During his campaign, Bolsonaro promised to push indigenous people to “develop”— arguing that marking out indigenous territories for indigenous people only serves to separate them from the rest of the population, like “animals in a zoo.” During a televised national address Friday night, he repeated that sentiment. “To protect the Amazon, command and control enforcement actions are not enough. We need to give opportunity to all of this population so they can develop like the rest of the country,” he said.

Across Brazil—not just in the Amazon—the forest is being cleared and then burned to make room for farming and ranching. While Bolsonaro has even gone so far as to suggest that environmental nonprofits set the fires intentionally, defenders of the forest point to a more likely culprit—a “day of fire” announced by a group of farmers and ranchers in the Amazon. Although plenty of fires were burning before this moment, these enthusiasts intended to show Bolsonaro that they were “ready to work,” that is, ready to clear the land and make it productive for farming and ranching.

Read: The Amazon cannot be recovered once it’s gone

Sometimes forest land is slashed and burned by its owner: In the case of the current Amazonian fires, two-thirds of the fires started since January have been on private lands. But according to data from the Instituto Socioambiental, in the past month there were 3,500 fires in 148 indigenous territories in the Brazilian Amazon. “This is a pretty shocking statistic,” says Christian Poirier, the program director for Amazon Watch. He says that indigenous people are responding by “trying to expose what is happening on their territories and demanding that the government take action.”

Helena Palmquist, who handles many indigenous affairs for the public ministry of the Amazonian state of Pará, says, “I’ve been receiving many complaints in the past few months of many invasions on indigenous land.” These intrusions are happening, she adds, “even in areas that have been guaranteed in Brazilian law to be free from invasion.”

The Brazilian constitution offers protections to both the environment and indigenous peoples, but local enforcement agencies often fail to safeguard either. “Enforcement has essentially been paralyzed in the Bolsonaro administration,” Palmquist says. She says that indigenous people often complain to the police that they hear tractors or see smoke coming from the forest but that the federal police don’t seem to do anything. “The indigenous people are on the front lines. They are feeling the greatest impact from the destruction of the forest,” she told me.

“Indigenous people have always been protecting biodiversity and nature; we’ve always been working for this,” says Aldilo Amancio Caetano Kaba Munduruku, a representative of the Munduruku people, in the upper Tapajós River area of southern Pará state. “And today many white men are invading the territory of the Munduruku."