Deutsche Bahn’s Brazilian Line

Changes are coming to the landscape of Cajual Island, in Brazil’s northeastern state of Maranhão. Its leafy forests and babassu coconut palm groves will be replaced by up to 350-metre-long cargo ships carrying thousands of tons of iron, copper, soya beans, corn, and other commodities to China, the United States, and Europe.

By 2027, the island’s multi-kilometre-long beaches and mangroves will give way to a port complex, with railway lines, power substations, and warehouses, where 1,800 workers will take turns day and night on the island of the municipality of Alcântara.

This is the change that the Portuguese-born, naturalized Brazilian executives Paulo Salvador, Nuno da Mota e Silva, and Nuno Martins of the Grão-Pará Maranhão corporation (GPM) plan to produce. Their idea is to have nearly 90 percent of the Vila Nova Quilombola Territory, on Cajual Island, occupied by the Alcântara Port Terminal and the EF-317 Railway.

“An enterprise of this scale effectively extinguishes the local Quilombola territory. It makes the protection of the territory completely impossible”, Yuri Costa, a federal public defender in Maranhão, explains. The public defender's office filed a public-interest civil action last year requiring land titling for the quilombo.

While the megaport project was designed to ship soya beans and other agribusiness and mining commodities to China, the US, and European countries, the feasibility study commissioned by GPM showed that the main product to be shipped will be iron ore, mined from the Carajás Mountains, in Brazil's northern state of Pará, by Vale S.A.

Iron ore is currently moved through the Carajás Railway to the Ponta da Madeira Port Terminal in São Luís, Maranhão, both operated by Vale. The new project, GPM states, is a “response to the need to meet future demand for iron ore exports through a deep-water port”.

Cajual Island is an Environmental Protection Area of the Maranhão Recesses, an area of international relevance. It is a “very preserved” and sensitive environment, according to a 2018 report produced by Brazil's environmental agency IBAMA, and still houses fossils of dinosaurs that inhabited the area about 95 million years ago.

It is also a Quilombola area where 51 families — about 92 people — live off fishing, farming, and small livestock rearing, a way of life inherited from their ancestors, who were brought to the country as enslaved labour at least three centuries ago.

The area to be destroyed includes homes, crop areas, a preservation area, and a municipal elementary school.

The land titling process to have the area recognized as a Quilombola territory, conducted by the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) and the Federal Heritage Governance and Coordination Department in Maranhão, has dragged on since 2007. The process is the only way to finally provide regular land titles to these families.

However, in 2017, the Association of Residents of the Vila Nova Cajual Island Black Rural Quilombola Community signed a contract granting the use and usufruct of more than 14 million square metres of their territory — or 1,400 football pitches — for the installation and operation of the port. The agreement, on behalf of the entire community, is valid indefinitely.

With a multi-billion-real investment and two federal permissions, GPM’s plans for this enterprise include a partnership with the German state-owned company Deutsche Bahn and strong support from the current Brazilian government and the Maranhão state government.

Port Will Take up to 87 Percent of Quilombola Territory

While no proper legal consultations have been conducted, the community is now about to witness the beginning of the project’s construction works. On 2 January, IBAMA, the Brazilian federal agency responsible for granting or not granting licences for the project, reported that GPM had not yet submitted all required documents detailing the socio-environmental impacts of its enterprise.

The Cajual Island Quilombola territory covers an area of just over 1,630 hectares, or 1,630 football pitches, according to data from the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR). Comparing the geographical coordinates of the land area of the future port with those of the Quilombola territory, we can see that the Quilombola association allowed more than 87 percent of its territory to be devastated for the installation of the Alcântara Port Terminal.

The area to be destroyed includes homes, crop areas, a preservation area, and a municipal elementary school.

Danilo Serejo, a political scientist and member of the Movement of People Affected by the Alcântara Space Base (MABE), argues that the island is too small to house such a large enterprise. “While the port initially requires a minimum operational structure, such an enterprise is expected to need more area as the demand increases. Inevitably, the community will leave”, he says.

When contacted by The Intercept Brasil, the director general of Grão-Pará Maranhão, Paulo Salvador, said the project will occupy “only 20 percent of the total area of Cajual Island”, and that the beginning of its construction work and operation is scheduled to last two to three years, depending on the administrative processes of authorization and licensing.

We asked him where local families would be moved to, as the project will be largely implemented in the quilombo area.

He said that decisions on the design of the project and its impacts on the community are being “made together, seeking to harmonize the requirements for the implementation of the terminal with the location of the various existing housing centres”.

Railway Will Run through Community, but Locals Are Unaware

The railway included in GPM’s project is 520 kilometres long and runs through at least 22 municipalities in Maranhão, according to the route plans submitted by the company itself to government agencies. The railway runs through more than a dozen rural settlements and, at some points, it runs just over 10 kilometres away from Indigenous Lands.

In one of the maps of effects produced by GPM, while the Tanque de Valença quilombo, in the municipality of Matinha, is not represented, the railway line runs through the middle of the community. We visited it in August last year, and none of the more than ten residents we spoke to were aware of the enterprise’s existence.

Danilo Serejo says the socio-environmental impacts of the railway will be even worse than those of the port. “You have the exposure of a population to iron-ore dust, which will lead to a number of respiratory, skin, and health problems in those people and communities that will be living by the railway. Not only that, there is also the problem of noise pollution, free movement, and traffic in the territory.”

In exchange for the use and appropriation of the territory's resources, the Portuguese executives offer in their contract basic sanitation, water supply, power supply, an elementary school, a football pitch, a space for religious practice, and a health care centre to 51 households.

We, who live in those lands, see and hear things, but sometimes we don’t know how to thoroughly assess what we are looking at.

They do not, however, specify where this structure will be set up. The contract also states that the partner association “will be responsible for the fruit corresponding to 6 percent of the enterprise, with all its respective advantages”. But there is no information in the contract about the terms and conditions of profit sharing or details on what these “respective advantages” may be.

In March 2018, a few days before the signing of the agreement between the company and the Quilombola association, six IBAMA analysts conducted a technical inspection on Cajual Island and spoke to local residents.

In their report, they highlighted that, “when IBAMA asked them about the project, we found that, in general, the residents had little information about its actual location and the impacts it would have”.

In early February, we asked Josilene Pereira Penha, the vice president of the Quilombola association, if she knew that the territory would be almost entirely occupied to set up the enterprise.

“We, who live in those lands, see and hear things, but sometimes we don’t know how to thoroughly assess what we are looking at”, Penha said. She was one of the three people from the association who signed the contract with GPM in 2017.

At the time, she was the general secretary of the organization. Penha argued that the association's incumbent president, Vanda Almeida Pereira — who was its vice president in 2017 — advised them not to give interviews about the project.

Paulo Salvador, executive director of Grão-Pará Maranhão, said that the construction work is still in its environmental licensing phase and that the “Quilombola association of Cajual Island has the right, by law, to the usufruct of the territory of the island, as recognized by all agencies consulted before the authorization process”.

He also said that the community is a partner in the project and that the association is aware of its role, “as we have repeatedly found in our monthly meetings since 2017”. Salvador also says that the 6-percent profit share assigned to the association, provided for in the contract, will be granted “as to any shareholder, with no expiration date, as long as the port terminal records positive results”.