“The UN – the same UN holding a climate conference just a few kilometres away – has been dumping its construction waste from conference facilities in this vulnerable community. We tracked it down, and wouldn’t you know it, we found the very dump site the UN is using. We found the discarded UN-logo’ed signs and trash hiding in plain sight.”
By SHEILA GUNN REID
WE CAUGHT THEM! UN climate elites dumped their conference garbage on a poor Brazilian neighbourhood
The United Nations has been dumping its construction waste from conference facilities in a vulnerable community.
While global VIPs preach climate virtue inside the UN summit in Belém, the city and the United Nations are using the impoverished community of Vila da Barca as their real-life dumping ground.
Former VP Al Gore was just at the United Nations’ climate conference droning on about how ordinary people are supposedly “using the sky as an open sewer,” but, as the facts now show, that phone call was coming from inside the house.
We discovered something that Gore, the climate delegates, and their media cheerleaders don’t want you to see: they’re using a poor neighbourhood here in Belem, Brazil as their own open sewer and garbage dump.
My videographer, Kian Simone, and I travelled into a favela called Vila da Barca on the edge of Belém. There’s no proper sanitation. There’s very little electricity. Homes aren’t hooked up to a sewer system. And it’s dangerous.
Most residents don’t even legally own the land their houses sit on. If the city decides to bulldoze everything tomorrow to make way for some shiny new project, that’s it. They’re gone.
We went there because we saw local Instagram videos from residents accusing the United Nations and the city of Belém of using Vila da Barca as a personal garbage dump. For years, people here have complained that sewage from richer parts of the city is routed straight through their community and out into the bay, turning the water into a filthy, dangerous soup.
On the ground, we saw the evidence. And then we found something else.
The UN – the same UN holding a climate conference just a few kilometres away – has been dumping its construction waste from conference facilities in this vulnerable community. We tracked it down, and wouldn’t you know it, we found the very dump site the UN is using. We found the discarded UN-logo’ed signs and trash hiding in plain sight.
I’m not someone who buys into the woke buzzword “environmental racism” when it’s used to smear oil and gas companies that bring good jobs to Indigenous and rural communities. But what we saw in Vila da Barca? If anything deserves that label, it’s powerful international elites quietly hiding their mess in a powerless, working-poor neighbourhood that has zero ability to fight back.
This is a poor community. It’s largely mulatto and marginalized. They don’t have political clout, lobbyists or PR teams. And yet the world’s climate aristocracy has chosen to hide its environmental carnage right in the middle of their homes.
The people of Vila da Barca can’t stop it. They don’t have a voice inside the UN conference centre, where journalists are more interested in recycling talking points than asking hard questions about where the garbage actually goes.
But we went there. We filmed what the UN and the city of Belém are doing in the shadows while preaching climate purity in air-conditioned halls.
This is real journalism – the kind the accredited press inside the conference won’t do because it doesn’t fit the script and might offend the powerful.
I’m proud of the work we did today in Vila da Barca, pulling back the curtain on yet another layer of UN hypocrisy.
To watch our full report from inside this community – and to help us keep exposing what the UN is really doing here in Brazil – visit RebelUN.com.
