- After a decade-long struggle, Apyterewa was officially demarcated as a protected Indigenous territory in 2007, exclusively for the use of the Paracanã people who’ve called it home for generations.
- But despite these protections, Apyterewa has lost about 5% of its forest cover since 2007 as outsiders continue to move in and clear land for pasture, mines and timber.
- Deforestation seems to have picked up pace in recent months: satellites detected 83,445 deforestation alerts between Aug. 24 and Nov. 16, with several weeks registering “unusually high” levels of forest loss.
- Civil society advocates blame the Bolsonaro administration for the surging deforestation in Apyterewa and other protected areas: “We have a scenario of a weakening of the environmental agencies, which has been really profound,” said Danicley de Aguiar, an Amazon campaigner with Greenpeace. “It’s as if we threw a knife in the heart of Brazil’s environmental policy.”
A thin plume of smoke rises above the lush canopy of the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, deep in the Brazilian Amazon. A couple of men feed the flames engulfing a wooden bridge serving as a gateway into the vast territory. On the other side, uniformed agents tasked with protecting the territory look on helplessly as the fire severs their access.
Nearby, an angry mob closes in on another handful of agents, firings guns into the air and hurling insults. “We are not going to back down, no,” one man can be heard saying in a video of the incident, which took place outside an enforcement post in Apyterewa last week. “We’re going to burn your cars!”
Apyterewa stretches across 773,820 hectares (1.9 million acres) in the Amazonian state of Pará, nestled in the municipality of São Félix do Xingu, Brazil’s ranching heartland. After a decade-long struggle, it was officially demarcated as a protected Indigenous territory in 2007, exclusively for the use of the Paracanã people who’ve called it home for generations.
But across the territory, outsiders are building communities — complete with churches, schools, shops and clinics — even though they have no legal right to the land. Indigenous rights advocates say illegal loggers, miners, soy farmers and cattle ranchers are invading this territory with unprecedented force, as they seek to exploit its riches.
“Activity had stopped for a while — but the deforestation has now returned with full force,” said Ricardo Abad, analyst at the Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA), an NGO that defends environmental diversity and the rights of Indigenous people. “It’s an area where clearing is just exploding.”
Apyterewa has lost about 5% of its forest cover since 2007, according to satellite data from the University of Maryland visualized on Global Forest Watch. And, in recent months, the razing of forests seems to have picked up pace: satellites recorded 83,445 deforestation alerts between Aug. 24 and Nov. 16, with several weeks registering “unusually high” levels of forest loss.
Even the end of Brazil’s dry season, when the clearing of forest typically grinds to a halt, didn’t seem to stop illegal incursions into the area. More than a third of the deforestation alerts were detected the week of Oct. 5, the data show. The clearing of forest in Apyterewa accounted for half of all deforestation across Brazilian Indigenous lands in September, according to Rede Xingu+, a network of environmental and Indigenous groups working in the Xingu Basin.
The number of fires recorded in the region has also jumped, with NGOs pointing to land-grabbing and burning by farmers, who are setting degraded fields ablaze or expanding their pastures further into the forest. Some 3,565 fire alerts were picked up in Apyterewa over the last six months, according to NASA data visualized on GFW; 2,971 of those have occurred since August.
In theory, Apyterewa should have been shielded by the neighboring Área de Proteção Ambiental (APA) Triunfo do Xingu, a vast conservation region created in 2006 as a buffer of protection for vulnerable Indigenous territories beyond its boundaries. But, as large swaths of Triunfo do Xingu have been cleared by cattle ranchers in recent years, the pressure has mounted on Apyterewa and other Indigenous territories around it.
Advocates point to a climate of impunity and say invaders are growing bolder, encouraged by the friendly tone coming from the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has railed against environmental protections, slashed enforcement budgets and vowed to open up Indigenous lands to development by miners, farmers and ranchers.
