- In northern Brazil’s Piauí state, the vast Afro-Brazilian enclave of Lagoas is home to 119 communities, making it the largest of its kind in the semiarid Caatinga biome and one of the region’s largest producers of organic honey.
- In 2019, the mining company SRN Mineração obtained a temporary permit to prospect for iron ore in the region, posing a threat to the communities’ beekeeping livelihoods as it could contaminate or destroy the bees’ food sources.
- Community leaders say they weren’t consulted by the mining company and that it continues to disrespect their presence and traditions by prospecting less than 100 meters (330 feet) from their most important shrine.
When Júlio de Castro began beekeeping in 1986, he never imagined he and his family would one day own the 500 hives they maintain today, producing up to 10 metric tons of honey per year. Castro lives in the rural Afro-Brazilian community, or quilombo, of Lagoas and is a member of Mel do Sertão, a beekeeping cooperative located in Brazil’s Serra da Capivara mountains, the main honey-producing region of this part of the country’s northeast.
“I started keeping bees because the payback was extraordinary. I don’t even farm my own land anymore,” Castro says, adding his harvest in 2021 earned him 100,000 reais, or about $18,500 at the exchange rate at the time.
“This place is excellent, I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he goes on. “In the winter everything is green, it’s healthy work, we take care of the bees, there’s plenty of water in the springs — life is great breathing the clean air out here.”
Lagoas is home to more than 140 associated beekeeping families, making it the Serra de Capivara’s strongest honey-producing community, with an annual average production of up to 500 metric tons. Lagoas is also the largest quilombo territory in the semiarid Caatinga biome, made up of 119 communities spread across 62,375 hectares (154,132 acres) straddling six municipalities in the state of Piauí.
“The bees are our year-end bonus here in the bush,” says Cláudio Tenório, the head of the quilombo. “They produce a great deal of honey and the entire world needs honey to make medicine and cosmetics. If the mining company pollutes the region, we will lose our organic certification and won’t be able to export anymore.”
In 2019, the company SRN Mineração received a temporary mining license from SEMAR, the Piauí state environmental agency, to explore for iron ore in the region. That same year, the company presented its environmental impact report, known locally as a RIMA, at a public hearing.
To the surprise of the Lagoas residents, the study neither recognized their territory nor did it include the quilombo’s certificate of recognition issued in 2009 by the Palamares Cultural Foundation, the government body responsible for officially recognizing quilombos across Brazil. The RIMA also omitted any mention of an ongoing land demarcation process with INCRA, the government’s land reform agency, to formalize the boundaries of the quilombo. The technical report on the boundaries was published in 2010, and the final process for obtaining the land title is underway with the Piauí state land agency.
SRN Mineração says it intends to extract up to 300 metric tons of iron ore per year from the territory. “This place will, without a doubt, be destroyed,” Castro says. “They say the hole will be over a kilometer [0.6 miles] wide. It might make life better for somebody, but for us, it’s just going to cause problems.”
He adds, “They came here to say that if they mine, they won’t pollute. That there’s a machine that keeps it all under control. But I don’t believe it. They say that they will pay people with beehives near the mine to relocate. But that’s not an easy thing for me, to leave the place where I was born and lived my whole life. All the money in the world couldn’t buy that.”
Henrique Neri, president of the Mel de Sertão co-op, says there are more than 3,000 people employed in beekeeping in Lagoas. Across the wider Serra da Capivara region, honey production generates some 35 million reais in revenue ($6.4 million) a year.
SRN Mineração expects to create up to 25 direct jobs with its mine in Lagoas, according to an interview with a company official on mining industry website Notícias da Mineração Brasil.
But Castro isn’t convinced: “100% of the folks here are against it. Because they were saying they would create jobs, but we can see this talk of jobs is a lie. They did a bunch of excavations, flew over with a plane, drove cars in, dug holes up to 200 meters [660 feet] deep. They do everything secretly, no one around here knows what they are doing. If they pollute our forest, our honey is done for.”
Neri says organic certification for their honey requires providing the coordinates of each beehive to ensure there are no contamination risks within a 6.4-km (4-mi) radius. “I recently received information on the places where SRN intends to mine in the Serra da Capivara region. There are over 500 beehives on the land surrounding these mining sites. They are surreal operations and there is no way they can exist alongside beekeeping.”
