Living at the border between cerrado and the Amazon forest, in the municipality of Brasnorte (586 kilometres Northwest of Cuiabá), the Manokis almost disappeared after first coming in contact with whites. But their numbers have begun growing again over the last few decades and while they fight to recover their original territory, they have become one of the indigenous people who have resorted to soybean production for income.

Growing soybeans and other large mechanized crops has become the main proposition for indigenous peoples under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who has historically opposed land demarcation and has even tried to revoke some indigenous land rights, which cover about 13% of Brazil’s territory.

Bolsonaro’s policy has raised fears that opening indigenous territories to large scale crop cultivation will increase deforestation. Indigenous territories have only a 2% deforestation rate. They are better preserved than all categories of protected areas, including national parks.

Fierce opponents of Bolsonaro’s, the Manokis claim that it is possible to reconcile mechanized agriculture with conservation.

The Manokis’  incursion into the production of Brazil’s major agricultural commodity began in 2004, after a decision taken jointly with the Parecis, a neighbouring indigenous people. That year the Manokis cut down 1,000 hectares of cerrado, equivalent to 2.2% of their territory. Now, 17 years later, the expanse of land they cultivate has not changed. It is the opposite of what happens on neighbouring fazendas (large plantations), where practically no native vegetation remains.

For years the Manoki, Parecis and Nambikwara flouted the law to grow soybeans. In addition to not having environmental licensing, the land was leased to fazendeiros (large plantation owners), and genetically modified crops were grown. Both of these practices are forbidden by legislation on indigenous lands.

This continued until December 2019, when the Coopihanama cooperative, involving the three peoples, and the Coopermatsene, belonging only to the Parecis, signed a TAC (Adjustment of Conduct Agreement) with the MPF (Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office) to regulate mechanized farming in their territories.

Among other things, the cooperatives undertook not to lease out their lands nor plant genetically modified crops and to seek funding from official institutions. Indigenous affairs agency Funai and environmental regulator Ibama subscribed to the agreement.

“It is a project we want to take to the entire country, so that this way they (the indigenous peoples) can gain income and greater dignity,” said the president of Funai, Federal Police chief and former advisor to the landowners’ caucus in Congress Marcelo Xavier. His speech can be found in a Funai institutional video filmed in April inside a rice harvester, alongside a Bakairi indigenous person, in Mato Grosso state.

Unlike their Parecis neighbours, whose leaders often appear in public beside Bolsonaro in public and even live-streamed Facebook lives, the Manoki do not see the government as an ally. Far from it: in August they sent representatives to Brasília to protest against a court ruling in the government’s favour. participate in the camp of protesters following the judgement of the “marco temporal” (“time frame”) in the STF (the high court).

From the Manoki’s perspective, the regularisation of mechanized farming came about as the result of a lengthy process of negotiation started by the region’s indigenous peoples under the Coopihanama cooperative.

“In my view, this is a crazy government that knows nothing about Indians’ life. On the one hand, it’s in favour of agriculture. But I’m not taken in by his words, no way,” says the chief of the Manoki, Manoel Kanunxi, 71. “I haven’t fought the president expecting him to give me support. I haven’t fought any candidate, deputy, senator, mayor or councilman.”

The Manoki say they don’t want to expand the deforested area. Neither do they engage in the white man’s agribusiness, they say. For them, mechanized farming, which this year has included off-season crops of corn, is the only way they have found to fund their medical expenses, transport and other needs created by contact with kewa [white people].

Their mechanized farming employs only four Manoki on a permanent basis, although this number goes up at harvest time. They learned to operate the machines working on neighbouring fazendas or taking courses. On the days when Climate Home News was at the site, they were spreading agricultural lime to balance the soil. The only white man present was a hired technician. For the Manoki, hiring a kewa employee is something to be proud of.

Last year their mechanized farming yielded R$ 700,000 ($12,800), which would be shared among the Manoki (a population estimated at nearly 500 individuals). The amounts allotted, approved in an assembly, were decided based on a calculation that includes each family unit and a per capita sum.

“I don’t eat soybeans. But we are putting these soybeans on the market so as to survive this way, so we can buy medicines and pay for private medical tests. We’ve found out that you have to pay for everything you use,” says Kanunxi.

The chief mentions his own wife’s treatment, which had to paid for with the income from soybeans – she needed a pacemaker in her heart. “It’s tough, but it has been worth it. If it weren’t for this, my wife would have died.”

The main reason the Manoki are unhappy with Bolsonaro is the president’s refusal to demarcate Indian lands. This is the greatest priority for their people, who have been fighting for three decades to expand their territory by 206,000 hectares of forested area that is part of the Manoki’s traditional habitat.

The official decisions so far have favoured their claim, but it is a lengthy process. In 2009 the Justice Ministry published an ordinance ratifying the expansion, but its official recognition was never signed by the president, and landowners are currently contesting the expansion in federal courts.

On the days when Climate Home was in the indigenous land, the Manoki were following with apprehension the judgment in the “marco temporal” case in Brazil’s supreme court. Supported by Bolsonaro and the landowners’ caucus, the so-called “time frame” thesis is that only lands that were occupied by indigenous peoples in 1988, when the present Constitution went into effect, should be demarcated.

The indigenous peoples’ territorial claims are based on extensive historic documentation, including reports presented by Marshal Rondon (1865-1958), who collected information and documented the massacre perpetrated by rubber tappers against the Manoki in 1900, marking the beginning of their contact with whites.

“Can any Brazilian soul not tremble as one with ours on learning that the entire population of men, women and children was burned to death inside their huts set on fire?”, the military officer wrote in 1922, a few years after he led an expedition through the Amazon with US president Theodore Roosevelt

In the mid-fifties, after suffering from outbreaks of Korean flu, measles and typhus, besides attacks from neighbouring peoples – themselves pressured by the arrival of the rubber tappers – most of the Manoki, including Kanunxi, allowed themselves to be convinced by the Jesuits to leave their lands. They went to live in the Anchieta mission, beside the majestic Utiariti waterfall, in the land of the Parecis.

On the one hand, the Manoki were safe from their enemies and received medical attention. But the strict school system, which jumbled members of different peoples together and kept boys and girls apart, made the Portuguese language compulsory. This is why only the elders speak Manoki today.

In 1968 the Manoki moved to the Irantxe Indigenous Land, an area of 45,500 hectares demarcated that year. At the time their numbers were reduced to around 50 individuals.

This area lies on the left bank of the Cravari River, where the vegetation is mainly cerrado, but their traditional territory is on the right bank, covered in forest. This was not a problem to begin with, as they wandered all over the region.

But from 1969 three fazendas sprung up with funds subsidized by Sudam (Superintendence for the Development of the Amazon Region). According to the Brasnorte council, the region began to be settled on a large scale from 1978 onwards, with the arrival of families coming from the west of Paraná.

In a few short years, the Manoki found themselves hemmed in by soybean plantations and pasturelands. Of the territory they claim as their own, 40,700 hectares of forest have already been destroyed. One of the landowners cut down the forest right to the banks of the Cravari, close to two waterfalls that are sacred to the Manoki. He even built a small hydroelectrical plant on the site, without an environmental license. The plant was dismantled after pressure from the Indians.

Should the supreme court approve the “marco temporal”, the Manoki would lose the right to retake their traditional land. The judgment on the case has been halted indefinitely after a request for inspection made by chief justice Alexandre de Moraes.

“A people that doesn’t have a demarcated territory can’t live as a people. The struggle began with our grandparents, our great-grandparents. The ‘marco temporal’ is the destruction of the indigenous peoples. The government says we have to integrate with society. But we don’t need to integrate – we need to interact. If you integrate, you stop being who you are to live in a different way. You forget your language, your roots and your territory,” says schoolteacher Edivaldo Mampuche Manoki, 34.

Another problem for the Manoki was the construction of the Bocaiúva Small Hydroelectric Plant, in operation since 2010. Because of the dam, fish species such as pacu and matrinxã, which were part of the Manoki’s food supply, have disappeared from the Cravari.

“It has had a tremendous and irreversible impact,” says schoolteacher Claudionor Iranxe. “Of course there was compensation, but not enough to offset what it has done to our people’s traditional food self-sufficiency.”

Questioned about the impact, the company that controls the plant, Sileia Participações, said: “There is no technical basis to establish this cause and effect relationship, in other words, to say that the construction of the project has been the cause of the disappearance of species of the icthyofauna.”

The environmental degradation surrounding the plant forces the Manoki to travel tens of kilometres to hunt and fish, activities related to preparations for their traditional feasts. In many cases the landowners don’t allow them to enter these areas.

In their present territory, besides soybeans, the Manoki sow their traditional crops such as yams, bananas and potatoes, as well as having fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Almost all the preparation of the land in these areas is done by hand. They are also starting to produce honey and farm fish.

Many families produce handicrafts. A Manoki cotton hammock can take up to three months to make. And some of them work for the public sector in the education and health areas.

All the villages except one are located far away from the soybean plantation. Their houses, made of wood or cement, are simple and similar in style but have running water, electricity and connection to the internet.

“As far as I am concerned, I want to forget this crop [soybeans]. It is not going to feed our people. It will help occasionally when needed. But we can’t live off this crop,” says the president of the Watoholi Association, Paulo Sérgio Kapynxi, 52.

“What we need to do is grow things without poison, have our livestock, make manioc meal. When we have to pay for surgery or buy an expensive medication, then we’ll remember the plantation. But in the meantime, let’s forget it”.

Translated from Portuguese by Clara Allain

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On 31 August 2018, then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro gave the sign. “Here in Rondônia we have 53 conservation areas and 25 indigenous territories. It’s crazy what is done in Brazil under the banner of the environment,” he said at a press conference in Porto Velho. “This has blocked the progress of those who want to invest in agribusiness and even in family farming. We’re going to find a way to turn this around.”

Encouraged by this and other Bolsonaro announcements, the invasions of protected areas began even before the results of the presidential election were known. Five days before the second round of the election, hundreds of families entered the national forest of Bom Futuro, in the Porto Velho municipality. The following January, with the new president already in place in Brasília, scores of men took over part of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous territory, in the municipality of Jorge Teixeira, Rondônia.

This movement has gained momentum over recent weeks. Another five state conservation units in Rondônia have been invaded: Guajará-Mirim Park, ecological station Samuel and the extractive reserves Rio Preto Jacundá, Aquariquara and Ipê.

Of these five areas, only Ipê has been vacated, after a court decision taken by request of the Rondônia state prosecutor’s office and the federal public prosecutor’s office in Rondônia, who are taking action to revert the other invasions.

Last week invaders camped outside the state government house in Porto Velho to demand the regularisation of plots of land in Guajará-Mirim park and its buffer zone. Monitoring provided by the national institute for space research (INPE) has shown 979 hectares of land have been illegally deforested over the last 12 months, this in an area in which the forest was practically intact.

In the Jacundá national forest, there is a threat posed by a landless encampment set up in August on one of the access roads, but no invasion has occurred as yet.

While invasions of indigenous lands and conservation areas in the Amazon region are taking place, the occupations of large agricultural estates have come to an end. There has not been a single case of this kind in Rondônia for at least four years, according to Brazil’s national institute for colonization and agrarian reform (INCRA). Under Bolsonaro, there were only five cases in 2019 and none this year.

The shift in focus also reflects a change in the main actors. In the place of social movements, such as the landless rural workers’ movement (MST) that campaigns against the invasion of conservation areas and indigenous lands, unknown and recently created associations have arrived. These associations, advised by lawyers and georeferencing firms, with the involvement of cattle ranchers in the region, supporters of Bolsonaro, enjoy the support of local right-wing politicians. 

They try to distance themselves from the traditional image of the landless rural workers, with their opposition to ranchers and by creating the image of “turmoil”. One of the supporters of these movements in Rondônia is federal deputy Coronel Chrisóstomo, an army reserve officer.

A religious realignment is also taking place. The Catholic Church, which has close ties to MST and has produced historic defenders of land reform in the Amazon region, such as bishop Pedro Casaldáliga and sister Dorothy Stang, has lost ground. Meanwhile, evangelical churches are often to be found in the newly invaded areas, despite the absence of a more active and formal involvement.

Besides Bolsonaro’s rhetoric against protected areas and the MST, another great incentive for the invasion of protected areas in Rondônia is the recent success of these efforts. In 2010, during the Lula administration, national forest Bom Futuro saw its area reduced by two thirds so as to legalise invasions that had taken place mainly in the government of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

At the state level, the governor of Rondônia, military police colonel Marcos Rocha, presented a bill to the state assembly this year that aims to legalise the invasions of Jaci-Paraná, which would affect 146,000 hectares of land. Around 55% of the conservation unit has already been stripped of forest, according to INPE.

Built on land cleared by an older invasion, the Bom Futuro camp was taken down on 10 September 2019, in a military police operation, after a court order obtained by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), the administrative arm of the ministry of environment. Around 200 families were removed.

Some of the displaced families set up camp around an abandoned schoolhouse in the neighbouring village of Rio Pardo, in the hope of being allowed to settle. When Folha was there, in August, there were around 60 families.

Their living conditions are precarious. There are two toilets in the camp, which had been without water for five days. The children, who are not in school at the moment due to the Covid-19 outbreak, used to spend five hours on a bus to travel to and from school. 

The spokesman for the group is José Roberto de Jesus, 47, native of Bahia. He is one of the people who believed that the forest Bom Futuro would be given to landless workers – a term he avoids, using “farmers” instead. His family migrated to Rondônia in 1984, but none of them managed to acquire a piece of their own land. 

Jesus, who is a father of five, works in the cacao industry, the family’s original occupation in the region of Ariquemes. He has no formal schooling, but has worked as a miner, blacksmith and charcoal worker. He says the advance of soya plantations, cattle raising and fish farming has reduced the availability of jobs, since these are activities that provide little employment.

He was not one of the leaders of the invasion, who disappeared after the complaint lodged by the public prosecutor’s office. After the eviction, his calm and articulate speech helped him gain ascendancy in the group, where he was nicknamed Pastor.

Repeating the story told by others who participated in the invasion, Jesus says he was encouraged to enter Bom Futuro because of the support given by ranchers. “It has never been my habit to invade something that belongs to others, but a unique opportunity arose and took me to that land. The ranchers put us there, as they had been fighting with the government, who took their lands and turned them into a reserve. They preferred to lose their lands to landless workers than to the government.”

Questioned about the risk of the ranchers taking the lands back if they were regularised, he responds: “We had to pay a price. We had to risk it.”

“I am an evangelical. God doesn’t allow us to invade anything that belongs to someone else, but what if you’re on land belonging to the Union? Who is the Union? The Union is us – we are workers. We were living on what was rightly ours, by law. We hadn’t invaded anything belonging to anyone else.”

Jesus says he voted for Bolsonaro and that the conversion of the Flona into a settlement depends only on the government. “I don’t understand this business of the fauna [of] Bom Futuro, but we understand that it is good land. We trust in the government, and in his campaign he [Bolsonaro] said there were many reserves in Rondônia, but they were degraded.”

A few weeks after the interview, Bom Futuro was invaded once more, this time by a different group. The Rondônia military police have yet to launch another repossession operation. From the start of this year to August, over 575 hectares have been deforested, according to satellite monitoring done by the MapBiomas Alerta.

“Many families were looking for a camp to stay at, in the hope of later obtaining a plot of land through the land reform process. Today this perspective is no longer there,” says the coordinator of the NGO Land of Rights, Darci Frigo, former president of the national council for human rights.

“They will settle on the margins or in places where there are indigenous people, quilombolas [members of quilombos, settlements formed centuries ago by escaped slaves], and areas of permanent protection. The tendency is to generalise invasions. It’s not that the poor are enemies of the environment. It’s that the rich, by keeping the poor living in poverty, end up creating the conditions that lead to environmental degradation. Besides the land grabbers, you have poor people who were waiting for land reform.”

About Bolsonaro, he says this: “His rhetoric attacks indigenous people, quilombolas and landless workers. It demoralises these people in the eyes of public opinion and simultaneously signals an order to support the invasions of public lands.”

According to geographer Ricardo Gilson da Costa Silva, of the federal university of Rondônia, Rondônia is undergoing a process of “Mato Grosso-ization” with the advance of soya plantations, that suffocate small farms and put pressure on the large cattle raising operations to seek new areas. The result is further deforestation in the north of the state and the neighbouring south of the state of Amazonas, that is undergoing a process of “Rondônia-ization”.

“This means deforestation,” Silva says.

[IG: “Mato Grosso-ization”: I’m not quite sure of the exact meaning and context of this] 

He describes the recent invasions as “agro criminality.”

“It’s not a social movement. These are economic and political movements sponsored by cattle ranchers, businessmen and local politicians. They sponsor invasions of protected areas, taking along landless workers in need of land, so as to create a situation which cannot be reversed. That is what is happening in Jaci-Paraná, where the rubber tappers have been evicted and there are even airstrips now,” he said. 

“It is a political and territorial project of converting environmentally protected areas into pasture land, to later turn them over to the land market and leave them for cattle raising and grain farming. It is something that has been thought out,” he says.

In Rondônia, Bolsonaro won the second round of the election with 72% of the votes, the third largest percentage in the country, only behind the states of Acre and Santa Catarina. State governor Marcos Rocha, an ally of the federal government, did not respond to comment requests. ​

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For the region’s inhabitants, the town is the heart of a municipality approximately the size of England, inhabited by 23 indigenous peoples.

The world’s largest deposit of niobium can be found a few dozen kilometres from the city – a mineral that has become an obsession of President Jair Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far right.

