Symposium on Visual Investigations: Best Practice in Collaboration and Community-led Approaches – Finding Illegal Settlements in Brazil – A New Toolkit in the Case of REVIDE – WITNESS’ Project for Indigenous Communities in the North and Northeast of the Country

[Natalie Hornos is a Program Manager at WITNESS with over 17 years of experience coordinating social impact, educommunicative, and investigative audiovisual projects across Brazil and Latin America. A specialist in community cinema, she holds a postgraduate degree in Anthropology and is currently a Master’s in Latin American Studies.]

Introduction to Revide

REVIDE – VIDEO SCHOOL FOR THE DEFENSE OF TERRITORIES – is a WITNESS training program in audiovisual and digital technologies aimed to support denunciations of conflicts, environmental and human rights violations in Indigenous communities from the North and Northeast of Brazil. In 2026, the initiative supported 30 young Indigenous people between 18 and 30 years old to collect and preserve visual documentation of environmental crimes committed by industry and government, and in creating audiovisual narratives that can be used in advocacy and accountability processes. The goal is to strengthen the fight for climate justice, reparation, and promote national and international public awareness of the threats and territorial conflicts and demands of Indigenous territories.

All training was anchored in WITNESS’ methodology for community-based audiovisual documentation, preservation and verification, and featured two modules: The first, conducted online, helped the participants identify the violations in their territories, gathered the demands for seeking justice, and supported the preliminary organization and collection of visual documentation. The second module selected 6 participants and consisted of an 8-day hands-on in-person laboratory, focused on using their own archival material, complemented by OSI (open-source information), such as satellite imagery, reports, in addition to using a vast list of databases for research on deforestation, fires, potential mining projects, to build video investigations which can be used by their community for public attention and accountability. 

The collaboration with WITNESS worked by offering all support to integrate the project, including internet support to follow online classes, distribution of HDs for video backup storage, access to monthly software editing fees, as well as access to free training with professionals, and the receipt of a micro-grant for project maintenance. The participants also received specific tutorials for secure archiving, with components such as access passwords and backups, increasing the level of security and risk management – especially during their travels across the territory – to avoid surveillance and persecution.

One of the biggest challenges of working with the collection and dissemination of community-filmed documentation was due to the risks to the integrity of data. The workshops demanded a robust dedication and understanding about the risks of using and storing their audiovisual documentation. Free, prior, and informed consultation protocols, along with community protocols regarding data use, are gaining traction in Brazil.  Because of this, building ethical protocols for data security and protection, alongside the use of  free and openly-sourced software and hardware, have proven to be a central aspect of working with these groups, who are at the very center of the global climate dispute and face real threats to their life and land.   

REVIDE also provided a space for building and mapping strategic actors for advocacy and engagement, and built a mailing list for the impactful distribution of the produced materials, as human rights organizations, press, social media channels and influencers who support the cause, and a directory indicating websites and platforms that give visibility to territorial conflict cases. 

The participants decided to distribute the videos to international human rights organizations, international human rights courts, as well as federal government bodies such as the national human rights council, the national secretariat of justice, and the federal public prosecutor’s office.

Land Rights and Violations in North and North Eastern Brazil: Understanding Demarcation

The initiative stems from huge urgency: The Indigenous Population in Brazil is more than 1.5 million and despite being Guardians of 80% of biodiversity globally, but only 13% of their land is demarcated (IBGE), the official process to register the boundaries of protected territories in Brazil. Not by chance, the struggle for land and environmental preservation is dangerous. These same communities – who live hand-in-hand with rivers and forests they preserve – face violent threats: Agrobusiness, mining, and logging are the greatest threats to Indigenous territories, responsible for invasions, illegal exploitation of natural resources – activities assessed as the main ones responsible for the emission of the most greenhouse gases that accelerate climate change.

The report “Violence against Indigenous Peoples in Brazil (2026),” published annually since the 80s by CIMI, reveals a scenario of worsening Indigenous vulnerabilities. This context of insecurity resulted in 1,276 cases of violence, which encompass mining and logging invasions, illegal exploitation, and direct conflicts. The structural root of this violence lies in the slowness and suspension of demarcations: of the 1,443 lands and territorial claims existing in the country, 897 have administrative pending issues for regularization, leaving entire communities exposed to the actions of invaders and large infrastructure projects. There were 474 cases of physical violence, in addition to a considerable increase in homicides, which jumped from 211 in the previous year to 258 murders of indigenous people (CIMI).

Even Despite Demarcation, Illegal Occupations Continues

The cases of the REVIDE participants, which are not named in this blog due to security concerns, especially highlighted the illegal invasion of agribusiness for soy and cattle, illegal timber exploitation in territory already demarcated in the heart of the Amazon. Two out of six participants lived on demarcated land, but the illegal mining – which contaminates rivers with waste – and violence and persecution of those who fight for preservation continued, whilst cases of murders and prevention of the right to freedom of movement was common. Separately, on land not yet demarcated, there were also cases of occupation, for example by transnational agribusiness companies, such as Cargill, on coastlines, preventing artisanal fishing and free circulation in rivers for subsistence. 

