By clothing-bag, 17/07/2022

The cry of the jungle.The Amazon lives under stalking - Catopardo

Covered from head to toe in transparent plastic, a blue mask and rubber boots, a woman of medium height holds the hands of a man and another woman. She has her head tilted forward. He says a prayer in a tremulous voice, suddenly raises his face to the ceiling and says:

—In the name of Peace, Lord, bring health to our people, Lord.

The woman's voice cracks. She asks God to help, to come down to earth, to do something. Around her, several repeat the prayer each time she says "amen." Cries are heard that overshadow the main voice, which seeks to be clear, firm and direct.

The image would not be surprising if it were that of a pastor from the many evangelical churches that exist in the interior of Brazil, but it is a doctor in the ward of a hospital in Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, surrounded by doctors and nurses. It is a video that circulated on Friday, January 15, 2021, when hospitals in that city stopped caring for patients with Covid-19 due to a lack of beds and oxygen tubes. A day later, on Saturday the 16th, two hundred deaths were recorded. The bodies were buried in mass graves and some families were unable to attend the burials. The city received help from Venezuela, which sent oxygen tubes; a gesture that Nicolás Maduro saw as an opportunity to hit back at his old enemy, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and turn medical care into a political cause.

The request for Bolsonaro's resignation slips into the prayers of the doctors. After a dizzying series of defections, on September 16, 2020, former general Eduardo Pazuello took over as Minister of Health. In his speech, he assured "he knows nothing of the Brazilian health system." Soon after, it began to authorize the prescription of hydroxychloroquine, a component that Donald Trump, during the beginning of the pandemic, came out to support until, on June 15, the FDA, the United States regulatory agency, revoked it. On October 31, Pazuello tested positive and had to be isolated. On March 15, 2021, after reaching the figure of 280,000 deaths from Covid-19, Bolsonaro appointed cardiologist Marcelo Queiroga as Minister of Health, the fourth since he assumed the presidency. The vertiginous expansion of infections made visible a constant in the Amazon: the absence of the State.

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Shortly before becoming president, Bolsonaro gave a chilling and foreboding speech at Club Hebraica in Rio de Janeiro: “You can be sure that when I assume the presidency, there will be no money earmarked for no NGOs”, he said; “There will not be even one centimeter demarcated for an indigenous reservation. Where there is indigenous land, there is wealth below. We have to get them out of there." The absence of a State in the Amazon is, ultimately, a State policy. Four hundred days after his inauguration, on February 6, 2020, he held a ceremony to sign a long-awaited bill that he sent to the Senate in order to enable mining exploitation and create hydroelectric plants on indigenous lands. To justify himself in the face of the criticism that would come, he said in his speech that article 231 is part of the National Constitution of Brazil, whose reform dates from 1988, and that his bill does nothing more than regulate its application. This was classified as a personal dream:

—I hope this dream comes true. The indigenous person is a human being exactly like us: he has a heart, he has feelings, he has a soul, he has desires, he has needs, and he is just as Brazilian as we are, he said.

After the rejection by hundreds of indigenous groups from the Amazon and various NGOs, the presidency made an official statement: “There have been more than 31 years without regulation of mining and energy generation on indigenous lands, which has caused legal insecurity, the lack of financial compensation and taxes and serious risks to life”. Although Congress stopped many of the projects promoted by Bolsonaro, in this case the bench linked to agribusiness may be decisive, which, according to the Center for Advanced Studies in Applied Economics (Cepea), generated, in 2020, 19.66% of the national GDP . A dream for Bolsonaro.

***

It is not the same to talk about the Andean Amazon, which runs from southern Colombia and passes through western Ecuador and Peru, as it is about the Venezuelan Amazon and the jungle that occupies a large part of Bolivian territory. Or from the part of the Guianas, marked by a European immigration different from the Spanish and the Portuguese. Or, of course, of the Brazilian, the vastest, which stretches from the northeast to Mato Grosso, aligns to the province of Rondonia and then plunges into the thickest part, whose center is the city of Manaus. It is estimated that the total territory of the Amazon covers some 7.4 million km2 and represents 4.9% of the planet's continental area. The water that the Amazon River basin discharges into the Atlantic Ocean, after traveling more than seven thousand kilometers from the Andes, in areas where the depth reaches 110 meters deep, represents 15% of the fresh water on the entire planet.

