Indigenous People Protest Hydropower Greenwash

Date: 
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Sheyla Juruna tells Valter Cardeal of Eletrobras that indigenous people did not give consent to Belo Monte Dam
Sheyla Juruna tells Valter Cardeal of Eletrobras that indigenous people did not give consent to Belo Monte Dam
International Rivers

During the same day that the Peruvian government canceled Eletrobras' Inambari dam in the Peruvian Amazon as a result of non-compliance with the international Labor Organization's Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, tribes from Brazil's Xingu River basin lambasted the Brazilian government at an International Congress for having failed to achieve consent from indigenous peoples who would be affected by the Belo Monte Dam.

The protests occured in Foz do Iguaçú, Brazil a day before the official launch of the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol, a new score card that promotes sustainability by asking the hydropower industry to voluntarily measure its own performance, while not requiring developers to meet the policy standards and regulations of national legislation and international accords.

Indigenous activists from the Xingu River basin were joined by members of the Guaraní tribe whose families were displaced by Brazil's Itaipú Dam in the 1980s, and who currently live in welfare encampments maintained by dam operator Itaipú Binacional on the shores of Itaipú's reservoir.

Read on for our position at the Congress of the International Hydropower Association, the main sponsor of the sustainability protocol.