The Amazon Is Paying For It.
At a meeting in 2023, Petrobras told Indigenous leaders in the Amazon that their helicopters flew an average of two flights a day over their territories. The real number was closer to eight. Nobody corrected the record.
So, you’re filling up your car, watching the number on the pump spin past anything that looks sane, muttering quietly to yourself about the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz and how none of this is your fault… and somewhere, ten thousand kilometres away, a young Indigenous leader in the Brazilian Amazon is changing her location again. For her own safety. Because she asked to be consulted.
These two things are connected. We’d rather they weren’t. But they are.
Let me give you the big picture first, because context matters here.
On the 28th of February 2026, the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran. Tehran’s response was swift and, frankly, strategically ruthless: close the Strait of Hormuz. That narrow strip of water, barely 33 kilometres wide at its tightest point, is where roughly 20% of the world’s oil trade passes through every single day. When Iran shut it, the global economy flinched. Then it buckled. Brent crude surged past $120 a barrel. The International Energy Agency called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Countries from the Philippines to Australia declared energy emergencies. Japan cracked open its strategic reserves. In Britain, Asda was reportedly running short on fuel. At a supermarket. The kind of thing that sounds like a bad dystopian novel until it’s actually happening.
And so, as it always does in a crisis, the world started looking for more oil. Urgently. Without particularly caring where it came from or what it cost to extract it… in every sense of the word “cost.”
Enter Brazil.
Petrobras, Brazil’s state-run oil company, has been working for years to drill in what’s known as Block 59, a stretch of offshore territory near the mouth of the Amazon River, off the coast of Amapá in Brazil’s north. The area is home to thousands of species of wildlife, including the leatherback turtle, the blue whale, and the Antillean manatee. It is also, and this matters enormously, adjacent to the territories of the Karipuna, Palikur, Galibi-Marworno and Galibi Kali’na peoples, communities with deep and ancient relationships to this coastline, these rivers, these forests.
In October last year, after years of legal battles and denied licences, Brazil’s environmental regulator Ibama finally granted Petrobras an operating licence for exploratory drilling. Petrobras started drilling the very same day.
In January 2026, 18,000 litres of drilling fluid spilt from the well into the Atlantic.
“All our fears as an Indigenous community,” said Luene Karipuna, a young leader from the Karipuna people, “everything we have been worrying about is coming true.”
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has done the painstaking work here, analysing hundreds of documents, meeting minutes and communications between Ibama and oil companies including Petrobras. What they found is not a story of evil villains twirling moustaches in boardrooms. It’s something more mundane and in many ways more depressing than that. It’s a story of bureaucratic indifference, of warnings routinely noted and then quietly filed away, of a system that technically ticked the boxes of consultation while ensuring that consultation never actually… happened.
BP first requested authorisation for Block 59 back in 2014. Despite the clear presence of Indigenous territories near the coast, and others connected to the sea through waterways, BP’s initial request made no mention of Indigenous people. Not one word. A handful of public meetings eventually took place, but Indigenous representatives made up only a tiny percentage of participants. Communities raised concerns about oil spills, about helicopter noise disrupting wildlife, about the need for consultations that actually respected Indigenous protocols. The concerns were noted. Development continued.
When Petrobras took sole control of Block 59, things didn’t improve so much as they became more elaborate in their inadequacy. At a meeting in early 2023, Indigenous leaders again raised concerns about helicopter flights over their territories. Petrobras told them there was an average of just two flights per day overhead. The real number, according to flight data obtained by the Bureau, was almost four times that. By 2023, Petrobras helicopters over Indigenous territories had increased to nearly 3,000 flights. In 2024, that number rose to more than 4,000.
Chief Edmilson, coordinator of the Council of Indigenous Chiefs in the Oiapoque region, says the helicopter noise has driven animals away. Villagers have described large numbers of birds disappearing overnight. Fish in the rivers have become scarcer, affecting food supplies. “This project has taken away our peace,” he said.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s a man describing what it’s actually like to live with this.
Here’s the legal bit, and I promise I’ll try to make it bearable.
Brazil is a signatory to ILO Convention 169, a binding international treaty that insists on free, prior and informed consultation with Indigenous peoples, with the genuine aim of obtaining their consent, for projects that affect their lands and ways of life. It carries, as former Ibama president Suely Araújo put it, “the force of legislation.” Not a suggestion. Not a nicety. Legislation.
Luene Karipuna has worked with other Indigenous leaders to create a consultation protocol. It’s not complicated or unreasonable. It places less emphasis on big public meetings where Indigenous voices are diluted among hundreds of attendees. Instead, it calls for collective, culturally appropriate processes where clear and timely information is shared, where there’s actual space and time for communities to deliberate within their own territories. It asks, essentially, for the process to work in a way that respects how these communities actually function.
