Summary Several studies have shown that land use has a strong influence on river chemistry and its biotic components. Most of these studies focused on nitrogen in temperate American and European catchments. Much less is known about the relationship between stream conditions and land use in tropical areas of developing countries. Besides climate, there are three important differences between attributes of temperate and tropical catchments: non‐point sources are the dominant contributor of pollution in USA, whereas point source pollution is the most important in our study; use of fertilizer is much smaller in developing countries, and the type of agriculture and management practices are distinct. We test whether the chemical composition of streams and their macroinvertebrate communities can be related to land use. Accordingly, we compared the variability of chemical composition and macroinvertebrate communities in the streams of two catchments (Pisca and Cabras) belonging to the same ecoregion, but having different types of land use. The main land use in the Pisca catchment in 1993 was sugar cane (62%), followed by pasture (22%) and urban centres (10%). In contrast, the main land use in the Cabras catchment was pasture (60%), followed by annual crops (13%) and forest (10%); urban centres occupied only 2% of the catchment. In the Cabras catchment, most of the parameters correlated with a land use index (LUI) ( Fig. 2). However, only conductivity, major cations and major anions (with exception of sulfate) had a statistically significant correlation coefficient. More than 90% of the variance was explained for these parameters. DIC, NO3 and richness of invertebrates (RI) also strongly correlated with LUI (R2 = 0.75), although these correlation coefficients were not significant. Total suspended solids (TSS) had a significant correlation with LUI (R2 = 0.98), but, the correlation was inverse. In the Pisca catchment, conductivity, major cations (with exception of potassium), major anions, and DIC, DO, and DOC had a strong and statistically significant correlation with LUI. Correlation coefficients were also high for respiration rate, although the correlation was not statistically significant. 2 Relationships between variables and LUI (land use index) for the Cabras (closed circle) and Pisca (open circle) catchments. Both catchment were pooled together in this figure, however, statistical tests were performed separately for each catchment.