Climate Litigation in the Brazilian Amazon: Analyzing the Legal Struggles of Quilombola Environmental Claims

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity, and Civil Law

Abstract

This paper analyzes institutional responses to Quilombola environmental claims in Brazilian courts. Barcarena, Brazil, has experienced environmental violence since the 1970s, when foreign-investment-based industry was established on ancestral Quilombola lands. Quilombola communities continue to struggle to have their environmental claims recognized through legal channels. Through document analysis of 22 legal cases involving CAINQUIAMA (Association of Caboclos, Indigenous, and Quilombola Peoples of the Amazon) against mining corporations and state agencies, this study examines the legal strategies corporate and government actors deploy against community environmental claims. The analysis bridges Global North legal sociology, Brazilian legal sociology, and Latin American legal mobilization scholarship to reveal how procedural mechanisms function as gatekeeping barriers in postcolonial contexts. Preliminary findings show that procedural gatekeeping dominates institutional responses through three primary mechanisms: standing requirement challenges, jurisdictional fragmentation, and data access blocking. Resource asymmetry patterns confirm that weapons asymmetry persists even with legal representation, as communities face coordinated state-corporate legal teams. Temporal manipulation further disadvantages communities through strategic delays spanning years. This paper contributes to legal sociology by expanding repeat player theory to postcolonial contexts, incorporating Brazilian legal concepts such as hiposuficiencia (structural legal vulnerability) and colonization of regulatory space into climate litigation scholarship, and demonstrating how legal systems generate inequality through procedural mechanisms independent of social inequality. For Quilombola communities facing environmental violence in the Brazilian Amazon, the central issue is not their chances of winning in court but whether their claims will be heard at all.

Author

• Mathaus Viana Campos, University of Oklahoma