There are 2.9 billion tonnes of untouched niobium underground. Above them, mountains, rocky formations of varied shapes, orchids and many-hued lakes make up one of the most unique areas in the Amazonian region, far from the endless green plain usually associated with the rainforest.

Before the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic, this reporter and photographer visited the area, known as Seis Lagos (Six Lakes), guided by inhabitants of the Balaio TI (Indigenous Territory). The communities living in the TI are discussing where their region is better suited to tourism or mining, but their greatest concern is their almost total isolation due to the state of disrepair of the road leading to it, the BR-307.

“Some people would like to extract the minerals, but it’s actually very complex to work that. Others see the potential of ethno and environmental tourism”, says Indigenous health worker André Veloso, 32, who guided Folha’s reporters, referring to the views of the 350 inhabitants of the territory, belonging to several different peoples.

Again, maps can be misleading. The distance from São Gabriel to the Ya-Mirim community, gateway to Seis Lagos, is a mere 85 km by the BR-307, crossing the line of the Equator. But the federal highway is actually a muddy track that can only be traversed by Toyota Bandeirante four-by-fours. It took us four and a half hours to cover the distance, moving at 19 kph. Cost of the return journey: R$2,000.

Having arrived at the community and spent the night there, we travelled upstream for two hours on the river of the same name. Then came the most exhausting part of the trip: four hours hiking up a mountain.  Along the way, the trees decrease in height as the terrain rises and the ground grows more rocky. Along the way we see the first lake, with green water, at the bottom of a valley.

We camped out for a night beside the Dragão (Dragon) Lake, surrounded by sharp earth-coloured rocks and a forest of medium height trees and bushes, some of them flowering. Mists are common in the area, and when they arrive, they cover everything in a split second.

Legislation and market for niobium

There are two almost insurmountable obstacles to mining niobium in Seis Lagos. Present legislation precludes mining in Seis Lagos. The site is included in three overlapping protected areas: besides the Balaio TI, it is part of Serra da Neblina National Park and Morro dos Seis Lagos Biological Reserve, belonging to the Amazonas state government. Mining activity is not allowed in any of these places.

Another obstacle to mining the Amazonian niobium is the lack of demand. Every projection drawn up shows the niobium deposits being mined today have enough capacity to supply the world market for many decades to come.

Brazil is already the main worldwide producer of niobium, with 88% of global production, according to the US Geological Survey. Most of the metal comes from CBMM (Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração), controlled by the partner family of Itaú Unibanco. Situated in Araxá (Minas Gerais state), the company estimates its deposits can produce enough niobium for at least another two centuries.

“Mining companies have no interest in Morro dos Seis Lagos,” says geologist Tadeu Veiga, at present a voluntary professor at UnB (University of Brasília). He travelled the region in 1997 as a representative of a mining company. At the time, CRPM (the Brazilian Geological Service) intended to bid for the mining rights in Morro dos Seis Lagos, but the plans never went ahead.

Despite the lack of a market for any increased production, Bolsonaro often uses niobium to justify starting mining operations in Indigenous lands. The activity is allowed by the Constitution, as long as it is regulated and follows prior consultation with the peoples involved.

In 2016, while preparing for the presidential campaign, Bolsonaro produced a video about niobium, filmed in Araxá. Holding up a piece of the metal, he stated: “This can give us economic independence.” In another part of his statement he mentioned the demarcation of Indigenous lands as a barrier to mining.

The most recent statement was made in June 2019. From Japan, where he was attending the G20 meeting, Bolsonaro, in a Facebook livestream, showed some costume jewellery made of niobium. He said the chain was worth R$4,000, more than if it had been made of gold.

The information is wrong. One gram of gold was worth R$293 at the end of May 2020 –more than the cost of one kilo of ferroniobium, around R$215, CBMM’s most expensive product.

The false idea that niobium could be a magic bullet that would solve the problems of Brazil’s economy comes from the ultranationalist leader Enéas Carneiro, whose ideas influenced Bolsonaro’s thinking. “Only niobium would allow us to have our own currency, backed by it,” he said in an interview in 2006, a year before his death.

In February Bolsonaro sent to Congress a bill opening up Indigenous lands to mining. Criticized by most of the Indigenous movement, the bill says the Indigenous peoples affected would have the power to veto garimpos (artisanal mining projects), but not large mining company projects.

Bolsonaro argued at the time, in an attempt to justify the bill, that “Indigenous people have a heart, they have feelings, they have a soul, they have needs and desires and are as Brazilian as we are.”

Combined with Bolsonaro’s instructions to put a brake on the actions of Ibama (the state environmental agency), the promise of legalizing mining activity has stimulated an invasion of garimpeiros (artisanal miners). In April, two inspecting coordinators of the agency were dismissed as a reprisal for the closure of garimpos in Indigenous lands located in the Middle Xingu area, in Pará state.

Also boosted by the rise in gold prices, illegal garimpos have been on the increase in the Indigenous Territories of  Raposa/Serra do Sol (Roraima state), Yanomami (Roraina and Amazonas), and Munduruku (Pará state), among others.

There are no garimpos in TI Balaio, but the area is on the route followed by garimpeiros on the way to illegal gold mines in the Yanomami TI and in Venezuela. They count on the tacit cooperation of the Army checkpoint on the road, which turns a blind eye to them.

When Folha’s reporters passed through, the soldiers appeared to be concerned only with identifying possible foreign nationals. After answering a few questions to confirm our nationality, we were not even required to show our ID. In the Ya-Mirim community, at least three garimpeiros were waiting for transportation.

Area is hard to reach

The poor condition of the road leading to the area causes enormous difficulties for the Indigenous people of TI Balaio and also the Yanomamis of the Maturacá community, with around 2,100 inhabitants. To reach their homes, they still need to travel for about a day on the Ya-Mirim river, that crosses the community, on canoes powered by the cheapest outboard engine.

The Indigenous people go to São Gabriel da Cachoeira frequently to receive their Bolsa Família and other benefits. Quite often they spend all the benefit money on transport.

Due to the high cost, several families often share the rental of the Toyota. The open back part of the pickup is shared by many people, including children and seniors. Mechanical problems and breakdowns in the mud are the rule rather than the exception, and travellers often have to spend the night on the road until they can be rescued by another Toyota driver.

“It’s a sad business. People here face great hardships,” says Tiago Fernandes Sampaio, 49, president of the TI Balaio association and a member of the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party). “It used to be that the trip took two hours. Not now, though. Sometimes you leave before dawn and arrive at dawn of the next day. The Toyota auto parts break down midway. If you are taking people who are gravely ill to get help, they sometimes die on the road.”

Besides the locals and garimpeiros, this route is also followed by tourists who want to climb Pico da Neblina, the highest peak of Brazil, accessible via Maturacá. The mountain is located within the Pico da Neblina National Park and also within the Yanomami territory. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the trip to São Gabriel was made by air from Manaus. There used to be three commercial flights a week, but they have been suspended due to the pandemic.

Authorized by Funai (the governmental agency for Indigenous peoples) and ICMBio (administrative arm of the Ministry of the Environment), the visitation project was seen as a source of income for the Yanomami of Maturacá and was intended to start in March, but the Covid-19 pandemic has postponed it indefinitely.

The experience of Yanomamis receiving visitors has been closely monitored in the TI Balaio. “The most feasible option for us right now would be tourism,” says chief Veloso, of the Desana people, comparing it to mining. “We have many beautiful spots, the community, waterfalls, small rivers which allow for bathing. All that is needed is some structure and organization.”

“Adding ecotourism to the ethnic experience of spending time with Indigenous peoples, who would be visitors’ hosts, would add a special flavour to this destination,” says tourism entrepreneur Kleber Bechara, former head of the Seis Lagos Rebio (Biological Reserve).

He believes there is potential for expedition tourism. “This is a remote area, difficult to access. With the proper infrastructure it could become an added attraction for a specific niche of the public that is interested in having experiences of this kind, with safety.”

The Army’s Centre for Social Communications reported by e-mail they are carrying out repairs and maintenance by means of two operations, at a cost of R$19,2 million, to ensure the road is usable up to TI Balaio. The work is forecast to be completed by November this year.

Regarding the policy of allowing garimpeiros to pass through the checkpoint, the answer was “there is no kind of checkpoint maintained by the Brazilian Army on the aforementioned BR (highway).”

Debating mining

With or without niobium extraction, mining has been one of the issues most discussed among the Indigenous peoples since the 1970s, at least, when the region was invaded by garimpeiros and mining concerns.

To expel them, the Indigenous people organized themselves in Foirn (Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro), that was created in 1987 and lobbied for the demarcation of Indigenous lands. Today the organization brings together 90 associations representing 700 communities and around 50 thousand people divided between 23 Indigenous peoples.

“They invaded our territory, and we had no security. Indigenous people and garimpeiros were slaughtered,” says the head of Foirn, Adão Henrique, of the Baré people. “Thanks to the strength of the movement and to Funai, they retreated.”

Contrary to Bolsonaro’s suggestion, the federal government has never got in touch with Foirn to discuss mining, says Henrique. According to him, the organization is open to discussing the question.

“We want development, but with participative discussion. It has to be done step by step, following legislation, both international and Brazilian,” he says. “Our movement will continue to strongly oppose the proposals of the present government. We don’t want the Rio Negro Indigenous peoples be harmed or deluded with projects destined to fail.”

Politically distant from Foirn, the mayor of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, Clóvis Saldanha (PT), known as Tarubão, of the Tariano people, was elected on the promise of regulating Indigenous garimpos –he has worked on garimpos himself. When he became mayor, in 2018, Saldanha created the Responsible Smallhold Mining Department, with the aim of promoting mining without the involvement of large companies.

One of the department’s advisors is Cisneia Menezes Basilio, of the Desana people. She graduated from Ufam (Federal University of Amazonas) and is the first indigenous geologist in the country.

Basilio says there is great geological diversity in this region, but it has been little studied so far. She mentions deposits of tantalite (used in the tech industry) and gold, as well quartz and gemstones such as amethyst, quartz, and aquamarine beryl. Like other specialists, she doesn’t believe it is feasible to mine niobium in Seis Lagos.

In the mayor’s office, the geologist says the aim is to stimulate the incipient production of biojewellery, training craftspeople and taking information about mineral exploration and legislation to the communities.

“When the communities heard about the existence of the department and that it had a geologist, they started coming to us with their samples to try and identify them, wanting to know about prices and imagining that those little quartz, amethyst or tantalum stones would be able to change their lives,” she said in an interview in her office, where she keeps several of these samples.

“What the people of São Gabriel need isn’t liberation or mining, but information. What is being discussed in Congress are large-scale mining operations, and our people at the grassroots often imagine this is something that will give them work and will benefit them directly. We know that is not true,” she says.

“We don’t lie to them, on the contrary. Our department’s role is to inform the people of their rights enshrined in the 1988 Constitution and research possible activities in which Indigenous people can be the main actors and can enjoy the fruits of their natural resources.”

This reporting is part of The Amazon under Bolsonaro, a collaboration between Folha De S.Paolo and Climate Home News. All photos: Lalo de Almeida/FolhapressSilva. Translated from the Portuguese by Clara Allain

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In a statement published on Sunday, the ministry said it had changed its mind about cancelling the event after talks with the mayor of Salvador Antonio Carlos Magalhães Neto.

Neto is also the president of DEM, a right-wing party aligned with the government which controls important ministries, such as agriculture, and the presidency of the congress’ lower chamber.

Bolsonaro’s plan to unlock the Amazon: split its indigenous peoples

Last week, the minister of environment Ricardo Salles said the climate week event would be cancelled, complaining that attendees would waste the time and resources on tourism. The mayor used social media to criticise the decision and offered to host the summit, which will gather diplomats from across the continent, without federal support.

“As a mayor, I’m very happy to help bring another big event to our city. Salvador is ready to welcome UN officials, researchers and other participants”, tweeted Magalhães Neto.

The Salles’ ministry also said it would participate, together with the ministry of foreign affairs, in all events leading up to the UN’s COP26 climate meeting, which will be held in Chile later this year after Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro withdrew its offer to host it.

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Initially set to take place from 19 to 23 August in Salvador, the event is part of a series of regional summits to encourage dialogue between governments and civil society, in support of national climate pledges.

The reversal comes months after Brazil backed out from presiding over the Cop25 UN climate summit, prompting a frenzied search for alternative venues. Chile stepped in with less than a year to prepare.

“We do not accept hosting the event because it is an action in the run-up to Cop25,”  Brazil’s environment minister Ricardo Salles told national daily O Globo. “It does not make sense to host an event from the climate conference, if we are not going to hold the conference.”

In a note to participants, shared with Climate Home News, UN Climate Change said “regrets” the government’s decision and it was seeking other options in the region, but would make no official comment until it received notification in writing. A spokesperson for the UN body declined to comment to Climate Home News.

According to Salvador City Hall, the event had been confirmed last year under Michel Temer’s interim government. André Fraga, the official charged with UN liaison, was informed of the cancellation on Friday night, in a phone call from the federal environment ministry.

“I have been informed that Minister Ricardo Salles was not comfortable with holding the event in Brazil,” Fraga told O Globo. “He claimed what all of this government claim: that the event only serves as a platform for NGOs, that it is useless and that the environment ministry’s focus is the urban agenda, which has nothing to do with climate change.”

The environment minister denied having a problem with campaign groups, saying: “It has nothing to do with the participation or not of NGOs, it has to do with our main agenda which, as I said, is an urban environmental agenda. We do not support a meeting organized before our administration, with a different agenda from the one we prefer, which is the issue of the urban environmental agenda and sanitation, dumps.”

Podcast: Reporting from the Amazon under Bolsonaro

Environmentalists were quick to condemn the move. Carlos Rittl of Climate Observatory tweeted that the government was a “climate disaster”.

Brazil’s cooperation with regional environment initiatives is at a low point. Despite hosting more than half of the Amazon basin, the Brazilian government did not accept an invitation to attend the UNDP-sponsored Good Growth Conference, which began Monday in Lima.

Peruvian president Martín Vizcarra opened the ceremony promising to fight deforestation and climate change, but said these were shared challenges.  “There are decisions we have to make with neighbouring countries because the [climate change] problem does not end at the border,” the president said.

The UNDP had invited two directors from Brazil’s environment ministry. Both had recently been removed from their positions and no one has been nominated to replace them.

One of the key participants at the meeting, the head of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Naoko Ishii said she was concerned about changes in Brazil  since January, but that it was too early to make a full assessment.

“If Bolsonaro does what he says, it’s a risk,” said the former deputy finance minister of Japan.

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The visit to Utiariti indigenous land, in Mato Grosso state, happened with great fanfare. Salles was joined by the minister of agriculture Tereza Cristina and Olivaldi Azevedo, the new director of Brazil’s environmental law enforcement agency Ibama. They received indigenous adornments from the hosts, the Paresi people, and mounted a combine harvester to celebrate the beginning of the harvest season.

Seven months before the visit, which took place in February, Ibama went there for an entirely different reason. They embargoed 22,000 hectares of GMO soybean plantation. According to Brazilian legislation, it is illegal to grow GMOs inside protected areas.

The fines, which included other environmental crimes, mounted to $34.5 million. 90% of this amount was levied on white farmers who leased the land, which is also illegal, and the rest on indigenous organizations.

In addition to the environmental lawbreaking enforced by Ibama, the plantation is also in breach of the Brazilian constitution, which forbids anyone but indigenous peoples from farming on land demarcated as indigenous.

Bolsonaro wants to make this all legal. In the past few months, members of his government have advocated that indigenous lands should be opened to non-indigenous farmers and miners. The first activity requires a change in the constitution, the latter depends on the approval of specific legislation. They say the changes will benefit the traditional landowners.

“The law needs to change urgently so the Indians do not live on the sidelines and instead receive royalties or work in agriculture,” Tereza Cristina told a congressional hearing in late February. “They have 13% of Brazilian territory and can not put their hands on this wealth to live with dignity.”

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Making the legal changes is proving difficult. Four months into his presidency, Bolsonaro’s priority is to gain approval for a comprehensive pension reform. That is eating up his political capital in the Congress. In a first vote this week, a bill to restructure the federal government, including moving indigenous land demarcation from the ministry of justice to the beef-caucus controlled ministry of agriculture, suffered a painful defeat.

Bolsonaro knows he needs to win the battle for public opinion. That’s where the Paresi come in. On April 18, in anticipation of a massive indigenous protest in Brasília a few days later, Bolsonaro appeared in a live Facebook transmission surrounded by five indigenous leaders who support his government in opening their territory to large scale economic activities.

Normally unrestrained, Bolsonaro has publicly curbed his racist views on indigenous peoples (in 1998, he famously said that “it’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians”). Instead, he said that they have the right to explore their land “without intermediaries”. He accused international NGOs of being “enemies” and criticized Ibama’s fine.

Minister of agriculture Tereza Cristina and Salles (left and second from left) on Paresi land (Photo: Office of Tereza Cristina)

“Our more humble brothers were fined by Ibama,” he said, without explaining that most of the fine went to white farmers. “That’s why, along with Salles, we are taking measures to replace this kind of people. These people [the Ibama agents] are not Brazilians.”

Beside Bolsonaro, Paresi leader Arnaldo Zunizakae said that he is part of a movement of indigenous producers who want to open their lands to commercial agriculture, mining and logging. The goal, he said, “is to improve our life quality, fulfilling the need for food, the necessity to occupy our lands and improvements in education and health. We want to contribute to the development we see around us, yet we live in poverty on a land the constitution says is ours.”

