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 The post Letter from the anti-COP30 anarchist days appeared first on Freedom News.

THEIR IDEA OF ‘SUSTAINABLE CAPITALISM’ IS TO SELL OFF THE RAINFOREST AND BUILD MEGA-PROJECTS ~ Rafael Sanz, desinformemonos ~ COP 30 has begun in Belém, the capital of the state of Pará and the main city in the Brazilian Amazon, a territory roughly the size of two Mexicos. The only reason it isn’t burning as it did in 2024 is that this is a La Niña year, meaning slightly more abundant rainfall in 2025. It will be the thirtieth time that lobbyists and representatives of governments and corporations from around the world gather to discuss fictions and unrealistic adjustments, green reforms for capitalism, and innocuous decarbonisation targets that they themselves routinely fail to meet, all while temperatures rise in the oceans, forests, and territories inhabited by humans. And in 2025, the various global climate representatives arrive in a rather complicated Brazil. The first scene from this Brazil is the recent Penha-Alemã massacre in Rio de Janeiro, where at least 128 bodies were executed by the state in the open air and piled up in a public square. The bodies had barely cooled when the media were already repeating the chorus from the state government itself (responsible for the “operation”) that all the dead were members of the Comando Vermelho criminal faction. Whether they were or not remains unknown. What is known is that the police’s main targets, the drug kingpins, were neither victims nor arrested, the city was paralysed for days, and the affected communities were collectively punished for the presence of criminal groups there, both legal (128 corpses) and illegal. But this approach to security is a constant throughout the country. In Rio, everything has been tried, from community policing models (Pacifying Police Units, UPPs) that have proven to be just as violent and prone to abuse as the regular police, to the infamous GLOs (Law and Order Guarantee Operations), in which the federal government authorises the use of the Armed Forces to assist the state police with public safety. In 2017, for example, General Walter Braga Netto led the GLO that promoted a military occupation of some Rio favelas, including Complexo do Alemão. A candidate for Bolsonaro’s vice presidency in 2022, he is now convicted of attempting a coup. And so the model arrived in the Amazon thanks to COP 30. Last Monday (3 November), President Lula signed a GLO for the capital of Pará at the request of Governor Helder Barbalho. On Tuesday morning, the military began arriving en masse with their land, water, and air vehicles. Social movements fear the repression that such security measures could generate, especially at COP 30, where Brazil is attempting to greenwash its recent environmental decisions. And by “recent” we don’t mean the tragedy we experienced under Bolsonaro’s government, prior to Lula’s current third term, in which our biomes burned like never before due to the deliberate federal promotion of expanding agribusiness and mining frontiers. Given the previous disaster, the change in administration brought with it the mistaken idea that the Brazilian state would be an ally of the rest of humanity in the fight against the socio-environmental collapse we witness daily. It is not. Throughout this administration, contrary to campaign promises to demarcate Indigenous and Quilombola territories and close the gap with extractive sectors (agribusiness, mining, hydroelectric projects, and highways), we have seen the opposite. Delays and bureaucratic obstacles have hindered the protection of already demarcated Indigenous lands and the demarcation of new territories. The encroachment of agribusiness into natural areas, culminating in the Day of Fire in 2024, not to mention the frenzy to build highways, railways, and hydroelectric plants that will primarily serve to distribute the predatory agribusiness’s production and facilitate the mass arrival of foreign data centers, with their high energy consumption and low-quality jobs for the working class. On the eve of COP 30, the energy transition model we are going to present to the world is based on the premise of treating hydroelectric power as “clean energy,” in contrast to thermoelectric and nuclear power plants abroad. But they fail to include deforestation in the equation, which is the main cause of carbon emissions here. Belo Monte, a hydroelectric dam built in Altamira (a municipality in Pará affected by the recent GLO), destroyed the once-lush Xingu River, turning it into a lake, but that’s not all. It also facilitated the arrival of a development model that doesn’t consider preserving the rainforest. The entire region has suffered deforestation and successive fires ever since. The model under which hydroelectric plants are built requires the construction of