The communities of Juruti Velho, in western Pará, developed a process of resistance and mobilization
in defense of their traditional and territorial rights in the face of the advent of the American mining
company Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), which intensified in the early 2000s. The process can be read from the perspective of decolonization, insofar as this process was triggered by the
communities having as substrate the traditionality, the territory, the people-nature relationship and a
socioeconomic mode not guided by the capitalist system. Resistance based on factors related to
strategies for experiencing and overcoming personal and collective limitations: community
organization and puxirum, in connection with a context marked by the validation of traditional and
territorial rights in the citizen's constitution (1988), the ratification of Convention 169 of the ILO, of
June 1989 and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and others that started to give security
and legitimacy to the demands of the traditional Amazonian community, in particular. This article
focuses on the process that supported the formation of resistance and mobilizations that led
communities to sui generis victories in the history of relations between communities and large mining
companies in the Amazon, in the period spanning 2000 to 2010. These communities obtained, from its
organization, mobilizations and articulations, the condition of going from invisibility to the negotiating
table with Alcoa, imposing the company and the state the recognition of its traditionality and its
territorial rights, starting to participate in the mining results, with full autonomy over the management
of the resources received by its own entity and the collective title of the PAE Juruti Velho, with the
transfer by Incra of the Real Use of Rights Concession Contract (CCDRU). We conclude that this
process constitutes an important example of resistance and confrontation with economic and political
power, as well as the attempt to reconfigure the space and its interiorization of submission to a
colonial model, that is, the action of the communities of Juruti Velho, inserts within a context of
deconstruction of colonial knowledge and affirmation from a decolonial perspective.
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