apodi is located in the area that divides the states of Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte, Brazi. In 1989 the National Department of Constructions against the Drought (DNOCS, in Portuguese) began a project of irrigation in the part of Apodi that was located in the state of Ceará. The area was occupied by big fruticulture companies, and that disarticulated the production of thousands of small agriculturists. In 2013, a similar project was about to begin, on the Rio Grande do Norte side, which threatened 6,000 family farmers.
In Brazil, in the town of Itapecuru Mirim, located on the margins of the BR 135 highway, there is the quilombola community of Santa Rosa dos Pretos. They have suffered many violations of their social, economic and environmental rights, due to the operation of the railway, especially since the duplication of the Estrada de Ferro Carajás (EFC, in Portuguese) is under construction. The impact of the construction can be seen on the silting of the igarapés, the noise and air pollution. Besides that, there is a bigger number of trains passing through the area, which made the crossing more difficult and increased the number of accidents.