roads and railways that cut through the forest. These roads are necessary to transport all the grain, timber, minerals, and electricity produced in the most remote corners of Brazil. This infrastructure will also serve the small towns that are beginning to grow as a result of this model, which places greater demands on the previously preserved local environment. Two current examples in the transportation sector illustrate this model: Ferrogrão and the reconstruction of the BR-319 highway . Ferrogrão is a planned 933 km railway, starting in Sinop (in the state of Mato Grosso, a central area for soybean and corn production in Brazil’s Midwest region) and reaching the port of Miritituba. From there, the transported produce would travel down the Amazon River to the Caribbean Sea, then be shipped to California and China. This multi-billion dollar project offers no social or ecological benefits to Brazil beyond satisfying the immediate interests of agribusiness. On the contrary, it will cut through conservation areas like Jamanxim National Park and affect hundreds of Indigenous and peasant communities. But there are two aggravating factors: first, the mere mention by the federal government of building the railway has already stirred up the region’s land market, which operates in a gray area between legality and illegality, between speculation and displacement; The second aggravating factor is that the transport of agro-industrial production to China and California would be carried out through the Panama Canal, whose capacity for use is already compromised due to the climate crisis. And every time a railway or road is built in a previously untouched or relatively undisturbed natural area, what is known as the “fishbone effect” occurs—precisely a consequence of the booming grey market for land. Observe a wooded area from above, as if from a satellite or drone. The main road is opened, the backbone of the “fish.” Gradually, with the land market in full swing (literally burning everything down), secondary roads are opened to provide access to the newly occupied areas. And so we see how the landscape transforms into something resembling a fishbone. This is the main concern of serious environmentalists and the communities living in the region where the BR-319 highway, which would connect Manaus (capital of Amazonas) and Porto Velho (capital of Rondônia), is slated for reconstruction. The problem is that this area, following a herringbone pattern, would extend the arc of deforestation all the way to Manaus and open the way to still-preserved areas of the western and northern Brazilian Amazon. This would cause the collapse of Brazil’s most resilient Amazonian ecosystems. Brazilians would be the first to feel the effects, with their rainfall system completely destroyed. But the world would also see a slight increase in temperature, exacerbating the global climate crisis. Another problem with the charade of the ecological transition is that it doesn’t address the quilombos (settlements of escaped slaves), indigenous lands, and conservation areas, instead focusing on parcelling out forests and promising their preservation through privatisation and maintaining the same logic of private property that has brought us to this point in history. Let’s remember that before capitalism, human societies were never a threat to life on the planet, only to themselves. The illusion surrounding the utopia of reforming capitalism is completed with the final touch to this cake of ashes and fire: weeks before the start of COP 30, Ibama (the Brazilian Institute of the Environment, a federal agency) authorised Petrobras (the state-owned oil company) to investigate the feasibility of oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River. This is simply a highly turbulent oceanic zone, where a single spill could affect several neighbouring countries. An authorisation to investigate that will undoubtedly become an authorisation to exploit, given the direction of the political debate. But they want to sell us the idea that we are going to drill in a very complex area from an environmental impact standpoint, extract rivers of oil, and burn it so that, who knows, one day we can finally abandon fossil fuels. Perhaps when we are all dead. And while we watch year after year the “climate representatives” celebrating their parties and discussing their fictions, temperatures continue to rise, forests continue to fall, and people continue to live and die in increasingly worse conditions. It is impossible to debate the climate issue without including capital and the state in the equation as a problem rather than a solution. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Indigenous people from various regions protest during the free land camp in Brasilia, 4 October. Joédson Alves/Agência Brasil The post COP30 farce in Lula’s Brazil appeared first on Freedom News.

