A year ago, the population of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul faced one of the worst – if not the worst – socio-environmental disasters in its history. In the last days of April and during the month of May 2024, the volume of rain recorded in the state was very high in most regions, an unprecedented situation in more than a century of measurements in different municipalities, as reported by Metsul, the meteorological institute. Localities in important river basins, from which several rivers flow into the Porto Alegre metropolitan region, easily averaged between 400mm and 800mm of accumulated rain in the period, reaching an impressive 1,023mm at the Caxias do Sul weather station in the region called Serra Gaúcha (Gaucho Hills). According to the data, in less than a fortnight it rained the equivalent of what it usually rains for five months in the state.
The outcomes were followed throughout Brazil by the media, including live broadcasts by famous TV anchors. The images of climate chaos travelled the world. Towns were inundated by flooding rivers and deficiency in the protection system and rainwater runoff, communities marooned due to landslides and destroyed roads, economic damage and impact on the environment. Approximately 537,000 people had to leave their homes; 80,000 had to resort to public shelters; 184 people died and other 25 are still missing. Around one in five inhabitants of RS were affected by the floods. Out of 497 towns and cities in the state, 478 were affected.
One year on, the historic flood remains in the memory for some, but for many it is still a daily reality. The working class, the impoverished population, small businesses, indigenous and quilombola territories, agrarian reform settlements and peasants are still trying to recover their losses and minimally rebuild their lives. One example is that at the end of April this year, almost 400 people remained in public shelters because they have nowhere else to go, most of them in the metropolitan region. The state government wants to empty them by the end of May, but using even more precarious solutions, such as solidarity stays and temporary housing, which end up extending the agony and insecurity that seem to have no end. As a more effective housing resource, there is the federal government’s programme for buying a house with public funds (called assisted purchase), but many families complain that they can’t access it because of the requirement to prove documentation, as well as the fact that the process takes months.
Resisting in order to exist: flooding reveals the struggle of the territories of life
The Mbyá Guarani Pindó Poty Village has been suffering from flooding for years in the Lami neighbourhood, in the far south of Porto Alegre (RS). The Guarani can no longer count how many times they have rebuilt their homes, lost their clothes and utensils, crops, domestic animals and those they raised for food. The great flood of 2024 was no different. The village was flooded when the Lami Stream, which runs alongside the village, overflowed its banks. The families were temporarily sheltered by Kaingang relatives from the Van-Ká Village, in the same neighbourhood in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul. When they returned, they relied on a network of solidarity and donations to rebuild their lives.
A collaborative survey, carried out jointly by CIMI Southern Regional, the Yvyrupa Guarani Commission (CGY), FLD/Comin/CAPA and CEPI/RS, indicated that more than 80 indigenous communities and territories were directly affected, some of them extremely seriously, last April and May. The CGY promoted a financial and donation campaign at the time, resulting in the distribution of 20 tonnes of food to 37 villages, which also received drinking water and basic items such as blankets and mattresses. According to a report released by the Guarani Commission in June 2024, 674 families were reached, totalling more than 3,300 people, in various regions of the state of Rio Grande do Sul.
CGY’s campaign was supported by a wide range of civil society partners, individuals, collectives and organisations, many from outside Brazil. In addition to this, Amigas de Terra Brasil took part in another front, together with Rede Coop, through which we delivered food baskets from peasant farming to the Guarani families of the Yy Ryapu village in Palmares do Sul, in the south of the state. These initiatives sum up well what we saw during much of the flood emergency period: a solidarity network sustained by already organised society and by so many individuals who, faced with urgent need, organised themselves. “None of the Tekoá [villages] affected have had support from the authorities so far. Not with food, not with anything. It’s really difficult. When this flood tragedy happened, we managed to get support from indigenist partners and organisations from other countries like Germany,” said Helio Wherá, from CGY.
The flood makes it clear that governments are increasingly distant from indigenous territories. Both in meeting the main demand of many of them, which is land demarcation, and in providing the necessary infrastructure and access to basic human services such as health and sanitation, so that they can live. At the federal level, we see an attempt by the Lula government to reach out to the locals, but it is happening very slowly. The Pekuruty village has resisted precariously for 16 years on the banks of the BR 290 motorway in Eldorado do Sul (RS), and was flooded in 2024, along with around 80 per cent of the town. What little was left of their belongings was removed by the DNIT (National Department of Transport Infrastructure) officials, and they had to start again practically from scratch, relying only on the help of partners.