“These signals from the government of tolerance towards deforestation and towards land-grabbing — this is feeding the invasion of these Indigenous lands,” said Danicley de Aguiar, an Amazon campaigner with Greenpeace.
A Supreme Court ruling also threw the future of Apyterewa into question earlier this year, when it opened the door to negotiations between Brazil’s government and the municipality of São Félix do Xingu, which is pushing to reduce the size of the Indigenous territory. The hope that Apyterewa’s boundaries will be redrawn in the favor of illegal settlers is driving invasions, according to Abad.
“This only increases the sense of impunity around these illegal activities,” he said. “It gives more fuel to the fire that is already raging in Apyterewa.”
Fighting off invasion
For nearly four decades, Apyterewa has been trapped in a bitter tug-of-war between the Indigenous people who call it home and illegal invaders looking to exploit its riches. The first incursions into the territory can be traced back to the 1980s, when plentiful mahogany trees began luring illegal loggers into Apyterewa’s dense, untouched forests.
Loggers carved illicit roads into the forest, which soon paved the way for illegal miners called garimpeiros, who descended on the region in the 1990s, slicing deeper into the forest in a frenzied search for gold. Over time, some invaders settled in the region, razing ever-larger swaths of jungle to build communities, plant crops and convert land to pastures.
“One thing opens up the way for another,” Abad said. “And it leads to larger and larger clearings of the forest, especially when agricultural activities arrive.”
Even after the federal government officially demarcated the territory in 2007, invasions continued. It seemed the Paracanã people had finally won the battle in 2016 when a court ordered the removal of all non-Indigenous settlers as a condition for the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, which lies some 300 kilometers (186 miles) from Apyterewa on the Xingu River.
But these evictions have still not been fully carried out. Under the government of Dilma Rousseff, in office from 2011 to 2016, police forces began to remove some of the roughly 2,000 families illegally occupying the land. But the process soon ground to a halt amid legal challenges by the settlers. In 2018, under pressure from local politicians, then-president Michel Temer, Rouseff’s successor, abandoned plans to remove the remaining 400 families from the territory.
“The process was advancing — but when there was this action that paralyzed the police forces, many of these settlers returned,” said Eduardo Barnes, Indigenous policy specialist at The Nature Conservancy, noting there have been no eviction operations since 2018. “Now, there are thousands of people there illegally, who should have been removed.”
The delay in evicting illegal occupants from Apyterewa has fueled a wave of fresh incursions into the territory over the last two years, according to Indigenous rights groups. They say most of these new invaders are there to harvest valuable tree species, clear pasture for cattle, and mine gold or cassiterite, the main ore from which tin is derived.
The COVID-19 pandemic, meanwhile, has forced many Indigenous people into isolation and created an opportunity for invaders. “COVID has paralyzed much of the monitoring that Indigenous people were doing,” Barnes said. “And there are groups that have seen an opportunity to move deeper into an area that they think the state will eventually recognize as theirs.”
Weakening enforcement
Under the leadership of President Bolsonaro, who took office in 2019 from Temer, hopes are waning that the land will be cleared of illegal occupants. The far-right populist has spoken out against the demarcation of protected territories and has pushed for a bill to open up Indigenous lands to wildcat mining. While the legislation has stalled amid criticism, Vice President Hamilton Mourão affirmed earlier this month that Brazil “must move ahead” with the bill.
Environmental enforcement has also been weakened on Bolsonaro’s watch. IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency, saw its budget slashed repeatedly last year, and the president has tried to stop its agents from destroying the equipment they confiscate during raids in the Amazon. Earlier this year, three high-ranking IBAMA officials were fired after their teams burned equipment confiscated during a mass crackdown on illegal miners in an Indigenous territory.
“We have a scenario of a weakening of the environmental agencies, which has been really profound,” de Aguiar said. “It’s as if we threw a knife in the heart of Brazil’s environmental policy — effective enforcement.”
In Apyterewa, IBAMA’s reduced presence has been keenly felt. In May, the environmental agency halted most of its operations in the territory, even though activists say these actions were helping stop encroachment and deforestation.