Luene says this hasn’t happened. Public hearings, she explains, don’t work for Indigenous people. They’re designed for a different kind of public. The company and the regulator, meanwhile, appear to have treated compliance with the letter of consultation requirements as indistinguishable from the spirit of them. Environmental lawyer Rodrigo Leitão, who began working with Indigenous organisations in Oiapoque in 2024, found that the communities had been given “little to no concrete information” about Petrobras’s plans. “No one had spoken with them yet,” he said. Discussions in previous meetings, he added, had focused almost entirely on projects Petrobras claimed would benefit the community, rather than on the central question of impacts and consent. “They do not recognise the right to free, prior and informed consultation, in good faith.”
A Federal Court ruled last year that there was no legal obligation to consult at the prospecting stage because there was no “direct and immediate impact” on Indigenous communities. The drilling fluid that spilt into the Atlantic in January might beg to differ on that point, but courts move slowly, and oil moves fast.
I want to stay with Luene for a moment, because I think she’s carrying something the rest of this story keeps trying to abstract away.
In the three years since she began speaking out and demanding proper consultation, she has received numerous threats. There was a break-in at her home. Online threats. She now changes location regularly to protect herself and her family. She is a young woman asking a multinational oil company and the Brazilian state to follow their own legally binding commitments, and for this, she has had to become, in effect, a person in hiding.
“When we began to take a stand and demand consultation,” she said, “we started to receive numerous threats.”
Read that again. The threat didn’t come from resisting violently. It came from demanding a legal right. From asking to be properly informed before decisions affecting her community’s land, rivers, wildlife and way of life were made without them.
That is the world we have built. That is what it looks like when you zoom in past the oil price charts and the geopolitical crisis briefings and the energy minister press conferences, and you find the actual human being at the sharp end of all of it.
The global oil crisis has a way of making all of this feel even more remote than it already did. When Brent crude is above $100 a barrel, when politicians are suspending fuel taxes and cracking open strategic reserves, when the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed and there’s genuine economic fear rippling through markets… the appetite for hearing about Indigenous consultation rights in Amapá shrinks. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that there’s only so much space for moral reckoning when you’re worried about heating your home and filling your car.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. The Iran war didn’t create this situation. Petrobras has been pursuing Block 59 since 2014. BP was there before them. The warnings from Indigenous communities have been on file, in writing, for more than a decade. The inadequacy of the consultation process was noted, officially, by Ibama itself when it denied the first licence in 2023. The document cited the high environmental sensitivity of the Amazon coast, the risk of spills, the inadequate flight impact assessment. Ibama knew. And then, eighteen months later, the licence was granted anyway.
The crisis didn’t corrupt the process. The process was already broken. The crisis just made it easier not to look.
There are three lawsuits currently challenging the drilling licence. Observatório do Clima, a network of NGOs including the former head of Ibama, is seeking to halt all drilling immediately. The Federal Prosecutor’s case was rejected but could be appealed. The UN’s special rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples is drafting a report on free, prior and informed consent for projects like this one, and the Bureau has submitted evidence to that process. It will go before the UN General Assembly in September.
Meanwhile, Petrobras drills on. The helicopters keep flying. Chief Edmilson’s birds don’t come back.
I don’t know how to tie this up neatly. Genuinely. I’ve been sitting with this story for a while now and I haven’t found the bow to put on it, because there isn’t one.
What I do know is this: the contradiction that Luene named isn’t accidental. Brazil under Lula has made a point of presenting itself as a serious actor on climate and Indigenous rights. It is hosting COP30. It has championed meaningful Indigenous participation in international climate negotiations. And simultaneously, its state oil company is drilling in the Amazon, has been lying to Indigenous communities about helicopter flights, started drilling the same day its licence was issued, and a young woman who asked to be properly consulted is now moving house to keep herself safe.
That contradiction is not a glitch. It’s a feature of how the world actually manages these things, as opposed to how it talks about managing them. We have the language of rights, of consultation, of consent. We have the treaties, the frameworks, the rapporteurs and the lawsuits. And then we have the thing that happens on the ground, in the wetlands, when no one particularly powerful is watching and the oil price is too high for anyone to want to ask difficult questions.
The drilling fluid that spilt into the Atlantic in January was 18,000 litres. A number. A reported incident. A two-week pause in operations. And for Luene Karipuna, it was the moment everything her community had feared, for years, quietly and without anyone important noticing, became real.
“All our fears,” she said. “Everything we have been worrying about. Are coming true.”
The world wanted more oil. Someone, somewhere, always pays for that. It’s just rarely the people who wanted it.
Until Next Time
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