In the murky and slow-moving depths of the Amazon, Brazil is laying more than just cables: it is building invisible bridges between isolation and opportunity. An ambitious state project has begun to install 1,100 kilometers of fiber optics under the waters of the largest river in the world.
There are no poles, no deforestation, just a delicate submerged network that promises to bring internet to more than 370,000 people in remote communities.
Technology is immersed where until now only digital silence reached.
A river of data: the new Amazon crossing
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
When geographer Bertha Becker wrote that the Amazon was “the most complex scenario of modernization in Brazil,” perhaps he did not imagine that this modernization would come underwater.
For decades, the Amazonian dilemma has revolved between development and preservation. The roads opened the jungle, but also the way to destruction. The dams generated energy, but also uprooting.
On the other hand, the so-called “infovia”, the new fiber optic connectivity project promises minimal intervention in nature with a maximum impact on human life.
Brazil had already tried to connect its northern region on other occasions.
During the 90s, the Connected Amazon Program proposed satellite connectivity, but the costs were astronomical and the coverage was poor.
Then came mobile networks, whose reach barely touched the urban peripheries. More recently, the Starlink satellite network, owned by entrepreneur Elon Musk, dominated the Amazon sky, but at prices that marginalized the poorest.
Faced with this scenario, the deployment of underwater fiber marks a strategic change: cutting-edge technology with a public vocation.
The Amazon, as the backbone of the green internet
“Communications can be the basis of a new territorial justice in the 21st century,” said sociologist Manuel Castells in his famous work The Information Age.
Applied to the Amazon, his thought takes on an unusual intensity. The region is home to more than 20 million inhabitants scattered in areas that are often inaccessible.
In some cases, arriving by land or air is so expensive that it becomes a barrier to access to health, education and the labor market.
In this context, underwater fiber optics becomes a kind of digital artery.
Brazil’s government, in a partnership between the Ministry of Communications, state-owned Telebras and private operators, is laying the cables from floating platforms coupled to tugboats.
The system makes it possible to avoid the deforestation necessary to erect towers and poles, a significant advantage in a territory hypersensitive to human interventions.
Every kilometre of cable also implies a political statement: technology must not be an enemy of the environment.
With an estimated useful life of 25 years, the cables will cover 13 Amazonian municipalities, including areas of the state of Pará, where the digital divide has been structural.
According to data from the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), more than 40% of rural households in that region lack regular access to the internet.
The figures are aggravated among indigenous peoples and riverside communities.
For them, the “infovia” is not only a technological innovation; it is a door to long-postponed rights.
The planned connectivity will reach 85 schools, 13 hospitals and 8 research centers.
Public squares will also have Wi-Fi points and operators will offer economic packages for the population.
This multi-pronged approach suggests an attempt at integral integration: it is not just about bringing Netflix to the jungle, but about allowing a young indigenous person to access a university scholarship, for a rural midwife to consult a medical base, or for a school to conduct hybrid classes.
When the digital divide becomes a physical border
Digital inequality in Brazil is shaped like a map: it worsens as one goes deeper into the jungle.
While in São Paulo mobile internet coverage is close to 98%, in many Amazonian towns there is no phone signal at all.
The situation not only deepens geographical isolation, but also crystallizes other inequalities: less access to social programs, less possibility of economic formalization, and an alarming disconnection with the rest of the country.
“Access to the internet has become a basic right, like water or electricity,” wrote journalist and researcher Renata Mielli in a report for the Center for Studies of Mídia Barão de Itararé.
Indeed, without connectivity it is almost impossible to enroll in educational programs, issue documents, obtain remote medical assistance or even make complaints of violence.
The Amazon, therefore, has not only been an ignored forest; it also became a digitally invisible zone.
This is where the project takes on an ethical dimension.
The so-called “infovia” tries to repair not only a technical failure, but a historical omission.
The Minister of Communications, Juscelino Rezende Filho, said that this work is “essential” to insert Amazonians into the digital world and ensure that public services really arrive.
The message is clear: without connectivity there is no full citizenship.
The intervention also responds to a geopolitical need. In recent years, Starlink’s presence has grown meteorically in the region, but with concerns about foreign control of sensitive data and a lack of domestic regulation.
The commitment to its own and terrestrial infrastructure, although underwater, represents a form of technological sovereignty in a strategic territory.
Between connected villages and networked dreams
In the community of São Félix do Xingu, in the state of Pará, the arrival of the first stretch of fiber optics has already generated visible changes.
The municipal school, previously without internet access, now broadcasts hybrid classes and carries out activities with digital platforms.
At the local hospital, doctors can check medical records online and arrange for transfers to urban centers.
The connection, although still intermittent, represents an abysmal difference from the previous isolation.
In other areas, such as Alenquer or Santarém, residents have already begun to organize online courses, start businesses via WhatsApp and access banking services that were previously only available in distant cities.
Indigenous leaders see this connectivity as a tool to strengthen their territories: from monitoring illegal deforestation to participating in government consultations without traveling kilometers down the river.
The network also allows researchers to expand their work.
At the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA), based in Manaus, scientists are already planning collaborative studies with foreign universities, thanks to the improvement in connection speed.
Until recently, sending large files involved days of waiting or the use of physical devices sent by ship.
However, challenges remain.
In several communities, the lack of constant electricity limits the full use of the internet.
In others, digital illiteracy is high, and training and accompaniment policies are required. But the first steps have been taken, and the momentum seems difficult to stop.
The challenge of avoiding a white elephant
Despite its promising reach, the Amazon infovia project faces a crucial challenge: to avoid becoming a digital white elephant, as happened with the Vive Digital high-speed network in Colombia.
That initiative, delivered to the Mexican company Azteca Comunicaciones, promised to revolutionize rural connectivity, but ended up involved in non-compliance, lack of technical sustainability and institutional abandonment.
In the Brazilian case, the durability of the impact will depend not only on the quality of the infrastructure, but also on transparent governance, continuous investment in maintenance, and pedagogical strategies to ensure effective use by communities. Without public policies that ensure the social appropriation of technology, even the most sophisticated cables can sink into oblivion.
The importance of an adequate strategy of social appropriation
Installing fiber optics on the bed of the Amazon is only half the way; the other half, just as complex and decisive, is to get communities to take ownership of that connectivity.
International experience shows that access without effective use does not transform realities.
Social ownership involves training teachers, training community leaders, translating digital interfaces into indigenous languages, and adapting content to local needs.
It is not enough for there to be an internet signal; it is necessary for people to understand how to use it to exercise rights, undertake, study or participate politically. A digital network without active and empowered users is just an empty promise.
In the Amazon, where cultural and linguistic conditions are as diverse as its biodiversity, a strategy of social appropriation must be sensitive, continuous and participatory, or the project risks replicating the vertical logics that have historically marginalized these populations.
In conclusion, the laying of fiber optics under the Amazon represents an unprecedented technical and symbolic advance in the history of Brazilian connectivity. However, the real challenge is not only in laying the cables, but in ensuring that they do not become a dead structure, as happened with the Vive Digital network in Colombia, whose deployment was ambitious, but failed due to lack of management, maintenance and state commitment. For the Amazon infovia to truly transform lives, it must be accompanied by sustained policies, community digital training, and a long-term vision that guarantees its operability and social appropriation. Without that, the risk that this infrastructure will remain as a symbol of abandonment disguised as progress remains latent.
