The Brazilian Constitution bans illegal mining on Indigenous lands under any circumstances. But the high demand for minerals, especially gold, drove miners to invade Indigenous lands anyway. Since 2018, the area of gold mines in the Amazon has doubled (1,217% since 1985), while the metal’s value has nearly tripled, reaching an all-time record high.
Since 2023, the federal government has conducted a crackdown on illegal miners, dealing significant blows to criminal operations in Indigenous lands. In the Yanomami Indigenous Territory (Brazil’s largest), operations resulted in more than 500 million reais ($93 million) in losses for illegal miners until mid-October, largely reducing the area affected by the activity, authorities say.
In the Sararé and Munduruku lands, authorities have destroyed hundreds of camps, excavators and bunkers that serve to hide equipment and weapons linked to local crime syndicates.
These actions are a direct response to the humanitarian and environmental crisis fueled by illegal mining. Criminals skyrocketed deforestation and mercury contamination in rivers and fueled violence in Indigenous communities, as the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime has warned in one of its 2025 reports.
However, while the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva moves in one direction, the Brazilian Congress goes another. Controversial bills that aim to legalize mining and other large-scale economic activities within Indigenous lands — such as PL 1331/2022 and PL 6050/2023 — are currently in discussion (and advancing), raising concerns among experts and organizations.
While the first provides explicitly for the exploration and mining on Indigenous lands, the second is broader and proposes a regulatory framework for different economic activities on Indigenous lands — it includes mining but also oil, gas, hydroelectric power and others.
In August, both projects advanced, being approved by the Senate’s Human Rights and Participatory Legislation Committee.
Suely Araújo¹, public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory, a network of Brazilian civil society organizations advocating for climate action, said the moment has created ideal conditions for the controversial mining agenda.
“Brazil is currently experiencing a political and economic environment that is favorable to the expansion of mining,” she told Mongabay. “This is due to a combination of the country’s geological wealth, the narrative — which says that there is a window of opportunity to become a mineral powerhouse in the energy transition — and international pressure, coupled with internal lobbying for more supply of critical minerals.”
According to Araújo, a former president of Brazil’s federal environmental agency, IBAMA, problems go further. “This enthusiasm has advanced faster than safeguards,” she said. “It accelerates [mining] bills, increases the risk of repeating socioenvironmental tragedies such as [dam disasters in] Brumadinho and Mariana, ignores the locational rigidity of deposits (many in areas of high socioenvironmental value in the Amazon and Cerrado savanna, including Indigenous lands) and prioritizes strategic projects without strengthening the proper technical licensing process.”
Contradictions fuel energy transition
The pressure comes from a significant paradox. Energy transition goals seeking to curb fossil fuels have created an appetite for critical minerals — such as lithium, nickel, copper, among others — which are essential for electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels and other renewable energy technology ventures, particularly in developing countries. When it comes to rare earths (whose compounds are dispersed and difficult to mine and separate), studies show that 12 Brazilian states show potential, making Brazil the world’s second-largest reserve of rare earth elements, behind China.
The condition is helping position Brazil as a key mineral supplier. A report projects gains of up to 243 billion reais ($45 billion) to Brazil’s GDP by 2050 if mining is expanded, according to CNN Brazil.
These potential profits have tempted mining companies, which have already filed more than 5,000 mining requests in the Brazilian Amazon, covering 26 million hectares (64.2 million acres), according to a survey from Brazilian news outlet InfoAmazonia.
More than a thousand of these mining requests are located within 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of Indigenous territories, with 390 directly overlapping them. Today, these requests are unconstitutional, and official ordinances prohibit mining within 10 km of them. The report also revealed that more than 1,200 bids overlap 107 Amazon conservation units.
In late October, a report by Brazilian investigative news outlet Repórter Brasil identified 1,827 mining requests for dozens of critical minerals within 40 km (24.8 miles) of isolated Indigenous groups, affecting at least 45 groups.
The filings are advancing fast. Out of 7,718 active applications for 16 minerals across the Amazon filed between 1953 and this September, 44% (3,392) occurred after 2020, the report showed.
The investigation was made in partnership with the Observatory of Isolated Indigenous Peoples. One of its main representatives, anthropologist Miguel Aparicio, said that mining, as well as road works and agribusiness, is one of the primary reasons leading Indigenous people to isolation. Now, he told Repórter Brasil, “the pressure is really mounting.”
Speaking in favor of one of the bills, Brazilian Senator Márcio Bittar argued that regulating economic activities within traditional territories “would not undermine the rights of Indigenous peoples,” as it “ensures autonomy and legal support” so that communities “decide their own future.”
The statement deeply contrasts warnings made in a recent report by the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB). In a document that focuses on the two measures, the organization denounces that opening up territories to different exploitation activities constitutes “a direct threat to the fundamental rights of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples.”
“These proposals are part of a political and legal context marked by systematic attempts to weaken the constitutional protection guaranteed to Indigenous peoples, under the argument of promoting national development and ensuring legal certainty for the primary sector in national policy,” APIB has said. “The legislative initiatives in question not only ignore the rights of consultation and free, prior and informed consent guaranteed by ILO Convention No. 169, but also promote the flexibilization of the exclusive use of Indigenous territories, as provided for in Article 231 of the [Brazilian] Constitution, as well as supporting distorted narratives that present Indigenous peoples as obstacles to national development.”
A long tug-of-war
It wouldn’t be the first time Brazilian legislators pushed an unconstitutional bill to strip Indigenous rights. In December 2023, lawmakers turned the “time frame” proposition (known as marco temporal in Portuguese) into law, even though the Supreme Court had considered it illegal weeks before. The measure bars Indigenous people from claiming land rights that they did not physically occupy on Oct. 5, 1988, the date Brazil’s current Constitution was promulgated. Supreme Court justices considered it a violation of Indigenous constitutional rights to land, as many Indigenous people have been forced out of their grounds throughout the centuries.
In February 2025, the pressure on Indigenous lands continued when a bill draft was presented by Justice Gilmar Mendes, which imposed new risks on Indigenous territories, threatening to open these areas to mining and other economic activities. According to Brazilian investigative news outlet Agência Pública, the draft had fragments of bills authored by politicians who indiscriminately endorsed mining on Indigenous lands.
The measure, presented during a heavily criticized conciliation chamber created by Mendes to discuss the time frame debate, was slammed by more than 50 civil society and social organizations, including APIB. “It is worth mentioning that, under the assumption that mining is a strategic activity of public utility, measures favorable to the mineral sector have been repeatedly implemented by the state despite their impact on territorial rights, which are also defined as being in the public interest. In reality, this assumption grants the mineral sector privileges and exceptional treatment that allow its interests to override collective rights,” organizations jointly stated earlier this year.
ustice Mendes later removed the mining proposal from his draft time frame bill.
Araújo said these blows to Indigenous peoples not only ignore their rights but also weaken environmental protection, which is also established in the Constitution.
“Indigenous lands play a fundamental role in protecting the social organization and culture of Indigenous peoples, in addition to providing extremely important ecosystem services. Furthermore, protecting Indigenous lands with standing forests is a necessary measure in combating climate change,” she said. “Legislative proposals that seek to relax restrictions on the economic use of these lands for mining and other economic activities must be debated with great caution and with the intense participation of Indigenous organizations. In general, these proposals do not take Indigenous peoples into account and will lead to widespread destruction.”
Critical minerals drive legalization of mining on Amazon Indigenous lands