Blood Timber, a Mongabay series on illegal logging and cattle ranching in the eastern Brazilian Amazon, has received an honorable mention at the recent Banrisul ARI Journalism Award, a prize recognizing excellence in journalism in Brazil.
The three-part series by journalist Karla Mendes revealed a correlation between environmental crimes and killings of Indigenous Guajajara people, some of them members of the Forest Guardians, in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s Maranhão state.
In 2023, four Guajajara individuals were killed, and another three survived attempted killings, making it one of the deadliest recent years for Indigenous people in the Arariboia Indigenous territory. Violence against Indigenous people has persisted in this part of Brazil, with the same number of recorded killings in 2016, 2008 and 2007.
“We Indigenous are dying. There’s no justice. I’ve never seen a white man who killed an Indigenous [person] imprisoned. Never,” local Indigenous man José Maria Paulino Guajajara, told Mongabay. He added, “My mother was killed by a logger. My brother-in-law was killed by a logger, his name was Santino. And now it was my son.”
Jose Maria’s son, Paulo Paulino Guajajara, was killed in an alleged ambush by loggers in November 2019. Paulo was part of the Forest Guardians, a self-organized group of frontline environmental defenders who have taken up arms to defend their territory against invaders and destroy illegal settlements on Indigenous land.
To date, no one has been prosecuted for Paulo Paulino Guajajara’s death. In fact, Mendes’s investigation found that between 1991 and 2023, 38 Guajajara individuals were killed, but none of the people accused of the killings have been convicted and the large majority were never brought to trial.
Federal prosecutors have said they will use Mendes’s reporting and video footage in Paulo Paulino Guajajara’s trial, giving his family and community hope that, at least for one of them, there might be justice.
Mendes found that a spike in violence against Indigenous people in mid-2023 coincided with the construction of an unlicensed airstrip near the Buriticupu River, which the Guajajara people depend on for food and water. The airstrip overlaps with four farms, suggesting it might be shared by the farmers. Construction of the airstrip coincided with an increase in deforestation in surrounding areas.
A police investigation still needs to be conducted, but the timing of the events strengthens the suspicion that the people behind the illegal airstrip could also be involved in the spike in violence against the Guajajara people.
The investigative reporting series was the result of Mendes’s year-long fellowship with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.
Banner image: Paulo Paulino Guajajara’s violent death has become a symbol in the fight to protect the Arariboia Indigenous Territory from criminal resource extraction. Image by Karla Mendes/Mongabay.
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