Zunizakae has admitted breaking the law by leasing to white farmers, but he argues they now have learned how to produce commercial soybeans on their own and now no longer need non-indigenous lessees to grow their crops in the cerrado biome.

Bolsonaro’s deforestation of the Amazon has already begun

Most of the land Bolsonaro wants to open to agriculture and mining is in the Amazon basin. Indigenous territories in the region cover an area twice the size of Spain and are important buffers against forest loss. Only 1.3% of indigenous land has been deforested, according to the NGO Imazon, much less than the 20% of forest cleared in the Amazon region as a whole.

The government’s tactics of backing the Paresi, which has illegally leased their land for soybeans for about 15 years, has posed a challenge to the indigenous movement. They argue that opening their lands to extractive industries threatens their cultural and social survival. While organisations such as Apib (Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation) have fiercely opposed Bolsonaro, they avoid publicly criticising the Paresi.

During the protest that brought some 4,000 indigenous people to Brasília in late April, Apib’s leader Sônia Guajajara said Bolsonaro was “betting on splitting the indigenous peoples”.

“They have got some Indians, but the indigenous movement is cohesive, we do not want this genocidal policy that only interests them, that opens indigenous lands for mining, livestock, soy,” she said.

Jair Bolsonaro meets with indigenous leaders, including Paresi Arnaldo Zunizakae (facing camera in headdress) in April (Screengrab: Jair Bolsonaro/Facebook)

Arnaldo Carneiro, one of Brazil’s top researchers on soybean production in the cerrado’s tropical savanna, told Climate Home News the current model was inappropriate in indigenous territory (although he is not familiar with the Paresi experience). For him, soybean expansion should be done on already deforested areas, such as cattle pasture.

“It is a model with a very low sustainability. It is heavily based on costly agricultural inputs. Moreover, the impact of agrotoxins causes several problems for the surrounding populations. It is far from a production mode that can bring benefits for the indigenous peoples,” said Carneiro, who is a senior researcher at National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA).

“The territories could have a much larger appeal with other production systems that stress its geography, ethnicity. This is not the soybean market, which will not see a difference between a Paresi product and other producers. They will not have any market advantage,” he said.

Bolsonaro’s Davos speech promised anguish in indigenous lands

All this represents a more nuanced approach from Bolsonaro, compared to the fire and fury of his initial days. According to Marcio Astrini, Greenpeace Brazil’s public policy coordinator, the president has abandoned abrupt major moves, such as annexing the ministry of environment into the ministry of agriculture. Instead, Astrini said, his government is pushing small, gradual changes that undermine its own environmental agencies.

As for the soybean, he sees Bolsonaro’s plan as a threat to the landmark soybean moratorium, the 2006 pact between productive sector, government and civil society, including Greenpeace and WWF, aimed at preventing the sale of soybean from deforested areas in the Amazon region.

“The consequence of opening new areas is more deforestation. If one has the federal government pushing deforestation in to the rainforest, it will be harder to enforce the agreement,” said Astrini.

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Speakers: Fabiano Maisonnave and Karl Mathiesen

Produced by Soila Apparicio

Read more of Fabiano’s reporting from the Amazon:

• Bolsonaro’s deforestation of the Amazon has already begun
• Bolsonaro has made grim threats to the Amazon and its people
• A gold mine swallowed their village. This Amazon tribe is here to take it back

The post Podcast: Reporting from the Amazon under Bolsonaro appeared first on Climate Home News.

One of the officials who intercepted Bolsonaro’s inflatable boat was José Olímpio Augusto Morelli, who works for Ibama, Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency. Although there were other personnel on site, Morelli signed the R$10,000 (about $2,500) ticket and wrote up the report. Plus, the agent took a now famous evidence photograph of the future president in a white swimsuit with a fishing rod behind him.

Bolsonaro never forgot Morelli or Ibama. A few weeks later, during a speech in congress, he recounted the incident in these terms: “The first thing he said to me was… ‘Get out!’ As if I were a dog”, Bolsonaro said in March 2012. 

“This citizen here, José Augusto Morelli, said: ‘Come out! No one can fish here, whether it be a congressman or not because the decree you voted on has to be respected’. I was obliged to answer in the same tone, cursing Morelli and saying that we did not vote the decree,” Bolsonaro went on.

NGO ignored warnings about bullying boss, before and after tragedy

Bolsonaro tried to nullify the fine, to no avail. In retaliation, in 2013 he introduced a bill to forbid Ibama’s agents to carry guns. In all other cases, Bolsonaro wants liberalisation of gun laws. After admitting he was targeting Ibama in revenge, he withdrew the bill.

But he didn’t stop there. In the same year, Bolsonaro filed an injunction in order to give him, and only him, to fish legal permission to fish the 84.5 sq km Tamoios protected area. The justice department dismissed the idea.

After these defeats, it seemed the battle was lost. But then the unthinkable happened: the homophobic, racist, pro-dictatorship congressman became Brazil’s president.

After his election, Bolsonaro continued his assault on Ibama. He repeatedly accused the body, which is the principle enforcer of legal environmental protections in Brazil, of being an “fine industry” controlled by radical greens. His criticism emboldened environment crime offenders, especially in the Amazon, where Ibama agents have faced increased opposition to enforce the law.

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As for the fishing fine, which Bolsonaro has never paid, things have swung in the his favour. Last December, a few days before he took office, the president-elect had his fine suspended by Ibama’s Rio de Janeiro bureau, following a legal opinion from the office of the solicitor-general, who found Bolsonaro had not been given the opportunity to defend himself properly by Ibama. Now the process will have to start again. The timing of the decision prompted the prosecutor’s office to open an investigation.

Finally, it was time to take revenge on Morelli. On 28 March, Ibama discharged him without explanation from his Brasília position as the head of Ibama’s Air Operations Center. It is a crucial task in which he coordinates airborne raids on illegal mining and forestry in the Amazon. As a permanent employee, the 56-year-old agent cannot be fired from the government easily, but he can be transferred to a less prestigious, lower-paid position. 

Morelli did not want to speak to Climate Home News on the record. Later he told other media he has no doubt his discharge is related to the 2012 fine. His department has nine employees in the same hierarchical level, but only Morelli was discharged by Bolsonaro’s government.

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The year was 2008, and there was a heated debate about the demarcation of Raposa/Serra do Sol Indigenous Land (TIRSS), inhabited by 25,000 people from five different ethnicities in Brazil’s far north. While waiting for a final decision from the Supreme Court, white farmers resorted to violence. In the worst incident, ten indigenous people were shot, although not fatally.

“[Bolsonaro] said he didn’t understand why a handful of poorly educated persons who didn’t speak Portuguese had more rights than Brazilian patriots,” Wapichana tells Climate Home News, describing a Congressional hearing about TIRSS that both attended. “We were shocked that a lawmaker could have such a racist, hateful view.”

The Supreme Court found in favour of the indigenous groups. Wapichana, the first indigenous woman to get a law degree in Brazil, played a critical role, presenting oral arguments in the case. White farmers left the area and received compensation. But a decade later, that indigenous victory is threatened.

Last year, Wapichana made history again, becoming the first indigenous woman to win election to Congress. Bolsonaro became president, meanwhile, with a campaign pledge to review TIRSS’ demarcation and open the area to mining as well as the return of white farmers.

“It is possible to explore rationally. And on the indigenous side, pay royalties and integrate them into society,” said the then president-elect in December. Bolsonaro has previously declared “minorities [should] either adapt or simply vanish” and compared indigenous lands to a “human zoo”, where they live in the “Stone Age”.

Bolsonaro gave the task to revise TIRSS and other indigenous land demarcations to the cattle rancher Nabhan Garcia. Until last year, he was the head of the Ruralist Democratic Union (UDR), a far-right organization which has historically opposed land demarcations and agrarian reform.

In mid-January, Garcia, who is now the secretary for land affairs, visited the city Pacaraima, which was almost enclosed by the TIRSS area.

Bolsonaro’s plans have been seen as a major threat to Brazil’s Amazon forest. Indigenous territories in the region cover an area twice the size of Spain. Only 1.3% of it has been deforested, according to the NGO Imazon. That is much less than the 20% of forest cleared in the Amazon region as a whole.

In TIRSS, the 25,000-strong indigenous population have vowed to resist on several fronts, including Wapichana’s presence in Brasília. A crucial part of the fight for them is to disavow Bolsonaro’s claims that they live in the “stone age” and are isolated from the rest of Brazilian society.

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In the three-day visit to Surumu, one of the TIRSS’ four regions, the communities were eager to offer local products, such as fish, manioc flour, mango, banana, pepper – and lots of beef. The region covers 17,500 square kilometres, roughly the size of Kuwait.

Red meat may sound at odds with conservation, as livestock is a major driver of deforestation. But this part of the Amazon next to Roraima Mount (the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World novel) is savannah, a natural pasture for cattle.

White farmers started to introduce cattle to the region around the mid-19th century. Indigenous people were employed as cheap labour, but it was not until the 1970s that they started to own livestock themselves, thanks to donations from progressive Catholic missionaries.

After the white farmers left, the indigenous communities removed most of the wire fences and expanded their flocks. Now, they own about 50,500 cattle in the region, according to state official figures.

“We are living well. My sons and I are not starving,” says Elisa da Silva, 42, from Macuxi people, who identifies herself as a “vaqueira” (cowgirl). “If the president comes here with soldiers, I have my arrow.”

Beside the natural pasture, another difference from white farmers is ownership. Each community, which varies in size, has its own flock, but families can raise their own cattle, too.

The leader of the 36 communities in Surumu, Anselmo Dionisio Filho, 42, explains the cattle herds are a form of savings to be used for collective activities, as well as to pay for more complex medical treatment.

“We have to fight this narrative that the indigenous peoples are an obstacle to development,” says Wapichana, adding tourism and biodiversity knowledge as other activities.  “We have to work in order to become the protagonists, too.”

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Ricardo de Aquino Salles, a 43-year-old lawyer, recently won the backing of the ruralists, one of Congress’ most powerful lobby groups.

In his first interview after the official announcement, the appointed minister told the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper the “discussion whether there is global warming or not is secondary” and “innocuous”.

Asked if Bolsonaro’s government would abandon the Paris Agreement, Salles said: “Let’s examine carefully the most sensitive points and, once the analysis is over [we will make the decision], remembering that national sovereignty over territory is non-negotiable”.

Salles ministry does not directly oversee Brazil’s participation in the Paris Agreement, but it works closely with the foreign office on the issue.

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Bolsonaro will be sworn in on 1 January. He has previously threatened to follow Trump’s US and abandon the Paris Agreement. At his behest, Brazil’s current government withdrew as host of the 2019 UN climate summit. The former army captain sees the deal as threat to the country’s sovereignty over the Amazon, a common idea among Brazil’s military.

The appointed minister Salles said defending the environment was of “unquestionable value”. But said protections must comply with the rule of law and due legal process, echoing Bolsonaro’s view that the ministry of environment is controlled by a “militant ideology” that persecutes agribusiness.

Salles was the secretary of environment of the industrialized São Paulo state, between 2016 and 2017. During this period, he was indicted for misconduct in public office for authorizing a preserved area by the Tietê river to be used for industrial purposes. He said he made a technical decision because the previous regulation had been “ideological”. His trial is pending.

In a statement, Climate Observatory, a network of green campaign groups in Brazil, said that Salles’ choice was in line with Bolsonaro’s promise to subordinate the ministry of environment to the ministry of agriculture. Both offices will be under control of ministers tied to the beef lobby.

A flyer from Salles’ campaign for congress showing his intentions for pigs and the left-wing MST movement

Salles is better known as one the founders of a extreme right movement called Endireita Brasil, which, in 2016 raised controversy after offering $260 for anyone who took video of themselves insulting left leader Ciro Gomes after publicising where he was having dinner.

This year, Salles ran for a seat in the congress’s lower chamber, but was not elected. In a campaign poster, he promised to use rifle bullets on boars (which are destroying crops in São Paulo) and the MST (a left-wing land reform movement). The MST have also been threatened by Bolsonaro.

The ministry of environment oversees hundreds of protected areas, which encompass almost 10% of Brazil’s territory. Most of them are in the Amazon. It also controls Ibama, an environmental agency which acts as a police force and is also in charge of the licensing process for oil wells, federal highways and hydroelectric plants.

Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is the environmental story of 2018.

No-one is better positioned than CHN’s Fabiano Maisonnave to cover the impact of his presidency on the world’s most important forest. We are the only international news site with a correspondent living in the heart of the Amazon. You can read some of the great reporting Fabiano has already done for us here.

We know we need to keep on this story, but after a huge 2018 and with the biggest UNFCCC talks in years approaching, our resources are really stretched. Please help us to keep Fabiano writing by making a small donation through our Patreon account.

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That means the forest lost 1,674 sq km from August to October, an area more than double the size of New York City.

The main culprit was the conversion of forest to pasture. The largest increase was in the border area between Acre and Amazonas states. The deforestation increase there, compared with the same period in 2017, was 273% and 114%, respectively.

Deforestation usually increases in Brazil’s electoral years, amid promises from local politicians they will open up protected land or make environmental legislation more flexible if elected.

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But during the 2018 campaign, far-right candidate and now president-elect Bolsonaro added a powerful permissive voice. In a nod to agribusiness, land-grabbers, and illegal gold miners and loggers, he repeatedly criticized Brazil’s environment agency Ibama’s supervision, calling it excessive and ideologically biased.

As a result Bolsonaro, collected landslide victories in Amazon regions with higher deforestation rates. A survey revealed long-term deforestation rates in pro-Bolsonaro municipalities were more than two and a half times higher than in municipalities that voted for leftist candidate Fernando Haddad (PT) in the first round.

Under heavy criticism from Bolsonaro during the campaign, federal environment agents have faced mounting opposition in the field. Several CHN spoke to have had warnings from illegal loggers and miners that “things will change” under Bolsonaro.

There were three attacks against federal agents during the campaign. The most serious one took place on October 19 in Pará state. A group of federal agents from ICMBio (the agency in charge of conservation area management) were trapped while returning from a raid after criminals burned a small bridge.

The team had to improvise another bridge and was rescued by Pará state police, which withdrew its support for ICMBio soon after the incident citing lack of security. As a response, the federal government had to dispatch the National Public Security Force, only used in exceptional situations, to the region.

The new figures on forest loss come from Deter B, a satellite monitoring system developed by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) in order to monitor deforestation in almost real time for surveillance purposes. The data is publicly available and the calculation of the rate over the electoral season was made by Inpe at Climate Home News’ request.

Brazil’s official annual deforestation rate is calculated by Inpe’s Prodes project, which has a more precise resolution. Both system, however, usually present similar results.

Cláudio Almeida, Inpe’s Amazon monitoring coordinator, warned Deter B  is more liable to suffer interference from cloudiness and other variables. But, he said the almost 48.8% difference with last year indicated the deforestation rate was unmistakably higher.

“Literature shows that several factors lead to an increase in deforestation: real estate speculation, expansion of the agricultural frontier, new infrastructures such as roads and ports and expectations of regional development,” he said.

The increase of the past three months, however, will only be officially accounted in 2019. The reason is that the Prodes uses data from August 2017 to July. 

The 2018 deforestation rate is expected to be published in the next weeks and will most likely show a small increase from 2017.

US funds with big Amazon farming stakes face Bolsonaro choice

After the election, Bolsonaro said he will no longer merge the ministry of environment into the ministry of agriculture, a campaign promise. The agribusiness and beef lobbies, close allies of the president-elect, advised him against it, as the environment ministry has other obligations outside agricultural affairs, such as oil and mining licensing.

The president-elect, however, has made clear that he will not choose an environmentalist to lead the department charged with protecting the Amazon and that the future selection minister will need agribusiness’ pre-approval. 

Last week, Bolsonaro chose congresswoman Tereza Cristina, the leader of the farm caucus, to be his minister of agriculture. Cristina is an agronomist from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which has a cattle population of 21.5 million and a human population of 2.6 million.

Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is the environmental story of 2018.

No-one is better positioned than CHN’s Fabiano Maisonnave to cover the impact of his presidency on the world’s most important forest. We are the only international news site with a correspondent living in the heart of the Amazon. You can read some of the great reporting Fabiano has already done for us here.

We know we need to keep on this story, but after a huge 2018 and with the biggest UNFCCC talks in years approaching, our resources are really stretched. Please help us to keep Fabiano writing by making a small donation through our Patreon account.

A recent report by Indigenous Missionary Council (Cimi), an arm of the Catholic church, includes Cristina in a list of 50 Congressmen with anti-indigenous rights record. Among other actions, in last August she petitioned President Temer to revoke a decree of 2007 that established the national policy for the sustainable development of traditional peoples and communities.

According to the request co-signed by Cristina, the decree “stimulate and cause acts that challenge the order and the security. What’s more, it violates the constitutional guarantee of private property and human dignity, imposing on the land owners the loss of its lands, its productions and their family livelihood.”

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Not only that. Indigenous territories opened to mining. Relaxed environmental law enforcement and licensing. International NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, banned from the country. A strong alliance with the beef lobby.

In a nutshell, this is what Jair Bolsonaro, who is sailing towards Brazil’s presidency after taking a near-majority in a first round vote on Sunday, has promised for the environment.

An enthusiast for torture and the 1964-85 military dictatorship, the retired army captain is famous for racist, homophobic, authoritarian and misogynistic rhetoric. But his views on how to manage Earth’s largest tropical rainforest are just as grim and appalling.

Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is the environmental story of 2018.

No-one is better positioned than CHN’s Fabiano Maisonnave to cover the impact of his near-certain presidency on the world’s most important forest. We are the only international news site with a correspondent living in the heart of the Amazon. You can read some of the great reporting Fabiano has already done for us here.

