‘We cannot be cowards’: the Brazilian village fighting for the right to have water

Children playing in an igarapé – a watercourse in the Indigenous Old Tupi language. While the quilombo villagers see springs as communal property, farmers who moved into the area in recent decades claim them as their own Photograph: Nicola Zolin

Beneath the family television stands a collection of trophies and a photo showing a smiling Haroldo Betcel sporting a football jersey. Smiling back at him is his widow, 41-year-old Cleia Betcel. The photo was taken a month before her husband’s murder.

Five years ago Betcel was stabbed in the back with a screwdriver in retaliation for defending water resources in Tiningu, a village on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in the Brazilian state of Pará.