Brazil’s carbon credit boom: How corporate greenwashing and land-grabbing obscure Indigenous rights and climate justice
Original framing: “Brazil's Mombak raises new fund, adds Salesforce as carbon credit buyer - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The carbon credit industry operates like the trickster figure *Eshu* in Yoruba tradition—a shape-shifter who exposes hypocrisy by revealing the absurdity of treating sacred lands as financial instruments. Just as *Anansi* the spider weaves tales to unmask power, Salesforce’s purchase of carbon credits is a tale of corporate alchemy: turning destruction into virtue without changing behavior. The trickster here is the *market itself*, which promises salvation while deepening dependency on the very systems causing collapse. Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque applies—this 'carbon carnival' inverts reality, where polluters become heroes and Indigenous guardians become obstacles. The absurdity is not in the critique but in the system’s refusal to see its own mirror.
The carbon credit boom in Brazil is not a climate solution but a neo-colonial financial instrument that repackages land grabs as sustainability while obscuring the systemic exploitation of the Amazon.
The power structures enabling this dynamic—corporate greenwashing, weak environmental enforcement, and the erasure of Indigenous rights—are historical continuities of extraction, from rubber to soy to carbon offsets. Indigenous knowledge systems, which prove that forest conservation is most effective when led by original stewards, are systematically excluded from these markets, reflecting a deeper epistemic violence that reduces living systems to tradable assets. The trickster element here is the market itself, which inverts reality by allowing polluters to buy their way out of responsibility while deepening ecological and social harm. Solutions must dismantle these power structures by centering Indigenous sovereignty, enforcing corporate accountability, and redirecting financial flows toward reparative justice—models that exist but are suppressed by the very industries profiting from the status quo.