[Protection for human rights defenders, reporting false solutions, impacts of mega projects, black women, trans women]
Leadership of the LesBiTrans Collective, Altamira, Pará, Brazil.
The LesBiTrans Collective is located in Altamira, a municipality located on the banks of the Xingu River, in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon. During the military dictatorship, a considerable part of the public lands were grabbed by landowners, who brought large numbers of men from the Brazilian northeast and put them in conflict with the indigenous and riverside population that lived there, starting a long cycle of violence and making it the most violent region in Brazil.
In the midst of this conflicting context, in 2016 a hydroelectric plant was built in the region, called Belo Monte - the largest hydroelectric plant in Brazil. The construction of Belo Monte brought even more men to the region, men disconnected from their communities and families, generating a large increase in gender-based violence. The city of Altamira still did not have any civil society organization to defend the trans population, who found themselves completely helpless in the face of the increase in violence and the collusion of the company that managed Belo Monte and public authorities.
The Amazonian Collective LesBiTrans, created in 2018, is the first civil society organization to work exclusively on climate justice and LGBTQIA+ people in the city of Altamira (PA). Since its founding, the LesbiTrans Collective denounces Belo Monte, a hydroelectric plant that produces more greenhouse gasses than it saves, and which caused the forced displacement of around 20,000 people.
The construction of housing complexes for these people in degraded areas, with inadequate soil and no forest formations, fragmented territories and intensified climate vulnerability. Thus, the LesBiTrans Collective works to protect LBTQIA+ women, especially black travestis from the riverside and forest communities, residents of inappropriate housing complexes built to house the removed populations.
Access to water has been one of the demands of the LesBiTrans Collective in the region in the face of water and soil contamination, as well as the defense of land, rivers and islands, the fight against gender-based violence and LGBTphobia, socio-environmental justice and direct confrontation with pressure coming from landowners, miners, mining companies and hydroelectric plants installed in the region.
To defend the well-being, mental and physical health of the women they work with, the collective is contributing to the construction of an “Ecological Park for Good Living”, in addition to being able to directly influence the local government to build networks of sanitation in a neighborhood whose population, until now, did not have this essential service.