“Brazil and the Netherlands share a special history,” said Brigit Gijsbers, director of maritime affairs from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, at the start of a speech given in the city of Belém near the mouth of the Amazon River. “For centuries, it was shipping that connected us. Pernambuco, Bahia, Recife and Rio de Janeiro were popular ports of call on the way to the East Indies,” she added in a veiled reference to a time when the Dutch West India Company shipped slaves from Angola to Brazil to work on sugar plantations. It was September 2015, and Gijsbers was in Belém with reps from 13 Dutch companies who wanted to profit from the construction of the Northern Corridor, a mega-infrastructure transportation initiative intended to movebear witness to the fact that until recently 196 families lived here. But the village has been wrecked, encroached on by high walls and barbed wire, marking the perimeter of the soy harbor known as Hidrovias do Brasil. Nearby, the river is dotted with ships waiting to pick up their cargo of soy. The Dutch consultancy Arcadis managed the harbor’s construction. According to official environmental impacts assessments, the area where the village stands was uninhabited when harbor construction began, explained Marcel Hazeu, a University of Pará researcher who studied the matter. That’s because shortly before the port was built, the families were vigorously pressured to sell out by K.F. de Menezes Consultoria, a Brazilian company. Evidence of unfair coercion: 85 per cent of the families ended up selling