The image that came from the sky was an alarm signal. On August 16, 2019, a NASA satellite obtained a photograph showing a stain that covered a large part of the Amazon rainforest. It was not the usual green spot, studded by occasional clouds, that hides, between forests, rivers and jungles, a varied population, the result of centuries of conflicts, crossings and migrations. It was white and compact, like a white plug between heaven and earth. It was smoke. And, under the smoke, was the city of Novo Progresso, in the state of Pará, in northern Brazil. Founded in 1983 during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985), it has twenty-five thousand inhabitants and has become one of the cities with the highest agricultural and livestock production in the country. One of its inhabitants, Adecio Piran, published in August 2019, in the Folha do Progresso newspaper, a very brief note in which he revealed that, six months after Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency with 55.21% of the votes (the amount lowest in Brazilian history and with the highest percentage of blank and annulled votes since 1989), the president had visited the city, where he had met with landowners and small farm owners. Inspired by the president, Piran said in his article, producers and ranchers planned to set a coordinated series of fires in the forest and on land near the city. The fires would take place on the 10th. In his text, Piran wrote: "Rural producers and ranchers, supported by the words of President Bolsonaro, plan to establish August 10 as the Day of Fire, in which they seek to clearing of forests and pastures.

The day after the publication, Piran took to the streets of Novo Progresso on his way to his position as director, owner and head of the newspaper. It was a hot and humid day, in the middle of August; the rainy season was coming to an end. Suddenly, something caught his attention. His photo was printed on a piece of paper attached to a light pole, along with a very long text. It looked like a western movie, when the sheriffs look for the robbers under the banner of wanted. The wanted one was him and the hunters were the owners of the fields. Puzzled, he tore the sheet off. But he saw others, on other posts. He sent a text message to a colleague, who sent him a chain of messages that circulated on WhatsApp and Facebook. The producers—whose names Adecio Piran would discover some time later—were furious with his article. They said that what he had written was a lie, that no one was organizing to set fire to the fields but, as the president said on his Twitter account, NGOs and environmentalists distorted the information to create a business with ecology. When he arrived at the newspaper, he received the first anonymous threatening message on his WhatsApp.

“Fire Day is causing a lot of upheaval in my life,” Adecio Piran says by text message. He refuses to talk further or arrange an interview. I live in a region where people do not understand the environment.

Piran's note served as a warning message that no one heard. The fires happened. The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE, by its name in Portuguese) reported that in August 2019 there were 74,000 sources of fires; an 83% increase in forest fires between January and August, compared to 2018. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, came out on Twitter asking for explanations about what was happening in the jungle. Environmentalists from around the world, including Hollywood celebrities, joined the warning voices. Something was wrong in the Amazon.

—Did you receive many more threats for your note?

“Lots of them,” says Piran. And he doesn't reply to any other messages.

***

“When Bolsonaro was elected president, there was a feeling that he would not meddle with environmental issues,” says Ane Costa Alencar, director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM, by its name in Portuguese), based in in Mato Grosso. She is sitting in front of her desktop computer. Short hair, warm smile, light clothing, has patience for basic questions: outreach, he says, is a day job.

To understand the dimension of the land conflict, Ane goes back to 1988, a key date in Brazilian history that marks the transition from dictatorship to a democratic system. In 1986 a National Constituent Assembly was installed to elaborate a new Constitutional Charter. Among the objectives of the National Development Plan of the New Republic, for the period 1986–1989, the development of mining and a conscious use of the land in relation to the care of indigenous communities and their territory stood out. Chapter VI, dedicated to the environment, establishes: "Everyone has the right to an ecologically balanced environment, a good for the common use of the people and essential for a healthy quality of life, imposing on the Public Power and the community the duty to defend and preserve it for present and future generations”.