THE ‘NARCOTERRORIST’ IS FABRICATED IN PLACE OF AN INTERNAL THREAT, CAPABLE OF SETTING THE CITY ABLAZE ~ Camila Jourdan, LASInTec ~ What threat should bodies displayed in public squares produce? What lesson of terror has always been expressed by public executions? Alongside this: what authorises the modern state to kill? How can death be produced and, at the same time, one claim to be doing so in defence of the democratic rule of law? How can a row of bodies be publicly displayed while simultaneously writing the caption: ‘city returns to normal after operation’? How can massacre and extermination be placed under the aegis of normality? From the day of the operation, television insisted on saying that all the dead were ‘criminals,’ even if it wasn’t known who they were. Everything had been done to maintain order and social peace. Peace for whom, after all? The implication: ‘he died, therefore he was a drug dealer’ is old in this context of producing discourses of the supposed ‘war on drugs,’ and has been around for at least four decades. We know that the term ‘asymmetric warfare’ is used to avoid calling it a massacre, extermination, slaughter, persecution of the poor, crime management, and territorial control through fear. When the media finally starts calling them ‘suspects,’ it’s always accompanied by depersonalsation. It’s important to make the targets non-subjects, and this is done in many ways. By displaying bodies in mountains. By placing numbers as the subject of the sentence. By attempting to avoid any empathy. More than 100 people were murdered, but this must be treated as a whole; only the family and friends of the four police officers are shown crying, feeling, demonstrating grief. The murdered people have no family, or this family is a hidden subject mentioned to acknowledge the guilt of the dead son; no one cares, they are just numbers: ‘128 dead’, ‘128 bodies’, no subjectivity… hence the backdrop for the governor’s statement, repeated by the security secretary: “we only had 4 victims in this operation, the police officers,” the others were contained, eliminated, shot down. The others are not people. All this is then accompanied by the impossibility of defence; the animalised other is the place of the social enemy, and the social enemy is the one who can be eliminated without punishment. More than that, whose attempt at self-defence must always trigger their own death. The place occupied by those who are labelled as non-human is what the designation of ‘terrorist’ should produce, the place that people without rights should occupy. The interviews given by the governor and the secretary of security intransigently defend an illegal operation, supported by this discursive stratagem: the place where defence is impossible is also the place of the prey. That’s why it’s so important for them to say that what’s at stake is no longer the drug trade, but the defence of the state, that these are ultimately very dangerous ‘narcoterrorists’. The ‘narcoterrorist’ is killable par excellence, an enemy of civilisation, fabricated in place of an internal threat, capable of setting the city ablaze, paralysing the market, disrupting roads, bringing chaos. Against him, any violence is presented as perfectly legitimate. Only in this way is it possible to justify leaving them in the woods for their families to retrieve the bodies. A refinement of cruelty, undoubtedly, but one that conveniently prevents forensic investigation. Because if they go to retrieve them, they are also accused of being criminals, of having tampered with the crime scene, of having generated any mark on the body that does not correspond to the version of the resistance report. But, if they were all in conflict, why weren’t their rifles found? Wouldn’t it be important for the police to leave evidence supporting their narrative at the scene, since they were acting in self-defense? How can unarmed bodies be seen as threats? Hence the importance of them being collected by their loved ones, those people who, even in the face of this sadistic strategy, insist on having empathy, like Antigone in the ancient myth. […] We shouldn’t claim that what happened was a tragedy, because it wasn’t; it was planned and executed according to plan. In this, the governor didn’t lie. In any case, Claudio Castro said that the police officers who died in the confrontation are heroes. I don’t want to dispute heroism. But if there is one action that can be applauded amidst all this, it is that of those who spent the night searching for the bodies of their relatives, friends, or even just neighbours in the middle of the woods. These people allow us to confront the fear that is systematically imposed on us as a policy of death. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abridged machine translation The post Rio massacre: The politics of extermination appeared first on Freedom News.

OVER 120 DEAD IN BRAZIL’S DEADLIEST FAVELA RAID IN DECADES ~ Matheus Fonseca ~ At dawn on 28 October, over 2,500 policemen overran the favelas of Penha and Alemão in Rio de Janeiro. They had a warrant to arrest hundreds of individuals linked to Comando Vermelho, the biggest drug trafficking militia active in Brazil, but as soon as they made contact with the gang members, the shootouts started. Police ran belligerents into planned ambushes, and it was reported that militias used suicide drones. Until now there is no confirmation that every casualty was involved in organised crime, nor is it known how many were summarily killed. No video footage has been published. Police may have abandoned a number of corpses found in nearby woods which have been recovered by local residents. According to media, some bodies have what seem to be torture marks and knife cuts. The favelas—slang for ghetto or slum—are overpopulated and lack planning, electricity and water supply, sewage system and proper communication systems. In these districts, hundreds of militia members oppress the working people with extortion, terror campaigns, child soldier recruitment, rape, torture and kangaroo courts. At the UN, High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said that that, for decades, “the high level of killings associated with the police in Brazil has been normalised”, with thousands of black youths from impoverished areas being killed by police every year in the country. He called on Brazil “to end a system that perpetuates racism, discrimination and injustice”. But anarchists in Brazil described the raids as a ‘social hygiene measure’ in the favelas, where every regime since colonial times has maintained poverty and violence.The Organização Socialista Libertária added that “The criminal overlords that control the drug and weapon trafficking in the borders—with police participation—will not be bothered or put out of business” by the raid, especially when “at this moment in time the state has found that the main protagonists in crime are from the upper classes”. It pointed out that past operations have found several multi-millionaire companies related to slush funds in São Paulo city involved in organised crime, and others have found tons of cocaine trafficked in Santos bay. The post Rio police massacre: “The criminal overlords are from the upper classes” appeared first on Freedom News.