Like Pindó Poty, Pekuruty is awaiting demarcation so that it can settle in a safe place. “The government has land, but does it not want to give it to the Indigenous people, or does it want to kill everything? The white man thinks with money. Then he buys animals, cows, land, plants everything; he harvests money. He sells water, he sells fish. There’s 2,000 or 3,000 hectares of land. And here [in the village], there are 400 hectares, horses, cows, land. Could it be that we don’t have a little bit to make it possible for the indigenous people to live here?” asked chief Estevão Kuaray.
The effects of the climate emergency are just one of many challenges that indigenous peoples face on a daily basis in order to survive. The Tekoa Yjerê Indigenous Retake, in Ponta do Arado, bordered by the Guaíba river in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, was completely hit by the flood. At the time, the families, who are constantly being attacked by a property developer who wants to set up on the site, lost everything, and chief Timóteo Karay Mirim reflected on the peoples’ relationship with nature, which is being destroyed by the capitalist society of non-indigenous people (Juruá). At the same time, in Tekoá Jatay’ti (Cantagalo) village, located in Viamão (RS), Jaime Vherá Guyrá, who was chief of the territory, highlighted the importance of land for indigenous people and the relationship between land and the climate emergency.
‘Disaster’ has become a profit opportunity for capitalists and big businesses
Since at least 2019, we’ve been following some of the drama faced by families from the Guaíba City allotment, where around 280 families live, between the towns of Charqueadas and Eldorado do Sul, near the Jacuí River. The community and the Apolônio de Carvalho Agrarian Reform Settlement, which belongs to the MST (Landless Movement), were at serious risk from Copelmi’s planned open-cast coal mine, which would be the largest in Brazil. The severe flooding of the region in 2024 was the final straw for the company to give up on the project this year, which was already facing a court embargo and strong popular resistance.
It is certainly a victory, but Guaíba City is still abandoned. The community, which has been neglected by public authorities for years, experienced another level of helplessness during the flood, when it was left stranded. According to the residents, there was no warning about the flood. They lost their belongings and domestic animals, and incurred losses as a result of their homes and small businesses being flooded. After the flood, when we visited the region, we recorded dead animals and lots of rubbish on the streets, damaged roads and disused public facilities such as a health centre. The community also asked for a bridge to be rebuilt so they could get around. The responses from the town halls were slow.
The town where Guaíba City and the Guarani Pekuruty village are located is Eldorado do Sul which, proportionally, was the municipality hardest hit by the floods in the whole of Rio Grande do Sul. Of the approximately 42,000 inhabitants, 34,000 were affected. An estimated 80 per cent of homes were damaged and the entire urban area was flooded. Many residents who left during the flood gave up on returning to Eldorado due to insecurity and lack of prospects. In the same town, the people who stayed are trying to rebuild their lives without much recourse and depending on long-delayed returns from the government, which may not even arrive as promised, while the RS government announced the installation of the largest digital infrastructure complex in Latin America by the company Scala, on one of the few plots of land that were not flooded. This ‘city of datacentres’ is expected to be among the largest private investments in the state’s history and will consume more energy than that generated by Brazil’s fourth largest hydroelectric plant.
In the neighbouring town of Guaíba, which is also suffering from the 2024 flood, pulp manufacturer CMPC confirmed at the end of the year that it intends to continue with the billion dollars project to build a new industrial park in the region and expand the areas of eucalyptus monoculture plantations. Monoculture tree plantations generate a loss of biodiversity and an increase in water deficit where they are implemented, isolating territories of life surrounded by these projects of death. Pulp mills, which use a lot of water, are also major polluters, as the peasant women who settle in their neighbourhood denounce. In addition, monocultures aggravate climate extremes due to their influence on soil, water and biodiversity. Monoculture is a climate emergency. Here in Rio Grande do Sul, it has been facilitated by the change in the Environmental Zoning for Forestry (ZAS), which allows monoculture areas to increase from the current 1.2 million hectares to 4 million hectares, a proposal that involved the CMPC itself, which benefits from the measure.