On February 22, 1989, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) was created by law, an autonomous entity, dependent on the Ministry of the Environment, which is in charge of granting environmental permits and licenses for agricultural and industrial development in order to exercise control over natural resources and to fine those who start an activity without said authorization. Those environmental licenses have become the target of Bolsonaro's presidential campaign since he was fined for fishing in a protected area without a permit. Once he assumed the presidency, Bolsonaro said that the system of fines and licenses was an "industry" and he planned to end it.

—So it was that some producers from Novo Progresso organized to make a joint burning, deforested a very large area and called it Fire Day, says Ane.

The cry of the jungle. The Amazon lives under threat - Gatopardo

On April 11, 2019, Bolsonaro signed presidential decree number 9,760 to create “conciliation centers” and investigate where the money collected from fines goes. The decree implements two important changes. The first, that if the "conciliation center" decides that the fine is not necessary, it is not implemented. Previously, if the debt was large, there was a discount of up to 60% if the remaining 40% was deposited in an environmental recovery project selected by Ibama. Bolsonaro introduced a variation there, the second change: this percentage must be allocated to a project selected by the company or the person fined and not to an NGO. The real intention of the decree is to take power away from the NGOs and protect the ruralistas, who are slowly making their way into politics.

Ane says that ranchers and agricultural producers have a great responsibility in the burning of land and, although there was a significant increase in the livestock sector towards the end of the 1990s and during the first two decades of the new millennium, which made Brazil one of the main meat exporters in the region (in addition to being its main consumer), the biggest problem lies in the illegal occupation of public land for logging, an activity that has not stopped growing.

—The main vector is land occupation. First, they are seized illegally and then they are dismantled. The expensive wood is sold in clandestine sawmills and then the ground is burned, to finally plant grass and occupy it with cattle.

The most affected area, he says, is in what is known as the “closed biome”, the ecoregion that includes Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, the entire state of Goiás, the federal district, the western part of Minas Gerais and the state of Tocantins. The area is characterized by flat land, low vegetation and a humid climate. In this sector, in the last twenty years, 825,729 km2 were burned, 37% of the biome.

Both the closed biome and the “pantanal” (another one greatly affected by the fires) surround the Amazon, whose vegetation is denser, with longer rainy seasons. However —and, above all, in Rondonia and Acre, located to the south of the biome—, the lands were also occupied and burned there. In the Amazon, 428,206 km2 have been burned, from the year 2000 to date, that is, 28% of the total Brazilian territory and 10% of the biome. It is the surface of Spain and Portugal together.

***

—The Amazon is a small laboratory of what Latin America is, says Ana Pizarro. A laboratory that has to do with the usurpation of natural resources and violence against native peoples.

Born in Santiago, Chile, after obtaining her Literature degree from the University of Santiago, she discovered that very few people had studied the enormous cultural and literary diversity that is hidden in the Amazon. A Guggenheim scholarship allowed him to travel to different parts of the Amazon to do her doctorate. The result was a book called Amazon: the river has its voices, an impressive cross between literary criticism, historiography and ethnographic narrative, for which he won the Casa de las Américas award in Cuba and which was published by the Fondo de Cultura in Mexico.

—The Spanish arrived from Quito along the Napo River. That is where the discovery of the Amazon occurs. Which is an absurd discovery, because the natives have always navigated that river.

Over the years, says Pizarro, there was a central problem between the Portuguese and the Spanish: that of establishing geographical boundaries. Captain Tejeira commanded an expedition up the Amazon River in 1690 for ten months, in which he attempted to draw a boundary from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The truth is that Portugal cared much less about the Amazon, because its commercial interests were located in the Asian world. And, unlike the Spanish, who set up a system to settle in the jungle, Portugal only sent prisoners and adventurers. Fortune seekers, travelers, curious people, they were the ones who made the Amazon a fantastic place, a land made with the same stuff that dreams are made of. English explorer and botanist Henry A. Wickham traveled to Brazil in 1870. He lived among indigenous communities and roamed the watersheds for years. He marveled at trees that measured more than thirty meters and that the aborigines called kauchuk, which in Quechua means “weeping tree”. Wickham came to smuggle more than seventy thousand seeds of this tree to study its scope in England. Thanks to him, it was discovered that latex could be made from tree sap.

