Defenders of
the Rainforest

Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil’s president on January 1, 2019, vowing to expand agro-business and mining in the Amazon. His administration cut the budget for fighting forest fires by more than 30 percent. When satellite images showing red stains spreading through the Amazon made headlines around the world, he blamed non-governmental organizations for setting the fires to embarrass him. Only after Brazilian exporters complained that the government’s response to the fires was damaging the country’s image did president Bolsonaro deploy the armed forces to put them out.

But he has done very little to dismantle the criminal networks behind those fires and behind the violence against forest defenders.

More than 300 people have died in conflicts over the use of land and resources in Amazonian states during the last decade, according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT, in Portuguese), a Catholic Church-affiliated NGO with offices in every Brazilian state. The commission is the only organization in Brazil that collects such data. Neither federal nor state authorities even keep a tally. Many of the victims were killed by people involved in illegal deforestation, the CPT believes.

I interviewed more than 170 people to learn the stories behind these numbers. Scores of them—relatives of the victims, witnesses, activists, and public officials—are themselves under threat from criminals who benefit from deforestation.

One of them is Osvalinda Pereira, a 50-year-old small farmer who breaks into a smile as she describes the pineapples, avocados, and bananas she and her husband, Daniel Pereira, 47, used to grow in their plot in the Areia land-reform settlement in Pará. The smile fades quickly when she recalls how they had to flee.

Osvalinda did not set out to be a forest defender. In 2010, she founded a women’s association and secured support from the Amazonian Environmental Research Institute (IPAM, in Portuguese), a Brazilian NGO, to help her and her neighbors develop sustainable organic agricultural practices. But the loggers who used the dirt roads in the settlement to access protected forests perceived even that as a threat.

Those loggers had been progressively taking over plots reserved for poor families in Areia, according to a 2013 internal report by INCRA, the federal agency in charge of the settlement. And yet, INCRA has done nothing to retake the land. The Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian environmental NGO, estimates that loggers operating in Areia illegally extracted 23,000 cubic meters of timber, worth 208 million reais (US$63 million at the time), from the Riozinho do Anfrísio Reserve just in 2017.

The criminal network operating in Areia is an example of what environmental enforcement officials call “ipê mafias,” referring to the ipê tree, whose wood is among the most valuable. Those networks coordinate large-scale extraction, processing, and sale of timber, illegal land grabbing and, in some cases, illegal mining.

The Areia criminal network deploys armed men to protect their activities and intimidate and kill those who obstruct them, residents told me. “They have organized armed groups. It’s a militia inside [the settlement],” Daniel Pereira said.

Since that first project with IPAM, loggers started threatening the couple and, eventually, the Pereiras sought help from the authorities and denounced the illegal logging. “I told the loggers that if I was killed, everyone would know it was them, because I had reported their names,” Osvalinda told me. The couple believes speaking out publicly offers them some protection and that’s why they want their real names used.

But the publicity has not stopped the threats.

In 2018, someone dug simulated graves, with mounds of soil and crosses on top, in their yard. “I felt Daniel and I were already buried there,” said Osvalinda Pereira. And so they fled their home and the state. They now long to go back to their avocados and pineapples.

As deforestation has picked up in the Amazon since 2012, Brazil has reduced the budget and staff of its federal environmental agencies. In 2018, IBAMA had only nine field inspectors to monitor environmental crime of all kinds—not only deforestation—for the entire Maranhão, a state larger than Italy, the regional director told me.

Of the more than 300 killings in Amazonian states documented by the Pastoral Land Commission during the last decade, only 14 resulted in trial. Violence continues “because nobody is punished,” said Deborah Duprat, director of the human rights unit at the Attorney General’s Office.

I asked police and prosecutors across the region why killers are so rarely held accountable. They often answered that the crimes occur in remote locations. However, I found serious flaws in the investigations of killings that occurred in urban centers. Eusebio Ka’apor, an Indigenous leader who contributed to the creation of the Ka’apor forest guardians, died in a hospital in a town with a police station after being shot in 2015, and yet, no autopsy was performed. And Davi Mulato Gavião was killed in a town plaza less than a kilometer from the police station in 2018, and yet, it took investigators more than 30 hours to visit the crime scene, police themselves told me.

I also found that when the killing attracts national media attention, police are much more likely to conduct investigations that lead to criminal charges, even in remote locations. That shows that it can be done.

Bolsonaro’s Anti-Environmental Policies

Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil’s president on a platform of “law and order.” Yet his vision of “law and order” appears not to apply to the criminal networks that are responsible for much of the destruction of the Amazon and the threats and violence against forest defenders. Instead, Bolsonaro has called on environmental agents to stop destroying loggers’ equipment, a legal power than is key to effectively fight illegal logging and preserve the agents’ safety.

He has lambasted environmental agencies –which he calls “industries of fines”—, civil society organizations that defend environmental and Indigenous rights, and European countries, which he accuses of promoting preservation of the Amazon to exploit its riches for themselves in the future. “Brazil is like a virgin that every pervert from the outside lusts for,” Bolsonaro said.

Loggers seem to have heard his message loud and clear. In July 2019, arsonists burned two bridges and a fuel truck delivering gas for anti-logging operations in two states. Federal and state prosecutors told me they have received increasing reports of threats against forest defenders. Loggers “believe that they will be able to do whatever they want” with Bolsonaro in power, a high-level IBAMA official who requested anonymity told me. “They believe that IBAMA won’t be able to impose fines on them or destroy their equipment.”

In fact, the number of deforestation-related fines issued by IBAMA in Amazonian states fell by 42 percent during President Bolsonaro’s first eight months in office, compared to the same period in 2018.

When INPE, the federal space research agency that publishes Brazil’s official deforestation data, warned in July of the exploding destruction of the Amazon region, President Bolsonaro accused it of lying and fired its director.

Footage by Human Rights Watch, additional footage by Getty Images.

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