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The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon
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As we watched the fire spread, a small plane buzzed away over the
trees. It belonged to the miners, Cabral said; they must have been
warned that the G.E.F. was coming. He pointed to a white rectangular
antenna on a tall pole in the center of the camp and said,
"Starlink"—Elon Musk's portable satellite-communications system. One
of the men hacked at the pole with a machete until it toppled, and
Finger broke the antenna and took the modem. The G.E.F. fighters are
well trained, and equipped with satellite imaging, combat gear,
assault rifles, and night-vision goggles provided by the U.S. State
Department. Increasingly, though, their opponents have similar
resources. The day's raid had destroyed a facility that might have
employed a dozen miners. The number of people involved in illegal
mining in the Brazilian Amazon is believed to be as many as half a
million.
For four years, Lula's predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, insisted that the
crisis in the rain forest was an elaborate hoax. A far-right former
military officer who embraced Donald Trump as an ally and a role
model, Bolsonaro maintained that advocates for the environment and for
Indigenous rights were part of a communist-globalist conspiracy. He
ran for the Presidency promising to dismantle environmental
safeguards, and his supporters took him at his word. He assumed office
in January, 2019, and within months an estimated twenty thousand
_garimpeiros_ were at work in Yanomami land. Despite Yanomami leaders'
pleas for help and a Supreme Court judge's order for the miners to be
forced out, Bolsonaro did nothing.
Lula, a veteran left-wing politician who served as Brazil's President
from 2003 to 2010, took office again last year, after a perilously
close election. By then, the Yanomami were enduring a crisis, with
malaria, hunger, and infant malnutrition spreading widely; hundreds of
children had died. Outsiders committed growing numbers of rapes and
murders, including incidents in which miners on motorboats shot and
teargassed Yanomami as they sped past a riverside community.
"By the power vested in me, from this day forth you may text each
other as many times in a row as you want without worrying that you're
coming across as desperate."
Cartoon by Ali Solomon and Miriam Jayaratna
The crisis gave Lula an opportunity to present himself as a savior,
and in one of his first acts as President he flew to Boa Vista, the
capital of Roraima. He toured a clinic that treated Indigenous
patients, and in emotional remarks afterward he blamed Bolsonaro for
"the neglect and abandonment of the Yanomami." It was "more than a
humanitarian crisis," he added. "What I saw was a genocide." He vowed
to end illegal mining on Indigenous land, just as he had vowed, during
the campaign, to achieve "zero deforestation" in the rain forest by
2030. "The planet needs the Amazon alive," he said.
Lula declared a public-health emergency and ordered an ambitious
series of raids to eject the miners. After operations began, in
February, 2023, dramatic footage emerged of security forces surging in
and destroying equipment, and of miners fleeing the forest. By June,
Lula declared the Yanomami land "free of illegal mining." Soon
afterward, his government promoted new statistics showing that illegal
deforestation in the Amazon had fallen thirty-four per cent in six
months.
Last August, in the city of Belém, Lula presided over a meeting of
regional heads of state, and called on them to join him in realizing
"a new Amazonian dream"—a grand plan for conservation linked to
sustainable development. A few months later, in Dubai for the annual
climate-change conference, Lula hailed Brazil's progress in preserving
the rain forest, and celebrated its selection as the site of the 2025
summit.
But, for all Lula's talk about a green future, the large-scale
operations in Roraima lasted only a few months. The armed forces,
which had joined last year's initiative only reluctantly, ceased
coöperating. It wasn't even clear how much loyalty the new President
could expect from the military, a largely conservative body that ran
the country as a dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. After the
inauguration, Bolsonaro partisans had launched a chaotic assault on
the Presidential palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court, and some
police and members of the military had assisted the mob. Lula
subsequently pushed out the commanders of the Army and of the police
force that guards the capital. But the military is still regarded as
hostile to Lula—not to mention to the idea of Indigenous rights.
When I visited Roraima, authorities there said that _garimpeiros_ had
been returning to Yanomami territory. Some politicians were not only
tacitly accommodating the miners but in some cases coöperating with
them. For many people in Brazil, the lure of easy money far outweighed
environmental concerns. Even the judge who had tried to force
Bolsonaro to intervene in the Amazon, Luís Roberto Barroso,
acknowledged the persistence of the problem. "There is an inescapable
reality," he told me, "which is that you have people living in poverty
sitting on top of vast wealth."