In all cases, the audiovisual records – whether from the Indigenous communicators’ own archives or through the production of new images documenting such violations – complemented by the corroboration and new understanding that satellite images could offer, were able to expose and prove violations on the land, and to expand the understanding of the real and threatening impacts. By cross referencing Google Maps layers which denote and mark the coordinates of demarcated land, Google Earth Pro was useful to prove the presence of illegal land uses, in the approximate increase in the amount of land violated over time, without the communicators being exposed while registering such reports. 

In the context of Indigenous territories – which culturally depend on nature for their own subsistence and maintenance of their identity and spirituality – the demand for justice is to stop this invasion and to protect and better implement the process of demarcation. That’s why the audiovisual device becomes an important support for highlighting the discrepancy between places where Indigenous populations reside, live, and therefore preserve, versus environments where they are targets of these types of illegal extractivism – which lay bare degradation, pollution, and the loss of a healthy environment – contributing to the worsening of the climate crisis.

Using Visual Investigations to Fight for Justice 

The main concern of climate defenders in Brazil involves safety and life-threatening risks. Brazil is the fourth deadliest country in the world for environmental defenders (Global Witness, 2024). In the group of REVIDE students, there were cases of relatives murdered for fighting for the land. This is further aggravated when the government fails to offer protection and security policies to land defenders, especially in municipalities where the extractive industry has broader power over local rulers. Through lobbying, mayors, city councilors, deputies, and senators are encouraged by large industries to vote in favor of bills that relax environmental legislation, and, through developmentalist discourse, misinform regarding the impact of these activities on the worsening of the climate crisis. The Parliamentary Front for Agriculture (FPA) — known as the ruralist caucus — is the largest and most influential multi-party wing of the National Congress, gathering about 340 parliamentarians between federal deputies and senators, which represents more than 57% of all Brazilian parliamentarians.

In August 2026, for example, two serious and threatening projects are up for judgment: the first is Marco Temporal, a legal thesis promoted by the FPA that proposes to restrict the recognition of Indigenous lands to areas occupied as of October 5, 1988 (Global Justice, 2026), diminishing their rights already recognized in the federal constitution. The General Environmental Licensing Law, approved based on the so-called “Devastation Bill,” is another measure in dispute, which could pave the way for mining in Indigenous Lands, increasing risks to territories, rivers, forests, and the ways of life of original peoples. In this way, it is in the national legal field that it will be defined which national project will prevail in the face of the climate emergency and the guarantee of the rights of Indigenous peoples, capable of redefining the directions of Brazilian territorial policy.

That is why promoting access to digital tools through the production of audiovisual content focused on defending territorial rights and training participants in identifying violations and threats, and in how to transform them into impactful audiovisual narratives in the pursuit of justice and reparation, are essential approaches for countries with a political and territorial reality like Brazil’s. The importance of this work becomes even more critical as AI is making it easier to fabricate what never happened and to deny what did.

Why a Community-led Approach Must be Front and Centre to Achieve Real Change

It is the community that can narrate what the greatest conflicts, demands, and urgencies are, in addition to being the holders of the greatest knowledge about their own territories and how violations affect them. Methodologically, a community-based approach is rooted in respecting the community’s agenda regarding violations, as well as the scaling and prioritization of which agendas will be prioritized for reporting, adhering to the community’s decision on what, how, and in what way they want to be represented as a primary prerogative. In the audiovisual universe, where the production of an audiovisual documentary piece assumes the presence of a director who guides the film’s narrative, the community-based approach inverts the logic, placing technology at the service of the communities’ narrative. As a concrete example, there were participants who discussed in local assemblies whether to show the faces of the community in the video due to security concerns, for instance. Another was the implementation of the consultation protocol regarding risks involving the creation of visual investigations – alerting and guiding the community on safety precautions involving participants based on the distribution of the videos. Another aspect of this approach is the precision of locations and geographic coordinates in the case of identifying satellite imagery.

Looking Towards the Future

Brazil needs to ensure the strengthening of its democracy, expanding and ensuring compliance with the laws provided in the ’88 Constitution, which recognizes the original and permanent right to traditionally occupied lands, with the Brazilian government responsible for demarcating and protecting them, ensuring Indigenous peoples exclusive use of their natural resources and declaring null any acts of occupation by third parties. In addition to territorial protection, the constitution guarantees legal standing for these communities to defend their rights in court with the involvement of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, ensures access to education that respects their mother tongues and own learning methods (Art. 210), and dialogues with previous complementary legislation, such as the Indian Statute, consolidating the defense and autonomy of these populations. 

In the geopolitical aspect, Brazil holds the second-largest reserve of rare earth elements in the world (about 23% of the global total), behind only China. In the energy transition perspective, the country is seen as an essential strategic supplier of minerals for electric cars and electronics. This ‘wealth’ has proven dangerous for Indigenous populations and points toward a crisis and worsening of unresolved conflicts. Cases such as exploration of mining claims and the advance of lobbying in federal agencies and Congress surround or impact Indigenous lands, especially in the Amazon, that hits the reality of river contamination, degradation of biomes, and violent conflicts in traditional territories.

Given this context, counting on international support in holding transnational corporate chains accountable for the exploitation of Brazilian lands are important judicial measures to slow the advance of natural resource exploitation in the country, of which community-filmed and produced documentation must be critical. 

Photo attribution: Jr Korpa on Unsplash