One Man Dies, and an Entire Uncontacted Tribe Vanishes in Brazil

[Mabouya]

This is so sad on so many levels:

(and, of course, it's also happening to animals - and plants I suppose - on regular basis)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/w...smid=share-url

(link should get you past the NYT paywall)

[Diablo de Acero]

I agree with your sentiment.

[j44ke]

I read that and thought immediately of a Borges short story. The Circular Ruins. We may think this man alone in the jungle and uninterested in us depends on us for his survival, but perhaps it is the other way around.

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Kafka...cularRuins.pdf

[vertical_doug]

The Washington Post has an article on the wholesale erasure of the Amazon today. Bolsonaro is sure doing a heckuva job.

The photos from the Paper really add impact.


Deforesters Are Plundering the Amazon. Brazil Is Letting Them Get Away With It.
2022-08-30 14:10:20.801 GMT

By Terrence McCoy

(Washington Post) -- BRASILÉIA, Brazil — Daniel Valle sped down Highway 317,
closing in on the first targets of the day. He was in a hurry. Deforestation
alerts had tripled in recent weeks. Police were warning that armed criminal
groups had invaded new territory. Another season of destroying the Amazon
rainforest was here, and in this corner, the only check on the looming
ecological disaster was this: Valle's small team of inspectors in a
dirt-splattered pickup truck.

Editor note

"This is it," said Valle, 39, pulling off the highway. A roving state
environmental inspector, he traveled throughout this remote land that was
increasingly under threat from a wave of destruction that had leveled the
forests to the east. His job was to slow its advance. The challenge felt
futile most days. But especially today.

His crew was in southern Acre, where the federal government under President
Jair Bolsonaro — a longtime critic of environmental regulation — no longer
staffed a single inspector. That meant his state agency, the Acre
Environmental Institute, now bore the burden of enforcing environmental law in
this area of more than 3,600 square miles along the border with Bolivia.

Valle pulled out his target list. The map showed 16 points of illegal
devastation — pinpricks of red piercing an expanse of green and brown.

He sighed. This was enough work for two weeks. Not the two days they'd been
given.

"We don't have enough people," Valle said.

This mismatch — too few inspectors for too much deforestation — is one of a
cascading series of shortfalls and failures that are enabling criminals to
raze the world's largest rainforest with impunity. Law enforcement misses the
majority of deforestation in the Amazon. The fines that the few state and
federal inspectors here write are seldom paid. The occasional cases that spill
into the criminal justice system languish for years. And in the rare instance
of a criminal conviction, it almost never draws a prison sentence, The
Washington Post found in a review of a year's worth of cases.

The violent and lawless erasure of the Amazon is perhaps the world's greatest
environmental crime story. Scientists warn that the forest, seen as vital to
averting catastrophic global warming, is at a tipping point. But in Brazil,
home to about 60 percent of the Amazon, nearly one-fifth has already been
destroyed. And virtually no one, law enforcement officials say, has been held
accountable.

"No one goes to jail," said Luciano Evaristo, former chief inspection officer
of Ibama, the federal environmental law enforcement agency. "For example, in
2016, we took apart a large deforestation ring in the south of Pará state.
They deforested 50 square miles. There were 23 arrests. In the end, no one's
in jail. And this was the biggest deforestation ring in Brazil."

Environmental agencies have similarly struggled to punish even those accused
of only minor deforestation — such as the man the inspection team was driving
to visit. At the end of the path, they found rancher Francisco Nonato de Souza
coming out of his house. They accused him of illegally deforesting 45 acres
and handed him a $17,000 fine.

Nonato glowered. He looked at the crew's heavily armed police escort.

"You come out here for this bit of deforestation but do nothing about the guys
who deforest 120 or 150 acres?" he said. "Those guys over there" — his chin
jutting into the distance — "they knocked it all down. Burned it. Planted
grass. Nothing happened to them."

Valle defended their work. Nonato was the first on their list in southern
Acre. But they still had 15 cases to investigate.

The rancher was unmoved.

"They knock it all down," he said. "And nothing happens."

Valle didn't reply; he knew environmental authorities were about to fall even
further behind. His was the only inspection team that traveled throughout the
state. The year was shaping up to be perfect for deforestation: hot and dry.
And the last agent to perform inspections from the south Acre field office,
disillusioned by the mission and tired of the risks it entailed, had just
announced he was quitting. So when tomorrow came, and Valle's crew departed
for another part of the state, they'd be leaving the forest here defenseless.

More than 3,600 square miles. And no one to enforce the environmental law.

The forest burns. Few pay.

