Letter from the anti-COP30 anarchist days

Organisers in Brazil reflect on the UN climate summit farce

~ CCLA Belém ~

Even before it began, as anarchists and libertarians we couldn’t expect much from a meeting that, over the years, has failed to curb capitalist greed in the slightest. It has only brought as its sole concrete “solution” to climate deregulation the commodification of a supposed right to pollute: the so-called carbon market.

Therefore, we had carefully prepared our cultural centre to welcome the most varied forms of protest coming from the Brazilian Amazon (starting with Belém and its metropolis), from South America, and from the rest of the world. Every day, during that circus of comings and goings of official delegations corrupted by oil lobbyists, we proposed cultural activities, debates and discussion groups, solidarity meals, preparation for popular protest marches, etc.

Despite this preparation and planning, we were fortunate to encounter unexpected moments and meet unfamiliar people, and to connect with others we had previously only known through the internet: we were able to participate in the occupation of the COP’s Blue Zone by indigenous peoples, receive visitors from far and wide and engage in dialogue with them, such as Macko Dràgàn (France), Mário Rui Pinto (Portugal), and Peter Gelderloos (USA)… and that’s not all: these were beautiful moments, full of learning in terms of resistance practices, exchanges of perspectives on crises generated by those at the top, and sharing solutions for us to overcome these challenges from our peripheral position.

To conclude these anarchist anti-COP30 journeys, we wanted to leave you with our assessment of this farce that was this COP, the thirtieth lost opportunity to save our Mother Earth (as Emma Goldman called her) and the populations that survive on her, trapped in avoidable ills and torments.

We already knew it: the courage to break free from this path of destruction will only be ours, and when we manage to reverse this desperate situation through our struggles, we will leave only the elites with the shameful clothes of those who could have done so but didn’t try, to dress and walk amidst the jeers of humanity and all creatures on the planet, finally freed from capitalist exploitation, inequalities, and oppressions.

* * *

From the beginning, we considered the COP a farce in terms of resolving or mitigating the environmental crisis in which capitalism has placed us. As expected, this edition of the COP showed us this in several ways. There was a record accreditation of lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry – almost two thousand representatives, with the main objective of debating means for the “energy transition” with more oil extraction and production. Meanwhile, more than 40 accredited representatives of Indigenous peoples were prevented from entering the Blue Zone because they did not have passports – yes, entering the most restricted area of ​​the COP was the same as entering another country. Throughout the event, the Lula government announced the implementation of the TFFF (Tropical Forests Forever Fund), yet another rent-seeking mechanism of financial capitalism that is far from solving environmental problems. This aligns with the logic of perpetuating the same mechanisms that produced this environmental crisis. For us, it is more of the same, without significant changes in the social conditions of those who suffer most from the extreme events of climate change.

Meanwhile, the forest peoples continue without self-determination over their own territories. Not surprisingly, the two demonstrations that broke through the security cordon of the colored areas of the COP were led by Indigenous peoples of the middle and lower Tapajós. It was a demonstration of dissatisfaction with the progress of the debates, which did not address crucial issues for these peoples, such as the guarantee of saying no to carbon credit market companies, mining and prospecting in their territories, and saying no to the privatization of the Amazon rivers for the construction of waterways that will only benefit the large landholdings of agribusiness grain monoculture and mining.

The COP reproduces the capitalist economic rationale of seeing everything that exists, including the air we breathe, as a bargaining chip. With this vision, solutions could only be conceived within the logic of the commodity. Ironically, on November 20, the day of Dandara and Zumbi, a fire broke out in one of the Blue Zone tents, symbolising an extreme event of climate change, burning down the COP. On the other hand, the activities of the Anti-COP Anarchist Days demonstrated that other worlds are possible, through the destruction of capitalism, the State, patriarchy, racism, and xenophobia. These were two weeks of activities, from street demonstrations, such as the Periphery March on Black Awareness Day, to debates with comrades from various parts of Brazil and several countries who contributed with their analyses, experiences, and struggles on various fronts of resistance against this system of domination/control/exploitation, where, in a broader assessment, while respecting the necessary dimensions in the

These struggles are traversed by the imperialism of the powers of the Global North along with their colonialism and racism, by environmental devastation resulting from mining in the countries of the Global South, by the situation of political and climate refugees, by the invasion of the territories of indigenous and traditional peoples, by real estate speculation in large population centres, by human trafficking, especially of women; by speciesism that sustains the logic of animal abuse for human consumption, by poverty/social inequality/concentration of wealth; therefore, some of the problems that were debated, in several languages ​​and with diverse accents. It is worth remembering that confronting this system of domination requires organisation, activism, conviction and resistance, but also music, dance and the construction of happiness. In the words of Emma Goldman, if this revolution doesn’t allow me to dance, then this isn’t my revolution; thus, we held a Libertarian Art Festival, another way to energise experiences of struggle and resistance through culture. We had performances by various musical groups and artistic groups where, nevertheless, we suffered police repression, typical of the modus operandi of this sector of the State, subservient to the petty elite who cannot stand to see the underprivileged in their cultural manifestations.

We understand that this crisis cannot be overcome through the neo-extractivism of oil and mining, the neo-developmentalist technology that requires the waste of millions of cubic meters of potable water to cool the data centres of Big Tech companies, the monopoly of renewable energy companies such as wind and solar (the latter even requiring and encouraging the mineralogical race for rare earths), agribusiness, the deprivation of peoples from exercising their rights to live in peace in their territories, the privatization of water and air, the maintenance of the privileges of the rich and colonial elites sustained by the terrible housing conditions, illiteracy, hunger, genocide, sexual exploitation, and poverty of the majority of populations, especially black or racialised people. We do not support and fight against initiatives to mitigate the effects of climate change that do not place the real problem at the centre of the debate, that is, capitalism and its counterparts.

We see in the practices of indigenous and traditional peoples those who truly safeguard biodiversity and the world’s forests, who remove tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to regulate the climate and throwing the rent-seeking logic of carbon credits into disarray. This, combined with the struggles and resistance waged by poor populations in the countryside and cities, scattered from north to south and from east to west of the global map, even with much humiliation and difficulty in securing bread, tortillas, chapati, or beiju, reinvent themselves through mutual support and solidarity when they see their lives being impacted by extreme weather events, produced by the greed and profit of the rich. The COP has no solution for our problems; on the contrary, it is an organisation created for the management of the environmental crisis, established by the same sectors that manage world hunger and poverty. Thus, our urgent needs do not fit within the COP. The solutions to the climate-environmental-s

From the humid tropics of the Amazonian lowlands, on the Belém peninsula in November 2025.

Machine translation. Photo: Peter Gelderloos

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