—Europeans realized that rubber was useful to them. Very useful.

Rubber generated enormous profits, not only because of the demand for this material but also because work on the plantations was not legislated. Many migrated into the Amazon to work there. That migratory wave was intensified by a climate problem, says Pizarro. Towards the end of the 19th century there was a great drought in the northeast of Brazil, in Pernambuco, Bahia and Rio Grande, where the sugar plantations were. People were jobless and starving. That need produced, in 1887, a migration of forty thousand northeasterners to the Amazon, where there was a promise of work, water and quality of life. When they arrived in the center of the country, they found the reverse of hope: work in the rubber plantations was disguised slavery, they were paid just enough to survive, living conditions were unhealthy.

Internal migration produced a demographic impact in the Amazon: cities began to form inside the jungle. During the 20th century, highways, routes and hydroelectric power stations were built. Like the conquest of the west in the United States, the Amazon represented, for the Brazilian State, a place to be dominated.

***

“A land without men for men without land”, reads the official slogan.

Opens shot: a black man speaks to the camera in a leisurely, entertaining tone. He is standing, in the middle of a road where cars pass. The sound is bad and the colors of the commercial are full, recorded by a 16mm camera. The man says that the country is going to get ahead, that everyone must trust. That Brazil is a big country. That inland there is land to occupy and produce. That land is called "Amazon". And that the Amazon is from Brazil. It is not easy to find on YouTube the campaigns to stimulate internal migration to the Amazon carried out by the AERP, the propaganda agency that created the military dictatorship. In 1964 the military assumed the government unconstitutionally, conferred extraordinary powers on themselves and five army generals alternated in command of the executive. Brazil was dragging a strong social polarization, an atrocious external debt, an imbalance in public spending.

According to the Brazilian historians Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling in the book Brazil. A biography, the Amazon became a repository of the developmental hopes of the dictatorship. The territory had to be populated and, to achieve it, it was necessary to break through; turn land into land. “The Minister of Finance had the power to authorize any expense that suited him. Powers that would have made a medieval king die of envy,” said former minister Maílson da Nóbrega in September 2014, in an interview with Rafael Cariello, for Piauí magazine. The Ministry of Finance had absolute control of the budget, that is, it controlled the expenses that should have been defined by the National Congress. Thus, they set out to build hydroelectric dams throughout the Amazon territory and many highways. Too many. The best known was the Transamazonica. A colossal highway, a line of 4,997 km that was embedded like a poisonous arrow in the heart of the jungle.

Construction took several years. It was intended to cross the Amazon basin from east to west to link the northeast region of Brazil with Peru and Ecuador. “The construction of the Transamazonica catapulted an ambitious colonization program that included the displacement of almost a million people with the objective of strategically occupying the area, not leaving any corner of the national territory depopulated and plugging the border area,” write Schwarcz and starling.

The result was the deforestation of more than 4,000 square kilometres, the forcible penetration of many aboriginal tribes who, until then, had had little contact with other inhabitants, and uncontrolled urbanization. Inaugurated by the de facto president, Médici, on September 27, 1972, it was intended to be used to enhance the triumphalist image of Brazil and share the idea that a formidable process of modernization of the country was underway. To reach the heart of darkness. Produce identity. Fill the apparent void that was in the jungle with the phrase that is printed on the Brazilian flag: "Order and progress."

***

The first time Luis Lima traveled to the interior of the state of Maranhão was in 2012. He was part of the Institute for New Social Cartography directed by Dr. Alfredo Wagner. Since the end of the seventies, faced with the advance of illegal logging, agribusiness and mining, the institute has brought together anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, political scientists, lawyers and philosophers with the intention of accompanying and providing legal and discursive tools to different groups of indigenous people, precarious workers and the so-called "cimarrones", whose ancestors were rebellious slaves who fled from the sugar plantations. Among these groups, there is one created entirely by women: the coco babasú quebradeiras (“breakers”), also known as the Movimento Interestadual das Quebradeiras de Coco Babaçu. The quebradeiras live by collecting the fruit of these palm trees that grow wild in the fields of Maranhão, Piauí, Tocantins and Pará. The movement was formed in 1969, during the dictatorship. Three hundred thousand women came together to seek containment in the face of the illegal occupation of land. Since 2007 they have been trying to enact a law for free access to babassu coconut. Although the “rompedoras” were recognized during the Lula da Silva government as one of the so-called “traditional populations”, protected by a series of environmental laws —along with natural rubber tappers (seringueiros) and fishermen—, and has set a minimum price for the purchase of its products from the government, they have not yet achieved the approval of the law.