Brazil had once promised something different. Rising from the yoke of a
military dictatorship that had promoted rapacious development of the Amazon,
the country vowed a radical new approach to the environment. The 1988
constitution described the environment as "essential" and called upon the
government and civil society to safeguard it. Soon came official plans to
crack down on deforesters, and the law enforcement agencies to do it.

The tools: Fines that could soar into the millions. Land-use embargoes that
prohibited the commercial use of illegally deforested or degraded land.
Criminal charges that could put deforesters in prison.

"A revolution" is how former environment minister Marina Silva described it in
an interview.

But in the decades since, law enforcement officials say, nearly every tool has
been dulled to the point of ineffectiveness, snagged by bureaucracy, case
overloads and a grinding appellate system that has long stymied the country's
criminal justice system. The atrophy has deprived Brazil of what should be its
most potent weapons against deforestation: credible regulations and the threat
of consequences for those who violate them.

"It's the economic theory of crime," said Jair Schmidt, a government
environmental analyst who studies law enforcement failings. "Will you make
more money from deforestation than you stand to lose if you are cited for an
infraction?"

In the beginning, the answer was unclear. Ibama, the country's chief
environmental enforcement agency, was founded in 1989 and professionalized
with a civil service exam in 2002. It would be years before it was writing
more than 10,000 citations a year. Then years more before deforesters knew how
seriously to take them. Between 2004 and 2012, according to government data,
deforestation fell 83 percent.

But there was a hidden flaw: As the number of citations rose, the number of
people charged with adjudicating them didn't. The backlog swelled. Thousands
of cases languished, some for as long as 15 years. At least 28,100 fines
issued since 2000 have expired, government records show, because of the
statute of limitations. Between 10 and 15 percent of fines are paid. But they
are the smallest ones, law enforcement officials say, for the pettiest abuses.
Less than 1 percent of the money owed for environmental abuse is generally
paid, according to government audits.

"Infractions aren't generating the dissuasive effect that they should have,"
Ibama officials reported this year in an internal technical note obtained by
The Post. "Offenders think it's worth it to continue with their undue use of
natural resources and that the risk of timely punishment is low."

Ibama didn't respond to requests for comment.

In the federal criminal justice system, which adjudicates more-serious
allegations of environmental abuse, the risk of punishment is just as slight.

"What you saw in your analysis is what we see every day," said Daniel Azeredo,
a federal attorney who has led some of the government's largest prosecutions
of accused deforesters. "We don't have people in prison for environmental
crimes. What we do have is a trade. We are trading massive areas of the Amazon
for very small punitive penalties."

Offenders enjoy several advantages in the court system. Crimes of
deforestation are limited to maximum sentences of four years. The appellate
system effectively freezes cases. And the legal resources at the command of
deforesters are enormous — many hire expensive defense attorneys now
specialized in environmental law.

Prosecutors named grocery store owner Ezequiel Antônio Castanha the "Amazon's
biggest deforester" in 2014 and won a conviction in 2019. But Castanha was not
sent to prison. (Prosecutors are appealing. Castanha declined to comment.)
Federal attorneys called São Paulo businessman A.J. Vilela the same thing in
2016. But his case is still pending. (Vilela didn't respond to requests for
comment. He has denied any wrongdoing.) José Lopes, one of the Amazon's
biggest farmers, was accused by federal attorneys in 2019 of forming a militia
to invade public lands and conduct "large-scale deforestation," but never
convicted. (Lopes contested the charges. Citing a lack of evidence,
prosecutors have requested a dismissal.)

In the Amazon, nearly 95,000 people were incarcerated as of December. But only
one-tenth of 1 percent of them were being held for an environmental crime,
according to the National Prison Department. There isn't a state in the
Brazilian Amazon that doesn't face illegal deforestation, but in some, not one
person was incarcerated for environmental abuse.

One such state was Acre, where a state environmental agent named Marcel
Pedralino had decided to call it quits.

‘I’m no martyr’

At the field office of the Acre Environmental Institute, the requests had been
piling up for weeks. One was from a local judge, asking for verification that
a ranch was respecting a land embargo. Another came from a judicial official
wanting a deforestation investigation on 45 remote acres. And in the back of
the sleepy office, one more request now sat on Pedralino's desk.

Pedralino, the last person in the office who investigated such infractions,
squinted at the page. "Damage to the forest," a colleague had written.
"Uncontrolled fire."

He looked around. Shuffled some files.

"Where is that stack of papers?" Pedralino asked.

