The fight to save the Amazon is a matter of life or death for those trying to protect it

Updated

Amazonian tribes and local campaigners who stand up to the illegal networks that are destroying the world's largest tropical rainforest are being threatened, attacked and even killed.

A Four Corners investigation has found the Brazilian Amazon is being destroyed at rapidly increasing rates from a combination of illegal logging, beef and soy farming and deliberately lit fires.

The Amazon has been described as a lawless land with criminal networks running major illegal logging operations with impunity. Cleared land is then used to farm cattle to meet the global demand for meat and to grow lucrative soybeans for animal feed.

Considered the world's most biodiverse rainforest, the Amazon is home to hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species.

The immense rainforest also plays a vital role in regulating the world's climate, storing an estimated 100 to 120 billion tonnes of carbon.

Under Brazil's new right-wing government led by President Jair Bolsonaro, funding has been cut for environmental agencies while enforcement has been drastically reduced on the ground to police illegal logging and deforestation.

Those trying to save the Amazon from destruction have never felt so unsafe.

Deep in the Amazonian jungle in north-eastern Brazil is the Arariboia Indigenous territory.

It is the home of the Guajajara people, who live among the rainforest.

With nearly 20 per cent of the Brazilian Amazon now destroyed, the Guajajara, like other Indigenous tribes across Brazil, are on the frontline trying to save what is left.

The Forest Guardians are a patrol group that spends days and weeks traversing the rainforest in an effort to stop illegal loggers and farmers from entering the protected reserve and stealing precious hardwood trees that sell for up $2000 dollars each.

"We are fighting against the criminality, we are saying this is our resistance," said Franciel Guajajara, co-chief of the Forest Guardians.

Brazil researcher for Human Rights Watch Cesar Munoz said the Forest Guardians protect the rainforest with "whatever they have".

"They go on patrol on foot. They go on boat, sometimes with motorcycles, but some of them don't even have the money for the gas."

The loggers around Guajajara territory operate with impunity.

Just one month before Four Corners visited the Guajajara, 26-year-old Forest Guardian Paulo Paulino came across illegal loggers in the forest.

They shot him dead.

A logger was also killed when Paulo's fellow Forest Guardians returned fire and the Guajajara villagers now live in fear of revenge.

"The destruction of the rain forest is big business. It is done by criminal networks that usually have armed militias, armed men to protect their business, that often involve corrupt officials," said Mr Munoz.

"Being a defender of the Amazon is really dangerous.

"We have a government that has undermined law enforcement in the Amazon, and in fact effectively, given a green light to criminal networks that are both destroying the forest and attacking anyone who stands up to defend it."

Over the past decade, more than 300 Brazilians who tried to protect the rainforest have been killed.

One of them was Dilma Ferreira Silva, a well-known environmental campaigner. Last March, the 43-year-old mother and her friends were tortured before they were killed.

Police said when local farmer suspected Dilma had reported his illegal land clearing to authorities, they allege he paid four men to ambush her at home.

Dilma's sister Francisca Silva de Quadros is not confident justice will be delivered and she's terrified she will be targeted for speaking out.

"I'm fearful. I had to leave my house, I had to leave. Today I live around others people's houses. I keep changing cities as I'm scared," she said.

The link between fires, illegal logging and timber exports

Last year, the world watched in horror as large swathes of the Amazon went up in flames. Fires happen every dry season when farmers clear land but in August 2019 more than 30,000 fires burned simultaneously across the Brazilian Amazon.

By January, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon had soared 85 per cent, with more than 9,000 square kilometres of rainforest destroyed — the highest rate in at least 10 years.

Last year's fires represented a 200 per cent increase from the previous year — and the vast majority of them were deliberately lit.

Former chief of the Brazilian Forest Service Tasso Azevdeo described the fires as "part of the deforestation process."

The process starts when illegal loggers enter a territory and cut down the most valuable trees.

Then, in order to fully clear the land, they burn the remaining degraded forest that is left.

Cristiane Mazzetti, Brazil's Amazon Campaigner at Greenpeace, said after a fire, land is often used for cattle ranching or agricultural purposes with soy or other grain.

Para State has the highest rates of illegal land clearing in the Amazon.

Unsealed roads are traversed by logging trucks that are said to be controlled by criminal networks.

Some of the Amazon's trees end up in decks and flooring in Europe, the US, Japan and even Australia.