In this awareness of rights, the participation and help of the Institute for New Social Cartography has played a central role for more than forty years. Luis Lima has been working at the institute since 2005. Professor of Geography at the Federal University of Amazonas, his task is to make and create social maps with information provided by anthropologists doing field work. In order to gain a deeper look and better understand the territory of the quebradeiras, he decided to travel to the interior of Maranhão in 2012, a trip that lasted two years.

—It is an area that is difficult to access —says Lima by videoconference— because it is also a zone of conflict. The activity of women is decreasing, by conditioning the access to the palm trees. Many fazendas destroy palm trees, cut them down or burn them.

The movement of these women is located in a highly conflictive area of ​​Brazil called Matopiba. In 2015 the government launched a plan to develop the area. Likewise, the lands of the region received support from foreign capital, coming from the United States, the Netherlands and Sweden, among others, to promote agro-industrial production. The investments are, in truth, speculative, because they aim to increase the value of the companies' portfolios, increasing the prices of land. In this deregulated purchase —supported by the government— the area suffers a huge impact: seventeen thousand square kilometers were deforested in just two years (2013–2015) and land ownership (73 million hectares) has fallen into the hands of so many only ten companies.

Through cut roads, unpaved routes or battered asphalt paths battered by humidity and rain, Luis crossed the interior of the state to reach Lago do Junco, Esperantinópolis and São Luiz Gonzaga, three towns with a few hundred inhabitants , located in the “closed biome”, where the native palm tree of northern Brazil grows, whose name, babaçu, means “big palm tree”. For the women who collect its fruit, the name means "mother plant."

It was hot, Luis recalls. Getting out of the truck, he saw a woman with a strange turban on her head. He had seen similar images in the photographs and footage sent to him by anthropologists, in the stories he had heard when he was working on the maps. But he had not seen it with his eyes: a woman was carrying on her head an enormous and very heavy clump of coconuts, with her back upright and maintaining an unreal balance.

The women used everything from the plant: oil to make soaps, coconut flour; the wood was used for carpentry and the bark was used as firewood. They lived in small communities, with many children, and many of them had been abandoned by their husbands. The work was an inheritance that was transmitted from the old to the young. In the days he spent in the community, there was something that caught Luis' attention: while they worked breaking the coconut shell, they sang. The songs talked about struggle and resistance. About the compañeras who fell while defending their rights, about young women and women in their eighties, like the leader of the movement, Cledeneuza Maria Bizerra Oliveira, whose life was marked by abandonment when she was a girl, until she discovered, in manual labor with other women, a wild and austere way to gain autonomy. A precarious way of living in freedom.

The voice of the women —Luis was able to see and hear during those afternoons, while the sun set behind the tops of the palm trees framed by the humid sky— was accompanied by the constant beating of the blows they gave with their sticks to the hard and rough rind of the fruit. Like a mantra, they repeated: "Break a coconut, create life."

***

The sound of bulldozers was piercing. From time to time, the machines turned off to turn on again. There was no sound of the mechanical movement of the garimpeiros, the gold prospectors who worked silently on the banks of the troubled river, behind the golden glow under the thick water. No human voices or songs were heard. They were machines stirring up the earth, chasing the veins at the bottom of the river. That image was found by the American journalist Jon Lee Anderson after traveling by sky and land from his home in England to the Kayapó indigenous reserve.

Anderson had wanted to return to Latin America for a long time, the place he visited in his youth and where he completed his training to become one of the most important reporters of recent years, with titles such as Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (1997 ) and The Fall of Bagdad (2004), among others. After writing a series of articles for The New Yorker on the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, he decided that the Amazon was a destination to explore. Anderson built a network of contacts and topics—illegal logging, forest fires, and the expansion of cattle ranching—but there was one that caught his attention the most: the rise of illegal mining in the Yanomami and Kayapó indigenous reserves. . So he flew to Brazil to join the Kayapó tribe that inhabits the flat lands of Mato Grosso and Pará.