Andy, Rhiannon, Sam and Simon discuss the UK Supreme Court’s ruling, what it means legally and what it actually means for trans people, as well as the solidarity demonstrations that took place over the weekend. We also look at the evictions in Greece and the Brazilian government’s continued repression of native peoples. Finally finishing off with Kier Starmer’s Labour Government’s ongoing identity crisis and what anarchists might do in the face of continued government cuts and austerity. The post Anarchist News Review: Trans rights in court, evictions in Greece and Labour’s latest mess appeared first on Freedom News.

FOR YEARS, INDIGENOUS FAMILIES HAVE FACED PRESSURE FROM REAL ESTATE DEVELOPERS SEEKING TO EVICT THEM IN ORDER TO DEVELOP THE AREA ON LANDS KNOWN AS SANTUÁRIO DOS PAJÉS, A SACRED PLACE FOR INDIGENOUS SPIRITUALITY ~ Aldo Santiago, Avispa Midia ~ On Tuesday morning, 15 April, members of the Military Police of the Federal District (PMDF), Brasilia, carried out a violent raid in the Teko-Haw village where 40 families of the Guajajara people live. Using violence, tear gas, tractors and drones, the PMDF members advanced to allow the entry of machinery that deforested an area of Cerrado vegetation – the savannah with the greatest biodiversity in the world – and also destroyed the Rezo Kwarahy Guajajara hunting lodge built by Guajajara families, who migrated from the state of Maranhão, in northern Brazil, in 2009. Located northwest of Brasília, these lands have been inhabited by Indigenous peoples such as the Fulni-ô Tapuya, Tuxá, Kariri-Xocó, Wapichana, and Guajajara. Their ancestral territory lies within the urban expansion zone where the Federal District Government (GDF) is interested in building the most expensive neighbourhood in the capital city—and one of the most expensive in all of Brazil—while promoting it as an “ecological green neighbourhood.” For years, Indigenous families have faced pressure from real estate developers seeking to evict them in order to develop the area on lands known as Santuário dos Pajés, a sacred place for Indigenous spirituality. According to the Map of Conflicts over Environmental Injustice and Health in Brazil, since the 1990s, the Santuário dos Pajés territory has been disputed by the construction companies Emplavi and Brasal, which seek to benefit from the expansion plan for the Northwest Sector of Brasília. According to the mapping, both construction companies have the support of Terracap, a public company with district and federal jurisdiction, responsible for land registration in the capital and which has made agreements with other Indigenous communities to vacate areas designated for urban development projects. To date, only 32.4 hectares have been officially recognized as Indigenous Territory within the Santuário dos Pajés (the only ones demarcated in Brazil’s capital), which covers a larger area of 50 hectares. This recognition was the result of a decade-long legal dispute, resolved through a 2018 agreement between the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (MPF), the National Indian Foundation (Funai), the Brasília Environmental Institute (Ibram), and the Federal District Development Agency (Terracap). However, the 32.4 hectares are designated for the exclusive use of the Fulni-ô Tapuya community, but other communities such as the Guajajara, Tuxá, Kariri-Xocó, and Wapichana also inhabit the area. They maintain the demand for the expansion and recognition of the entire ancestral territory historically occupied by Indigenous peoples. BRASÍLIA HAS INDIGENOUS VILLAGES The Teko-Haw village was established in the indigenous territories of Brasilia, just 20 minutes from the centre of Brazilian political power, as a form of political protest in 2009, when a presidential decree—issued by Lula da Silva during his second term—ordered the restructuring of Funai without the participation of Brazil’s indigenous communities. Chief Francisco Guajajara with families living in the Teko-Haw Village during his participation in the Terra Livre 2025 Camp. Photos: Aldo Santiago Since then, the village, made up of Guajajara Indigenous people from Maranhão, has remained on their ancestral lands northwest of Brasília, where they practice traditional corn and cassava farming among native Cerrado trees such as the pequi and araticum. Despite submitting multiple formal requests to various government agencies, for more than a decade they have been denied official recognition of their territory, as well as access to basic rights such as sanitation, electricity, drinking water, education, and healthcare. In this context, the families of the Teko-Haw village—especially the children—face severe food vulnerability. Just days before the conclusion of ATL 2025—where thousands of Indigenous people from across Brazil mobilized—GDF security forces launched a police operation against the village. This, despite the fact that during the encampment, community members held meetings with federal officials, demanding commitments to respect the Guajajara families resisting in the Teko-Haw village. During ATL 2025, Chief Francisco Guajajara and other members of the Teko-Haw village joined the mobilizations to