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Paper short abstract

This article examines Brazil’s far right through its anti-Indigenous agenda in the Amazon. Based on ethnography in the Lower Tapajós, it shows how legal rulings and Bolsonaro-era rhetoric mobilize victimhood and nostalgia to recast deforestation as patriotic and Indigenous rights as threats.

Paper long abstract

This article examines the Brazilian far right through its anti-Indigenous agenda, narratives of

victimhood, nostalgia, and conspiratorial rhetoric. Drawing on eighteen months of

ethnographic fieldwork in the Lower Tapajós, it analyzes how agribusiness interests and

far-right politics converge through legal decisions and political discourse. The first section

centers on a 2014 federal court ruling that denied the existence of Indigenous identity in the

Maró territory, branding its inhabitants as “false Indians.” This decision not only sought to

delegitimize Indigenous land claims but also became a rallying point for regional

agribusiness actors, who framed themselves as besieged by environmental regulation and

international conspiracies against national development. The second section turns to Jair

Bolsonaro’s presidency (2019–2022), showing how his “zero demarcation” policy drew on

restorative nostalgia for the military dictatorship. His rhetoric reframed Indigenous

mobilization as a threat to sovereignty and portrayed agribusiness as the true guardian of

the nation’s future. Ethnographic encounters with soy union leaders and analysis of electoral

dynamics reveal how these affects—particularly self-victimization and nostalgia for

authoritarian developmentalism—were mobilized to cement alliances between local elites,

national politics, and broader far-right agendas. By tracing how grievances are weaponized

and conspiratorial narratives normalized, the article highlights the ecological and political

consequences of far-right populism in one of the world’s most critical environmental frontiers.

Ultimately, it argues that support for the far right in the Amazon cannot be explained solely

through economic pressure or dispossession; rather, it emerges from affective regimes that

recast privilege as persecution and deforestation as patriotic progress.