The power line

MANAUS to BOA VISTA.

"The Waimiri Atroari people have never been at peace. They never allowed us to think properly."

In a few sentences, Ewepe Marcelo Atroari, 52, sums up a common feeling of unease and alludes to the history of uninterrupted pressure on the territory of the Kinjas, as the Indigenous people of the Waimiri Atroari land in the states of Amazonas and Roraima call themselves.

"There aren't many old people here. The leaders are between 48 and 52 years old."

The BR-174 highway, which cuts through the traditional territory to connect Manaus to Boa Vista, was built at a tragic cost: the Kinja population was reduced from 1,500 to 374 Indigenous people by the end of the construction work that began in 1971. The deaths occurred as a result of the military's offensives and from diseases that had previously been absent from the territory, such as measles, chickenpox, and malaria.

In the 1980s, a mining company started operating in the region, contaminating the Kinjas' water supply. Then, the Balbina hydroelectric plant flooded 30,000 hectares of Indigenous land, displacing villages and disrupting the forest, rivers and lakes.

A new project is now taking shape in the Kinja's forest: the construction of the power line between Manaus and Boa Vista. Its pharaonic size brings to mind the major infrastructure work carried out during the military dictatorship in Brazil.

The Tucuruí power line – 724 km long, with almost 1,400 power towers taller than the Amazonian treetops, countless cables and three substations – will finally connect Roraima to the national power grid, ending the state's dependence on energy generated by diesel and natural gas-fired thermoelectric plants.

The power line follows the course of the BR-174 highway, alternating sides depending on the terrain and location of villages. Its most important and delicate point is where it crosses the Waimiri Atroari Indigenous Land. In this Indigenous territory, 237 towers, some almost 100 m high, are being erected over a distance of 122 km.

The works are well advanced, and the Lula (PT) government plans to complete the power line in September next year, with operation starting in December, according to the Ministry of Mines and Energy.

Hundreds of construction workers are now within the Waimiri Atroari territory. They are hired by the company that provides the services to Transnorte Energia, the consortium responsible for the power line construction, to erect the galvanised iron towers and stretch the massive cables through the forest.

These men, mostly young migrants from Maranhão and Piauí, appear tiny when seen with the naked eye. They cling to the tower structures or hang from the cables to make the necessary adjustments before transmitting power.

But on the ground, a unique set-up is taking place, unusual for a project of this magnitude: the Indigenous Kinjas have taken on a leading role in supervising the works, monitoring the movements of outsiders and, where possible, altering the route of the towers to reduce their impact on the forest.

This is the first time, after a succession of large-scale projects in the Waimiri Atroari territory, that the Kinjas have participated in every stage of the physical works, in an attempt to reduce the damage.

This model for involvement has not been seen in other large projects in the Amazon.

"Since 2011, the Waimiri Atroari people have been very concerned about the power line. We proposed that it should not pass through here, but rather through the Branco River," says Marcelo, one of the Indigenous inspectors.

"We suffered a lot of threats at the beginning of the studies, because they said we were an obstacle, that we were getting in the way. What we wanted was to understand. And if the power line was going to pass through here, then it was necessary to listen to the local people," he says.

The Kinjas allowed the newspaper Folha de São Paulo’s journalists to record the inspection work carried out by one of the groups of dozens of Indigenous people, who take turns each month. The report documents the 724 km power line between Manaus and Boa Vista.

Each inspection group is made up of 35 Indigenous people. For one month, they are responsible for monitoring, step by step, the erection of the power line towers, establishing rules of respect for the forest and the local residents.

Along the BR-174 highway and its margins, women and children can no longer be seen. Instructions have been given to minimise movement in these areas due to the presence of hundreds of power line workers. This has been the situation for almost two years.

All the Kinjas involved in supervision live at the CGAK (Kinja Environmental Management Centre), a large place with dormitories, offices, meeting rooms, a kitchen, and a canteen. The same space is used by the environmental consulting company employees hired by the power line consortium and teams from the Waimiri Atroari Programme, who manage community programmes in the Indigenous territory.

Each month, a new Indigenous group of the same size takes over the work. During these nearly two years, about 450 Indigenous people have participated in the oversight activities, equivalent to 17% of the territory's current population, which is 2,600 people living in 91 villages.

The goal is to enforce the environmental plan, developed so that the power line is erected according to rules and criteria validated by the Indigenous people.

Every day, the company's construction workers send the daily schedule for the work on 12 concurrent towers via WhatsApp. The Kinjas then divide and organise themselves, usually in pairs.

