A WAR OF NARRATIVES

Portuguese version 🇧🇷

Translated by Maria Clara Parente e TJ Jordan

When fisherman and environmental campaigner Nelson Bastos took the microphone from the hands of a Petrobras employee, he knew exactly what he wanted to say. “Petrobras needs to respect us”, said the 58-year-old. “We who have been here in Marajó for generations, with Indigenous and African ancestry, always in poverty, taking blows, surviving – we deserve respect.”

Bastos had just interrupted a Petrobras event for around fifty residents of the town of Cachoeira do Arari, on Marajó Island in the state of Pará, on 24 November last year. Two Petrobras employees were explaining how the oil company had just began exploring for deepsea offshore oil in the nearby Foz do Amazonas basin. Bastos pressed on, lamenting the impacts on fishing and the devastation that an oil spill could wreak on the delicate Amazonian ecosystem. The waters around here are home to the world's largest continuous belt of coastal mangroves and at least 9,300 km² of coral reefs.

To get to the meeting, the fisherman had borrowed a friend's car and driven for two hours from Salvaterra, where he lives, to Cachoeira do Arari. It took him another half hour to find the fishermen's association hosting the event, in a wooden hut on stilts tucked away at the end of a road. Bastos knew that if he wasn't there, the oil company's pitch would likely go unchallenged.

Before his arrival, the two Petrobras employees running the event had told the audience that the company had met all of Ibama’s requirements for preventing potential oil spills. According to them, the company's studies indicated that even in the event of a leak at so-called Block 59, the oil would never reach the stretch of the Amapá coastline closest to the well – let alone Marajó Island.

For now, Block 59 is just one deepwater drilling area, located 175 km off the coast of Amapá and 500 km from the mouth of the Amazon and Marajó Island. Petrobras’ current licence, granted by Ibama in October, permits the drilling of a single exploratory well – named Morpho, after an Amazonian butterfly – to determine whether there are commercially viable oil reserves that can be safely extracted. The company began drilling the day the licence was issued. But if those tests succeed, it could open the door to drilling at hundreds of other blocks owned by Petrobras and other international oil companies along the Amapá coast and further south, past Marajó.

The Petrobras employees also listed twelve environmental projects the company supports in the region and promised that drilling would boost the local economy. At one point, they pointed at the oil-derived plastic objects in the room: “The air conditioning, the speakers, the computers, the mobile phones, the chairs... Oil touches so many areas of our daily lives.” One brief reference to the “greenhouse effect” was swiftly skipped over. Scientists’ warnings that there can be no new oil exploration if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change went unmentioned.

Bastos told the audience a different story. He believes that Petrobras’ oil spill risk studies fail to account for the specific currents and tides that govern the region's waters. “The people who fish out there, to the north, in what they call the Foz do Amazonas, know there's a wind called the geral”, he said. In 2017, Bastos paused his work as an artisanal fisherman to pursue a master's degree at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) in Belém, studying the impacts of oil exploration on Amazonian peoples and their territories. He is now working on a doctorate on the same subject. “I've examined Petrobras’ Environmental Impact Report closely. I've seen the models that say the oil would never reach our coast. But when one of our buoys breaks loose up north, the geral wind carries it all the way to the beach. That’s what could bring that oil here, if there's a spill”, he told the crowd in Cachoeira do Arari.

It is not clear whether the geral wind could influence a potential oil spill. But eight environmental and Indigenous organisations, among them Greenpeace, WWF (World Wildlife Fund) and the Coordination of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon (Coiab), share Bastos’ broader concerns. They have challenged the government's decision to grant Petrobras the exploration licence, arguing that the oil spill modelling is flawed – the computer simulation of what would happen in a disaster, predicting the trajectory, dispersion and behaviour of oil spilled at sea based on ocean currents.

One of those flaws, campaigners say, is the use of tide and current data from 2013, even though data from 2024 was available. The legal challenge also alleges that Ibama ignored during the licensing process the climate impacts that oil exploration in the region could produce, and that Petrobras failed to fulfil its legal obligation to consult the Indigenous and Quilombola communities living near the drilling area (an initial meeting with local representatives in 2023 was never followed up).