In the capital, Porto Alegre, the property sector is among the most affected by the floods. Areas of the city that were already home to high-income real estate projects and were flooded will have to receive large investments from the government to improve their infrastructure. Other scrapped areas, but with potential for exploitation, are likely to be the target of real estate speculation. This year, mayor Sebastião Melo is seeking to privatise the most profitable part of DMAE, the municipal body responsible for supplying drinking water and managing the capital’s sewage system, whose abandon and precariousness was at the root of the worsening climate chaos experienced by its 2 million inhabitants.
After months out of work, the only airport in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, operated by the German transnational Fraport, only resumed reconstruction after an economic bailout by the federal government and has not yet returned to full capacity. In the midst of the climate chaos, the state and city governments called in private US companies such as WayCarbon and Alvarez & Marsal, specialised in disaster capitalism , which was also responsible for the private, privatising and racist climate disaster management in New Orleans (United States) after Hurricane Katrina.
Oblivious to the changes in the climate caused by exploitation and the predatory production methods of the society in which we live, the Leite and Melo governments opted for false solutions that benefit big business and capitalists, and which will certainly deepen the climate emergency even further. If before the fight was against denialism, now the fight is against climate opportunism, which is trying to expand its death projects through neoliberal policies and market solutions.
The answer lies in grassroots organisation and the strengthening of people’s solutions
The advance of capital into the territories of life was the driving force behind the flood, a tragedy that had been so long foretold by environmentalists, social and grassroots movements that are focussing on the climate emergency, a product of capitalism. Many of the impacts could have been avoided, but warnings were ignored in the name of profit from real estate speculation, agribusiness and mining. Those are sectors that, with their businessmen or politicians, navigate the climate chaos with death project, sometimes disguised in life jackets announcing false market solutions.
A year after the flood, for most people the precariousness is not just a memory. Effective measures have not been taken by the public authorities, a fact that is evident in any rainfall, which causes flooding in most cities, bringing risks, destruction, disease, lack of electricity, access to drinking water and transport. The dread is repeated. While Porto Alegre recently hosted the South Summit Brazil, Latin America’s largest technology and innovation event, where resilience was discussed in terms of private business, the state is still not building flood protection systems (8 projects have been promised, none are underway). The governments’ proposal is for more privatisation and more distancing from the people in politics. The fundamental people impacted in the countryside, cities, indigenous villages and retakes, quilombos and peripheries, who make food, care and collectiveness possible within their territories of life, need to participate in political decision-making spaces.
Just as the immediate response to the floods was provided by organised social movements and territories of life, founded on the principles of solidarity, this is also our only long-term way out. The indigenous retakings remain alive and from their roots come answers on how to regenerate the planet, re-exist and sow life. The Maria da Conceição Tavares occupation by the MTST (Homeless Workers’ Movement), in a public building that has been unoccupied for years in the centre of the capital, demonstrates that the solution might not have been the temporary houses proposed by the government, but that there are more houses without people than people without houses, and that the right to decent housing must prevail over the greed of the real estate speculation sector. Emergency kitchens continue to operate to this day, in a network of solidarity between the countryside and the city that has expanded and gained new spaces.
People’s organisations acted vigorously during the biggest socio-environmental catastrophe in Rio Grande do Sul to guarantee rights, and they continue to work together to support the population and build real responses to the systemic crises. They demand that the state assume its responsibilities and that policies be orientated around the needs of the territories of life, with popular participation. They constantly remind us that there is no climate justice without justice for the peoples. And on their horizon, as well as the brake on the climate emergency, are the banners for food sovereignty, the strengthening of agroecology, land sovereignty, popular urban and rural reform, the demarcation of indigenous territories and the titling of quilombolas. Against the fatalism preached by the capitalist system, which profits from disasters, there are peoples and communities in struggle, making alive the memory that reality must be transformed.
* Column originally published on May 22 in the newspaper Brasil de Fato at the following link https://www.brasildefato.com.br/colunista/amigos-da-terra-brasil/2025/05/22/um-ano-da-enchente-no-rio-grande-do-sul-o-que-e-memoria-para-alguns-para-muitos-ainda-e-realidade/