The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon
As miners ravage Yanomami lands, combat-trained environmentalists work to root them out.
By Jon Lee Anderson
April 1, 2024
...
For many viewers, the video was a rare document of an encounter with isolados—members of a Yanomami community living with no links to the outside world. For the armed men I was with, it was evidence: a potential lead in a high-profile initiative, sponsored by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to dislodge thousands of illicit miners from Yanomami territory.
The men—fighters with combat gear and assault rifles—belonged to a tiny special-forces unit known as the Specialized Inspection Group, or G.E.F. Most of them wore face coverings; mining in the rain forest is increasingly infiltrated by violent criminals, making it dangerous for them to reveal their identity. The G.E.F.’s leader and co-founder was Felipe Finger, a wiry man in his forties with a salt-and-pepper beard. Finger trained in forestry engineering, and his unit works under the Brazilian ministry for the environment. But he has spent much of his adult life in armed operations to protect the wilderness, and he talks like a soldier, with frequent references to operations and objectives and neutralizing threats. The current mission was known to national authorities as Operation Freedom. Finger and his men called it Operation Xapirí, from a Yanomami word for nature spirits.
The group formed a circle as Finger laid out the day’s targets. On a G.P.S., he pointed to a yellow circle showing where the isolados had been harassed in the TikTok video, and then red dots, representing the miners, in an irregular cluster around them. Miners had been detected roughly eight miles from the isolados—meaning that they had penetrated dangerously far into a protected ecosystem. “Wherever they go, the miners destroy everything, entire river systems,” Finger said indignantly. “And they do it at the expense of these highly vulnerable people.”
The Amazon faces many threats. The constant proliferation of road networks—both legal and illegal—brings new settlements, and growing human populations burn forests to clear land for cattle and crops. The rain forest is enduring an unprecedented drought, and in Roraima, the state where the Yanomami territory is situated, wildfires set off by such slash-and-burn efforts have spread out of control; more than four thousand square miles burned there this year, releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. But mining for gold and cassiterite, a mineral used in electronics, exacerbates the environmental problems with singular ferocity. Wildcat miners, using giant excavators, dredgers, and mercury, can devastate miles of river and forest in a matter of days. With the price of gold now above two thousand dollars an ounce on the global market, a rush is under way in the Amazon, and illegal prospecting accounts for more than half of Brazil’s supply.
Full article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240628092727/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/08/the-brazilian-special-forces-unit-fighting-to-save-the-amazon
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