Conservation for Whom? USAID, the Amazon, and the War on Indigenous Stewardship
Donato Bibitata, a Rikbaktsa Indigenous man, collects latex from a rubber tree in the Japuíra Indigenous Reservation, located in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. Photo courtesy of Agência Brasil.
Given the unprecedented dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), it is imperative to reflect on the understudied role that American aid agencies have played in shaping conservation efforts. This history is characterized by the violent imposition of market-centric approaches to conservation. USAID, foreign corporations, and the American government all play a part in engineering a model of conservation built on domination rather than preservation.
The American approach embodies a philosophy of conservation in which nature conservation and human activity are mutually exclusive. These approaches continue to shape government policy in the Amazon, casting Indigenous rainforest communities as barriers to conservation, and frequently relegating them to the sidelines, often by force. USAID’s role in the erosion of Indigenous stewardship to conservation might seem obscure, but using the instrument of foreign aid, the agency has ensured that an extractive, market-driven model of conservation prevails, placating Western capital interests at the detriment of the rainforest and its communities.
Scholarly research overwhelmingly affirms the critical role of Indigenous communities in environmental conservation. In regions where state enforcement is weak or absent— such as parts of the Amazon — governments often rely on coercive force rather than effective governance to assert control, undermining environmentally sustainable outcomes. In such contexts, engaging local communities is essential for effective, sustainable, and equitable conservation, as their participation ensures adequate natural resource management and environmental protection. This approach, rooted in the theory of common resources (assets under the jurisdiction of the community), emphasizes collective organization, equitable resource use, and the integration of local knowledge into decision-making. Community-based conservation has gained global recognition by safeguarding ecosystems and species through sustainable agricultural systems and climate-resilient water management. For instance, in the Amazon, where protected areas often face financial, personnel, and political challenges, community-based conservation has yielded tangible ecological recoveries in degraded ecosystems. Such community-based governance has consistently proven economically viable and environmentally sustainable. It has also been shown to outperform traditional conservation methods, as evidenced by studies in tropical forests and protected areas worldwide.
In the context of the Amazon, these community-oriented practices can be loosely labeled as a socio-environmentalist approach. In the Brazilian Amazon specifically, community-oriented solutions gained traction following the fall of the military dictatorship and the adoption of a new Constitution in 1988. The results were impressive: under center-left governments in the early 2000s, Brazil created protected areas at higher rates than any other country in the world, conserving up to 44 percent of the land that makes up the Amazon today. Moreover, the socio-environmentalist approach led to the emergence of community-based environmental protection systems, including the Voluntary Environmental Agents program (VEA). Since its inception in 1995, the program has conserved nearly 9000 km² of rainforest. The grassroots nature of the VEA, coupled with an incredibly popular mandate, stemmed from decades of local activism integrated with broader social movements. For instance, community-based resource management programs have aided in the recovery of freshwater fisheries, resulting in a thirtyfold increase in fish stocks along the Juruá River in the western Brazilian Amazon. Ultimately, the VEA program has enabled the expansion of protected areas and gained prominence by resisting illegal deforestation, promoting progressive legislation aimed at broadening forest protection, and improving labour representation, all while empowering local communities to manage their territories.
Despite the success of local efforts, U.S. foreign aid has hindered efforts to adopt a socio-environmental approach to Amazonian conservation. Before the US-backed military dictatorship took power in 1964, the Amazon was nearly untouched, largely out of reach of the global capitalist order. This changed with the introduction of the Alliance for Progress (AFP). The AFP was a decade-long multibillion-dollar foreign aid commitment to Latin American countries, ostensibly aimed at promoting economic prosperity to prevent the spread of communism (as had happened in Cuba a decade prior). Under the purview of the AFP, USAID transmitted funds to Brazil to advance American political and economic interests. Consequently, the interests of the American government and private sector aligned with the Brazilian military government and ruling class, who sought to profit from integrating the Amazon into the global market economy through measures such as land privatization and resource extraction. Under the guise of government aid, American companies advanced their interests by acquiring and extracting resource-rich areas, while selectively financing Brazilian education that disseminated market-centric approaches to Amazonian preservation. The legacy of the Alliance for Progress and politically motivated foreign aid has thus hindered Brazil’s capacity to preserve the Amazon by eroding the possibility of a socio-environmental approach.
