ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I call attention to the remarkable communal and territorial re-interpretation of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention from the International Labour Organization—which provides potentially affected communities with the right to prior, free, and informed public consultation on any state intervention in their territories—proposed by the Munduruku people and the riverside communities in the Middle Tapajós region, Amazonia. Based on their own territorialized social, political, and economic modes of collective living, they created their own consultation protocol, which was central to successfully countering governmental attempts to depoliticize the prior consultation process and contributed to hindering the construction of two mega-hydroelectric plants in their territories—which, if built, would have opened the way for large-scale mining and timber exploitation in the region and served to increase the flow of soya and corn from the south, stimulating the expanding agribusiness frontier to further enter the Amazon region. Relying on the Munduruku people and the riverside communities communal territorial modes of re-existence to foster their proper ways of doing politics, the Munduruku Consultation Protocol became a powerful tool of territorial resistance, enabling not only a critical view of the inherent limits contained in the legislation, but also the strengthening of their own modes of re-existence and alliances.