“The impact that IBAMA’s activities had there was fantastic,” Abad said, noting the operations were successful in dispersing illegal miners and destroying their equipment. “But, after IBAMA left, these people all came back.”
Invaders, meanwhile, have been emboldened, as demonstrated in the video that surfaced last week showing a group of illegal settlers surrounding an inspection base in Apyterewa, harassing inspection agents and setting fire to a wooden bridge leading to the Indigenous territory.
New strategy
As the power of IBAMA dwindles, the Brazilian government appears to be shifting the task of protecting the Amazon to the country’s military. With international criticism mounting amid a fresh surge in fires across the Amazon this year, the government responded with a military mission in May, dubbed Operation Green Brazil 2. The operation, initially meant to last a month, was recently extended until the end of April 2021.
So far, the Ministry of Defense has allocated some 418.6 million reais ($76.9 million) toward the operation — nearly three times what IBAMA normally spends on environmental enforcement each year.
The operation had resulted in fines totaling 1.84 billion reais ($340 million) as of Nov. 19, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense said in an emailed statement. The government has allocated 410 million reais ($76 million) for the operation, with just over half spent so far. Some 104,000 hectares were embargoed and 879 pieces of equipment were dismantled, including mining engines, tractors and excavators. Agents seized vehicles, drugs, arms, gold, helicopters and illegal timber, the spokesperson said
Yet environmentalists say the results of the extravagant mission have been limited, claiming there is no tangible punishment doled out for infractions. Most fines end up not being paid and invaders just resume their illegal activities once military forces leave the area, they note.
“I’m not seeing an impact. If anything, we are going backward 20 years in terms of environmental enforcement,” de Aguiar said. “Because if you have the feeling that you won’t be punished, you will breach the law.”
The data seem to echo this. In October, deforestation across the Amazon rose 50% from a year ago, according to data from Brazil’s space agency, INPE, which monitors deforestation in the country. INPE picked up nearly 90,000 fire alerts in the Amazon through the end of October — more than the number of hotspots recorded in the whole of 2019.
“This is not a natural occurrence — these fires don’t naturally happen in the Amazon ecosystem,” said Martha Fellows, a researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), whose work is focused on Indigenous lands. “I think it’s clear to everyone that, if there is any measure being taken, it has not been sufficient.”
Mounting pressure
As deforestation continues to chip away at Apyterewa, the impact may have far-reaching consequences.
“The border along this mosaic is always what suffers most,” Fellows said. “And Apyterewa is suffering all of the impact right now.” She added that Apyterewa’s importance extends outside of its borders, as “it is serving as a buffer to all the other neighboring Indigenous territories.”
For now, the territory is still providing protection for still-intact Indigenous lands like Araweté Igarapé Ipixuna and Koatinemo. But, late last year, the opening of an illegal road crossing through Apyterewa and winding north through other Indigenous lands, signaled that invaders may be poised to move deeper into the Xingu Basin, a rich ecological area made up of some 28 conservation areas and 18 Indigenous territories.
Indigenous rights advocates warn that it remains impossible to halt the destruction of Apyterewa’s forests, and the threat it brings to Indigenous people, without fully expelling invaders who are encroaching on the protected area and closing it off to outsiders.
“The key thing that Apyterewa needs is the removal of these occupants — by force, if need be,” Barnes said. “Until then, the deforestation and destruction of Apyterewa will only keep going.”
Banner image made using satellite imagery from Planet labs.
Editor’s note: This story was powered by Places to Watch, a Global Forest Watch (GFW) initiative designed to quickly identify concerning forest loss around the world and catalyze further investigation of these areas. Places to Watch draws on a combination of near-real-time satellite data, automated algorithms and field intelligence to identify new areas on a monthly basis. In partnership with Mongabay, GFW is supporting data-driven journalism by providing data and maps generated by Places to Watch. Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence over the stories reported using this data.
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