We know we need to keep on this story, but after a huge 2018 and with the biggest UNFCCC talks in years approaching, our resources are really stretched. Please help us to keep Fabiano writing by making a small donation through our Patreon account.

Bolsonaro has galvanized voters in urban centres who are disillusioned with the political establishment’s corruption scandals and attracted to his “tough-on-crime” positions amid rising criminality rates. He received 46% of the vote on Sunday and now faces a 28 October run off with the Workers Party’s Fernando Haddad, who polled 29%.

In the Amazon, illegal loggers, miners, land-grabbers, as well as large land owners have rallied to his banner. Here, they don’t expect Bolsonaro to enforce the law. On the contrary, the hope is that he fulfils his promise to obliterate nearly all environment and pro-indigenous legislation. He won massive support in rural central western states and all but one Amazonian state.

Amazon: A gold mine swallowed their village. This tribe is here to take it back

In August, Bolsonaro raised eyebrows internationally when he pledged to join Trump’s US and withdraw Brazil from the Paris Agreement. That means the country would no longer be committed to curb its emissions from the deforestation of the Amazon, which is here a bigger source of greenhouse gas than the burning of fossil fuels.

Bolsonaro accepts the climate is changing dangerously. CHN asked him about this during a press conference in April, he said the solution was in controlling the growth of the world’s human population.

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“This explosive population growth leads to deforestation,” he said. “Because you will not grow soy on the terrace of your building or raise cattle in the yard. So we have to have a family planning policy. Then you begin to reduce the pressure on those issues that lead, yes, in my opinion, to global warming, which could be the end of the human species.”

Yet he praised president Trump’s policy on the Paris deal and implied that it was part of a UN plot to strip Brazil’s sovereignty over the Amazon.

“Congratulations to Trump. If it were good for them, [the US] wouldn’t have denounced it,” he said, adding that a concept for a “136 million hectare ecological corridor” that would be “under world’s control, not ours” had “been discussed”. ” I don’t know how deeply,” he added.

Jair Bolsonaro says he would withdraw Brazil from the Paris Agreement if elected president (Photo: Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom/Agência Brasil)

Brazil’s current environment minister Edson Duarte said: “Instead of spreading the message that he will fight deforestation and organized crime, he says he will attack the ministry of environment, Ibama and ICMBio [Brazil’s federal environment agencies]. It’s the same as saying that he will withdraw the police from the streets.”

Speaking to the O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper, Duarte said: “The increase of deforestation will be immediate. I am afraid of a gold rush to see who arrives first. They will know that, if they occupy illegally, the authorities will be complacent and will grant concordance. They will be certain that nobody will bother them”.

Indigenous lands

Bolsonaro’s environment policies are tied to racist attitudes toward minorities and Brazil’s indigenous peoples. In a speech last year, he said: “Minorities have to bend down to the majority… The minorities [should] either adapt or simply vanish.”

Expressing a view common to military circles, he has claimed, without evidence, that indigenous land rights are part of a western plot to create separatist Amazonian states supported by the UN.

“Sooner or later, we will have dozens of countries inside [Brazil]. We won’t have any interference in these countries, the first world will exploit the Indians, and nothing will be left for us,” he said last year.

Bolsonaro has promised to open indigenous lands to mining and other economic activities. About 13% of Brazil’s territory is recognized indigenous lands, most of them in the Amazon. They are a major barrier to protect the forest, only 2% of rainforest deforestation has occurred inside indigenous territory.

The law protects indigenous rights. Article 231 of the 1988 Constitution states that indigenous peoples have “original rights over the lands that they have traditionally occupied”, although the land belongs to the state and they have no ownership rights over minerals. 

But there are concerns about whether Bolsonaro will respect these laws. Several analysts have warned Brazil could slip towards authoritarian rule. These fears have increased in the past weeks. His running mate, general Antônio Mourão, has argued for a new constitution without popular participation and raised the possibility that Bolsonaro could proclaim a self-coup.  

Both Bolsonaro and Mourão have defended the excesses of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which displaced and killed (intentionally or through diseases) thousands of Indians in the Amazon, amid an effort to build roads and hydroelectric dams in the forest. The armed forces have never recognized any wrongdoing.

“If he wins, he will institutionalise genocide,” says Dinamam Tuxá, the national coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples, in a phone interview with Climate Home News. “He has already said that the federal government will no longer champion indigenous rights, such as access to the land. We are very scared. I fear for my own life. As a national leader, I am sure I will be punished by the federal government for defending the rights of the indigenous peoples.”

Ministry of environment no more

During the campaign, Bolsonaro promised he will abolish the ministry of environment and transfer its functions to the ministry of agriculture. The agriculture portfolio will be handed to politicians from the “beef caucus”, a conservative group of lawmakers who control about one third of Congress and have opposed indigenous land demarcations and advocated for the reduction of conservation units, among other measures, to expand the agriculture frontier. Last week, they formally endorsed Bolsonaro. 

In several speeches, he said he would to end the “fine industry” run by Ibama and ICMBio, to control illegal mining, deforestation and logging. On Sunday he used his first post-election statement to vow to neuter Ibama.

This is personal for Bolsonaro. In 2012, he was caught fishing illegally inside a federal reserve off the coast of Rio de Janeiro and was issued a $2,700 fine. Since then as a member of Brazil’s chamber of deputies, he has targeted Ibama, going as far as presenting a bill that forbids its agents to carry weapons, even though they operate in some of the most dangerous areas of the country.

Ibama will be stripped of its environmental licensing powers, he said during the campaign. These will be redistributed to other official agencies. That means, for instance, that federal agency will no longer be able to contain controversial projects such as the reopening of the disused BR-319, an 890km highway that cuts from one of the most preserved areas of the Amazon, and São Luiz do Tapajós, a giant hydroelectric plant planned to be built in an area inhabited by the Munduruku indigenous group and river dwellers. 

“Entrance is prohibited without authorisation”. In the absence of legal enforcement, indigenous people mark out the border of the 54,400 hectare Montanha e Mangabal territory in Brazil’s Pará state (Photo: Fabiano Maisonnave)

BR-319, which connects Manaus to Porto Velho, is specially troublesome, as it will allow for secondary roads. According to a study by NGO Idesam, an area as big as Germany and Belgium combined is under its influence and will become more vulnerable to land-grabbers and deforestation. Recent attempts to pave it have been barred by Ibama.

It’s war in the Amazon, says Brazil’s top environmental law enforcer

“He names Ibama and ICMBio as his number one public enemies and has given several messages that he will reverse environment and social laws”, said André Guimarães, director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. “However, one thing is what he says during the electoral campaign. Another thing is what he will be able to do if he takes office.”

Guimarães said that recently the beef caucus has tried to relax environmental and slave labour legislation, but failed in most of them attempts due to strong opposition.

“He will try and he is obstinate, but it’s up to the civil society to react against it. It will be a scenario with intense and almost permanent disputes”, he said. “We must be indignant.”

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In its latest Responsible Investment report, it earmarked meatpackers Marfrig and Minerva for discussions on deforestation in their supply chains, as well as American firm Bunge.

To the surprise of expert observers, the Government Pension Fund Global omitted JBS, the largest cattle buyer in the Amazon, from its watch list. Since 2008, it has invested $143.4 million in the meatpacking company, despite evidence of links to deforestation.

Ibama, Brazil’s federal environment agency, says JBS sources a significant share of its cattle from ranches created by illegally cutting down rainforest. Last year, it raided the company’s meat processing plants and fined it $7.7 million. The company denied any wrongdoing.

Paulo Barreto, a senior researcher for Belém-based Imazon (Amazon Institute of People and the Environment), criticised the omission.

“The fund says it has committed itself against deforestation and has already divested of companies associated with it. Thus, the fund should not finance meatpackers, considering how they operate today. All of them operating in the Amazon stimulate deforestation, at least indirectly. None of them has a system that adequately controls indirect suppliers,” he told Climate Home News.

“If the fund wants to fulfill its commitment, it will have to divest these companies or demand that they quickly control the origin of the livestock. The three companies financed by the fund have this power as they control almost 40% of the domestic market and almost 80% of Brazilian meat exports.”

Report: The Brazilian state letting illegal Amazon loggers keep logging

Others welcomed the Norwegian fund’s moves to exert shareholder pressure on problem companies, and its transparency in publishing lists of those it was concerned about.

“We are glad that the GPFG is finally taking steps to address the massive deforestation caused by soy and beef producers in Brazil, both through divestment and ownership engagement,” said Vemund Olsen, a senior policy adviser with Rainforest Foundation Norway.

“Norway’s pension fund invests more money in companies that destroy rainforests, than the money the country uses to save rainforests. But instead of divesting, the fund should use its financial influence to demand that companies like JBS, Marfrig and Minerva cut their ties to deforestation. We are glad to see that the fund is finally beginning to do this.”

Cattle ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation across the Amazon rainforest. In Brazil, 83% of the deforested areas in use are occupied by pasture, according to official figures. One of the main tools to fight deforestation is the Amazon Fund, a REDD+ mechanism created to raise donations for non-reimbursable investments. The Norwegian government has given so far $1.14 billion, which represents 94% of total.

Norway’s state-owned GPFG is one of the most active institutional investors in the world on environmental and social issues. In 2015, it sold an estimated $8 billion worth of coal holdings on climate grounds. There is an ongoing debate on whether to radically cut its exposure to oil and gas.

While it did not flag up JBS’ links to deforestation, the fund did raise concerns about corruption. JBS founders Joesley and Wesley Batista, who are brothers, have admitted paying bribes to dozens of politicians, including President Michel Temer, who denies the charges.

Barreto, who has published extensively on cattle ranching in the Amazon, said JBS’ involvement in serious corruption cases made it harder for the sector to crack down on deforestation in supply chains.

GPFG declined to elaborate on its stance towards JBS, saying it was against its policy to comment on specific investments.

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But a joint investigation by Greenpeace and Ibama, the country’s environmental agency, has found that the permits hide a trail of fakery fuelling the destruction of the Amazon.

In a report published on Tuesday, Greenpeace argues that fraud is so widespread in the Brazilian Amazon’s lumber industry that it has become virtually impossible to separate legally from illegally logged timber.

The investigation analysed 586 Logging authorisations (Autefs, in the Brazilian acronym) granted by the State of Pará between 2013 and 2017. In 76.7% of them, Greenpeace found they showed a higher density of standing Ipe trees than scientific research has shown to be typical. That means the quantity was likely overstated in order to generate false credits – the so-called imaginary trees.

Brazilian Amazon lost 660,000 hectares of forest in last year

These false credits are then used to launder ipe trees stolen from indigenous lands and other protected areas. In the most extreme case, Ibama did not find any of the 283.53m³ of Ipe credits (about 10 trees) registered at one private property. The timber is commonly used as decking in construction around the world.

A further investigation discovered that these credits had been transferred to a company in the city of Santarém, which then used most of them to export Ipe wood to Europe.

One of the main loopholes of the licensing system is that there is little, if any oversight of information about forest management areas. That allows forest engineers to overestimate the amount of Ipe and other valuable wood.

“State agencies subsequently issue credits for the harvesting and movement of this non-existent timber. These credits are then used to ‘cook the books’ of sawmills that are processing trees illegally logged from forests on indigenous lands, protected areas or public lands,” explains the report.

According to Greenpeace, the US is, by far, the biggest importer of the tainted Ipe wood, followed by France and Portugal. The NGO said consumers should suspend purchase from Brazilian wood, as there was no guarantee of its legal origin.

“In order to avoid the irreparable loss of species with high commercial value and the biodiversity associated with them and, more generally, to avoid the degradation caused by illegal logging, with all its negative impacts on forest biodiversity and local communities as well as broader climate impacts – it is important that the production, harvesting and trading of timber are halted until the current problems in the licensing and control systems are addressed,” says the report.

This reporter contacted the state of Pará’s department of environment, which is responsible for the licensing, but it declined to comment on the report.

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Named Watch Post (the Portuguese acronym is PV), the village has been swallowed by the heavy equipment of hundreds of illegal gold miners (called garimpeiros). What was once a few huts hidden in the Amazon forest now resembles a bombed field of war.

In January, this reporter was the only non-indigneous member of a warrior party sent to PV village to reclaim it from the miners. The expedition navigated the entire 226km length of the Tropas river.

The Tropas is dead. Muddy and toxic with mercury. Around PV village, the waters are lined by strips of barren land, fallen trees, huge holes dug by excavators, scattered huts and unpaved roads used by motorcycles, tractors and quadbikes.

“Game used to be very easy here – pig, deer, tapir. But it is all gone due to the machines and pollution. Now, only one stream still has fish, but they are all sick from mercury”, says 70-year-old Chief Osvaldo, in a conversation inside his hut, which remains in the village. “This damage will remain forever.” 

There is even an airstrip, where a daily average of ten single-engine airplanes come back and forth from Creporizão town, a 25-minute-flight. The air bridge transports fuel, food, liquor, illegal drugs, mechanical parts, mercury, sex workers, merchants – and a lot of gold.

Despite the industrial scale, the whole process is illegal. According to Brazilian law, mining in indigenous lands is a federal crime. In practice, though, large swaths of the Amazon, including federal protected areas, have increasingly become stateless areas dominated by gold, land-grabbers and criminal timber rings.

The direct impact of mining on Brazil’s out-of-control deforestation is small in comparison to clearing for pasture, but it is not negligible and is increasing. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of illegal mines discovered in the forest rose from 382 to 949.

Illegal gold mining has traditionally financed cattle ranching and land-grabbing, probably the most common ways to launder money in the region and both big drivers of land stripping. The Tapajós basin, one of Brazil’s largest gold reserves, is now a hotspot for deforestation. Outnumbered and with budget restraints, federal police and environmental agents are powerless against organized crime. 

Whole cities’ economies now depend on illegal, environmentally-damaging activities, capturing local politics and gaining social acceptance. Itaituba, a city of 98,000 people, elected a former gold miner as mayor. It even has a “gold street”, where the metal is sold openly despite its illegal origin.

The result is a breakdown between federal and local enforcement. When illegal garimpeiros burned two government environmental offices to the ground in Humaitá, state governor Amazonino Mendes sided with the miners.

This has coincided with a consistent erosion of the budgets of the agencies that do protect forests. In the 23,820 sq km Munduruku Indigenous Territory, which is the size of Belize, Brazil’s federal indigenous bureau Funai maintains only one employee.

With no allies, the Munduruku have decided to take matters into their own hands. On 17 January this year, they published a manifesto that said PV village “no longer exists” and announced a warrior expedition to “arrest and expel all pariwat from our land” and “destroy all mining machinery”. This followed a decision taken during the people’s general assembly, last year.

A few days later, a six-boat party of bow-and-arrow armed warriors, leaders such as the Munduruku chief Arnaldo Kaba and several children left for PV village. Authorised by the leadership, Climate Home News joined the group. Funai’s representative refused to go, citing a lack of security.

As the boats moved upstream, the water changed from light brown to the colour of thick mud. The expedition passed many Munduruku villages. Locals reported they had stopped fishing and drinking from the river about four years ago.

At the tributary of the Caburuá, clean, black water feeds into the Tropas, a shocking contrast. Biyom Saw, a 29-year-old Munduruku female warrior who travelled with her baby son, blamed the pariwat for the contaminated water. “We can’t fish, and the children are hungry. If we bathe in the river, rashes appear.”

The final hours of the journey to PV village run along a water that is thick, lifeless and brown. All around, the forest is cleared to give the garimpeiros access to the soil and gold beneath. Some of the craters are several meters deep, and the old ones fill with muddy, poisoned water.

Along the river, garimpeiros work with excavators, stand outside huts or drive around. “It looks like a city,” said Ana Poxo, one of the expedition leaders, whose village is a two-day boat trip away.

At PV village, about 60 gold miners live alongside 15 remaining Munduruku families. Many more live in huts scattered through the forest. Chief Osvaldo said that after a few previous attempts to enter the Munduruku indigenous territory, the garimpeiros struck deals with some local leaders. Soon, dozens of pariwat arrived and took control of the territory.

Now, in this once remote corner of the Amazon, there are food stores, a brothel and liquor joints. One of them, Osvaldo explains, is run by his eldest son, who also grants permission to the miners to explore for gold. 

“My son forced his 8-year-son to drink. The child got drunk. He should apologise to everybody for this,” said Osvaldo. 

With the arrival of the expedition party, the Munduruku warriors tried to reestablish authority over the village. Some 40 of them went to the small businesses, inspected them in search of drugs and alcohol and ordered them to close. At a meeting in the village centre, the Munduruku’s chief Kaba demanded the miners leave.

“The Tropas river is dead”, he told dozens of garimpeiros. “I didn’t see even a butterfly crossing it.” The garimpeiros took his people’s gold and contaminated their water with mercury, he said. “You have to go. It’s not me who is expelling you, it’s our people. I don’t order anything, it’s the people.”

The task, however, is complex. Exploiting divisions among the Munduruku, garimpeiros claimed they were there with the permission of local groups. While others tried to make compromises.

“Sometimes we go to Creporizão [a nearby town] and spend 15, 20 grams of gold on rum and prostitution. I say this based on my own experience. And we don’t have the guts to give Chief Osvaldo 5 grams, 10 grams?”, said, Barbudo  – ‘Beardy’ – a garimpeiro, to the meeting.

Several Munduruku work in the mine as cheap labor. A few have even become bosses and sided with the pariwat. One of them, Waldelirio Manhuary, now lives in a brick house in the city. He is one of the few who defend non-indigenous permanence and said the pollution was an acceptable side affect.