request support from the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib) and other Indigenous peoples who participated in the protests. In an interview with Avispa Mídia, Chief Francisco maintained that his community is responsible for caring for and defending the environment in a context of urban expansion that causes deforestation and threatens the region’s water sources. “We are here to demand the demarcation of our territory, our health, and the preservation of the environment, because we, the indigenous peoples of Brazil, are the ones fighting for climate justice,” shared Chief Francisco, while protesting the attempts to destroy the prayer hut, a structure that, despite the community’s efforts, was dismantled during the operation this Tuesday, 15th April. “We are fighting with Terracap so that we can regularize our territory. That is what we need, because we need our living territory. That is what we demand,” said Chief Guajajara. ANOTHER ATTEMPT This Tuesday’s police operation is just the latest in Terracap’s efforts to displace the Teko-Haw village. Recently, at the end of March, the Federal Court ordered a temporary suspension of the community’s eviction after receiving a request from the Federal Public Defender’s Office (DPU), which reported the violation of Indigenous rights during a police action that occurred in February of this year. However, this Tuesday’s eviction attempt was ordered by Judge Kátia Balbino, who authorized the GDF and Terracap to take joint measures to, “stop further illegal occupations in the region and continue infrastructure projects in the area.” According to a GDF bulletin, based on a March 2025 inspection, the property, “located in Block 707 of the Northwest, is unoccupied, with no residents or Indigenous communities present. The court decision was based on aerial images that confirmed the absence of residential occupations at the site.” Despite the violent incursion and the destruction of the prayer house, at press time, no injuries were reported in the Teko-haw village, while Guajajara families remain on alert in their homes for any further incursion by security forces. The post In Brasilia, Teko-Haw village resists violent eviction appeared first on Freedom News.

“WHERE WE COME FROM AND WHERE WE ARE GOING”: A REFLECTION ON BRAZILIAN ANARCHISM, THEN AND NOW ~ from O Amigo do Povo ~ Brazilian anarchism lost influence over the masses with the decline and later, the end of revolutionary syndicalism in Brazil between the 1920s and 1930s. This syndicalism already had certain limitations when compared to the model of the historical AIT and its relationship with Mikhail Bakunin’s Alliance. The limitations can be summarised as purism, a-politicism and lack of understanding of the reality of Brazil, in addition to the centrality of anarchist organisation. What remained of anarchism in Brazil for more than half a century were small initiatives of propagandists, educationists and memorialists of anarcho-communist groups, composed of a mix of the old generation of anarchists in contact with young university students and punks, mostly from the petite bourgeoisie. Between 1995 and 1996, through contacts between anarchist activists in Brazil and the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU), a new era emerged for anarchism in Brazil, culminating in the creation of the Libertarian Socialist Organization (OSL) in 1997 and, later, the Forum of Organised Anarchism in 2000. Despite the limitations and lack of theoretical and strategic unity of some local groups, it was in this context that Brazilian anarchism once again gained a small presence in the class struggle. Of note were the actions of the Gaucho Anarchist Federation (FAG) and, later, the Collective of Pro-organisation Anarchist of Goiás (COPOAG), with its work among waste pickers in the National Movement of Waste Pickers (MNCR), and the Libertarian Socialist Organization OSL-RJ (future UNIPA), with its urban occupations and secondary school movements in the outskirts. Of the initiatives that stood out in the class struggle in the early 2000s, FAG’s activities lost traction among waste pickers and other social movements, adopting a shift towards post-structuralism. The Colective Anarchist Pro-organisation of Goiás, which was Bakuninist, ended in 2008. The only organisation that continued to advance, both in theory and in practice, was the group from Rio de Janeiro, which became the Popular Anarchist Union. At that time, the Popular Anarchist Union had already been debating the importance of building a revolutionary theory through Bakunin’s thought, criticising individualism and highlighting the importance of strategic action, as in the debate between CONLUTAS and INTERSINDICAL that existed within the Forum of Organised Anarchism. In this sense, the Popular Anarchist Union broke with Forum of Organised Anarchism and launched itself as a national organisation, criticising revisionism and eclecticism. The Popular Anarchist Union, which was a local group in Rio de Janeiro until 2007, due to its more successful performance in the national context of degeneration of the left with the Worker’s Party governments, such as in the revolutionary