INDIGENOUS TAKEOVER AT COP30

The UN's annual climate change conferences are usually a staid and formulaic affair. World leaders jet in from thousands of kilometers away, to spout empty platitudes from the North or increasingly desperate pleas for action from the South. Negotiating teams pull all-nighters to debate arcane and technical details word-by-word. In a final sprint, they may or may not produce a final statement of non-binding commitments that most participants ignore. Rinse and repeat.

But this year, mass people's movements rewrote the script. As host of the 30th annual conference (COP30), Brazil made a point of bringing the world to Belém: the gateway to the Amazon rainforest. After years of rampant climate denialism and intensified deforestation under the far-right regime of Jair Bolsonaro, Lula's government wanted to show it had definitively turned the page.

But from the depths of the Amazon emerged popular forces steeled by the anti-Bolsonaro land struggle that had no intention of letting Lula off easily either. The Landless Workers' Movement (MST), forged through decades of rural land occupations, took the fight directly to COP30 for shamefully greenwashing big agribusiness. A 5000-strong people's flotilla converged on Belém from the entire length of the Amazon River. And most spectacularly, Indigenous Yanomami people repeatedly blockaded and stormed the meeting hall itself -- a show of force befitting the rightful stewards of the land and guarantors of the planet's future.