“The federal government wants us to remain in the jungle, only hunting and fishing. It doesn’t want us to bring machines and to do the way they do it, like growing soybeans. We are poor and rich, because we are siting on a very big wealth”, he says.

Requests for comment from Funai about the Munduruku remain unanswered. So far, no government agency has tried to shut down the PV gold mining operation or tested the water in the Tropas River.

According to information gathered by the Munduruku leadership, mining resumed right after the warriors’ two-day visit. Arnaldo Kaba said that, if they don’t go, there will be a new expedition, now only with warriors. “Then all the other villages will come,” said the leader of the 14,000-strong ethnic group. “This is the warning we left.”

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Just over one year ago, the agency, known by its Portuguese acronym Ibama, launched a helicopter raid in the Aripuanã Park indigenous territory. This reporter tagged along.

Well into the territory, agents came across two lorries loaded with timber. Logging within indigenous lands is a federal crime. Inside the vehicles, which were left abandoned upon the agents’ arrival, there were wood transport authorisations in Finco’s name.

Finco owns Taquara 1, a boundary farm less than 6km from where the raid took place. He has a permit from the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to harvest timber on his lands. In a classic scheme to launder illegal timber, Finco was attempting to use this authorisation to disguise the trees stolen from Aripuanã Park, Ibama said. 

Logged indigenous territory, photographed on a federal raid in late 2016 (Photo: Fabiano Maisonnave)

The agents set fire to the lorries and other equipment. Ibama issued Finco a $125,000 fine and blocked him from a federal system that provides licensing for wood export. Mato Grosso’s secretary of environment was informed of his malfeasance.

But the state of Mato Grosso, which just signed an agreement with the UK and Germany to finance anti-deforestation projects, sees Finco’s case differently. Seven months later, they ignored Ibama’s warning and granted a new license that allowed him to continue operating in the same region where he allegedly steals timber.

In a written response, the Mato Grosso environment secretariat said the Ibama case against Finco was not considered because “the project is related to a private area, not an indigenous land”.

Since December 2016, this reporter has made several attempts to interview Finco, but all requests were left unanswered.

Mato Grosso is a hotspot of deforestation in Brazil. A leading soybean and meat producer, its politics is dominated by the country’s all-powerful agricultural lobby, which is hungry for more land to be cleared.

The state government has flooded the market with logging authorisations. In 2017 alone, Mato Grosso, which holds 18% of Brazil’s Amazon forest, authorised the extraction of 7 million cubic meters of native timber. This figure is higher than the sum of all seven other Amazon states combined. If fully used, the credits would be enough to load more than 375,000 lorries with logs.

According to Ibama’s top official Luciano Evaristo, Mato Grosso does not have enough forest to feed the number of permits being written. These documents are used to launder illegal timber into European markets, according to Ibama and NGOs such as Greenpeace.

Despite this, the state could benefit from a share in $123m in REDD+ anti-deforestation deals with Germany and the UK, signed during the 2017 UN climate talks in Bonn.

The trucks contained logging permits under the name of Hidemar Finco. They were destroyed in accordance with Ibama proceedures (Photo: Fabiano Maisonnave)

To the dismay of Ibama and environmentalists, Finco is far from an exception. In July, Mato Grosso authorised timber harvesting inside the Kayabi indigenous territory, even though this is forbidden by Brazilian legislation. Four months later, the federal agencies managed to suspend the license.

Those licenses were signed by Mauren Lazzaretti, who was head of Mato Grosso’s license office until December. Outside government, Lazzaretti has made a career as a lawyer representing loggers and other defendants of federal crime. She told Climate Home News there was no conflict of interest, as she ceased her legal practice while in office.

For Roberto Cabral, the commander of the operation that destroyed Finco’s trucks, the reissuing of the logger’s license is deflating.

“It’s as if someone ran over and killed a person, but bought a car in order to drive again. In the environmental area, the fines are linked to the vehicle, not to the driver,” he says.

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Thus, community leader Ageu Lobo chooses his words carefully while telling a group of them they cannot remain inside the ‘Agroextractivist Settlement Montanha e Mangabal’, a federal project that until last week existed only on paper.

“In 2006, our community got a court decision recognising that we occupy this territory,” Lobo tells the miners. A judge threatened non-community members with a R$10,000 [$3,100] daily fine for trespassing, he adds.

The gold miners, four in total, did not look happy. One of them fiddled with a machete attached to his waist. Another, walking nervously back and forth and avoiding eye contact, said: “God would come down from the sky to solve it, as no human being owns anything.” 

As risky as confronting gold miners can be, Lobo, who has received death threats in the past, was safe enough, for he was not alone. For five days, he along with dozens of villagers and indigenous warriors had been cutting through 17.5km of thick forest.

The creation of the settlement, where there are 101 families living, was approved in September 2013 to international fanfare. It was seen as a surprise win for poor communities, with the government ceding control of an area in which it has plans to develop hydroelectric power. 

Ageu Lobo confronts illegal miners inside the Montanha e Mangabal territory (Photo: Fabiano Maisonnave)

But since then, no progress has been made to formalise the boundary. The National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (Incra) has not even mapped the 54,400 hectares, a task that should have finished within a year, according to government decree.

Fed up with waiting for the government to fulfil its promises, the “beiradeiros” or riverside dwellers, so called because they lived on the banks of the Tapajós river, were drawing their own border. They marked the limits of the territory with a series of improvised plaques and a pathway cut through the forest. This reporter joined them for three days.

Under pressure from a powerful caucus of pro-agriculture members of congress, Brazil’s president Michel Temer has frozen all new land demarcations since he took office last year, even those processes that are in an advanced stage are being blocked. The government has also refused to comply with judicial orders to evict land-grabbers from indigenous lands.

For Lobo, whose family settled by the Tapajós seven generations ago, self-demarcation has several aims: it allows them to build sustainable forest-based industry and inhibits the invasion of land-grabbers, miners and loggers, it presses Incra to fulfil its promises and it strengthens their stance against large hydropower projects.

(Photo: Fabiano Maisonnave)

The community independently marked out the border, putting pressure on Incra’s regional superintendent Mário da Silva Costa who eventually held a public hearing on 17 November this year. During the meeting, he promised to implement official border markers.

Their idea to take matters into their own hands has precedent. In 2014, their Munduruku neighbours posted plaques along the edge of the Sawré Muybu Indigenous Land, across the Tapajós River. The area has been approved by Funai, Brazil’s indigenous bureau. But the process was stuck, waiting to be ratified by Brazil’s minister of justice and Temer.

The self-demarcation helped the Munduruku fight against São Luiz do Tapajós, the largest planned dam in Brazil. Estimated at $9.4 billion, the expected capacity would be enough to supply a city of at least 8.5 million people.

In April 2016, Ibama, Brazil’s environmental agency, suspended the license because of “irreversible” impacts on the Munduruku. Eletrobras, Brazil’s state energy company filed an appeal, still unanswered. The communities believe that a physical border, even if it is not official, makes it harder for developers to ignore them.

Lobo hopes to use the same tactics to fight another hydro project inside the Montanha e Mangabal territory, the smaller Jatobá plant. Its environmental and social impacts are currently being assessed by the government.

With the freeze in land demarcations across Brazil, the Tapajós experience has made ripples and attracted the interest of leaders from other regions of the Amazon, mostly indigenous people.

One of the seven indigenous men from the remote Trombetas valley helping Lobo mark out his land, Joventino Kaxuyana, traveled three days by boat and bus to join the group. With GPS in hand, he was in the front group learning how to use the equipment.

There are hundreds of small scale illegal minig operations in the forests around Montanha e Mangabal (Photo: Fabiano Maisonnave)

Next year, he wants to repeat his experience in the 2.2 million-hectare Kaxuyana-Tunayana Indigenous Land in the municipality of Oriximiná in the state of Pará, where there is also a planned hydro power dam. The area has already been drawn up by a Funai report, but the process is languishing in Brasilia.

For Lobo, the border remains makeshift. Without the government’s back-up, his threats of fines and legal backing are toothless.

In other parts of the Amazon, the power vacuum left by a state unwilling to protect the world’s most important forest is leading to violence. So far this year, two massacres have left 19 peasants dead and the alleged slaughter of an isolated tribe by illegal gold miners is still under investigation. Under-gunned, Brazil’s environment agency has had vehicles and buildings torched.

They leave the miners in the forest, not knowing whether their warnings and hand-painted signs will be heeded.

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Brazil, China, India and South Africa – which makes up the Basic negotiating group – and the G77 coalition of 133 developing countries have accused rich countries of trying to “unilaterally apply new eligibility criteria” to the Global Environmental Facility (Gef) and Green Climate Fund (GCF).

The Gef and GCF both act as conduits for billions of dollars in climate finance given by industrialised countries to fund projects that can help improve the lot of those most affected and least prepared for climate change. This assistance comes in the form of grants and loans.

During the last board meeting of the Gef in Addis Ababa in October, developed countries proposed middle income countries should have access to grants blocked. Instead, they would only be able to apply for loans granted at a concessional interest rate. 

According to Brazil’s chief climate negotiator José Antônio Marcondes, if the rules changed as proposed, in Latin American, only Haiti would be eligible for grants.

Final wrap: China flexes its muscle as climate talks end with slow progress

In the same month, the UK vetoed Argentinian and Paraguayan projects in the GCF (where decisions are reached by consensus). The bids, worth $67m between them, would have been directed to sustainable forestry and farming activities.

At the time, British representative Josceline Wheatley suggested that the grants were too generous for middle income countries.

In a statement, the Basic group told delegates to climate talks in Bonn: “These attempts have no legal basis and, in our view, are tantamount to renegotiating [the Paris Agreement]. This may potentially undermine the level of ambition of developing countries in the global effort against climate change”. The Basic group said they had the backing of the G77.

Marcondes said the moves were “an attempt to rewrite the Paris Agreement”, adding that differentiating the developing world would make the funds work like the World Bank.

Report: Indigenous peoples given a voice at UN climate talks

Bolivia’s chief negotiator Ivan Zambrana told Climate Home News the GCF should make the countries’ pledges to the Paris deal “more effective”.

“But unfortunately there is an attempt to make them work like development banks. That would demonstrate that developed countries are not honouring their commitments,” he said.

“This has not been done in an open manner, but rather in the way they operationalise. For instance, there has been a bigger institutional effort towards loans than concessional transfers”, said Zambrana.

Miguel Arias Cañete, EU commissioner for climate action and energy, said: “There are probably many improvements that can be done but the important thing is that we are fulfilling our commitments.”

At an event on the sidelines of the Bonn talks last week, Howard Bamsey, executive director of GCF, said there was nothing in the funds constitution to support a division of developing countries. 

“It’s always a complicated calculus when we try to define for the board the appropriate level of concessionality – that is the level required to make the project viable. But there is no policy that says we should take a different approach for middle income countries,” he said.

In a press conference for Spanish-speaking reporters, UNFCCC executive secretary Patricia Espinosa said the funds were “highly appreciated by developing countries as they reflect the principle under which the developed world bears a bigger responsibility” against climate change.

Espinosa said that, while it is understandable why the developing countries have raised the issue, the UN talks talks were not the appropriate place to discuss the funds.

“GEF and GCF have their own boards, where decisions are taken. It’s important that the countries act through their representatives in these boards,” she said.

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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Developing countries are pushing for more opportunities to quiz rich countries on their plans for releasing money to help them cope with climate change.

Rich countries, on the other hand, argue that this is beyond what it was originally agreed upon in the Paris Agreement in 2015.

Sources said the European Union was being constructive, but the ‘umbrella group’, which includes the US, Australia and Japan was pushing back on developing country demands.

“What was promised by leaders of developed countries has not trickled down to negotiators,” Seyni Nafo, head of the African group of negotiators told Climate Home. “As a result, we’re stuck on how developed countries are going to report on their financial contributions. The US’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has had a big impact on how developed countries are behaving on finance. Despite France’s leader and others promising to step in after Trump’s withdrawal, it does not reflect in the negotiations,”

Camilla Born, a climate policy advisor with E3G, said: “Finance flows are growing and many developed countries have a good story to tell. They shouldn’t tarnish themselves with the same brush as President Trump, who is pushing for deep cuts in US climate finance. They should instead engage with developing countries in good faith, seeking to build trust between parties.”

Heads of delegation met and a proposal for resolving the issue was put forward just after noon, Bonn time, by the lead negotiator for the Fijian presidency ambassador Nazhat Shameem Khan.

The issue could hold hostage the key Fijian initiative at these talks – the Talanoa dialogue, which will take stock of the efforts made by countries on climate change during 2018. With little time remaining, the Fijians now face a stern diplomatic test.

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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For the so-called “first nations”, the platform will both strengthen the voice of populations that are often persecuted in their countries and recognise their leading role as the guardians of the forest. 

There an estimated 370 million indigenous people in the world, and over 20% of tropical forest carbon is stored in indigenous people’s territories.

“The overall purpose of the platform will be to strengthen the knowledge, technologies, practices and efforts of local communities and indigenous peoples related to addressing and responding to climate change”, said the agreement, which was approved on Wednesday.

Report: Developing countries win concessions on early climate action at UN talks

Indigenous land rights have been shown to be a strong buffer against deforestation, which is a driver of climate change.

Former Brazilian environment minister Izabella Teixiera told the Guardian: “Indigenous rights are really important to move towards a fair, low-carbon planet. I hope this can also help us avoid backsliding on this agenda in Brazil.”

Indigenous leaders met with French President Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of the COP23 climate talks in Bonn on Wednesday. In the brief conversation, the European leader said he expects the conditions for the indigenous peoples to improve with their acceptance into the process.

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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That is how Luciano Evaristo, director of Brazilian environmental law enforcement agency Ibama, described the latest developments in the fight against deforestation.

The last major incident took place on 27 October, when a mob torched Ibama’s office and four pickup trucks in Humaitá, in the state of Amazonas, after a crackdown on illegal mining operations in Madeira river. Another environmental agency, Chico Mendes Institute of Conservation of Biodiversity (ICMBio), also had its office destroyed. In response, the federal government sent army troops to patrol the city.

“We have lost 14 pickups this year alone criminal attacks against Ibama,” said Evaristo on the sidelines of UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany.

Surprisingly enough in the context of Brazil’s deep economic crisis, Evaristo says money is not the problem. Ibama’s budget has been reinforced this year with a Norwegian and German-backed anti-deforestation fund, and the environment minister increased its budget for next year by 11%.

The problem, he says, is a lack of cooperation from local and state governments. “There is evidence of a planned action with the participation of local politicians and organized crime,” said Evaristo.

Feature: Climate finance helps ayahuasca culture protect remote Amazon forest

The head of the environmental protection agency accused state governments of granting excessive logging permits to shadowy companies, allowing them to launder illegally felled timber for export to the US, Europe and other international markets.

“It’s permit on on top of permit. There is not enough forest for so many permits,” he said. “When the Amazon state governors arrive here in Bonn and say ‘we will commit to zero deforestation’, ask how many permits they are granting.”

Mato Grosso and Acre states and the federal government signed deals totalling $123 million with donors for REDD+ anti-deforestation projects in Bonn on Tuesday. Germany is disbursing €61 million ($71m) and the UK £40m ($52m) towards the programme.

According to the Ibama director, Mato Grosso is one of the most problematic states. Lumber mills operate on the edge of indigenous territory despite a ban on logging within, Evaristo said.

In a WhatsApp conversation, the chief of staff for Mato Grosso’s environment secretary, André Baby, expressed surprise at Evaristo’s declaration. “We are focused on improving environmental management in Mato Grosso. We invited Luciano and Ibama to be with us. If they want to audit our database, they are welcome,” he said.

Christiane Ehringhaus, coordinator of the REDD+ programme for development bank KfW, which is channeling the German funds, said Mato Grosso’s size – three times the area of Italy – and multiple actors presented some challenges.

“The fight against deforestation is getting more and more difficult,” she told Climate Home News. “We would like to see more cooperation between federal government, states and municipalities.”

Crowds watch the Ibama office in Humaitá burn

Environmental law enforcement is highly unpopular in the Amazon, especially in areas where cattle, and illegal logging and mining are the main economic activities. More often than not, local politicians are led by people involved in environmental crime.

It is no surprise, then, that the mayor of Humaitá blamed Ibama for the riot. A few weeks ago, another mayor from Ourilândia do Norte went to Brasília to lobby the government to let gold miners to work in indigenous territory.

Brazilian environmentalists have long warned of bogus logging permits and corrupt local officials undermining efforts to protect the rainforest. They say president Michel Temer has made the situation worse, pardoning environmental vandals to protect his precarious hold on power.

In the past two months, the lower house of congress voted twice to reject corruption charges against Temer for allegedly taking bribes, thus avoiding a Supreme Court trial that could have unseated him. In exchange for parliamentary support, Temer has adopted several measures favouring the influential “beef caucus”.

Report: Brazil’s Temer extends amnesty to Amazon land-grabbers

In July, for instance, Temer signed a law that legitimizes land-grabs from as recently as 2011 and allows squatters to buy title deeds at discount rates.

“The state, which has to take care not only of the law but of those 70 million hectares [of Amazon public lands, twice the size of Germany] is passing the message that crime finds shelter, that illegal activity is tolerated,” said Marcio Astrini of Greenpeace Brazil during the debate in Bonn.

“We have gone to the very dangerous situation where lawlessness is making the laws. This is perhaps the worst picture possible, because the message that reaches the person committing the crime is of total permissiveness.”