The most common arrangement is for a pair to remain at the construction site of one tower all day. They are the first to arrive and are responsible for opening the gates to the site and the last to leave. There are also mobile teams that spend their days conducting mobile inspections.

Videos are made on mobile phones, describing what is being done and shared with groups of village residents. 'The idea is not to leave people in the villages feeling anxious,' says Marcelo Atroari.

Posters put up display rules of conduct - such as no smoking, no filming of Indigenous people, and the need to respect the culture of the Waimiri Atroari people. The Indigenous inspectors give talks before the start of the working day, sometimes in the native language, sometimes in Portuguese. This also occurs when instructions are given to new groups of workers arriving in the territories and at meetings at the Indigenous Management Centre.

Accompanied by three Kinjas older than the Indigenous people on the front lines—Marcelo Atroari, Sawa Aldo Waimiri, and Sanapyty Geroncio Atroari, in their 40s and 50s—the journalists visited ten working sites. They went to towers still in the foundation stage, towers already completed and undergoing adjustments, areas where giant drones are launching cables, and the structuring of wires from one tower to another.

There is a feeling of discontent among the Indigenous people, especially in areas where there has been more deforestation and where mud has taken over construction sites. When construction deviates from the basic environmental plan, there is a mixture of resignation, contained indignation, silence, and demands to correct the course.

Continuous monitoring has already minimised the impact on the territory and the Indigenous people, such as reducing the number of towers, the space through which the power line advances into the forest, the size of the tower quadrants and cable launch areas, and a restriction on working hours until 4 p.m.

The project's first stage was the most painful for the Kinjas: the deforestation and clearing of areas, both the quadrants of the 237 towers and the 36 cable launch sites. This continuous suffering lasted almost a year.

'The removal was very sad. The forest bled a lot, I wasn't expecting it,' says Marcelo.

At this stage, the older Kinjas, such as Sawa, acted as specialists. They mapped the trees, indicated a separation of hardwoods, and prepared seedlings for a large nursery near the Indigenous Management Center.

Each time a tree sacred to the Kinjas, the angelim, was felled, they asked the workers to pause for a short ceremony. It was a kind of lament, with songs and dances at the foot of the trees, each time an angelim fell.

'We are going to replant açaí, bacaba, buriti, and the shorter species under the power lines. That's why we collected seeds and have a nursery,' says Sawa.

Around 80 angelim trees passed through the sawmill set up within the territory to reuse the wood for village improvements. In total, around 3,000 logs were produced from 50 species of Amazonian trees.

The sadness felt by the Kinja people over the felled trees is proportional to their distrust of strangers who operate in their territory every day.

Yago Oliveira Sampaio, 18, is one of them. He has been working on the power line construction since January this year. He left the hinterland of Piauí, in the Piripiri region, to be suspended in towers and cables over the Amazon rainforest, within an Indigenous territory. He had never worked with this in his life.

From below, looking up at the cables already stretched out where Yago hangs, the worker appears tiny. He moves along the cables in a mobile chair, span by span, until the workday ends. His job is to install equipment – similar to springs – whose function is to scare birds away so they do not collide with the cables.

On the section of the power line before entering the Indigenous land, it was necessary to demolish houses directly beneath the wiring. In the village of Presidente Figueiredo, there were about 12 houses, and residents say they received fair compensation. In these sections, workers continue to erect towers and lay cables, without the same difficulties encountered in the dense forest of the Indigenous territory.

The passage of the power line through Waimiri Atroari land was conditional on the payment of funds to compensate for irreversible environmental impacts, restrictions on land use and property losses, as well as strengthening the Waimiri Atroari Programme and funding the monitoring and supervision of the work.

Court decisions cite the amount of R$133 million, which is considered low in view of the profits to be generated by the exploitation of the energy matrix and the damage caused to the Indigenous people. In 2022, the government of Roraima stated that the amount to be paid by the federal government would be R$90 million. A Ministry of Mines and Energy committee has already approved eleven reimbursement installments, totalling R$37.5 million.

Among the Kinjas, there is already a new cause for concern: how will everything work after the construction is completed?

'Who will have access to the territory? Who will take care of it?' asks Marcelo, who is still waiting for information about the operation of the power line.

The Ministry of Mines and Energy states that the post-construction phase will follow the 'same logic of dialogue and joint construction adopted during the implementation phase.' 'The project was designed to minimise the need for frequent interventions. Any operational activity on Indigenous land will continue to be presented to the Kinjas in advance.'