Petrobras and Ibama told piauí magazine that the campaigners’ argument about tides and currents is “incorrect” and that the oil spill modelling follows “industry best practice”. They also said the requirement to consult local communities did not apply because the drilling area is offshore. Ibama also said it is not required to consider the project's climate impacts, because the licence is for exploratory drilling rather than commercial oil and gas production.

When Bastos finished speaking, there was no doubt which side the room was on. The residents of Cachoeira do Arari applauded as he handed the microphone back to the Petrobras representatives, who thanked the activist for his contribution.

About a month and a half later, Bastos’ warning came close to being realised. On 4 January, 18,000 litres of drilling fluid – a mixture of water and various chemical substances injected into the well during drilling to maintain pressure and carry rock fragments to the surface – leaked from the Morpho well into the sea. Petrobras said it had brought the leak under control and that the fluid met “permitted toxicity limits”. Ibama, however, fined the company 2.5 million reais ($490,000). An internal report by the environmental agency, obtained by DW Brasil, found that the chemicals in the fluid could affect basic functions such as respiration in fish and other organisms.

Two months after the leak, on 4 March, Brazil’s National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels (ANP) announced it had found inconsistencies in Petrobras’ plans for testing and maintaining the well’s firefighting pumps, and that it could impose a further fine of up to 2 million reais ($390,000). Petrobras said that its safety operations are effective and that the problem was outdated documents, not the equipment itself.

Between 2020 and 2021, Petrobras went from being a minority partner with European oil companies BP and TotalEnergies in six Foz do Amazonas blocks (including Block 59, formerly BP's) to controlling them outright. Since then, it has expanded its communications spending year after year to push its narrative about the drilling and paint itself as a responsible corporate citizen, including via events like the one on Marajó. The company has built a sophisticated publicity and communications machine, as shown by internal documents and data obtained by piauí in partnership with the investigative climate outlet DeSmog, through freedom of information requests and transparency portals.

In 2023, Ibama denied Petrobras a licence to drill in Block 59, citing the inadequacy of its emergency response plans given the “extreme socio-environmental sensitivity” of the Foz do Amazonas basin. That same year, for the first time, the head of Petrobras’ communications department began reporting directly to the company's chief executive. When Petrobras reapplied for the licence with an updated response plan, dozens of Ibama staff signed a recommendation, in February 2025, that the application be denied once again. But the licence was ultimately granted last October, on the eve of COP30 – to the dismay of campaigners and climate scientists. Ibama said its decision was “underpinned by sound technical assessment” and that there had been no external interference in the agency's work.

Petrobras told piauí there is no “causal relationship” between the licensing process and the increase in its advertising and sponsorship spending. However, in 2025, the company invested 372 million reais ($74 million) in buying advertising space – five times what it spent in 2020. Its public disclosures show it also quadrupled the value of its cultural and environmental sponsorship portfolio over the same period, from 245.4 million reais ($47.4 million) in 2020 to 1.25 billion reais ($240 million) in 2025. Petrobras said communications spending was lower than usual in 2020 as it went through a phase of asset disposals to lower its debt pile, before it returned to “levels compatible with the scale, reach, and institutional responsibility of the largest company in Brazil” from 2023 under new management. Petrobras added that its inflation-adjusted advertising spend was 55% higher in 2012 than in 2025.

Petrobras’ PR machine encompasses everything from presentations to communities – like the one in Cachoeira do Arari – to meetings with journalists, to visits by social media influencers to the oil company’s environmental projects in northern Brazil. As a result, the Petrobras logo has increasingly appeared alongside Foz do Amazonas mangrove conservation projects, films about artisanal fishing communities, and Indigenous women’s poetry exhibitions. The company said it began sponsoring projects in the Foz do Amazonas region in 2023, “demonstrating that Petrobras arrived in the territory beforehand with voluntary socio-environmental projects”.

The sponsorship portfolio includes a growing number of initiatives in the region. These include 16.4 million reais ($3.2 million) spent supporting a mangrove conservation programme – the very mangroves that, according to local communities and civil society organisations, would be devastated in the event of an oil spill. Petrobras and civil society are locked in “a war of narratives”, in the words of Suely Araújo, who headed Ibama from 2016 to 2018. She is now public policy coordinator at Observatório do Clima, one of the organisations challenging the drilling licence in court.