Cova da Tia and quilombo resistance
A tiny house protected by an improvised wooden fence stands alone in the middle of the Caatinga’s strong, green savanna. Inside, a simple but well-cared-for altar stands before a bright blue wall, composed of different images of the Virgin Mary, Brazil’s patron saint, alongside other Catholic saints like John and Joseph. Offerings of artificial flowers also adorn the wall. And, of course, the lady of the house: the Tia, or Aunt.
Cova da Tia, or Aunt’s Grave, is a pilgrimage site in the part of the Lagoas quilombo that lies in the municipality of Bonfim do Piauí. Locals tell of how a Black woman who fled slavery is buried there. Wandering through the forest for days after her escape, she eventually died and her decomposing body was found by a group of cowboys. They carefully buried the body on the site and made a promise that if they were to find a herd of cattle that had been lost for some years, they would return to the spot to build a fence around the place where they had buried the woman’s body and raise a cross. The group found their cattle that same day, and thus began their devotion to Tia and the pilgrimage to the site.
“Cova da Tia is a sanctuary dating back over 200 years and has everything to do with our quilombola way of thinking and being,” says Salvador Viana, the Lagoas quilombo’s cultural leader, who promotes events with guitarists and poetry slams for the community. “We don’t have one religion here, we accept everyone with open arms. We include imagery from Catholicism, Candomblé and spiritualism alongside candies and sweets originating in the religions of our African roots.”
Tenório, the longtime community leader, recalls how devoted his mother was to Tia: “I’m 71 years old today and some of my earliest memories are of my mother going to the grave to make promises.”
But according to Tenório, Cova da Tia is also under threat from the mining company: “The sites where they have been testing are only 100 meters [330 ft] away from the spot where Tia is buried. It’s a sacred place to those who were born and grew up here. All of our lives, we’ve seen our people going there to make promises. We feel disrespected by the mining company and that they are invading our sacred space. They have never called us to sit down and talk. The public hearing was held only after we insisted, and they only invited us the day before it happened. Plus, they only invited three people from the community, of whom I was one. How could we have spoken for 10,000 people?”
The story of the Tia — of an enslaved Black woman who had to flee to make a better life — resonates for the residents of the same land today. According to Tenório, “even today there’s a 5,000-hectare [12,400-acre] piece of land that we can’t use because they say it belongs to some people who live in São Paulo or Belo Horizonte. We respect it because we recognize, we know, that it is part of the estate of the heirs of the original landowner, the slave owner. But even today, we’re still practically slaves — living on the land, but unable to work the land.”
Culture is one of the main sources of resistance in Lagoas. Special songs and dances like the reisado, celebrated during Epiphany, and the festival of Saint Gonçalo bring communities together on special dates, strengthening the collective. Rituals associated with Umbanda, the traditional Afro-Brazilian religion, serve the same purpose. Tenório says winning societal acceptance of their religious diversity is still not easy: “Some people say it’s black magic, but it’s not black magic. These are our traditional religious practices. The people who carry out these practices still have to be fearful and hide themselves. But they exist, and are part of our respected culture.”
Manuela Viana is part of the Mãe Jaciara de Yemanjá Umbanda group, which performed at the Umburana agricultural festival in Várzea Branca, one of the municipalities where Lagoas lies. She tells of the difficulty in performing before large audiences: “It is hard for us to be performing in front of people without knowing what they are thinking, because there is still a lot of prejudice. Our performance shows that what we do isn’t evil, and that we transmit love, compassion and solidarity.”
The Lagoas quilombo responded to SRN Mineração’s arrival in the community by filing a civil action case together with the Federal Public Defender’s Office, the state of Piauí and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office. They’re still waiting to for a decision from the Federal Regional Court. The temporary mining license granted by SEMAR, the state environmental agency, expired in 2022 and wasn’t automatically renewed. Community members told Mongabay that they still occasionally see vehicles belonging to the mining company in the region and that they’re anxiously awaiting the judgment on the case.
Banner image of beekeeper Júlio de Castro tending to his hives in the Lagoas quilombo. Image by Rafael Martins for Mongabay.
This story was reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and first published here on our Brazil site on Sept. 16, 2024.
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