One of the founders of Greenpeace Brazil, Paulo Adario, said the Amazon is living a “wild west” moment”: “Crime in Brazil has become the rule because the examples come from above. The criminals are in office.”

Unabated, Evaristo, who has earned a reputation as a hardline Amazon champion, promised to step up his work. To a round of applause, he pledged: “We’re going to fight. You can be sure, we will go until the end, no matter the bullets they shoot at us. We will lower deforestation. Crime cannot win.”

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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The central American country’s chief climate negotiator, Paul Oquist, is set to be the next co-chair at the multi-billion-dollar Green Climate Fund (GCF).

According to three diplomatic sources, Nicaragua lobbied for the position, but the fact that it had not signed up to the UN pact that underpinned the fund made the appointment awkward.

At the same time, left-leaning Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega did not want to be seen as taking Donald Trump’s side. With Syria promising this week it too will join the Paris pact, the US is now the only country in the world to reject the 2015 landmark initiative.

Oquist’s appointment at the GCF is due to be confirmed in February. The 24-member board appoints two co-chairs, representing developed and developing countries, for 12-month terms. Oquist is currently an alternate board member.

He has ministerial status in Nicaragua and is close to the first lady and vice-president Rosario Murillo. Both are in charge of the country’s climate change policies.

In 2015, Nicaragua refused to join the Paris Agreement on the ground it was too timid. “We’re not going to submit, because voluntary responsibility is a path to failure,” Oquist told Climate Home News at the time.

Under a rotation scheme, the next co-chair from the developing world will be nominated by the Latin American and Caribbean nations. The current co-chair is Saudi Ayman Shasly. The co-chair is mainly responsible for steering the meetings, with decisions reached by consensus.

GCF is based in South Korea and meets three times a year. It started with $10 billion of funding pledged by developed countries to support poorer countries with low carbon growth and resilience to climate change impacts. At the last meeting in October, it approved 11 funding proposals valued at $393 million.

Oquist did not respond to a request for comment.

Climate Home News’ reporting at Cop23 is supported in part by the European Climate Foundation.

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After my second cup of the bitter psychedelic brew, the rainforest that surrounded Nova Esperança (New Hope) village slowly started to acquire new colours, formats, and sounds.

Banisteriopsis caapi vine, the main ingredient in ayahuasca, has long been used for Amazon ethnic groups in religious and medicine ceremonies. In the past few years, the 1,000-strong Yawanawá have found a new purpose for it: to fight deforestation.

“All our medicine comes from the forest. Uni [ayahuasca, in the Yawanawá language] reconnects us with our essence. It is an instrument that controls our way of thinking, of seeing nature”, says Biraci Brasil, chief and spiritual leader of Nova Esperança, reachable only through the small and winding Gregório river, a 6-hour boat trip from the only paved road in this remote part of Acre state.

It was the first time I had drunk ayahuasca. The drug, made famous in the west by writers such as William Burroughs, draws seekers deep into the forest. Those I meet come from the cities of Brazil, as well as the UK, Turkey, the US and Australia. They look for authentic experiences and are willing to pay. In recognition of the link between forest protection and a strong culture and economy, international climate money is now helping the villagers attract more tourists upriver.

Brazil: “Beef caucus” takes over indigenous policies

Regulars users say ayahuasca feels more special in the forest than within the walls of a temple. While I can’t compare it myself, it was incredible how the cicadas’ buzz grew louder and closer and the trees looked taller and mysterious against the night sky. I even saw a face in a banana leaf bathed by the moonlight. With my eyes closed while laying on the floor, there was a flow of indigenous faces and drawings moving slowly amid bright colours.

I was cautious enough to stop drinking before ayahuasca starts to cause purging, a common reaction. I was done by midnight, but most Yawanawá and Brazilian and foreign visitors kept drinking and dancing to local song until the day rose again.

The traditional use of ayahuasca was interrupted when north American Christian missionaries arrived in the Yawanawá territory during the 1960s. All of a sudden, almost everything they knew was transformed into sin: the language, the naked body, the rituals and the sacred drink.

Festival goers and villagers bathe in the Gregório river, near Nova Esperança (Photo: Fabiano Maisonnave)

The Yawanawá have suffered from contact with non-indigenous people since the early 20th century, when rubber barons exploited their communities. “We never earned anything, we only worked. My aunts, my mother and my family were abused because of alcohol,” recalls Ubiraci.

Things began to change in the 1980s. After studying in the city and better understanding how Brazilian society worked, Bira and other Yawanawás leaders obtained demarcation of their lands, expelled the missionaries and the other invaders and began the resumption of ancestral traditions. Sixteen years ago, the village of Nova Esperança created a festival, attended last week by this reporter. Over five days, the Yawanawá perform ancient rituals and plays, including the ritual use of ayahuasca.

Special investigation: Forest diamonds

Outside influence is now strictly controlled: there is (unstable) internet and generator-produced energy, but churches and non-indigenous music are banned. Alcohol is strictly forbidden, and the single TV set can only be used for football matches.

The festival has become a source of income. Every year, visitors from Brazil and abroad come to the festival at a charge of $920 per person. In other parts of the year, they also accept tourists for weeklong stays.

While at Nova Esperança travellers find surprisingly good infrastructure for such a remote place, with sheltered huts and collective refuges. During the festival, two canteens offer breakfast, lunch and dinner for the visitors. 

Much of this, as well as the festival’s expenses for transporting tourists up the river, comes from the German-funded Rem (Redd Early Movers) programme, which is administered by the left-leaning State of Acre government. Although it follows the framework of the results-based Redd+ system, Rem is an international cooperation project, and not a carbon offset scheme.

Acre is one of the most heavily forested states in the Amazon – 87% is still covered by original forest, whereas the Brazilian Amazon as whole has 80% preserved. Home of forest preservation champions such as rubber-tapper leader Chico Mendes and former minister of environment Marina Silva, the state has had notable success backing novel forest protection schemes. 

The festival, originally only for villagers, now allows a limited number of outsiders to join, for a fee (Photo: Fabiano Maisonnave)

“Historically, Acre had already pioneered many socio-environmental policies, including in relation to indigenous peoples. In this sense, Acre was the natural candidate, since it had both very good results in reducing deforestation as well as programmes and partnerships that made it possible to make the resources reach different beneficiary groups”, says Christiane Ehringhaus, coordinator of the REDD for Early Movers Program of the KfW Development Bank. 

In the first phase, Rem has disbursed €25 million to various project, including the villagers at Nova Esperança. Now the programme will be replenished with another €10m from the German government and about €20m from the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to be announced on 14 November, during the “Amazon-Bonn Day” at the COP23 UN climate talks in Bonn. KfW will support a similar project with larger, more problematic Mato Grosso state, Brazil’s leading soy producer. Since 2015, Germany also funds a similar programme in Colombia.

In Acre, Rem allocated about €1.3m to projects in 24 indigenous lands, benefiting about 7,000 people, according to the state government.

In the Nova Esperança village, about €24,000 was spent on tourism infrastructure two years ago. In addition, the Yawanawá received €6,600 to buy gas for the boats, Festival Yawá’s highest cost.

Bira hopes that what he calls “spiritual tourism” will help the village to maintain Yawanawá culture and prevent invasion by cattle farmers. 

Resisting cattle in Acre is a growing challenge, according to American anthropologist Jeffrey Hoelle, author of of the book “Rainforest Cowboys – The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia.” Pastoralists have already moved into some nearby protected areas, such as the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve.

Brazil: Worst land-related killings in decades expose Amazon’s lawless frontier

“You could say there is a culture war occurring in Amazonia. It’s not like a material land war with vast areas of forests being burned or the massacre of groups or communities. It’s more of a cultural battle related to the value of nature and how the land will be used. But it is also between rural-urban, local-outsider, small-large producer and production for subsistence vs production for accumulation,” says Hoelle, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Across Acre, he says, you cross back and forth on the “fish-barbecue frontier”. As the surrounding land becomes overrun by cattle, traditional fish dishes are replaced by meaty churrasco. Where indigenous culture falls, so does the forest.

“Acre and much of Amazonia have been involved in this culture war since the opening of the region to settlement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. People came to Amazonia for a piece of land and by land they meant that which could be cultivated. The forest was and in many cases still is not seen as economic resource, but as an obstacle to unlocking the economic benefits derived from cattle or agriculture,” he says.

There is strong evidence to back up the efforts to bolster indigenous culture. Whereas the official deforestation rate for the Amazon as whole was 16% less this year, Acre reduced by 34%, ranking third among the nine Amazon states.

The Rio Gregório indigenous land, shared by the Yawanawá and Katukina peoples, lost only 1.11% of its 2,023 km2 of original forest in the same timeframe. All the figures are calculated by the government-sponsored National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

“Here, instead of Catholic or evangelical churches, there is ayahuasca spiritual leadership. Bira is to be congratulated”, indigenous leader Alvaro Tukano, who attended the festival this year. “The best way to preserve the Amazon is through spiritualism, which they draw from the strength of the waters, the ayahuasca and the forest.”

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The figures comes from the new edition of Seeg (the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Forecasting System), launched on Thursday by the NGO Observatorio do Clima. Seeg uses data produced by government reports and research centres to predict emissions.

Emissions from land-use change grew 23% in 2016, accounting for roughly half of all greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by Brazil. This was driven by a 29% increase in Amazon deforestation during the period between August 2015 and July 2016, according to calculations by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), a federal government research centre.

Report: Brazilian Amazon lost 660,000 hectares of forest in last year

The recession has led to a decrease in emissions from most other economic activities. The largest drop came from the energy sector, a 7.3% fall.

Last week, INPE released new data showing that deforestation reduced 16% in the following period, but analysts warned that the effect of president Michel Temer’s pro-agribusiness policies, including a pardon for land-grabbers, are still to be felt. 

“The lack of deforestation control, especially in the Amazon, has led us to emit 218 million tons of CO2 more in 2016 than in 2015. It is more than twice what Belgium issues per year,” said researcher Ane Alencar of IPAM (Institute of Environmental Research of the Amazon), who was in charge of the calculations of emissions caused by change of land use. “This is dramatic, as deforestation is mostly illegal and not reflected in the country’s GDP.”

(Credit: Seeg)

Last year, Seeg estimates Brazil released 2.278 billion gross tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), compared to 2.091 billion in 2015. This is 3.4% of the global total, Brazil remains the seventh largest polluter on the planet.

After falling for almost a decade from their highest point of 3.9 billion tonnes in 2004, Brazilian emissions have risen again in the last few years. Under the Paris climate agreement, the country has pledged a 37% reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by 2025. Given the large reduction in deforestation achieved under previous governments, much of this work is already done. But the country still needs to cut back on carbon.

Amazon forest fires: Pushing climate change ‘beyond human control’

While the major source of extra emissions was from forest loss, emissions from agriculture also rose by 1.7%. Agribusiness is by far the main source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country: 74%. According to Seeg, if Brazilian agribusiness were a country, it would be the eighth largest polluter. Between 1990 and 2016, the land use sector in Brazil emitted more than 50 billion tons of CO2e, equivalent to one year of global emissions.

The government of Brazil has been contacted for comment.

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This week, president Michel Temer’s administration said the 16% reduction from the previous period was a victory against illegal clearing. But environmental groups cautioned against such optimism and criticised the government for stripping protections from forests to aid farmers.

The figure, calculated by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has been used for a range of environmental policies. It is also the base to calculate the level of Norwegian aid to fight deforestation in the Amazon – if the rate increases, the funding dwindles.

In a press conference held on Tuesday, environment minister José Sarney Filho said the reduction showed Brazil had regained control over deforestation in the Amazon as a result of more effective enforcement of the law.

“When people who do illegal deforestation know that the Brazilian state is present, they reduce their activities. This is what’s happening”, said Sarney Filho.

Temer: Brazil’s pro-beef president, betrayed by the industry he courted

The minister also defended the federal government’s record from heavy criticism by environmentalists. He said the government abandoned the idea of opening a 46,450 sq km area in the Amazon for mining and refused to grant an environmental license to build a big hydroelectric dam in the Tapajós river.

But in the long term, Sarney Filho warned the state could not combat deforestation only through enforcement measures. There are about 25 million people living in the Amazon under strict environmental laws. The best option, he argued, is to promote environmental forest services that bring profit through conservation, such as the UN’s REDD+ carbon credit programme.

The reduction in the deforestation rate came as a relief for Temer, who came to office last year after the controversial impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, faces several corruption charges and has an approval rate as low as 3%.

In order to avoid the same fate as his predecessor, Temer made an alliance in Congress with the powerful “beef caucus”, which according to investigative journalism website Agência Pública controls 207 out of 513 lawmakers in the lower chamber. Ultimately, it’s this alliance that keeps him in office. But it has come at a price.

Report: Greenpeace plane crashes in Brazilian Amazon, Swedish woman killed

Among other measures, Temer signed a generous legislation to regularise more illegal claims, froze indigenous lands demarcations and has tried to reduce conservation units in order to legalize land-grabbers. As recently as this week, facing a new vote in Congress that could end Temer’s rule, the government relaxed the definition of slave labor, an old demand of the beef caucus.

Brazilian environmentalists showed little, if any, enthusiasm at the lower deforestation rate. They argued the reduction was not enough after a 29% increase in 2016 and said the negative effects of many Temer policy decisions were still to be felt.

NGO Observatorio do Clima published a list of ten reasons of why the announcement should not be celebrated. Besides the government’s embrace of the beef caucus agenda, it mentions this year’s long drought, with a record of 106,000 forest fires in September alone, as well as a lack of policies beyond enforcement, as the Sarney Filho himself admitted.

“The 2017 Brazilian Amazon deforestation rate released by the federal government is still alarming. We lost 6,624 sq km, despite the fact that there is already nearly 100,000 sq km of pastureland under-utilised in the Amazon,” said Paulo Barreto, a researcher with NGO Imazon, which has a parallel deforestation monitoring that had already forecast the slowdown of the deforestation. “The burning of this area released greenhouses gases equivalent to 2.3 times all the 49 million cars in Brazil during a year.”

“The drop is likely to be the result of some restoration of enforcement efforts by the government, but also due to the reduction of cattle prices associated with the Brazilian recession. Several studies have shown that the cattle price is a good predictor of the deforestation rate since pastureland occupies nearly 65% of the cleared areas,” said Barreto.

According to the researcher, the government’s July decision to pardon grileiros, or land-grabbers, “sends a clear signal to grileiros and environmental criminals: Keep deforesting illegally. Politicians will pardon you.”

Compounding the grim picture painted by environmentalists, on Wednesday, researchers at the University of Vermont released a study that found mining operations were an alarming new driver of deforestation in Brazil. Mostly illegal, mines were responsible for 10% of Amazon rainforest deforestation between 2005 and 2015.

A Climate Home News investigation in September showed how diamond miners, with the aid of the Catholic church, had devastated one indigenous reserve.

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The death of Carolina Nyberg-Steiser, a Swedish Greenpeace employee, was confirmed by the NGO in a statement. She was 29 years old.

Nyberg-Steiser “was very dear and respected for her serious work”, said Patrik Eriksson, programme director of Greenpeace Nordic.

“She came to Brazil to get a closer look at Greenpeace Brazil work in the Amazon in order to think about new possibilities of engagement in the protection of the forest. She was on a flight on Tuesday to see first hand the beauty of the forest,” he said.

“Carolina will be deeply missed by all of us, and our thoughts are with her family.”

The other passengers – three Greenpeace staff and the pilot – were only lightly injured and have received medical treatment.

The seaplane, a Cessna Caravan 208, fell at around 11:00 local time, the Brazilian Air Force said. The wreckage was found in a river near the Novo Airão municipality, 180km west of the city of Manaus.

The accident occurred in Anavilhanas National Park, which is formed by dozens of islands in the Rio Negro in the northern state of Amazonas.

This is the second time a Greenpeace plane has crashed in the Brazilian Amazon in two years. In 2015, an aircraft of the same model suffered an accident near Manaus. The two crew members had only minor injuries.

“At this time, we are concentrating all our efforts on providing assistance to the victims and their families and also collaborating with the competent bodies that are investigating the event,” Greenpeace Brazil said via its press office. “Greenpeace is in mourning.”

Rescuers at the scene of the accident on Tuesday (Photos: unknown)

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But in recent years, Brazil’s government, which holds the largest swathe of the biggest tropical forest in the world, has privileged economic interests over preservation, according to one of the world’s leading experts on the region and its environment.

Philip Fearnside, a US-born professor at Brazil’s National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA), has researched the Amazon for three decades. In an interview with Climate Home in his office in Manaus, he explains how climate change is driving forest fires through the most important forest on earth, creating a cycle of carbon emissions that threatens to push beyond human’s capacity to control it. He also criticises Brazil’s government for their favouring of industry and explains the country’s peculiar relationship to its own laws.

CH: What do we know and what don’t we know about climate change in the Amazon? 

PF: The climate has changed. Major droughts and major floods are both more frequent. The water levels in the rivers have gone to extremes. Higher floods than ever before and also more lower water levels in the low water periods than ever before, so it’s something that is obviously different from what the patterns had been in the past century.

Philip Fearnside (Photo: INPA)

This is most likely the result of different phenomena that are linked to global warming, which, of course, is an anthropogenic phenomenon. You have two major things that cause droughts here. El Niño, which causes droughts in the northern part of the Amazon region, and you have Atlantic dipole, which causes droughts in the southern part.

This Atlantic dipole has been increasing in frequency at a tremendous rate, much faster than El Niño, which is also increasing. We had a major drought in southern Amazonia in 2005 and another one in 2010, just five years later.