For months, President Lula and his allies publicly insisted that oil exploration in the Foz do Amazonas represents an unmissable economic opportunity for Brazil and could finance the transition to cleaner energy sources. The same messages have appeared in Petrobras’ public relations’ materials. More recently, some of the project's supporters – including the president of the Brazilian Petroleum, Gas and Biofuels Institute (IBP), the main lobby group for Brazil's fossil fuel sector – have added a new justification for accelerating drilling in the region: the war in the Middle East and the resulting spike in oil prices. “It doesn't matter what's real; what matters is what gets put into the narratives. So, to finance the energy transition, I’m going to make the very problem it needs to solve worse”, says Suely Araújo.

Opponents of the exploration argue that Brazil already meets its domestic demand for oil, and that the government has never directed export revenues toward the energy transition. In 2024, only 0.16% of the 137.9 billion reais ($27.2 billion) the state collected from oil went to climate or environmental spending, according to a study by the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies (Inesc), a Brasília-based think tank.

Petrobras views the local press as a strategic battleground in this war of narratives, internal documents show. In 2022, the company invited 36 journalists from Amapá to take part in an online course about its drilling plans, according to an invitation list. The course materials covered various talking points about the project, including “positive impacts on the region's socio-environmental development”. They did not mention any negative environmental or climate impacts.

Seles Nafes was one of those invited to the course, although Petrobras declined to confirm whether he or any other invitees attended. He runs a news site about Amapá, has 90,000 followers on Instagram and published at least ten articles backing the drilling plans and attacking their detractors, with headlines such as “Oil could add R$10 billion to Amapá's GDP”. Nafes also shared a video – viewed more than 1.5 million times – in which the YouTuber Sérgio Sacani claims energy prices would “skyrocket” if Brazil does not start drilling in the Foz do Amazonas. Nafes did not respond to piauí’s interview request.

Petrobras has also expanded its network of social media influencers. In 2024, it hired 72 of them – nearly double the previous year’s figure, and more than three times the number recorded in 2022, according to data obtained by piauí, DeSmog and Unearthed, Greenpeace's British investigative unit. The influencers range from biology teachers, to TV news presenters, to LGBTQIAPN+ activists. Most have been chosen to engage younger audiences who would not normally engage with Petrobras content.

In total, Petrobras influencers posted more than 5,000 times between January 2024 and August 2025 – the year and a half before the Block 59 licence was granted –, according to the company's internal data. These posts appeared more than 4 billion times in users' social media feeds. The videos alone amassed 1.65 billion views: the equivalent of every person in Brazil watching a Petrobras-sponsored video eight times.

In a press release announcing the “Just Energy Transition” advertising campaign, the oil company said it had hired “a squad of influencers whose language speaks to Generation Z”. The strategy has become common among oil companies worldwide, including Shell and BP, as they seek to connect with broader, younger audiences. Influencers are key to that effort. “They manage to create a real connection with their audience, and that ends up lending legitimacy to the corporate messages the companies are promoting”, says Bruno Araujo, a geographer and climate influencer.

Some content, such as a series of videos by Gen-Z science influencer Mylly Biologando about algae fuels, presents the company as a clean energy innovator. Other posts associate the Petrobras brand with socially progressive, Indigenous or environmental movements.

We’e’ena Tikuna, an artist and activist of the Tikuna people with 1 million followers on Instagram, created and shared a Tikuna version of the traditional orange jumpsuit worn by Petrobras workers for the “Petrohype” campaign, which celebrated the company’s 70th anniversary in 2023. In the travel series Mochileiras (“Backpackers”), female influencers tour cultural and conservation projects sponsored by Petrobras, including in the Amazon. In one of the videos, which has more than 5 million views on YouTube, the influencer Amanda Mota smiles at the camera in front of the Petrobras logo at the 2025 Choro Jazz Festival on Marajó Island – an event to which the company has dedicated 6.7 million reais ($1.3 million) in sponsorship over the past two years.

The artist We’e’ena Tikuna asked that her name not be included in this story and threatened to take legal action if the request was refused. Amanda Mota did not respond to an interview request. Mylly Biologando said her team “carefully evaluates the companies it chooses to associate with [...] and believes in Petrobras’ seriousness and in its efforts to modernise and prepare for the energy transition”.