American support for the dictatorship can partially be explained by a desire to secure access to the Amazon's resources. As the Uruguayan scholar Eduardo Galeano observes in “The Open Veins of Latin America,” U.S. interest in Brazil’s natural resources prompted them to overthrow two democratically elected Brazilian presidents—Jânio Quadros and João Goulart—who sought to nationalize key mineral deposits, hindering their accessibility to American firms. In the wake of the political unrest, a U.S.-backed military junta seized power in 1964 and incorporated the Amazon into the market economy. Immediately after the coup, the regime announced tax exemptions for American mining companies, under the pretext of developing the previously untouched rainforest. These companies, seeking to secure access to the subsurface resources, were openly associated with the dictatorship within the framework of the U.S. government’s foreign aid policy to the region. A 1968 Brazilian Congressional inquiry revealed that the military government undemocratically authorized the United States Air Force to conduct aerial surveys to detect mineral deposits in the Amazon. Using this information, in defiance of Brazilian sovereignty, American multinational companies bought a mineral-rich piece of land about the size of New England, paying just 7 cents per acre. Specifically, the corporate titan United States Steel (USS) used the photographic material to discover the biggest iron ore deposit in the world in the Carajás mountain range. USS then secured a 49 percent stake in the mining rights of this region, while the remaining 51% went to the Brazilian state-owned company Vale do Rio Doce, illustrating the growing association between the dictatorship and American capital interest.
Under American pressure, the military regime in Brazil became obsessed with integrating the Amazon into its developmental project for the country as part of a national security strategy named “Project Amazon,” guided by the motto “occupy so as not to surrender.” This outlook led the regime to promote settling the rainforest, which they erroneously considered to be an uninhabited space, facilitating progress through an infusion of state, multinational (mainly American), and domestic capital. In developing the Amazon rainforest, the regime used American foreign aid funds to facilitate land privatization, agribusinesses, and mining ventures. This was accompanied by the rapid expansion of infrastructure in transportation and electricity, including works like the Trans-Amazonian Road and the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Powerhouse. The projects forced the local Indigenous and non-Indigenous working class into the market economy, rendering community-led conservation obsolete.
The large-scale incorporation of the Amazon into the matrix of American and Brazilian commercial interests lacked a democratic mandate. Instead, any resistance to these projects was met with brutal state repression, leading to the murder of thousands of local Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists. Gilney Viana, a historian and member of the Peasant Truth Commission, estimates that at least 1600 peasants were killed or disappeared between 1964 and 1968. Armed peasant groups, such as the Guamá Guerrilla, represented attempts at Indigenous agency and resistance. For example, the Guamá Guerrilla attempted to defend their land from companies like the Josapar Company, which deputized criminal organizations to violently expel indigenous communities from their land, with overt state support. In response, the then-Governor of the Pará state, Jader Barbalho, massacred members of the Guamá Guerrilla and resorted to extrajudicial killings, torture, sexual violence, and targeted assassinations against the indigenous resistance.
In addition to the overt violence and neoliberalization that characterized U.S. interests in the Amazon, there was a more subtle crusade waged on the educational front. As Noam Chomsky articulates, the educational front was a crucial Cold War battleground, fought to win the “hearts and minds” of people. Brazilian historian Rodrigo Molina points to this lesser-known form of American interference in the Brazilian Amazon—USAID’s role in shaping the contemporary structure of Brazilian agri-business through education. Specifically, during the first decade of the dictatorship, USAID funded an agricultural education partnership between the State University of Ohio and the University of São Paulo (USP). To foster the incipient Brazilian agribusiness, USAID financed new academic programs and teaching material under the American Land Grant Colleges model for the most important university in the country. This included the creation of new undergraduate and graduate courses, particularly in the field of genetic engineering of crops and livestock. Such action served the explicit purpose of promoting a doctrine of conservation predicated on the capitalist modernization of Brazilian agriculture. The curricula emphasized adopting modern production technology while maintaining its archaic colonial characteristics, such as land concentration and indentured labor. USAID’s mission at USP functioned to increase the productivity and profit of the São Paulo agrarian aristocracy, which owns millions of acres of land in the southern frontier of the Amazon, a region critically affected by deforestation.
