The technical staff of Funai, Brazil's federal agency for indigenous affairs, has asked for the suspension or annulment of the installation license for the Volta Grande Project, an open-pit gold venture by miner Belo Sun billed as the largest of its kind in the country. The mine would sit in the Volta Grande do Xingu, a big bend of the Xingu River in Pará state already altered by the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, one of the largest in the world.
The position appears in an official letter from Funai's Environmental and Territorial Management Directorate (Digat), dated August 7 and sent to the agency's specialized federal prosecutors' office. The document, first revealed by Agência Pública and also obtained by Folha de S.Paulo, was produced as part of a conciliation attempt led by the TRF-1, the federal appeals court reviewing the case. It reverses the stance Funai held under former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Communities left out of the studies
Funai's main argument is that the impact studies behind the license ignored indigenous communities that could be affected by the mining. In a survey carried out after a commitment made during the conciliation, the agency identified 20 communities and villages in different land situations: six in the Jericoá Indigenous Reserve, still being formally created; five with territorial claims registered at Funai; and nine outside demarcated indigenous lands. Being listed does not mean all will be deemed affected. Funai says studies still need to determine the impacts on each group and define the project's area of influence.
Digat also points to technical gaps: disagreements over water intake from the Xingu River, the lack of a settled design for the ore processing plant, and the fact that the license reissued by Pará's state environmental agency (Semas) covers neither the tailings dam nor the Ouro Verde pit, one of the planned extraction sites. According to Diogo Cabral, a lawyer with the Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre (Xingu Alive Forever Movement), the project foresees a tailings dam with capacity for 35 million cubic meters of waste and cyanide processing close to the river.
"These aspects show that essential information has not yet been sufficiently clarified, compromising the proper assessment of impacts on the indigenous component and informed consultation with the potentially affected communities," Funai's technical note says.
The mine's relationship with Belo Monte is another friction point. Norte Energia, the dam's operator, has itself flagged incompatibilities between the two projects, citing risks to water quality, river flow and fish in the stretch of the Xingu with reduced flow, and asked for the mine's licensing to be reviewed because of what it called a conflict between the activities. Funai now demands an answer from Semas on these concerns and requires Belo Sun to produce a Cumulative Impact Assessment adding up the effects of the mine and the dam on the indigenous peoples of the Volta Grande.
The installation license was reinstated in February by a single-judge ruling from Justice Flávio Jardim of the TRF-1 and validated by Semas in April, without Funai's consent. Cabral disputes the idea that pending issues could be fixed later through license conditions: "it allows questions that should be resolved before authorization to be left for later," he told Agência Pública. The outcome, now before the TRF-1, should show how far Brazil's licensing rules and ILO Convention 169, which requires prior and informed consultation of indigenous peoples, will actually be enforced on large mining projects in the Amazon.