Petrobras has been allocating ever larger budgets to TV, radio and cinema advertising, and launched its “Transição Energética Justa” (“Just Energy Transition”) campaign in July 2025. Starring the actress Camila Pitanga and soundtracked with an original song by Diogo Nogueira, the campaign premiered during the commercial break of Jornal Nacional, Brazil’s flagship evening news programme. In the campaign’s main advert, the actress, wearing a green shirt, declares: “Petrobras is leading the just energy transition.” A few scenes later, Pitanga appears in the company's offices, where she meets smiling employees and watches a presentation about a humpback whale conservation project. “And you always have to look out for the environment”, she whispers from her seat in the auditorium. In the next scene, she and a truck driver, passing a field of solar panels, agree that “embracing new forms of energy is also part of a just energy transition”. In the final scene, at dusk over an idyllic bay, Pitanga repeats her opening line, adding: “Just for everyone. Just for you.”

Growing awareness of the climate crisis is putting Petrobras under pressure to show it can lead the country's transition to cleaner energy. Like TotalEnergies, BP and Shell before it, Petrobras is trying to reinvent its image: it no longer wants to be seen merely as a reliable oil company, but as a force for social and environmental good.

The campaign featuring Pitanga was made by Propeg, one of the two main advertising agencies working for Petrobras, along with Ogilvy Brasil. Both are headquartered in São Paulo, and both state in their contracts that their work aims to “strengthen Petrobras’ corporate image [...] in Brazil and abroad”. In part, this is because foreign investors own 47.5% of the oil company. Ogilvy Brasil has a five-year contract with Petrobras (2022 to 2027) worth 488 million reais ($96.4 million). The contract held by the Brazilian agency Propeg is also for five years, running until 2027, and is worth 450 million reais ($88.9 million), according to Petrobras’ public contract database.

A former senior employee at WPP – the British advertising holding company that owns Ogilvy Brasil – said Petrobras’ recent communications strategy appeared to be designed to earn the “social licence” it needs to keep expanding its fossil fuel operations (they asked not to be identified, fearing professional repercussions). “Social licence” is industry jargon that describes the way companies make business as usual acceptable to the general public. The former employee also said that WPP’s agencies were usually key to the way that its clients built communications strategies to meet goals like this. “That means of course creating an image that the companies want people to see rather than presenting the reality”, added the former employee.

In June 2025, climate activists unfurled a banner outside WPP's offices in London. They branded the company’s leadership “climate criminals”, in protest at its work for fossil fuel producers. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Paris-based intergovernmental body, is currently examining a complaint against WPP accusing the holding company of violating its guidelines on climate and human rights for the same reason. When approached by piauí, Propeg and Ogilvy said that questions about their role in Petrobras’ advertising strategy should be directed to Petrobras. WPP did not respond to interview requests.

“I think advertising agencies need to take very serious responsibility for the way they position the oil industry”, says Alana Manchineri, communications manager at Coiab. “It's like gambling advertising. You know it harms people. You know there are people who will get sick because of it, and yet you set up communications machinery to capture society's imagination and make it popular.”

In November 2025, four months after launching the “Just Energy Transition” campaign, Petrobras announced plans to invest 109 billion dollars (around 550 billion reais) in expanding its business between 2026 and 2030. Only 8% will go to low-carbon energy such as biofuels and solar – a figure that also includes gas production, another fossil fuel driving global heating. That percentage represents a drop of 1.7 percentage points compared with the previous year's plan.

More than 70% of the budget will go to oil exploration and production, an increase of two percentage points on 2025. “You cannot say Petrobras is acting in the best possible way in the face of the climate crisis”, says Suely Araújo, the former Ibama president. “It simply isn't true. And the company promotes the energy transition as if it were completely just. Just for whom? For whose benefit?”

Another of Petrobras’ battlefronts is online content. The company has produced a collection of videos “with the aim of informing the public about the company's investments in the Equatorial Margin region” (Petrobras has taken to using the term “Equatorial Margin” for the drilling area, avoiding Foz do Amazonas, which evokes the Amazon rainforest). In its Petroverso series, released on YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram across 2023, 2024 and 2025, a Petrobras employee from the Amazonian municipality of Óbidos talks about working on drilling safety projects. “I imagine myself [in the future] taking part in the great challenge of [drilling in] the Equatorial Margin”, he says, wearing the bright orange Petrobras uniform. “I want to see it happen. It's a source of pride for me to be part of this team, you know?”