It’s linked to warming of water on the surface of the tropical part of the Atlantic, north of the Equator. And that is explained by a decrease in the amount of dust over the Atlantic ocean. There’s a lot of dust that comes from the deserts in Africa and there have been particles coming from pollution in Europe, too, which is also decreasing.

But the rainfall in the world is increasing. As you have the oceans warming up all over the world, so there’s more water evaporating. And water has to fall somewhere as rain. Rainfall has increased over the Atlantic Ocean. So that is washing out this dust that is in the atmosphere, removing what was a shield that was keeping some of the energy from the sun from reaching the water in the ocean.

Report: Brazil’s Temer extends amnesty to Amazon land-grabbers

Removing a lot of that shield allowed the water to warm up more, so more air is going to rise. Warm water also has consequences for hurricanes, but for Amazon droughts the problem is that more air is rising when the sun is right above that patch of water. The place on the Earth where the sun is beating down directly migrates north and south of the equator, and for part of the year this location is in the tropical north Atlantic.

This air cools as it goes up, and it will dump a lot of rainfall right there, and the rising air then divides, with part going north and part going south. The air travels for 30 degrees latitude and then falls back to the surface of the Earth, after which it makes a circle and goes back to where it was before. 

If there’s more air going up, it means there also more coming down in the other side of cycle. The place where the air is coming down, is over the southern part of the Amazon, in places like Acre and Rondônia. The descending air is dry, creating a drought when it comes down.

Also, the warmer water in the tropical north Atlantic pushes the place where the air comes down even farther north. This means it’s even farther into the Amazon, where it’s drying things out. This is what gives you an Atlantic dipole drought. 

Those things together give a pattern: extreme drought in the southern part of the Amazon. Forest fires in Acre, which is not a place that is used to forest fires like the northern part of the Amazon is. This is a kind of drought that is expected to increase rapidly over the next few decades. 

What is the impact of El Niño?

In the fourth report of the IPCC there is a clear statement that, with more global warming, there will be more “El Niño-like conditions”. This is the key phrase. It’s not El Niño itself, but rather means a big patch of warm water in the Pacific Ocean, which is what causes El Niño.

The problem is to get climate models to agree on the next step, which is how the warm water affects currents of air in the atmosphere and, therefore, droughts and floods in different parts of the world. The climate models don’t agree enough to be able to say all these are linked to global warming.

But one of the impacts of a patch of warm water in the Pacific that you can see that very clearly  is big droughts in the northern part of the Amazon. For that, there is no doubt – it’s very obvious.

Report: Brazil’s pro-beef president Temer, betrayed by the industry he courted

Every time there is a big patch of warm water in the Pacific Ocean, you have a big drought and forest fires in the Amazon. That happened in 1982, 1997, 2006, and 2015. El Niño produced huge forest fires in the Brazilian state of Roraima and in Venezuela.

These fires represent something that the forest simply can’t stand up to. The Amazon forest isn’t adapted to fire, it’s not like the savannahs in central Brazil, where the trees have thick bark and are adapted to fires. Amazon forest fires kill a lot of trees. The fire moves through the understory of the forest, burning leaves and twigs on the ground. It’s not what people imagine of a forest fire. People think of the Disney movie Bambi, with the whole forest burning up. That’s what you get in pine forest, not an Amazonian forest. But even that little line of fire will kill a lot of trees. It moves very slowly, so it takes times to pass each one of the trees.

Forest Diamonds: How the Catholic church helped open up a forest to miners

So, the next time you have an El Niño, there will be a lot of dead wood in the forest, and that’s firewood that’s going to burn. It’s a vicious cycle that gets started and after three or four fires, basically you don’t have a forest anymore, just a bare area with a few scattered trees here and there.

This is very dangerous for the climate because it’s something that doesn’t depend on people deciding what to do. You can decide not to burn fossil fuels and not to cut down trees with chainsaws. But if a forest is being killed because there are more forest fires, it’s something happening beyond human control. And there’s a limit to how much humans can do to control global warming. 

What are the policy changes that are taking place in the Brazilian Amazon?

There are many problems with changes in public policies in the Amazon. There were also problems in the previous presidential administration, but they certainly became more grave in the year we have had this administration [under Michel Temer]. There is a series of bills and proposed constitutional amendments passing through the national Congress that would basically, eliminate environmental licensing, open indigenous lands to mining, and make it easier for land claims to be legalised. 

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These things lead to more construction projects for highways, dams, mines and so forth without the environmental and social restrictions that have helped slow down the most damaging kinds of development.

The economy as a whole is moving towards extraction of physical products and exporting minerals, timber and soybeans, things like that, as opposed to manufactured goods and other things that have less environmental impact.

How easy it is to change policies in Brazil?

The politics in Brazil are different to other countries in various ways. One important thing is that it is very easy to pass constitutional amendments. It’s very different from the US, for example, and other places. The constitution has been amended 95 times since it came into effect in 1988. This opens the way to have all sorts of fundamental things change.

There are other aspects of Brazil that are strange. There are many laws that are simply never enforced. Laws are tested to see whether they will actually be enforced or not. This happens over and over with regulations on deforestation, environmental licensing and whatever. People in other countries just assume that whatever is the law is what actually is going to happen. That isn’t the case here. 

Brazil has decreed that it requires indigenous people be consulted over projects that would directly affect them. It is part of convention number 169 of the International Labour Organisation, which was converted into a Brazilian law in 2004. It’s simply not enforced. 

Michel Temer (Photo: Diego DEAA)

You’ve got a dam that just got its final approval a couple of weeks ago: the São Manuel Dam, which didn’t have any sort of consultation with the indigenous peoples. It’s only 700 metres from an indigenous area.

There are other things that are different. One is putting things in “contingency” status. This simply does not exist in North America or Europe. Here you have a budget for the environment ministry, for example, at the beginning of the year, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually going to get that money. Sometime in the middle of the year, the money runs out and so the government puts different areas in contingency status, which means they don’t get the money they were promised until the government collects more taxes and has money to give out. 

In practice, there is much less money for enforcing environmental laws that you would imagine just looking at the federal budget. So, lots of things can happen between a public policy being set up and having the actions actually happen in practice. This is certainly evident in many different ways in the environment area.

The post Amazon forest fires pushing climate change ‘beyond human control’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

In 2013, they became the first indigenous population in the world to sell carbon credits under the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (Redd+) scheme. Then, last year, they discovered their territory is rich with diamonds, and all hell broke loose.

The Paiter-Suruí’s 248,000-hectare Seventh of September territory sits atop one of the largest unexplored diamond reserves on earth. Mining in indigenous territories has not been regulated in Brazil and remains illegal. But that hasn’t stopped diamond hunters from rushing into the area.

As the miners moved in, the carbon credit programme collapsed. The mining and the Redd+ scheme and the fate of this remote part of the Amazon forest rest on the competing visions of two cousins and leaders in the Paiter-Suruí community, Almir and Henrique Suruí.

In 2009, Almir realised a dream to provide a long term, sustainable income for the community through carbon farming. The Suruí Forest Carbon Project was realised, after he managed to unite other Paiter-Suruí – even Henrique – to support the Redd+ carbon credit programme and impose and enforce a logging moratorium. The scheme was supposed to run for 30 years and save more than 7m tonnes of CO2.

For a while, it worked. In 2013, the Paiter-Suruí sold 120,000 tonnes of carbon offsets to Brazilian cosmetics giant Natura – the first deal of its kind struck by an indigenous group anywhere on earth. The following year, Fifa bought the same number of credits in order to reduce the footprint of the 2014 football world cup in Brazil.

But Henrique, who admitted to this reporter in 2015 he was involved in illegal logging in an interview published in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, was not convinced. The proceeds from the carbon were not being divided up evenly he said, and began to campaign against his cousin, trying to convince villagers to reject the scheme.

Almir’s credit programme needed the support of the community, who had to prevent forest clearing in order to remain eligible for payment. It was a struggle of will. Then three years ago, Henrique enlisted an ally – God.

Brazilian NGO, the Institute for the Conservation and Sustainable Development of the Amazon (Idesam), has been involved in the carbon credit project from its outset. Senior researcher Mariano Cenamo said opponents inside the Paiter-Suruí were heavily influenced by the Catholic Church-backed Indigents Missionary Council (Cimi).

Created in the 1970s to aid indigenous resistance against Brazil’s military dictatorship oppressive policies, Cimi is linked to left-leaning groups inside the Catholic Church. Usually, it denounces actions by big farmers and it is one of the most important supporters of the indigenous struggle for land rights. It is the most influential pro-indigenous lobby group in Brazil, even among non-Catholic groups like the Paiter-Suruí.

Cimi officially opposes carbon credits, on the basis that they commodify the indigenous relationship to their land. It is widely rumoured that in 2015 Cimi’s then president Bishop Erwin Kräutler, who advised Pope Francis on the writing of his encyclical on climate change Laudato Si, had convinced the pontiff to include a passage that condemned carbon credits as “new form of speculation”.

“Cimi promoted the conflict between two different groups inside a territory in order to support a ideological position,” said Cenamo of the Paiter-Suruí. “They strengthened a group that destroyed a world-renowned project. It’s scary.”

Ivaneide Cardozo, the head of local NGO Kanindé, which works closely with the Paiter-Suruí, also criticised the Catholic organisation. “Cimi contributed to increase deforestation in the Seventh of September. It strengthened the party that cuts down the forest.”

The campaign began in late-2014 when Cimi’s newspaper Porantim, one of the major indigenous publications in Brazil, ran a interview with Henrique in which he accused Almir of misleading the Paiter-Suruí and described an apocalyptic situation. “Life in the community has radically changed. It’s no longer allowed to hunt, to fish, to plant and to produce handicraft.”

A few weeks later, accompanied by a Cimi lawyer, Henrique Suruí had an audience in the national attorney general’s office for indigenous affairs (Portuguese acronym MPF) in Brasília, some 2,000 km away from Seventh of September. According to official records, Henrique told the government the carbon project was “weakening” the Paiter-Suruí.

In an article about the meeting, Porantim said the carbon project was “loathed” by the Paiter-Suruí and depicted Redd+ initiatives as the “politics of green capitalism and neocolonialism”, a position the Catholic group adopted in 2012. As a result of Henrique’s lobbying, the prosecutor’s office in the state of Rondônia began monitoring the carbon project.

Five months after the meeting, in July 2015, this reporter visited the territory and could not verify the claims made by Henrique about the loss of community life. But by that time support for the carbon project was already dwindling: only 10 out of 25 Paiter Suruí villages were still participating. Disagreements over how to redistribute the money divided the Paiter-Suruí, and some leaders resumed alliances with illegal loggers.

Meanwhile, diamonds had been discovered. Recent operations from the federal police and Brazil’s government environment agency Ibama reveal the extent of the mining. Police footage, published here for the first time, shows the devastating scars left on this pristine part of the Amazon. Last year 20 hectares were stripped by mining, according to the last monitoring report of the Suruí Forest Carbon Project.

The money generated by diamonds has fuelled the conversion of forest into pasture. According to monitoring by NGO Imazon, between August 2015 and July 2017, Seventh of September had the seventh worst deforestation rate among 419 indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon. Between 2015 and 2016, the territory lost 653 hectares of forest, a deforestation rate 256% higher the Redd+ project’s allowable limit. Leading to the decision to suspend the programme.

“We couldn’t generate more carbon credits because the deforestation rate was larger than predicted”, says Almir Suruí, the indigenous leader behind the scheme, in a telephone interview with Climate Home. “We couldn’t control it.”

Redd+ is the UN climate treaty’s major tool for combating the destruction of forests in developing countries. Projects like the Paiter-Suruí’s become eligible to sell off credits for avoiding the carbon emissions caused by deforestation if they adhere to UN-sanctioned forest management guidelines.

Climate Home has asked both Fifa and Natura if there was a clause in their contract with the Paiter-Suruí that guaranteed the ongoing protection of the forests. The cosmetics company explained that the carbon credits it purchased were certified between 2009-2012, so it no longer monitors the project. Fifa has not replied.

The inability of an existing and high profile project to deter miners highlights the difficulty of combating deforestation in an Amazon region increasingly falling prey to legal and illegal industries.

Communities are faced with the choice of fast cash or slower, more careful sustainable income. Convincing them to take the long road is tough. The extent to which the Paiter-Suruí exemplify this was revealed during police raids on their territory this year. According to a police report, seen by Climate Home, the main indigenous leader behind the diamond mining is Henrique Suruí.

“He only thinks and moves in accordance with mining interests,” said the report. “On the day of the raid, the federal police found heavy machinery in the mining area, which was under supervision and leadership of Indians. It is beyond doubt that they belong to the group led by Henrique Suruí.”

In a phone interview, Henrique told Climate Home the police accusation that he was a lynchpin for current mining operations was “a big lie”.

“The guilty one is the federal government. The mining is a disgrace that affects our culture and our land. I blame the white man,” he said. “The carbon project is better than mining, it preserves the environment, but the money it generated should have been distributed for the whole community.”

By phone, Cimi executive secretary Cleber Buzatto, told Climate Home the relationship with Henrique was no longer close after the suspicions of his involvement in illegal activities. He said that, during Cimi’s involvement with him, there was nothing linking Henrique to forestry or mining. 

“It was quite the opposite, he had always exercised an important leadership in Rondônia state,” said Buzatto. “He was interviewed under these circumstances. He expressed his criticism about carbon credits, which, in our opinion, was well-grounded, especially due to the concentration of the programme in Almir Suruí’s inner circle.”

Almir, however, said that the explained Henrique’s involvement with logging to Cimi as soon as the interview came out, to no avail. “I simply can’t understand why Cimi support the total annihilation of our land instead of a preservation project,” he said.

With the carbon credit scheme dead, Henrique’s concentration has shifted to legitimising mining in Seventh of September. In June, he travelled to Brasília and petitioned Brazil’s minister of justice Torquato Jardim to regularise mining in indigenous lands. He was joined by leaders from the neighbouring Cinta-Larga group, whose lands also sit atop the diamond deposit.

“As everybody wants to dig for diamond in our lands, we want it to be without the white man’s involvement,” he told Climate Home.

In a letter to the government in June, indigenous mining advocates argued most of the money from legal mining goes to non-indigenous businessmen and miners, while indigenous peoples working in their own lands are subject to police repression. So far, there has been no official response.

In a written response to Climate Home, Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Bureau (Funai) refused to comment on the demand. Funai claimed mining in the Paiter-Suruí land had stalled and that the government was working to stop it spreading.

Buzatto said Cimi did not endorse mining activities in indigenous lands, especially when done by non-indigenous actors. “Our hope is that indigenous people generate income from traditional practices and a respectful relationship with the environment.”

Meanwhile Cimi’s attention has turned to another carbon credit project. In the neighbouring state of Acre, a pioneer carbon credit agreement with German development bank KfW, which involves several indigenous territories, has also met fierce opposition from the Catholic institution.

On 31 July, 57 indigenous leaders and 11 indigenous organisations signed a letter criticising Cimi’s campaign against the Acre scheme. “It come as a surprise us that Cimi’s chapter in Acre is making intrigues, acting in bad faith and provoking discord and conflicts among us,” said the letter.

Buzatto said carbon credit programs tend to undermine collective organizations and change indigenous relationships to nature into mercantile transactions. “Historically, the indigenous peoples take care of the environment in a free and grateful way, as they see themselves as part of it. The Redd imposes a radical change, as it commodifies this relationship with nature.”

Regarding the controversy in Acre, Buzatto said most of indigenous leaders in the region opposed Redd+. He said that the subscribers of that letter were directly linked to the programme.

The Cimi leader also sent Climate Home a letter signed by six leaders of the Jaminawa ethnic group. They claim the letter criticising Cimi did not represent them and demanded an explanation of how money paid by KfW had been used.

“We oppose any form of economic exploitation of indigenous territories by third parties, even if there is some level of participation of some indigenous people, regardless of who they are”, says Buzatto.

Cimi opposition and ethnic internal divisions are not the only difficulties faced by carbon projects in Brazil. The federal government has refused to officially sanction the UN’s Redd+ scheme on the basis that it is a threat to the country’s sovereign power over forest policies.

Cenamo, from the NGO Idesam, said the lack of official support for carbon credit schemes stopped international funding reaching those charged with protecting the forests, such as the Paiter-Suruí, leaving forests exposed to exploitation.

“In ten years, Brazil achieved the largest reduction of carbon emissions, but we were not able to convert this into a sustainable development model for the Amazon… On the other hand, deforestation keeps generating profit,” he said. “The recent increase in the deforestation rate is a result of this.” (Brazil’s deforestation rate has increased by 24% and 29% in the past two years after falling for a decade.)

As the schism among the Paiter-Suruí widens, Almir said that his followers, a minority inside the ethnic group, are exploring alternatives to carbon. “Some of us went to Europe and struck deals to export coffee and Brazilian nuts. We will try to survive from sustainable agriculture and handicraft. We will find alternatives.”

Almir Suruí and the ‘arc of deforestation’

One of Amazon’s most important indigenous leaders, Almir Suruí was born in 1974, only five years after his tribe was first contacted. Despite a language barrier, he graduated from university in biology. Since, he has traveled the world as an advocate for the Amazon, meeting world figures such as Prince Charles and US senators. In 2013, the UN nominated him a ‘forest hero’ for his efforts to protect the environment.

Almir’s trajectory is perhaps the best symbol of the Paiter-Suruí’s adaptation to the Western civilisation. Few people in the world have lived through such a dramatic transformation in so little time. 

When they were contacted, the Paiter-Suruí had an estimated population of 500, which was reduced by half in the 1970s, mostly due to measles but also after violent confrontations with settlers brought to the region by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Now, the population stands at about 1,400.