Boa Vista is a low-slung city of half a million people, spread along
the banks of the Rio Branco. Although Brazil has a complex web of laws
to protect the wilderness, settler communities inevitably find ways to
profit from the minerals and the timber found in the rain forest, and
Boa Vista is booming. Newly built avenues are lined with ostentatious
villas, restaurants, and boutiques. Downtown, a children's water park
has been constructed next to an artificial beach, decorated with huge,
colorfully painted statues of anacondas, jaguars, anteaters, and
crocodiles. Near the government offices, a modernist stone sculpture
depicts a prospector panning for gold.
Local officials leave little doubt about their support for mining. In
2022, the Roraima state legislature enacted a law that prohibited
destroying equipment confiscated from illegal miners within its
jurisdiction. Outside the office of the governor, a Bolsonaro ally
named Antonio Denarium, miners and ranchers gathered to celebrate with
a barbecue and concert, under a banner that read "Garimpo Is Legal."
(Last year, after Lula took office, Brazil's Supreme Court threw out
the law.)
Cognizant of the local attitudes, the G.E.F. keeps its presence in Boa
Vista quiet. When I'd arrived, I was told to check into a hotel and
wait. Nearly a week later, I got a call telling me that an unmarked
car would take me to meet the team at one of the helicopter launchpads
that it uses in town: a walled-in grassy patch at the regional
headquarters of the federal police. Around the wall were rusting
carcasses of helicopters and airplanes confiscated from miners on
previous raids. A couple of years before, an angry group had protested
the seizures by attempting to set a government helicopter on fire.
The G.E.F. helicopters took us past the edge of Boa Vista, where vast,
treeless cattle ranches and soy farms stretch into the distance. In
thirty minutes of flying at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, we
could see the open plains start to give way to forest, until my
chopper landed at a site where the paved road turns to red-dirt track.
It was the team's refuelling point before seeking out mines in
Yanomami territory. Near a farmhouse, a shiny steel tanker was parked
by a mango tree. The truck drove several hours from Boa Vista each
morning with an armed escort.
During the raids last spring, the G.E.F. had been able to refuel in a
Yanomami community where the military maintained an outpost. But, a
few weeks before my visit, the Air Force had suddenly removed the fuel
tank, offering no explanation. The arrangement at the farm was
provisional and seemed unlikely to last. One of the agents providing
security told me that men in a pickup truck had pulled up early that
morning, taken pictures of the tanker and its guards, and then driven
away.
Within a few minutes of taking off again, we had entered Yanomami
territory: a rolling green blanket, punctuated only occasionally by
the bright-yellow flowers of an ipê tree. Deep in the forest, we set
down at a gouged mining area. In a camp under the trees, we found a
cook fire still burning. The miners clearly weren't far away.
The G.E.F. members started to burn the camp, monitoring the flames to
make sure that they didn't spread. While the men worked, Finger
quietly headed into the forest, like a hunting dog that had picked up
a scent. Fifteen minutes later, he reappeared with a woman in tow. He
explained that he'd found underwear drying on a clothesline and a
stack of warm pancakes in the mess, and he figured the camp's cook
must be nearby. He'd found her hiding in some bushes. She was in her
fifties, wearing a pink dress and carrying a bag stuffed with
belongings. She looked frightened.
Speaking in breathy bursts, she told Cabral and Finger that her name
was Margarida. She was a widow, and after her husband's death she had
struggled to pay rent and buy food. She had arrived at the mine two
days before, after a long river journey, she said, and she didn't know
anything about its operation—not even what the miners' names were.
Cabral, looking skeptical, asked what her salary was. She gave a
figure that amounted to about four hundred dollars a month. It was a
suspiciously small amount, but the cooks, invariably women, were the
worst-paid employees of the mines; younger cooks earned extra money as
sex workers or were coerced into prostitution.
No one could say precisely how many miners had made their way back
into the territory after last year's raids, or had never left, but one
government ministry recently estimated the number at about seven
thousand. Many of the people who worked the mines were impoverished
locals looking for any job they could find; others made a career of
it. At one camp, we'd come across the résumé of a thirty-seven-year-
old named José, who had been a sales assistant at an auto-parts shop
in Boa Vista, then moved to the city of Manaus to work in a shoe
store. His legal employment history ended in 2016, which presumably
was when he had turned to illegal mining. Finger drew a distinction
between people like Margarida and those like José. "These simpler
people, a hundred per cent are there for financial gains," he said.
"But many of the miners are in this for a better life style. If he can
make five thousand reais per week mining, why would he stay in the
city earning a thousand or less?"
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