In another video, from 2023, which has racked up more than 17,000 views on YouTube, Petrobras’ then chief executive, Jean Paul Prates, says the company needs to drill in the Foz do Amazonas to “make the [energy] transition viable, both financially and to guarantee Brazil’s energy security”. The company’s current chief executive, Magda Chambriard, has deployed similar arguments. At an oil industry conference in the United States in May 2025 she had no qualms about repeating the slogan used by Donald Trump to champion oil exploration: “Let’s drill, baby, drill!”

While grassroots opposition was growing during Petrobras’ fight for its drilling licence in the Foz do Amazonas, the company set about ensuring that favourable narratives circulated within local communities. The event in Cachoeira do Arari, on Marajó Island, was one of more than sixty “informational meetings” held for the region's communities since 2022, according to the press offices of Petrobras and Ibama.

Between November and December 2025, after exploratory drilling began at Block 59, Petrobras held seventeen meetings, according to a letter the company sent to Ibama on 19 November. The meetings were a condition of the Block 59 licence, intended to ensure “broad and effective communication [...], allowing expectations to be aligned in relation [...] to the drilling activity”.

A study published last March in the academic journal Global Environmental Change identified, in a sample of Petrobras communications materials about the Foz do Amazonas produced between 2022 and 2024 – including community presentations – at least ten false or misleading claims. One slide from the presentation Petrobras delivered to communities between November and December 2025 stated that the company had drilled “more than 3,000 deepwater wells without any harm to the environment”. But Petrobras reports hundreds of offshore environmental incidents to the ANP every year, such as drilling fluid leaks, according to data available on the agency's website.

Petrobras has also been responsible for a series of environmental disasters on and offshore. In 2000, pipelines burst twice, pouring millions of litres of oil into Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro and later the Iguaçu River in southern Brazil. The following year, the P-36 offshore platform sank after a series of explosions, killing eleven workers and causing an oil spill in the Campos Basin, off the Rio de Janeiro coast. A similar explosion in the Espírito Santo Basin in 2015 killed nine workers.

Activists, academic researchers, residents and even the Ministério Público Federal (MPF), Brazil’s public prosecutor, say the information shared at the community meetings is misleading and unverifiable. They say the presentation given played down legitimate concerns with the project, including by emphasising the distance of Block 59 from the coast, repeatedly highlighting Petrobras’ wildlife conservation programmes, avoiding discussion of the climate crisis, and making broad safety claims. “In Marajó, some communities don’t have access to this information. It simply doesn't reach them. Or it arrives completely distorted”, said Fernanda Pereira, a 23-year-old biology student from Cachoeira do Arari, after attending a meeting in Soure, on the island’s southern coast. Another participant at the same meeting described the presentation as “a wonderful PR performance”.

In February, the MPF sent a formal recommendation to Ibama calling for Petrobras’ licence to be revoked, arguing that the company was misleading the public in community meetings and communications materials. Prosecutors from Amapá and Pará said Petrobras was minimising the project's potential impacts by referring only to the Morpho well at the meetings, when it plans to drill at least three more wells in Block 59 between 2027 and 2029. Campaigners say this is part of a wider strategy to frame the Block 59 licence as a short-term test exercise to audiences that may oppose the drilling, rather than the door to exploration throughout the region.

The presentation document and an audio recording of the meeting in Soure, on Marajó, was reviewed by piauí, which found that the Petrobras representatives at the event made no mention of the three additional wells. Petrobras told this magazine that it did disclose the three extra wells in the meetings. The company did not respond to questions about the lack of information on oil’s contribution to climate change, apart from noting that the majority of Brazil’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions come from farming. Ibama said the meetings “aimed to inform participants about the impacts of the project under licensing, and did not cover discussions that, while relevant, go beyond the scope of the project itself [...] the discussion of climate impacts falls outside the scope of an exploratory drilling project”. The agency did not directly answer questions about the MPF's recommendation.