Since the year 2000 and to date, the area equivalent to Spain and Portugal combined has been burned in the Amazon.

The history of the Kayapó is very interesting, says Anderson over the phone. It is going through moments of resistance and defense of its territory, but also by compromise with certain state policies. The rise of its best-known leaders coincides with the rise of union leaders: with the appearance of Chico Mendes among the rubber tappers in the Amazon region of Acre (assassinated in 1988), with the formation of the Workers' Party in the early eighties, with the end of the dictatorship and the transition to democracy, which culminated in the constitutional reform in 1988.

The Kayapó were the focus of attention in 1987, when an attempt was made to install a hydroelectric dam on their territory, in Altamira, Pará, on the banks of the Xingú River. Hydroelectric plants have a long history in the Brazilian Amazon basin; They are part of an energy plan that different governments have designed. Each new construction has aroused suspicion from indigenous communities and environmentalists. A dam not only alters the jungle ecosystem, but also represents the first step to extract material resources from the heart of the Amazon, through waterways with a depth suitable for navigation. The resistance of the Kayapó towards the construction of the plant received international solidarity; even Sting, the English singer, organized a series of concerts in his support. As a consequence, the World Bank canceled the credit that had been granted to the State to carry out the project. When Anderson arrived last year, he found a different landscape.

—I went to a town called Ourolandia (“land of gold”), which did not exist thirty years ago. Now it has thirty thousand people. There are many houses and other towns nearby, with an evangelical church. There are masseurs and prostitutes and everything you expect to find in a frontier town.

During the 1980s, the Kayapó had a leader named Tutu Pombo, who became the first developmentalist indigenous to negotiate with the State, who allowed entry to mining groups, illegal logging, and “garimpos” in exchange for money. He was the great adversary of Raoni Metuktire, another Kayapó chief. According to the old tradition of the tribe, when another cacique is born he must found his own town. From another town, Raoni fought Tutu Pombo, who died in 1992 and left an estimated $6 million inheritance. Tutu Pombo's other heritage, Anderson says, is cultural. In his chronicle “Blood gold in the Brazilian rain forest”, he narrates the conflicts and contradictions he saw when he managed to enter the area where illegal mining takes place within the Kayapó reserve.

—I flew over the town and what I saw was incredible. Havoc after havoc.

They were not men and women looking for gold nuggets in the river with the traditional method of the garimpeiros, that is, a small water pump mounted on the bank and five or six people moving the bottom. They were several very expensive excavators, with a very great destructive power, working day and night to extract gold that would be illegally traded in Turkey, Arabia, India and several countries in the East: the world's great gold buyers. It was a landscape devastated by indiscriminate extraction, with a population of almost one hundred thousand garimpeiros who worked in the Kayapó indigenous reserve, who let them enter, with their machinery and with thugs who do not allow other people to enter, in exchange for illegal money.

"Gold isn't taxed," says Anderson. And no one wonders where it comes from.

The situation was totally out of control. The garimpeiros dumped the mercury they used to clean the gold nuggets into the water, increasing the levels of contamination carried from the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon basins. There, in the Andes, thousands of meters high, where the slopes form the riverbed, the oil companies extract oil and what is known as "water in formation", one of the fluids present in an oil reservoir and which is very toxic due to its high sodium, chloride, chromium, lead and cadmium content. These formation waters emerge during drilling. A recent study by the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam pointed out that, for every barrel of oil produced, companies extract up to 98 barrels of forming water, which they dump into the ground and into rivers. of the tropical forests. The same study revealed that the Peruvian and Ecuadorian oil companies have been dumping this water into rivers since 1972. The contamination in the rivers extends for kilometers to the mouth in the Atlantic Ocean and creates a bioaccumulation of heavy metals in fish, animals, flora and in the people who feed on the fishing and hunting of said animals and who drink that water.

