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Campus & Community

Deep in the Amazon, local politicians resist gold miners — and inspire thesis

Christy DeSmith

Harvard Staff Writer

May 27, 2025

6 min read

Encounter during rainforest trip leads Eduardo Vasconcelos to research focus

Part of the
Commencement 2025
series

A collection of features and profiles covering Harvard University’s 374th Commencement.

Reaching the tiny settlement, located deep within the Amazon rainforest, required several hours of travel by river boat.

“When we finally got there, we were immediately greeted by the mayor,” recalled Eduardo Vasconcelos ’25, who reached the far-flung municipality as a volunteer delivering medical supplies during the pandemic. “He took us to see the public school and the public health facility, all of which was managed locally. I was just mesmerized. I thought, ‘Wow! This is the most fascinating experiment in self-governance I’ve ever seen.’”

The encounter stuck with the double concentrator in economics and government, stirring old passions and eventually shaping his senior thesis. Vasconcelos set out to investigate what prevents elected officials like the one he met from falling in with illegal gold miners. Brazil’s federal government has banned these black-market operators, who rely on a process that pumps the environment with toxins. But the miners have proven effective at enlisting cooperation from some of the rainforest’s secluded local powers.

“People tend to look at policy in the Amazon as something that is determined by national administrations,” said Frances Hagopian, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government and one of three faculty advising the thesis. “There are those who are more protective of the environment and there are those who lean more toward developing the Amazon’s resources. What Eduardo did that was different was look below the level of national government.”

Vasconcelos, who grew up amid a family of civil servants in Brazil’s federal capital of Brasília, was interested in government from a young age. He was just 14 years old when he started working with teen trauma survivors. A wave of violent threats against the country’s public schools later inspired him to co-found Jovens Líderes pela Paz (Young Peacebuilders), a nonprofit that trains Brazilian students in de-escalation and advancing mental health supports.

Vasconcelos also worked on education issues as a government volunteer while still in high school. During his senior year, a federal scholarship enabled his first visit to Cambridge for the Harvard Model United Nations program. “I immediately fell in love with the institution,” he recalled.

At the time, then-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was actively freezing public funding for universities while taking shots at certain humanities and social science disciplines. “That really motivated me to try to come,” said Vasconcelos, whose application was supported by the Jorge Paulo Lemann Fund. “It would allow me to study what I love.”

“When we talk about protecting the rainforest, we don’t always think about how we can better support local governments.”Eduardo Vasconcelos

As a College first-year, he made his first trip to the rainforest with the nonprofit G10 Favelas, which transported medical supplies to Brazil’s small communities during the pandemic. Inspired by the responsive democracy he saw practiced in a remote Amazon outpost, Vasconcelos subsequently landed spots on two immersions in the region organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS).

“I feel like the Amazon is what bonds every Brazilian together,” Vasconcelos said, noting that Brazilian Chief Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, a senior fellow at the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, helped him home in on the rainforest as a research focus. “I see an opportunity to rediscover our sense of identity in the Amazon’s conservation and its future.”

Vasconcelos learned that illegal gold mining, on the rise since the early 2000s, contributes not only to deforestation and CO₂ rise. The extractors’ reliance on mercury and cyanide, used to isolate gold from river sentiment, contaminates water and air alike. Widespread mercury poisoning, with its devastating harms to the human nervous system, has been found in corners of the rainforest where unlawful mining is prevalent.

“He became very interested in why some local governments seem to allow this and others don’t,” said Hagopian. “And it turned out that the answer was not as simple as, some municipalities have the gold and others don’t.”

Vasconcelos kicked off his research project by indexing the influence of criminal mining interests over local governments. He focused on 50 municipalities in the Brazilian state of Pará, home to more than half of all illegal gold mining in the Amazon, finding some level of capture in 13. Advising the thesis with Hagopian were Government Professor Steven Levitsky, a Latin America expert, and Rio de Janeiro native Marcia Castro, a demography professor at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In search of deeper understanding, Vasconcelos next turned to assessing a host of political variables in each municipality. “Most political scientists and economists who study illicit economic activity assume that it flourishes where states are weak,” Hagopian explained. “What’s interesting about what Eduardo found is that it’s not the weakest local governments that play host to a lot of this activity. It’s actually local governments with some capacity.

“They have enough trained bureaucrats to give legal license to mine on land reserved for environmental protection or Indigenous nations,” she continued. “They have enough resources to build new infrastructure.”

Instead, one-party rule emerged as the most predictive factor. “The specific result shows us that when there is more diversity of parties, we see a lower likelihood of gold miners running for election or funding campaigns,” Vasconcelos explained, pointing to Brazil’s diverse political landscape with more than 30 parties.

In a separate chapter, the Kirkland House resident and former World Bank intern went deep on the social impacts of this brand of corruption. He found that rates of deforestation doubled in the Amazon’s captured municipalities, while these communities saw decreased investment in education and public health.

“We also see war-level homicide rates — the highest in the country,” Vasconcelos added. “Our data show that this is not a sustainable economic activity. It doesn’t bring better quality of life for the local population.”

The bottom line, he concluded, is that local government is the first line of defense against a profoundly damaging industry. DRCLAS awarded Vasconcelos its 2025 Kenneth Maxwell Thesis Prize on Brazilian Studies this week.

“When we talk about protecting the rainforest, we don’t always think about how we can better support local governments,” said Vasconcelos, a Schwartzman Scholar who will move to Beijing this summer for a one-year, fully funded master’s program in global affairs at Tsinghua University. “I’d like to see more research looking at this intersection.”