To help organise the community meetings, Petrobras hired the Brazilian environmental consultancy NAV Ocean, whose clients include oil giants Shell and Equinor. João Zanella, who runs NAV Ocean, is sceptical of the criticism voiced at the meetings by campaigners like Nelson Bastos. He says he saw the same thing in the run-up to oil exploration in the Pelotas Basin, in southern Brazil. “When something of this scale arrives in a region, it always raises expectations about what it will mean for fishermen's livelihoods”, Zanella says, after a meeting at the fishermen’s association in Salvaterra, on Marajó. “But any decline in fishing isn't going to come from this project. It’ll come from the other industrial pressures that have been building up around them. Over time, people begin to understand that. Their relationship with the company improves.”

Alongside its influencer push, Petrobras has increased the number of cultural projects it backs in the Amazon basin and neighbouring states every year since 2020 when it began to take full ownership of the Foz do Amazonas blocks, including films, concerts and Indigenous festivals. The total rose from just 2 projects in 2020 to 19 by the end of 2025, according to data from the company's transparency portal. In all, the company has invested more than 108 million reais ($21.3 million) in these contracts.

That sum includes 16.4 million reais ($3.2 million) spent sponsoring the Mangues da Amazônia (“Mangroves of the Amazon”) conservation programme. “Historical research shows that when a company has big plans, feels threatened or knows that there are more fossil fuels to be won. They invest a lot of money beforehand”, said Gertjan Plets, who researches oil and gas philanthropy at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “They are very afraid of local communities protesting because they can make it very difficult on the ground. So they enter the local cultural sector, the local ecological preservation groups, to really make sure that they have the social licence to operate.”

Petrobras’ communications strategy amounts to “manipulation”, says Jorge Gabriel, a 50-year-old fisherman who lives in Soure, on Marajó, and is part of the “Nem Um Poço a Mais” ("Not One More Well") campaign. “It's like putting a blindfold over people's eyes.”

Across 2023 and 2024, fifteen houses in Pesqueiro, on Marajó’s southern coast, were swept away by flooding. All that’s left today is a series of jagged wooden stumps on the beach. One of those homes belonged to a 34-year-old fisherman named Dione Leal, who is also studying biology at the Federal University of Pará’s Marajó campus. He believes rising sea levels driven by climate change are partly to blame. Meanwhile, as ocean temperatures rise, experienced Marajoan fishermen say their catch is getting smaller every year.

Global heating is making life harder in Marajó, a region already suffering economic neglect. Which is why some residents see oil money as a way out of hardship. “I think there are still people who have this idea that Petrobras is going to bring good things”, says Leal, sitting on the beach and looking out at the spot where his house once stood. “Some think they're going to get rich”, adds Patricia Faria Ribeiro, a Pesqueiro resident who often represents the community on environmental matters. “What I tell them is that this well isn't going to bring us any benefit. No benefit in health, education, work, jobs. It's an illusion.” To the north, in Oiapoque – the town closest to Block 59 – new settlements are already springing up in anticipation of job opportunities. “There's this idea that Oiapoque could become the new Dubai. The disinformation process is enormous”, says Luene Karipuna, an environmental and Indigenous rights activist from Oiapoque.

On the outskirts of Amapá's poorest towns, even those who understand the impacts of oil exploration believe they have no choice but to support the project. “Any hope that a person's life might change is hope”, says Janaína Freitas Calado, a professor at the Federal University of Amapá (Unifap) who researches local communities' perceptions of the oil exploration plans. “How can I worry about whether the world is going to end because of global warming if I have three children to feed and no water, no food, nothing?”

Biologist Jeronimo Dias dos Santos, a resident of Amapá’s capital, Macapá, agrees. While he acknowledges the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to reduce fossil fuel use, he argues that the energy transition will be gradual, and that Brazil needs to preserve its energy security in the meantime. For him, exploration could “move the economy of a state historically forgotten by the government”. Dias dos Santos adds: “We can increase revenue without felling a single tree, without opening up vast areas of monoculture, without deforesting.”

