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Brazil’s Supreme Court has upheld a ruling allowing Cinta Larga Indigenous communities to legally explore and mine four territories under temporary safeguard while Congress develops long-delayed national legislation governing mining on Indigenous lands to conduct research and mining activities on four Cinta Larga Indigenous territories.
The decision upholds a March 2025 ruling by Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino that gave Congress 24 months to regulate mining on Indigenous territories. Until lawmakers act, the interim framework provides the Cinta Larga with a legal route to mineral exploration while requiring environmental approvals, community consultation and limits on mining activity.
“A lot of people have already died because of this debate. We have been discussing and judging mining in Indigenous lands while we see hundreds dying in multiple conflicts for decades,” Dino said during the recent session, according to g1. “The debate is not about if mining exists in Cinta Larga. It has been there for decades. The debate is about the role, defense and use of their territory.”
The ruling could give Indigenous communities greater control over mineral development on their territories while addressing a longstanding contradiction in Brazil: mining already occurs illegally in some Indigenous areas, but Congress has yet to establish the legislation envisioned by the Constitution to regulate legal extraction and ensure communities share in its benefits.
Interim rules
The case was brought by an organization representing the Cinta Larga people in the states of Rondônia and Mato Grosso, Valor International reported. The group sought authorization to extract minerals in an area where illegal mining has fueled conflict and increased vulnerabilities for the community.
They argued that Congress had failed to regulate the activity and prevented them from engaging in mining and benefiting from its proceeds.
The ruling that came out in March 2025 gave Congress 24 months to address this issue, recognizing the Cinta Larga people’s right to perform mining activities and allowing Congress to authorize it if they choose to.
The Supreme Court upheld the ruling earlier this month, allowing research and mining on the four Cinta Larga territories provided projects comply with the temporary framework.
While Congress doesn’t develop and approve a bill to address this issue, Dino established temporary regulations to make sure at least the Cinta Larga people can start using their land for legal exploration and lower conflicts and issues they have faced for decades.
That framework requires prior consultation with Indigenous communities about exploration projects, as well as environmental, Congressional and National Mining Agency authorizations, Valor International reported.
If mining projects are approved, they will also be limited to occupying 1% of the Indigenous territory.
Indigenous peoples will have preference in exploration activities on their land. If they are not interested in exploring but have approved the project, they must receive 50% of the total value owed to the state and federal governments. Their financial participation must be directed to developments that advance safety, sustainable production, environmental recovery, health, education and sustainability.
The ruling also asks for Indigenous people to organize into cooperatives and that studies are conducted to examine environmental impact and recovery during and after exploration.
These temporary rules only apply to the four Cinta Larga territories in the states of Mato Grosso and Rondonia. When a bill is approved, it is expected to include other communities and regions.
Long time coming
The lack of ownership and control Indigenous people face in their own land in Brazil is nothing new.
Since 2009, Indigenous communities have been dealing with “Marco Temporal”, a legal thesis that stipulates Indigenous peoples only have the right to land that they occupied on October 5th 1988, the day the Brazilian Constitution was published.
That means that if a community was dislocated on that day from their original land, either because they were moved or someone occupied it, they have no right over it and it can’t be designated as Indigenous land. Those territories then became private or state-owned, even if they originally belonged to Indigenous peoples.
While this thesis is wildly defended by ruralists and others that want to explore those lands, it has been vastly criticized by Indigenous communities, environmental organizations and other experts.
Indigenous communities argue that the doctrine leaves them more vulnerable to illegal miners and violent conflicts over mineral extraction.
Article 231 of Brazil’s Constitution says mineral exploration and mining on Indigenous lands may proceed only with congressional authorization after consultation with affected communities, which must also receive a share of the proceeds as provided by law. Congress, however, has yet to enact the legislation needed to fully implement that provision despite numerous proposals over several decades.
While this is on the Constitution, this is not a reality for most, if not all communities.
Many projects and bills tried to uphold that and put it into practice, but nothing was able to address this issue or was approved to regulate this matter.
“Over 40 years, we have had 200,000 legislative proposals on this subject,” Márcio Santilli, president of the Socioenvironmental Institute, told Valor International. “And the fact that we still do not have a law is less the result of some cosmic incompetence by Congress or visceral resistance by Indigenous peoples than of the fact that the Brazilian state is far from being prepared to put this into practice in an appropriate way.”
“The Brazilian state is far from having the means, instruments and resources necessary to implement a model of mining on Indigenous lands that would not be disastrous,” he added.
