Inside the battle for the forest’s future — and ours — as Brazilian ranchers and farmers vow to protect their way of life at any cost CoveringClimateNow
It’s June, the start of burning season in the Amazon. Fires are beginning to rage all over the forest, the final stage of clearing land for pasture. The smoke gets so thick it’s visible from space, and hard to breathe down here on the ground. But from where I sit, in a dented pick-up headed south, I can barely see through a storm of dust.I’m on a highway called BR-163, a rutted road from hell that has been in some state of construction sincewas ruled by a military dictatorship 40 years ago.
I’m headed to the frontline of a battle over the forest’s future. It’s a lawless zone where cattle ranchers, gold miners, and timber companies are inching ever closer to one of the largest intact indigenous reserves left in the southern Amazon – a 21,000 square mile area that includes the villages of Baú and Mekragnotire, the home of the Kayapo people. I want to see if the forest can be saved, before industry kills it for good.a remote jungle outpost roughly 10 hours from the port.
, Bolsonaro tapped into a global populist wave. Like Trump, he expressed an open disdain for science, and he declared climate change a Marxist conspiracy. He promised to open the Amazon for development and vowed to eliminate environmental-impact studies on infrastructure projects bogged down in red tape. Roads that had long gone unpaved, like BR-163, would be finished. And he would not allow for “a centimeter more of indigenous land.
Tractor-trailers drive along BR-163 near Novo Progresso, 2014. The road is often choked with trucks bringing soy to port. Brazil is the largest exporter of soy and beef in the world, with 31,000 tons of beef going to the U.S. last year, mostly in the form of corned beef, jerky, and pet food, while furniture makers and car manufacturers import the leather.
And so in an ambitious plan the Brazilian government offered large plots of land to anyone who would agree to get on a plane and get dropped off in the forest. Similar to the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, the government didn’t care much that the forest was, in fact, already occupied. The results were disastrous. Dozens of tribes disappeared, and with no forest-management program in place the settlers slashed and burned their way deep into the jungle.
He arrived in Novo Progresso in 2003, and already tensions over the future of the forest were rising. That year, when federal agents came to mark the boundaries of the newly created Baú and Mekragnotire reserves, a mob of hundreds of ranchers, loggers, and miners, many of them armed, led about 1,000 citizens to shut down the highway in protest. Then, they entered the forest, vowing to hunt down the agents.
“In the rest of Brazil, a title deed proves who owns the land,” Daniel Azeredo Avelino, a former federal prosecutor in the state of Pará told, a Brazilian online magazine. “The number of people with a title is very small. From 80 to 90 percent of the properties in the region don’t have this document.”, IBAMA officials were reviewing satellite images from their office in Brasilia, Brazil’s capital. The imaging from around Novo Progresso was shocking.
IBAMA agents and the federal police began probing deeper into Castanha’s business operations, studying his taxes and financial transactions and wiretapping his phone. They allege he sat atop a sprawling criminal organization that stretched from the Amazon down to São Paulo and southern Brazil. On the morning we visit, the sun is just rising above the jungle. Several Kayopo are sitting on the porch, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the institute to open. The smell of freshly cut timber hangs in the air from a lumber yard next door.are one of the richest and most powerful of Brazil’s 240 tribes, but in the late 1970s, when the Trans-Amazonian Highway was completed, their population had dipped from 4,000 to about 1,300.
Vilela operated for years before IBAMA even detected forest loss because his crews left the canopy intact by sparing the tallest trees, shielding the cleared fields from showing up in satellite imagery. Then in April 2014, members of the Kayopo showed up in the capital in full war paint, carrying bows and arrows. They waited for the head of IBAMA to leave work and confronted him in the parking garage. Land inside their reserve was disappearing, and they needed IBAMA’s help.
A rancher who promised to talk off the record about the criminal network in Novo Progresso tells us he’ll meet us for dinner one night and never shows up. The next morning we get a cryptic text from him and then he ghosts us. “We came here because this same government, which now calls us bandits and criminals, sent us here,” he says. “We were pathfinders, and now they put us on the news as villains.” He tells me Castanha is a local hero who stood up to a tyrannical government that would fly into cleared land and destroy tractors and burn fences with no due process.
“The NGOs, and you, the media, come here and paint us as villains. This is why I won’t allow any of them to come here,” he says of the NGOs. “I’ll go to any means necessary to keep them from establishing themselves here.”An awkward, tense silence fills the room.“We will preserve our way of life.” we rise before dawn and head east, toward the Baú and Mekragnotire reserves. We are traveling with Kudjekre Kayapo, a member of the Kayopo tribe who works at the Kabu Institute.
His name is Cacique Ireo Kayapo, and he motions for me to sit down next to him. He has painted a thick strip of black paint across his eyes and down his belly, which is beaded with small drops of sweat. Another man in the tribe sits next to us, translating. Truckers line up on the BR 163, blocked by “garimpeiros” – illegal gold miners – during a protest in Para state, Brazil, on September 13th, 2019. Photo credit: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images
“It was very violent,” Timo tells me. “A great problem of the frontier is there’s no state, there’s no electricity, no water, no school.” That number should be higher. By law, slaughterhouses that operate in the state of Pará, which has over 250,000 farms, are required to track their supply chains, but only 63 meatpackers have complied, while 65 refuse. As a result, roughly 18,000 cattle a day are slaughtered in the Amazon without any environmental monitoring.
“We don’t have to create any more monitoring tools,” Timo says. “The tools are there. The laws are there. What we lack are police resources to crack down on this”By law, slaughterhouses that operate in the state of Pará are required to track their supply chains, but only 63 meatpackers have complied, while 65 refuse. As a result, roughly 18,000 cattle a day are slaughtered in the Amazon without any environmental monitoring.
It’s a Catholic holiday today and the supermarket is one of the few places in town still open. Most of the city’s businessmen have left for their ranches to barbecue and drink beer. Gabriel, my fixer, says it’s unlikely Castanha will be around. But then he talks so quickly I’m fumbling to get my tape recorder out of my pocket. He admits that he cleared forest, but questions whether it was actually illegal. He loves the forest. He points to the signage over his store, which includes a collage of pictures of rivers and crocodiles and leopards. His name, after all is Castanha, which is the Portuguese word for Brazil nut and the tallest tree in the forest.
Before I can ask him anything else, he looks at his watch and tells me he has to go. He puts his hand on my shoulder and thanks me for visiting Novo Progresso. He is not the King of Deforestation, he tells me. The media here, like in the United States, prints a lot of fake news. later, I get a text from a rancher in Novo Progresso. Farmers are conspiring on WhatsApp to set fire to the forest along BR-163.
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