Despite the aforementioned achievements by the working class and Indigenous communities towards socio-environmental solutions since the end of the dictatorship, the far-right’s return to Brazil in 2019 under former President Jair Bolsonaro was a major setback for this approach. At the same time, it created a significant opportunity for USAID to advance its market-driven approach to Amazon. As an open supporter of the former Brazilian military dictatorship, Bolsonaro revived their dream of expanding into the “World’s Lungs,” mounting the most ecologically destructive campaign in the Amazon since the 1960s. An analysis of USAID’s most recent annual report regarding Amazonian conservation reveals a preservation strategy based on market principles, drawn from a neoliberal doctrine of conservation, dragging the biome into the global market economy. At the same time, by declaring that Amazon was “open for business,” Bolsonaro positioned himself as a crucial ally to this market-oriented approach towards the jungle and its people. Thus, the pattern emerged once again—theUSAID utilized authoritarian, pro-business leadership in Brazil to shoehorn its neoliberal philosophies into the framework of Amazon conservation. Furthermore, USAID’s annual reports correctly recognize that Amazonian preservation rests primarily on its autochthonous population. However, they do this by enabling Indigenous communities to apply market-oriented solutions to generate income while preserving the biome’s vast biodiversity. To this end, USAID portrays a false synergy between Indigenous and American economic interests, a claim that is laughably absurd given its history of violence and exploitation, but necessary for USAID to maintain its image as a benevolent force for conservation.
Amazonian Indigenous people have historically sought to preserve the biome’s diversity through the traditional knowledge and doctrines, which have proven effective notwithstanding exogenous interference. These doctrines, however, are diametrically opposed to the mass commercialization of the Amazon and therefore cannot be reconciled with USAID’s mission. To “overcome” this fundamental contradiction, the U.S. utilized foreign aid and ideologically charged education to attempt to integrate the local population into the globalized market, therefore convincing them of the hopelessness of the socio-environmentalist approach. For this purpose, in 2020, USAID created the first School of Indigenous Governance and Amazonian Development (EGIDA), to promote a similar market-centered ideology akin to that of USP and the State University of Ohio. Thus, USAID’s actions echoed the legacy of American universities during the Cold War and McCarthyism, wherein education was instrumentalized to safeguard U.S. foreign policy interests.
Located in the Peruvian Amazon, EGIDA teaches a business-oriented approach to alleviate the region’s woes, such as the negative impacts of extractive activities. Nonetheless, community leaders like environmentalist Chico Mendes have already devised highly productive methods of extraction, such as rubber tapping, without disproportionately harming the region. Grassroots socialist approaches accomplished this by drawing on the combined knowledge of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous working-class people in the Amazon. But that socio-environmentalist approach has been threatened by USAID’s presence in the biome. Creating an Indigenous School based on the Green Capitalism method was a way to prevent effective non-market-oriented efforts. When analyzing the syllabus of one of the courses, ironically named “Indigenous Economy to Promote Good Living in Our Communities,” the agency’s intent to subvert socio-environmentalism remains evident. The course teaches its Indigenous students to engage in commercial exchange and entrepreneurship, stating that integration into the Western market leads to the fulfillment of demands that cannot be met solely through their relation to the environment. By framing economic integration as the only viable path to well-being, USAID subverts traditional Indigenous knowledge systems and collective land management practices, reinforcing a dependency on market-driven solutions rather than effective, grassroots, community-led alternatives.
The historical role of USAID and American foreign policy in the Amazon reflects a profound clash between market-driven conservation and Indigenous socio-environmental approaches. While Indigenous communities view the Amazon as a living entity integral to their cultural, spiritual, and physical survival, American interventions have consistently treated the rainforest as a resource, exploiting it for profit. This exploitative mindset, rooted in colonial and capitalist ideologies, has justified the displacement, repression, and genocide of Indigenous peoples while undermining their sustainable practices. USAID’s market-centric strategies, from funding agribusiness education to promoting green capitalism, have systematically eroded the possibility of community-led conservation, perpetuating environmental degradation and social injustice. The failure to recognize and support Indigenous worldviews and governance structures not only hinders effective conservation but also perpetuates the legacy of colonialism. Yet as USAID faces unprecedented dismantling, this moment also raises the question of whether such disruption could open space for more autonomous, locally grounded models of stewardship. To truly preserve the Amazon, it is imperative to center Indigenous knowledge and dismantle exploitative systems, embracing a socio-environmentalist approach that respects the land as a living, sacred entity rather than a commodity.
Enzo Cosenza (PUC-Rio ’26) and Mihir Yedur (Sciences Po ’25) study International Relations and Political Science, respectively, with a shared interest in how aid, development, and environmental policy shape the Global South. They can be reached at enzocosenza2@gmail.com and mihir.yedur@sciencespo.fr.