More than $75 million dollars of Brazilian timber products are imported by Australian businesses each year.

But Greenpeace said it is impossible to guarantee a clean supply chain for any timber coming from Brazil.

"Right now, it's very hard to say that the supply chain is clean. It's hard to say that any timber that comes from Brazil is legal, has a legal origin," said Ms Mazzetti.

Demand for beef driving up land clearing

Brazil's BR-163 is the road credited with opening up the Amazon for development.

Today, the destruction of the rainforest fans out alongside the highway.

South from Para State down the BR-163 is the cattle and logging town of Novo Progresso, infamous for the threats environmental agents receive when they visit.

The farmers in Novo Progresso are proud of the cattle industry they've carved out of the rainforest.

Beef is what they live, eat and breathe and 78 per cent of the town voted for President Bolsonaro.

Deputy Mayor Gelson Dill believes previous governments have unfairly punished farmers in the Amazon.

Mr Dill himself is among the many in Novo Progresso fined for illegal land clearing.

"Fires, clearing areas, everything results in an environmental fine. It's a great injustice done to the farmers of this region," he said.

Local producers have benefited from a massive jump in demand for beef from China, which buys about a third of Brazil's beef exports.

From April to June last year, more than 15 square kilometres of rainforest right next to Novo Progresso, within the Jamanxim National Forest was destroyed — that's more than 1 million trees.

Experts sent hundreds of alerts to Brazil's environmental agency calling on them to intervene, but nothing was done.

"It's difficult to imagine right? You have like you know 30, 40, even 50 people with chainsaws cutting down the forest here. So it's massive and fast," said Mr Azevedo.

Brazilian scientist Carlos Nobre was a lead author of the ground-breaking Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report into climate change which helped win the organisation the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

He said the Brazilian Government has failed to stop the rise in illegal activities.

"There was absolutely almost no action to counter that illegality," he said.

Politicians and police bribed to turn a blind eye

Novo Progresso's police chief Conrado Wolfring said criminal logging networks are colluding with local politicians — and have even infiltrated his force.

"Unfortunately, there are policeman involved in this. They receive bribes," he said.

"There are politicians involved in this making money. So it is very hard to fight something when the people who are supposed to be fighting it are also part of it.

"Many people have made a fortune with the destruction of the Amazon. And for that, people go to great lengths. If they need to take a life, they will," he told Four Corners.

Further down the BR-163 highway in northern Matto Grosso state, the destruction of the Amazon is almost complete, with vast tracts of the forest replaced with soy fields.

Brazil is now the world's largest producer of soybeans, doubling its production of the grain in the past decade.

The beans grown here aren't used for tofu or soy milk. Eighty per cent of Brazil's soy is exported to Chinas as animal feed for poultry, pigs and cattle.

Farmers are flouting an international agreement signed more than a decade ago that was supposed to stop newly deforested land being turned into soy crops.

Not far from the soy field, the Kayapo tribe are hanging on to their last piece of the Amazon.

"We realised that the soy already killed some fish because of the pesticides they put in the soil," said community patrol leader Mydjere Kayapo.

"The forest is being destroyed, things are changing. It doesn't rain as much anymore in the village and the river doesn't fill up as high," said Kayapo Chief Ireo.

President Bolsonaro has recently introduced legislation that would open up Indigenous reserves for commercial mining.

But the Kayapo tribe said they will fight to the death to protect the Amazon.

"For our future, for our grandchildren, we are ready for combat. If we have to die to protect our reserve, we are ready for that fight," said community patrol leader Mydjere Kayapo.

For decades, scientists have warned of an Amazon "tipping-point" when the forest begins to emit more carbon than it absorbs and no longer generates the rain it needs to survive.

"This post-deforestation climate in the southern portion of the Amazon, that would become savanna-like climate, no longer a forest-like climate," Dr Carlos Nobre told Four Corners.

Dr Nobre said the tipping point for the Amazon could be reached within the next 15 to 30 years.

"We talk about 20-25 per cent total deforestation. We are at 17 per cent now. We are, let's say, 15-30 years into passing, exceeding this tipping point," he said.

Watch the full investigation on ABC iview.

Topics: fires, disasters-and-accidents, rain-forests-and-forest, environment, air-pollution, pollution, pollution-disasters-and-safety, foreign-aid, government-and-politics, brazil

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