He opened the cupboard behind him and pulled out a beige envelope. It was
stuffed with all the complaints of deforestation that had never been
investigated. There were dozens: "They burned all of the vegetation protecting
the creek," one reported. "Seventy acres already destroyed by fire," another
said. "Illegal extraction of wood," added a third.

Pedralino put the additional report on the top. He closed the folder and
placed it back in the filing cabinet.

He was done. His paperwork was signed, delivered and approved. He no longer
worked here. He now was employed by the state sanitation service, a prospect
he found far more enticing than defending the Amazon. No one gets killed
tinkering with sewer systems.

"I'm no martyr," he said. He wasn't even an environmentalist. He of all
people, he believed, didn't deserve to go down like the cop ambushed and
killed in 2016 after an environmental bust in Pará state. Or the government
worker shot dead in 2019 while investigating illegal fishing in Amazonas. He
didn't want to be attacked like the Ibama agents who came under fire in 2020
in Roraima state and to not have a way to respond. The agency didn't give him
a gun. It didn't provide a bulletproof vest. He didn't even have a car. The
office truck had been in the shop for weeks. No one knew when they were
getting it back.

Pedralino glanced to his right. Elaine da Silva was typing at her computer.
She was also authorized to perform inspections, but had never done one in the
region and had no plans to. Not without an armed escort, which police almost
never provided to the field office, unlike for Valle's team of inspectors. No
environmental offender, she believed, would listen to her, a Black woman,
anyway.

So here they sat, gunless, carless, with 3,600 square miles to patrol and
limited resources to do it.

"Give me a hand with this property registry," da Silva told Pedralino,
dropping a form on his desk. With no other work to do, he gave it a look.

It hadn't always been like this. When Pedralino joined the agency in 2012, the
government had seemed on the cusp of eliminating illegal deforestation. Each
federal and state environmental agency staffed an inspection force. Pedralino
would travel down distant roads, hand out the tickets and be on his way, free
of concern for his safety.

But that was before the election of Bolsonaro. Before Bolsonaro's
environmental minister met with gold miners, loggers and land grabbers. Before
the number of Ibama inspectors plummeted. Before Acre's conservative new
governor told accused environmental offenders not to pay fines issued by state
inspectors. Before the rise of a politics of grievance that presented
deforesters not as criminals, but as honest workers oppressed by authoritarian
environmentalists. And before Pedralino realized that this job, a job for
which he felt no personal affinity, was putting his life at risk.

He had always considered himself willing to do whatever was necessary to
perform his work. But now, when asked to investigate deforestation, all he
could see was the violence that might happen. He remembered when dozens of
angry ranchers, some of them armed, surrounded his truck in 2013. He thought
about the illegal logger who went to get something from his house, and
Pedralino was sure it was a gun. He heard his own pleas, begging visiting
environmental agents in 2019 not to destroy the logging equipment they'd
confiscated — because that could trigger retaliation, and he was the one who
lived here and would have to suffer the consequences.

The stress got to be too much. So late last year, Pedralino complained to his
bosses that it was nearly impossible to investigate environmental wrongdoing
without security. Then in early July, with nothing having changed, he told
them he was quitting. And now it was a week later, and he was standing up from
his desk, not feeling a bit of regret.

There was only one matter that caused him remorse: the thought that other
inspectors were out there now, patrolling territory he refused to go into,
taking on risks he could no longer stomach.

"That's the hardest thing to face," he said, "But, maybe it will prolong my
life."

Fighting the future

Sixteen points of deforestation on the map. One now done. Fifteen to go.

Daniel Valle pulled out his target map, feeling a swell of annoyance. The
phone he held was his own. The mapping app he used to locate the deforestation
was a free promo. The Acre Environmental Institute hadn't even provided the
targets. They came from the state police.

Every shortfall cost time. Not having a mobile printer meant losing 30 minutes
writing fines by hand. Having no access to property records meant personally
pinpointing on which ranch the deforestation had occurred. Too few inspectors
meant they had to drive hours just to reach their targets.

Sometimes during those long drives, they got to thinking that their challenges
had been imposed intentionally, that they weren't employed to fight
deforestation but to provide political cover. So that Acre could say it was
combating deforestation when really it wasn't.

"We're pushing with our bellies," fellow inspector Josmario Santos Guimarães
said during one such conversation, using a Brazilian expression that means not
doing much of anything.

"The agencies have been shrunk so much," lead inspector Ivan de Jesus Pereira
de Araújo e Silva said during another.

Valle looked up from his map. He grabbed the wheel.

"We'll take advantage of our current location," he said. "This next point is
close to our last inspection."