There was no police presence or state control on the Kayapó reservation. “In the two weeks I was there,” Anderson wrote, “I made several flights over the forest. In one of them, as the plane flew over the treetops, I saw a huge plume of smoke rising into the sky like a cloud of volcanic ash. For hours, the fire burned out of control and a thick patch of smoke settled on the horizon. Fires like this are very regular in the current life of the Amazon and its inhabitants consider it an essential part of progress”.

***

On noon on November 1, 2019, the sun was high in the municipality of Bom Jesus das Selvas. Paulo Paulino Guajajara and his friend Tainaky Tenetehar (also known by his Portuguese name, Laércio Souza Silva) had wandered off the lands of the Guajajara community, in the state of Maranhão, to hunt. Suddenly, among the forest, they saw something to which they were—and are—accustomed: logging machines and tractors. A group of loggers was illegally cutting down trees.

Years ago, Paulo Paulino and Tainaky, together with a hundred indigenous people from other communities, formed a group called “Guardians of the Amazon”. The group seeks to stem the spread of illegal logging in the state of Maranhão, including the 4,150 km2 indigenous territory of Araribóia. It also seeks to raise awareness among neighboring tribes that, isolated in the jungle, have no way of defending themselves against attacks by loggers. That November morning, five armed men ambushed the two guards and without warning fired a burst of shots at them. Tainaky felt a sting in her back and arms; he ran his hand over his back and looked at the blood as he ran desperately. With little strength he managed to reach his community to ask for help. There he noticed that he was alone. Paulo Paulino was not with him. When Tainaky is asked to try to describe in detail what happened that day, the day Paulo Paulino was killed by a group of loggers, he does so in a monotonous way, recounting flashes of unconnected images. Sitting in front of the monitor next to him is Sarah Shenker, one of the spokespersons for Survival International, an NGO with a long history of working with indigenous peoples in the Amazon.

“The loggers are organized,” Tainaky says. The businessmen are the ones who pay the loggers and hunt us in the border area. Many businessmen support loggers who enter forests to clear forests. And when they enter, they do it with tractors, chainsaws, heavy machinery.

In recent years, the assassination of indigenous leaders has been on the rise. According to a report by the NGO Global Witness, the murder of land and environmental defenders showed the highest number of deaths in 2019: 212 people, an average of four murders per week. Of these, 98 were from the Amazon, among others, the aforementioned Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and trade unionist who was assassinated on December 22, 1988.

Increasingly, indigenous reservation lands are being invaded by ranchers who are building internal roads without state permission. According to an IPAM report, in the last twenty years, 66% of deforestation and fires were caused in private areas for grazing cattle or planting soybeans, while 2.5% were in public areas. The figures become more chilling if one considers that 17.5% of the entire Brazilian territory was set on fire at least once. 68% of what was burned is native vegetation and 51% suffered more than two fires on the same ground. Is there some kind of protection that can be used? Tainaky says that the National Indian Foundation (Funai), a state agency —under the Ministry of Justice— that was created in 1967 to provide assistance to aboriginal communities and delimit their territories, only acts when there is international pressure.

In 2019 Bolsonaro transferred the activity of demarcating indigenous lands, which Funai carried out, to the Ministry of Agriculture. The identification and demarcation of lands passed into the hands of the ruralistas, whose interests are contrary to those of the indigenous peoples. Bolsonaro also tried to merge the Ministry of the Environment with that of Agriculture. His attempt was thwarted by pressure from NGOs. Failing to achieve his goal, the president opted for the easiest way: to take away the funds. The 2021 Budget Law project that the government sent to Congress reduces the budget for the Ministry of Environment to some 318.5 million dollars, the lowest value since 2000.

“In recent years,” says Fiona Watson of the NGO Survival International, “indigenous peoples have played a key role, not only in conserving threatened plant and animal species, but in different ways of life. The struggle of these communities has become our struggle.

Since the year 2000 and to date, the area equivalent to Spain and Portugal combined has been burned in the Amazon.