bloc in Conlutas and in the promotion of a combative tendency in the student movement with the Class-Based and Combative Student Network, experienced relatively large quantitative and qualitative growth in the 2010s building centres in the Federal District, Ceará, Center South, Goiás, Mato Grosso, among others. Meanwhile the Forum of Organised Anarchism, which became the Brazilian Anarchist Coordination (CAB), despite its growth, changed little in terms of strategic unity and mass line, often acting as an auxiliary line of reformism or practicing welfare in social movements, resulting in less influence in the class struggle. Garbage collector in Juazeiro, Bahia, 2007. Photo: Glauco Umbelino CC BY 2.0 In 2013, with the June uprising and the growth of its influence in several cities, the Popular Anarchist Union contributed to the call for the National Meeting of Popular, Student and Revolutionary Trade Union Organisations and the national reconstruction of Federation of Revolutionary Syndicalist Organisations of Brazil, becoming a reference for class-based tendencies in Brazil, mainly in the student movement with the Class-Based and Combative Student Network and in basic education with the Class Resistance Opposition group. There was a significant increase in the participation of Bakuninists in the class struggle, such as in the high school occupations of 2015 and in universities in 2016. The Popular Anarchist Union, which established itself as the only bastion of revolutionary class-based anarchism in Brazil during the Worker’s Party governments (2003-2016), began to make its first mistakes after Dilma’s impeachment, by adhering to the coup narrative and, consequently, favouring the fight against the Worker’s Party “coup-mongering” and the defence of bourgeois democracy. This can be explained, in part, by the contradiction of its growth having occurred in intermediate sectors, such as the student movement of federal universities and the civil service. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Anarchist Coordination lost itself in social-democratic and identity-based narratives, having little influence in the class struggle. After losing its way in the conceptual dispute with the reformists following Dilma’s impeachment, the only Bakuninist organisation in the world also failed to fully understand the changing context and the decline in struggles after 2016. Even in a new context of right-wing governments and a decline in struggles, it helped to convene the second National Meeting of Popular, Student and Revolutionary Trade Union Organisations, with a proposal de-contextualised from Western Europe by the anarcho-syndicalists of the International Confederation of Labor (CIT) with the creation of the SIGAs, parallel unions, breaking with the only model that was working: the class-based and disciplined tendencies. Thus, they created free unions aimed mainly at libertarians and doctrinaire revolutionaries, focusing only on agitation and propaganda, like the outdated models of the factory-gate unions of the 20th century. The Popular Anarchist Union/ Federation of Revolutionary Syndicalist Organisations of Brazil continued to present errors in reading the context and promoting hasty and misguided structural changes, and as a result, several internal disagreements arose, mainly on issues such as the “Coup”, “Bolsonaro Out”, “identitarianism” and the “stay at home” policy. In this context, between 2021-2023, there were many ruptures in The Popular Anarchist Union/ Federation of Revolutionary Syndicalist Organisations of Brazil, some public, others not. In the Brazilian Anarchist Coordination, there were also disagreements on two main issues: the advancement of the national organisation with political and strategic unity and the criticism of liberalism/identitarianism, which culminated in a split, mainly of the southeastern organisations of the Brazilian Anarchist Coordination, which formed the new Libertarian Socialist Organization (OSL) in 2023. With all these changes in the situation in recent years – right-wing governments, the pandemic and the return of the Lula government, even more bourgeois – splits were created that today divide militant anarchism in Brazil into four main lines: Brazilian Anarchist Coordination, Libertarian Socialist Organization, Popular Anarchist Union/ Federation of Revolutionary Syndicalist Organisations of Brazil and its dissidents, such as GLP/Jornal Amigo do Povo, Ofensiva Revolucionária, among others. Our humble position, the result of these ruptures and more than 20 years of activism even though we are not an anarchist group today, but rather a group of class-based activists, is summarised in advancing where the historical Popular Anarchist Union (2003-2016) was unable to do so. We want to make a quantitative and qualitative leap not only with intermediate sectors, but mainly with strategic sectors and the marginal proletariat, continuing with disciplined activism and theoretical and strategic unity as a legacy of Bakunin and Makhno. We must go to the people and continue fighting for the social revolution. The post The ruptures of militant anarchism in Brazil appeared first on Freedom News.