Like President Lula and his allies, Petrobras has argued for years that the oil industry can lift Brazilians out of poverty. “Oil means diversification – not just of energy, but economic diversification, the ability to generate development for Amapá”, said Clécio Luís, the governor of Amapá, in 2024, as he pressed Ibama to grant Petrobras the exploration licence. In April of that year, the oil company told Indigenous leaders in Oiapoque that drilling could generate up to 3.3 million jobs, 46 billion reais ($9.1 billion) in additional tax revenue, and add around 778 billion reais ($154 billion) to the GDP of the surrounding states, according to an information obtained by the researcher Marina Kuzuyabu, from the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s São Paulo School of Business Administration.

Municipalities near oil exploration areas receive millions of reais in royalties, which are supposed to be invested in improving public services. According to a 2013 study published in the journal Resources Policy, those royalties improved, on average, literacy rates as well as access to electricity, water and waste collection in Brazil’s oil municipalities. But in some towns in the south-east, such as those of the Campos Basin in Rio de Janeiro state, oil and gas revenues also deepened inequality, according to another study published in Resources Policy in 2015. This was generally due to mismanagement of royalty distribution. Of the fifteen municipalities that collected the most oil revenue between 1999 and 2024, the majority still had medium or low socioeconomic indicators in 2025, according to an analysis by Agência Pública.

Fisherman Flavio Lontro, 62, who lives in Itaboraí, near Guanabara Bay, in Rio de Janeiro, says oil exploration in his region brought nothing but abandoned construction projects, damage to artisanal fishing, and unreported drilling fluid and oil leaks. The skilled jobs in the oil sector go to workers from elsewhere, he says, while the local population is left with poorly paid work. “What kind of development is that?”, he asks. “The benefit to the fishing community is zero. Forget it – it doesn't exist”, says Lontro, now national coordinator of the National Commission for the Strengthening of Extractive Reserves and Traditional Coastal and Marine Extractivist Peoples (Confrem).

At one of Petrobras’ informational meetings in Soure, on Marajó, local campaigner Isabel Brito recalled what fishermen from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, Bahia and Sergipe – regions with oil exploration – had told her: “This exploration is about generating money for people who already have money. It will deepen social inequality and end up destroying our environment, our nature.” The audience applauded. But with Petrobras already drilling its exploratory well in Block 59, the question remains: have these warnings come too late for campaigners to halt the oil company's progress?

It’s 10 am on Jubim’s Bernarda beach, on the east coast of Marajó. The sandy bay is lined with thick, green mangroves. A group of fifteen men stand knee-deep in the water around a wooden boat, sorting fish from a blue net. The constant hum of chatter is only broken by the occasional burst of communal laughter. Every few seconds, a different-coloured fish slaps into a plastic crate on the sand, lobbed from the water with an accuracy honed over many mornings of practice. Nearby, black vultures wait patiently for the discards.

Two of the fishermen have been up since 1am, when they set out in search of their catch. The rest arrived to meet them on their return at 6 am and will be rewarded with a fresh tainha each for lunch, grilled over hot coals on the beach. Nelson Bastos – the environmental campaigner who took to the stage at the Petrobras presentation – learnt to fish from his father here aged 13. “This is what we’re afraid of losing”, he says.

For now, Ibama’s decision to let Petrobras run its tests at Block 59 has put the Foz do Amazonas project in motion, but it is not yet a done deal. If enough oil reserves are found, full-scale production likely won’t be possible for another seven to eight years. The recent drilling fluid leak from the Morpho well at Block 59 could support the argument to revoke the licence, says Vivian Ferreira, a lawyer from Observatório do Clima working on the case. “We actually joked that it may be the best thing that could have happened”, Ferreira says. “We hope the leak will show that the company does not have the absolute control that it claims to have over the region.”

Some campaigners say they won’t give up trying to stop the drilling. They continue to attend anti-oil meetups, post on social media, and organise protests. Others are less optimistic, resigning themselves to sitting through Petrobras’ presentations to find out if they will be compensated if something goes wrong.

As for Bastos, he appears wearied by the efforts of challenging a company with seemingly infinite resources to tell its own version of the Foz do Amazonas story. For hope, he looks to the soul of his homeland. “Marajó is special because it is our home – our common home, our biosphere. And it is where my ancestors, the encantados (enchanted), dwell. The encantados of the waters, of the forests. That is why we are against oil exploration. Because it will destroy our lives, and the encantados that live in the waters. They are what give us life.”

With additional reporting by Naira Hofmeister.