Linguist and professor of Letters and a native of Scotland, Fiona traveled through Latin America and got to know in depth the indigenous problems in the Peruvian, Venezuelan and Amazonian jungles. She came into contact with the Yanomami community, in the center of the Brazilian Amazon, on the border with Venezuela, in the Demini river basin. He met their leader, the shaman Davi Kopenawa, and worked with the Yanomami people for several years. In 1989 Survival International won the Right Livelihood Prize, also known as the Alternative Nobel. Survival invited Davi Kopenawa to the reception ceremony. On that trip to Europe, Kopenawa spoke about the situation of his people. He recounted how, in the 1940s, Brazil sent a delegation to delimit the borders with Venezuela and they met an indigenous tribe that had never had contact with the white world. How, during the military dictatorship in Brazil and with the construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway, the Yanomami lost a large part of their territory. And how, in the eighties and nineties, his town was suffering, in addition to measles and the flu, from another disease: gold fever at the hands of the garimpeiros.

French anthropologist Bruce Albert, interested in the Yanomami tradition, asked Kopenawa to write a book together. Thus arose The fall of the sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman, a book that, unlike the enormous bibliography that abounds on the Amazon —a subject so prone to attract the narration of chroniclers, journalists and writers from outside—, arises from the heart of one of the indigenous reserves largest on earth, with eighteen million hectares in constant danger. The book is made up of three parts and mixes personal experience, autoethnography, cosmogony and cultural debate.

“The white, who knows nothing about the forest, needs to see and read to remember,” said Kopenawa in a recent interview for the newspaper Página 12, when he received the Right Livelihood Award in 2019, this time in a personal capacity, along with Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. “The white man thinks that the Indian does not think, that he does not know how to explain, that he does not know how to speak, that he does not know the future. I found it very cool that Bruce volunteered to record. And I told him about the origin of everything. I wanted to show my wisdom, my knowledge, so that the target understands that we know how to speak and explain on our own. It is not for us, it is for you, who need to see the jungle in a different way”.

In 1992 Kopenawa participated in the documentary Davi contra Golias to denounce the massacre of sixteen Yanomami aborigines at the hands of garimpeiros. He traveled the United States, met with presidents and attended ceremonies at the United Nations. His name became known to the point of being compared to the Dalai Lama. He has warned, over and over again, about the climate situation in the Amazon, the importance of taking care of the forest and the water cycle, of taking care of the plants and trees that absorb billions of tons of carbon dioxide every day. On this, Antonio Lobato Nobres, from the National Institute for Space Research, in the report "The climate future of the Amazon", pointed out that in the sky there are "flying rivers", currents of water that circulate through the atmosphere in the form of steam, They bring rains to different areas of Brazil and also reach neighboring countries such as Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay. When the water in the rivers is contaminated, this cycle is altered and, by cutting down the trees, the flying rivers lose the main resource from which they receive twenty tons of water per day. In her book Viaje al fin del Amazonas (Debate, 2016), the Argentine journalist Silvina Heguy wrote: “Each tree, in addition to emitting oxygen, dissipates the water that will constitute the rain that falls to the south, on the city of São Paulo. or on the crops of the Argentine pampas. In the largest basin on the planet there are rivers on earth and also in the sky. The trees are springs.” Despite desperate attempts to care for the world's "green lung", the National Institute for Space Research — which keeps the global community on the alert about environmental disasters in the region — estimates that a fifth of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed .

Kopenawa, in a passage from The Fall of Heaven..., recounts that once, when he was young, he was camping in the forest, near the Mapulaú River. He had accompanied some grown men to search for a young woman from the Uxi River, who had been kidnapped by a man from the Toototobi River. It was early morning. There was no sound of thunder or lightning in the sky. It was a quiet night. Suddenly, lightning flashes illuminated "the chest of heaven." Everyone started screaming and crying, thinking that the sky would collapse. Kopenawa was also scared. He believed that everyone would die from the rain and lightning. He asked himself: "What will happen to us? Will the sky fall on us? Are we going to be buried in the underworld?" So, several shamans began to work together that night to support the weight of the sky. Their grandparents and great grandparents had taught them how long ago, so they were able to prevent their fall. And after a few minutes, the sky was calm again. Although, Kopenawa clarifies, some day soon, it will finally fall upon us. And then we won't know what to do.

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