Blasting the Amazon: The Araguaia-Tocantins Shipping Channel’s Data Holes and Erasure of Traditional Peoples
Ronaldo Barros Macena and Eva Moraes are leaders of the collective of 23 traditional riverfolk communities of the Pedral do Lourenção in Pará.
by Tiffany M. Higgins*
In the coming months, Brazil may begin blasting a river in the Amazon to create an industrial shipping channel. The Hidrovia Araguaia-Tocantins, largely unknown outside Brazil, could span over 3,000 km, bringing profound consequences: disrupting traditional livelihoods, endangering food security and biodiversity, threatening public health, increasing carbon emissions, and altering forests in Indigenous, quilombola, and ribeirinho territories. Experts warn that its impact could rival the Belo Monte dam, yet unlike Belo Monte, this project has advanced quietly through thousands of pages of studies with little civil society debate.
The project will involve dredging and rock-blasting over 4,500 km of riverbed, the most extensive reshaping of a river basin in Brazil’s history. But can it even work? My investigation found that a technical feasibility study was never conducted to assess whether a shipping channel could function in this basin. Water loss in the Araguaia and Tocantins rivers—both documented and projected—raises doubts about the channel’s viability.
Crucially, Brazil’s Transportation Infrastructure Department (DNIT) based its water data only on Tocantins River levels through 2017—failing to account for the severe droughts of 2023-2024 or future water scarcity projections. Lower river levels increase waterway transport’s fuel use and carbon emissions. Leading experts—including Carlos Souza (MapBiomas Água), José Marengo (CEMADEN), Rodrigo Paiva (UFRGS Hydraulic Institute), and Suely Araújo (Climate Observatory)—agree: DNIT must update its studies with projected lower water flows before proceeding.
Despite this, DNIT and agribusiness are exerting pressure to issue an installation license in the coming months to begin three years of explosions at the Pedral do Lourenço, a crucial regional fishery that sustains thousands. The 43-km-long, 80-meter-deep rocky labyrinth, formed over millions of years, would be permanently destroyed—without certainty that the channel will remain navigable as river levels drop. Experts insist that DNIT must resolve these glaring uncertainties before detonations begin.
Beyond feasibility concerns, the project threatens vast areas of traditional lands, a soy expansion corridor accelerating the conversion of smallholder-managed forests into industrial agriculture, exacerbating carbon emissions, warns Carlos Souza. On the Tocantins River alone, it will impact more than 35 Indigenous territories, dozens of quilombola communities, and more than 10 conservation units. The entire channel would cross Mato Grosso, Goiás, Maranhão, Tocantins, and Pará, with plans for new megadams to control water levels for barges.
A 2009 ruling affirmed that a project of this scale requires comprehensive environmental impact studies for all affected stretches, to be submitted at the same time to licensing organ Ibama. But DNIT adopted a different strategy: dividing the project into smaller parts and denying that it is a shipping channel. Instead, they claim to only be making “navigation improvements” in the 500 km between Marabá and Barcarena in Pará—while recycling studies from an earlier channel licensing attempt. DNIT recently told a judge it “gave up on” Araguaia hidrovia plans. Yet documents show DNIT, since 2022, is the "responsible party” for Hidrovia Araguaia construction.
This fragmentation is “fraud,” says Suely Araújo, the former director of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA). By minimizing the project’s scale, DNIT has kept public scrutiny at bay, preventing meaningful debate on its impacts.
A February 5 ruling on licensing falsely claimed no traditional river communities exist at the Pedral do Lourenço. This is demonstrably untrue. Since 2019, I have documented the traditional riverfolk communities who for generations have dwelled and fished there, maintaining deep cultural ties to the river. Their collective of 23 ribeirinho communities has a consultation protocol, and they have long demanded their legally guaranteed free, prior, and informed consultation—a right that has been ignored.
Fisherman Ronilson Medeiros Neres, of Cardoso Quilombo in Baião, Pará, describes how dredging and the Hidrovia Araguaia-Tocantins channel operations would negatively impact fishing and access to fishing grounds. Video and interview: Tiffany M. Higgins.
The ruling also wrongly stated that a fishing diagnostic had been conducted for the Pedral. Professor Cristiane Cunha (UNIFESSPA), who researches Pedral fishing, attests that it was not done. Federal prosecutors argue that without a baseline assessment of the riverfolk’s catch and income, there will be no way to measure the impact of three years of explosions on their livelihoods. Without this, future legal claims for damages may be impossible.
DNIT publicly seeks to license 177 km of dredging of the Tocantins River between Marabá and Barcarena. However, documents I reviewed suggest the true dredging area planned by DNIT there may be over 400% larger than what is being presented for licensing. This raises alarming questions about communities left out of impact assessments.
DNIT’s approach relies on a government directive that classifies navigation as having minimal environmental impact, supposedly negating the need for licensing. It’s a claim that federal prosecutors challenge, and that a judge rejected in the case of the Hidrovia Paraguai-Paraná. Communities on islands and riverbanks excluded from DNIT’s studies will still face the consequences: riverbank erosion, disruption of fish populations and reproduction, pollution from barge waste and fuel leaks into drinking water.
These oversights have serious human rights implications, say federal prosecutors. Without urgent action, the Araguaia-Tocantins channel risks becoming another Belo Monte, bringing lasting harm to river communities.
Before the explosions begin, fundamental flaws in data, impact assessments, and community rights must be addressed. The future of these river ecosystems—and these riverfolk, quilombola, and Indigenous peoples—depends on it.
*Tiffany M. Higgins is an independent multimedia investigative journalist covering the Brazilian Amazon. A Fulbright scholar and Pulitzer Rainforest Journalism Fund grantee, she has reported extensively on the competing interests shaping the conflict over turning the Tocantins River into an industrial shipping channel.
This article was written for issue 157 of the WBO newsletter, dated March 14, 2025. To subscribe and receive free weekly news and analysis like this, simply enter your email in the field provided.