In 1983, after a long fight, the federal government finally demarcated their land. By then the region was undergoing one of the fastest settlement processes in history, largely due to the construction of the World Bank-financed BR-364 highway, which attracted tens of thousands settlers from Brazil’s southern, Europeanised states.

Engulfed by the 2,000-mile-long ‘arc of deforestation’, the relentless advancement upward of the agricultural frontier in the Amazon, the Paiter-Surui and other neighbouring indigenous territories soon became green islands surrounded by a sea of pasture, soy plantations, roads and cities.

Connected to cities by road and to the electrical grid, their villages are now far from what most people think an Amazon village looks like. While their language remains in use, it has become an increasingly difficult task for elders to teach it to the younger generations, many of whom end up living in the city in order to attend high school and college.

In 2007, in search of economic alternatives to illegal logging, Almir started to see the carbon market as a potential means of financing their 50-year forest management plan, created in 2000 to strengthen local control over the territory and to develop sustainable economic activities. In 2009, he launched the Suruí Forest Carbon Project.

The post Forest diamonds appeared first on Climate Home News.

This cycle was completed again last week, when embattled president Michel Temer signed legislation, previously approved by Congress, to regularise more illegal claims.

Under the new law, anyone who appropriated Amazon land before 2011 may be excused, an extension from the previous 2004 limit. The maximum area of claimable land has been increased from 1,500 hectares to 2,500 hectares per person. What is more, the cost of title deeds has been discounted by up to 90%, from a government index that already values the land at below market rates.

Temer rubber-stamped the act as he tries to gather support in Congress, which is deciding whether to authorize the Supreme Court to try him for corruption – a first for a sitting Brazilian president. It will help him keep the influential “beef caucus” onside, which has 207 out of 513 lawmakers in the lower chamber.

Justifying the changes, the federal government argued they would bring relief to thousands of low income families living in remote areas of the Amazon.

“This policy improves the fight against deforestation and land-grabbing, as the public lands will have a proper destination in the region. We understand that there is no such a notion that once you occupy a public land, you will be regularized”, said José Dumont, secretary of land regularization in the Amazon, during a press conference on Tuesday.

Report: Norway rebukes Brazil’s Temer over Amazon deforestation

Two days later, in another measure heavily backed by the beef caucus, Temer sent to Congress a bill that could strip 349,000 hectares (862,000 acres) of Jamanxim National Forest, in the Amazon state of Pará. The goal is to regularize land-grabbers that invaded part of the conservation unit, which may lose 27% of its area.

The move came just weeks after Temer, under pressure from environmentalists, vetoed a bill approved by Congress that would reduce 37% of Jamanxim’s area.

“Temer governs for his own good and not for the country. Without any shame, he is selling out the Amazon in exchange for votes against his impeachment. This bill is absurd, it demoralizes the Brazilian State and shows that he is willing to do anything to continue in the presidency,” said Márcio Astrini, coordinator of public policies at Greenpeace Brazil.

In response to the news, land-grabbers in Jamanxim area lifted a two-week long protest that blocked BR-163 highway for most of the days. During the blockade, they burned eight new 4X4 pick-ups that were being delivered to Ibama, Brazil’s environment agency.

They might well be happy with the turn of events. NGO Imazon calculates the two bills combined will gift squatters a windfall of $160-190 million, instead of punishment for their environmental crimes.

This is based on comparing the market value of one hectare in that region ($566) with the regulated price for title deeds to be charged by the government. In Incra’s (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) spreadsheet, the minimum price of unused land in the region is $211/hectare. The new law provides that, for titling, land-grabbers will be charged between 10% and 50% of that amount.

“There is no technical or legal explanation to change the base year from 2004 to 2011. It was basically a political decision,” adds Brenda Brito, a researcher from Imazon.

Imazon is still analysing the impact of the new legislation in the Amazon as a whole, but Brito fears it will encourage others to invade public vacant lands in the Amazon, which comprises 71.3 million hectares, an area twice the size of Germany.

Another environmental NGO, Ipam, predicted the deforestation if the reduction of Jamanxim forest takes effect. The method was to project the deforestation rate of the surrounding area in the 27% of the forest that will become a less strictly regulated APA (Environmental Protection Area, in the Portuguese acronym). It concluded that, by 2030, the deforested area will more than double: on top of 113,737 hectares already lost, a further 138,549 hectares of forest will disappear.

The post Brazil’s Temer extends amnesty to Amazon land-grabbers appeared first on Climate Home News.

As he toured the Scandinavian nation to drum up investment for his struggling economy, Temer was reminded that Norway’s major foreign aid support is conditional on protection of the Amazon rainforest.

In a leaked letter preceding Temer’s Oslo visit, Norway’s environment minister Vidar Helgesen criticised a recent rise in deforestation and moves by Congress to cut environmental protections.

“I believe that it is important to express concern when concern is due,” wrote Helgesen, addressing his Brazilian counterpart, José Sarney Filho.

“As you are aware, a set of policy measures that have caused strong public reactions in Brazil are making their way through Congress, including the revision of the environmental licensing criteria and the roll back of of protection of significant tracts of the Amazon. In parallel, budgets for key institutions that provide vital services for forest protection, are being cut, and their mandate to operate effectively is put under pressure.”

Report: Brazil’s Temer vetoes rollback of Amazon forest protections

Norway is in a special position to deploy such strong diplomatic language. Brazil is the largest recipient of its foreign aid. Since 2009, Norway has pledged $1.1 billion to the Amazon Fund, which has financed anti-deforestation and sustainable development projects such as an agroforestry management and production project with the Ashaninka people and satellite monitoring.

“The big picture of the last decade is very positive. Brazil has set an example to the world in combating deforestation. Now, we are seeing a worrying development in the last couple of years. We’ve had a very good and frank dialogue with Brazilian authorities about what can be done to get back on track,” Helgesen told this reporter on Monday in Oslo.

While he said environmental policies “are entirely up to the Brazilian government,” the Norwegian minister added aid payments are based on results. “If deforestation is reduced, there is money coming from Norway. If deforestation increases, there will be much less money, because it’s about honoring results of nationally-based policies.”

Although data is not yet available for this year, Norway’s payments through the Amazon Fund are likely to be significantly cut, following a 29% deforestation increase in 2016.

On Tuesday, Temer vetoed a bill from Congress that would have reduced protections across 1.4 million acres of land, much of it in the Amazon. Observers suggested he was trying to improve his image for Norway, after the plans sparked an international outcry.

That reprieve for the forests may be temporary, with Sarney Filho announcing on Sunday he was developing another bill to deregulate a different area. Farming and mining interests continue to wield significant influence in Brazil’s politics, lobbying for the right to expand operations into forested areas.

During Temer’s state visit to Norway, the two environment ministers meet for the second time this year. There was a previous meeting in Brasília in March.

The post Norway rebukes Brazil’s Temer over Amazon deforestation appeared first on Climate Home News.

In April 2017, environmental agents fined him $9.2 million for converting into pasture 7,586 acres of Jamanxim National Forest, in Brazil’s Amazon. That didn’t stop the destruction. Next month, Cordeiro got another fine, now at $4.6m, for chopping down 3,618 acres of pristine forest next to the first area.

Cordeiro, however, has never been found. He supposedly lives in Curitiba, a regional capital some 2,800km south of Jamanxim. His name appears only in the Environmental Rural Registry (CAR, in Portuguese) alongside plots of land in the forest he claims to own. That federal database requires all rural properties to register, but does not run background checks.

Setting up straw men or fall guys is the modus operandi of land-grabbers in the Amazon. They allow fines for stripping forests to accrue against other names while avoiding punishment for their environmental crimes.

Last week, this reporter tried to interview one of Cordeiro’s neighbours, Nelci Rodrigues. She is head of the Vale do Garça Association, which represents 186 squatters who claim land inside Jamanxim National Park.

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Rodrigues, her husband Jaime Zaminhan and their two sons claim 17,050 acres of the park, according to the CAR database. They admitted that they took over federal land without paying for it, saying they were lured to the region by federal government policies created during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship. However, they seized the land, where they raise cattle, in 1998, 13 years after the regime’s end.

Rodrigues said she knew Pedro Cordeiro in person, whose land claim in the national forest is next to hers, but refused to help this reporter to locate him.

The conversation didn’t last long. Angered by questions about his family, Zaminhan interrupted the interview and expelled reporters from his comfortable home equipped with a swimming pool, in the Castelo dos Sonhos district, a few miles from the national forest.

“You’re just a journalist. Are you coming into my house to sacrifice my family? You pay attention, mate. You’d better leave, I rule here”, he said.

Instead of pursuing those actually behind the largest deforested area inside Jamanxim, the Brazilian federal government appears to be about to let Cordeira and several other supposed environmental offenders off the hook.

Last May, the Congress approved a bill that opens 1.5m acres (almost 6,000 sq km) in the Amazon to private property, pasture, agriculture and mining activities, in a move heavily supported by the powerful “beef caucus”. Now, president Michel Temer has until 22 June to sanction or veto it.

Report: Brazil’s Temer urged to veto rollback of forest protections

Most of the land set for resignation, 1.2m acres, is in Jamanxim National Forest, which would lose 37% of its area. The rest belongs to the neighbouring Jamanxim National Park, which would lose 12% of its total. These areas, which include land claimed by Cordiera and Rodrigues, would be downgraded to APA (Environmental Protection Area), the lowest protection category in Brazilian conservation system.

Inside APAs, private land ownership is legal, this would legitimate the farming practices of squatters, real and fake. Deforestation is again rapidly increasing in Brazil after it had declined for almost a decade, with pastoralists the main driver.

According to law, rural properties in the Amazon have to keep at least 80% of their area covered by natural vegetation. In practice, though, this is rarely respected, as fines such as those given to Cordeiro are rarely enforced and the federal government has regularly granted amnesties to farmers caught illegally clearing their land.

Defenders of the changes to the land designation, such as senator Flexa Ribeiro, argue the APAs will allow the regularisation of small squatters who lived inside the limits before the creation of the parks.

“There was no reduction [in protection], there was only recategorisation,” said Ribeiro. “We have changed the conservation unit so that the activities can be developed in the areas already occupied for decades.” 

But land claims in Jamanxim National Forest usually involve large areas – an average of 4,378 acres per land-grabber according to the 2009 federal census. That is a considerable size even in the Amazon.

Squatters regularly live outside the boundaries of their claims. In Novo Progresso city, the gold miner and mayor Ubiraci da Silva, claims 2,380 acres inside the National Forest. He owes $580,200 in environmental fines. Last week, environmental authorities caught his employees deforesting inside the park again. He didn’t answer interview requests.

Unlike the national forest, the Jamanxim National Park has no permanent human occupation, it is one of most preserved forests in the Amazon. The 249,576 acres slated to become ‘APA Rio Branco’ has less than 1% of its surface deforested, according to calculations done by environmental NGOs Imazon and ISA with satellite images.

A more plausible explanation for its creation than the normalisation of residents who sometimes don’t even exist are the rich mineral reserves the area is likely to contain – especially gold, but also diamond and cassiterite – said social scientist Mauricio Torres, coauthor of a book that examines land-grabbing and deforestation in the region.

“The portion that the bill intends to amputate from the Park and transform it into a ‘generous’ APA has no settler occupation. The area is the victim of logging and of a new wave of illegal mining. One can wait and watch the area to be taken by land-grabbers and the environmental crimes that happens today. It will increase deforestation”, said Torres.

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Among his many concessions, he made one of their number the minister of justice, froze indigenous land demarcations, agreed to withdraw the environmental license requirement in large agricultural areas and even rubber-stamped land grabbed illegally inside protected areas.

But his pliability has been repaid with betrayal. This week, Temer’s government was brought to its knees by JBS, the world’s biggest meat producer.

On the evening of 7 March, in a meeting at the official residence in Brasília, Joesley Batista, chairman of JBS, secretly recorded Temer allegedly endorsing the executive’s payment of a bribe to silence the former Congress president Eduardo Cunha, who was jailed last year on corruption charges.

Report: Troubled meatpacker JBS sanctioned over Amazon deforestation

On Wednesday, O Globo newspaper revealed the conversation, throwing Brazil into political chaos and uncertainty.

The move is part of a plea bargain that the Batista family, who owns JBS, is negotiating with federal prosecutors. The meatpacker giant and its sister companies are the subject of five separate federal police investigations, including an international scandal over the alleged bribing of inspectors to issue health certificates for poor-quality meat.

On Friday, the Supreme Court released explosive new information from the plea bargain that alleged Temer, along with former presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, had received millions of dollars worth of bribes from JBS.

The revelations left Temer facing down calls to resign, including from several former allies. Raised to power after Rousseff’s controversial impeachment process, he has single-digit approval ratings and is trying to promote an unpopular austerity agenda in the middle of Brazil’s hardest economic crises in decades.

Brazilian meatpacker JBS exports beef, chicken and pork across the world (Photo: Fuera de Foco)

JBS is well-known for its political connections. During the terms of leftist presidents Lula da Silva and Rousseff, the company secured generous billionaire-subsidised loans from BNDES, the state development bank.

The meatpacker has generously rewarded the political world. In 2014, JBS was the largest donor in the general elections, handing out $108.6m to finance campaigns from across the political spectrum. Its money aided the election of 162 out of 513 members of congress in the lower chamber. The company has also admitted to off the books payments.

Many of these lawmakers belong to the 200-strong beef caucus, the most powerful pressure group in Congress. That includes Osmar Serraglio, named minister of justice by Temer in February. In his 2014 campaign, Serraglio received $59,000 from JBS – his single largest donor.

As a minister, Seraglio remained attached to the beef caucus agenda. Literally. In his first 55 days in office, 82 out of his 305 official meetings were held with members of the beef caucus, formally known as Agricultural Parliamentary Front (Portuguese acronym, FPA). He met five times with its head, lawmaker Nilson Leitão.

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Serraglio, whose responsibilities include oversight of indigenous policies, has also halted the demarcation of new indigenous land claims, a priority for the beef caucus, and cut the budget and personnel of Funai, the national Indian foundation.

In response, indigenous leaders, who have never had a formal meeting with Serraglio, mobilised some 3,500 Indians to a protest in Brasília last month – an impressive share of Brazil’s total indigenous population of roughly 900,000.

A few days later, Funai president Antonio Costa was sacked. In his farewell interview, he accused Serraglio of being “the minister of one cause, the agribusiness” and said the foundation was “under a dictatorship”.

Even when the federal government moves against JBS interests, the conglomerate’s influence is clear. In March, minister of environment José Sarney Filho, publicly apologised to the beef lobby after Ibama, the environmental protection agency he commands, embargoed two JBS processing facilities for buying tens of thousands of cattle from illegally deforested areas in the Amazon.

In a video, Sarney Filho said he had no knowledge of the raid and that it had happened at an “inopportune moment”, as it “could weaken the agribusiness sector, a major exporter”.

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In recent months, during negotiations over a new environmental license law, Sarney Filho acceded to an exemption for large agricultural areas, stripping away protections, although he opposed a more flexible system in which the states would have the final word.

Temer’s alignment with the beef caucus’ agenda is also clear-cut in Congress. Last week, the government’s majority in the lower chamber approved a bill that downgrades 1,475 acres of protected areas, most of them in the Amazon, legalising land-grabbers and allowing mining activities.

At the same time, Temer was negotiating with the beef caucus a big debt pardon to the agricultural sector in order to gather votes for a controversial welfare reform project.

With the political crisis, all these deals in Congress will come to a halt. So far, the FPA has not decided whether to continue supporting Temer or join the chorus for his resignation.

Report: “Beef caucus” takes over indigenous policies in Brazil

But the impasse is unlikely to bring relief to an environment reeling from rapidly increasing deforestation. If Temer resigns, it is unclear whether elections will be held, or, as is constitutionally correct, Congress will choose. Either way, the new president will face similar pressure to comply with the powerful agricultural agenda. No president in recent years has failed to kiss their ring.

If Temer stays, he will be even more reliant on the Congress, and as a consequence the beef caucus, to keep him in power.

So why has Temer, so compliant with agribusiness, been betrayed? One reason is that JBS and the beef caucus are not the same thing, according to Alceu Castilho, head of the watchdog Agribusiness Observatory. He said several lawmakers oppose JBS’ quasi-monopoly of Brazil’s slaughterhouses. Moreover, the mammoth conglomerate is not as influential in the FPA as the soybean and corn sectors.

A Pantaneiro cowboy leads a herd of cattle in Mato Grosso, Brazil, where indigenous peoples are locked in a battle with farmers over land (Photo: Bernard Dupont)

“The interests of the ruralist group – represented in part by the FPA – are broader than those of a specific company. They are sectorial. But they coincide in common themes such as debt forgiveness, removal of legal obstacles, including environmental licensing, the defence of agribusiness lands, as well as in the fight against indigenous lands and conservation units. There are those in the ruralist group who uphold the interests of JBS competitors. But everyone knows how to walk together when it is convenient,” said Castilho.

One clue as to JBS’s motivation for betraying Temer is the conglomerate’s intention to move its headquarters overseas. In the process, the Batista family plans to move to the US, where it makes almost half of its global sales. In order to comply with both Brazilian authorities and US Department of Justice demands, the family agreed to cooperate with several investigations.

“In selling out Temer’s government and, in the process, throwing Brazil into the abyss of political, financial and economic uncertainties, Joesley Batista wants to secure his and the group’s passport to leave the country”, writes Valor Econômico newspaper columnist Vanessa Adachi.

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