It was easy to get frustrated, but Valle couldn't picture himself doing any
other work. Raised on a rural commune, he'd always felt connected to the
forest. He remembered the cool Amazon mornings of his childhood — "cold enough
to kill a monkey," his grandmother would say — and his fear when he learned
that not only was the biome in danger but that its demise could threaten the
world.

He decided there could be no better way to spend his life than defending
something so important. But over the years, as more of the forest disappeared,
and temperatures rose, and mornings cold enough to kill monkeys grew rarer,
the idealism with which he'd entered the profession was infected by cynicism.
Most days, he didn't feel like he was fighting deforestation. He was fighting
the future.

They passed dirt roads branching off the highway. Each of these, he believed,
was opening more territory to illegal deforestation. Some days, he'd find
illegal loggers mowing away with their chain saws. Other days, blackened
embers smoking from a recent blaze, or trucks laboring under the weight of
giant logs. But every day, he'd hear the same story. Deforesters saying they'd
done it to survive, to feed their families.

Was it the truth? Maybe for some. Not for others.

And he was about to hear it again.

The inspectors were arriving at a 500-acre cattle ranch. An unshaven Màrcio
Silva de Melo, 41, had been accused of hacking down 20 acres of forest. The
cattleman looked down at his muddy boots. He said he'd done it to widen his
pasture. He wanted more money to support his two daughters, ages 14 and 3.

He felt embittered. First the government had left him without support out
here, he said. Now it wanted to fine him $8,000 for doing what was necessary
to survive. That money, he said, would "come out of the mouths of my
daughters."

Valle listened, relieved there was no violence in the man's voice. No one knew
whether accused deforesters were armed, or how they would react. The
inspectors took what precautions they could — never work alone, take security
escorts, treat everyone with respect — but still, the job had become more
dangerous. Just the other week, his crew had inspected a farm occupied by a
man convicted of organizing the murder of a female American missionary in
2005. They now relied on police to tell them where it was safe to go — and
where their presence would bring trouble.

Hoping that the next stop wouldn't, they plunged deeper into the forest. The
path led toward a huge ranching complex ringed by illegal deforestation.

A dozen men emerged from the shadows of a building. No one said anything for a
long moment.

"Let the police get out first," Valle said.

Property owner Luiz Ricardo Fernandez Leon, 56, came out to greet the
inspectors, uncertain and unsmiling. Valle walked with him to the shaded porch
of a farmhouse, where he said they'd discovered more than 200 acres of illegal
deforestation on his property. As the rancher's men watched, Fernandez Leon
was handed several documents: a fine of $80,000 and an embargo prohibiting him
from using the deforested land to grow crops, graze cattle or any other
moneymaking activity.

The rancher shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He didn't deny the
destruction, but said he would fight the enforcement. Not with force — with
lawyers. He planned to appeal the case. It would almost certainly be years
before the matter was settled. If it ever was.

"I was not expecting this," Fernandez Leon said. "Five years we've been out
here, and I've never seen one government inspector."

Valle knew it was unlikely he'd ever see another. He got back into the truck.
A long drive loomed, and the crew had to get moving. Their next destination
was along the far eastern tip of the state. Their work here was done.

Sixteen points of deforestation. They'd worked two days, and hadn't even
visited half.

A dream of conservation undone

Back in the office, a phone on Pedralino's desk was vibrating.

He grimaced and picked it up. "It's me."

The woman on the other end sounded frantic. Headquarters needed someone to
drive into the field and lift an environmental embargo. Could Pedralino go on
Monday? He was already shaking his head.

"We don't even have a car," he said.

"What?" she said.

"Why don't you send an email?" he said. "I don't work here anymore. I now work
in sanitation."

"You work in sanitation?"

He suggested a solution, hung up and went back to his computer. He pulled up
Google Earth. He zoomed in to show his house, a property surrounded by forest
on all sides. "How I like it," he said. Then he zoomed back out again.

The screen showed the states of Acre and neighboring Rondônia, side by side,
each showing a different side of the debate over the future of the Amazon. Two
of the last Brazilian states to be incorporated, they once mirrored one
another: remote, forested jurisdictions of similar size and economic power.

Then their paths diverged. Acre, reeling from the 1988 assassination of
conservationist Chico Mendes, chose to preserve the environment. It built a
sustainable economy around ecological reserves, rubber-tapping and the
harvesting of nuts. Rondônia, meanwhile, opened itself up to the cattle
industry. Land grabbers stole territories. Armed disputes erupted. In a matter
of decades, the state lost nearly 40 percent of its forest.

Today, Rondônia has twice as many people as Acre, three times the economic
output and nearly four times as many cars. And its neighbors in Acre,
increasingly critical of the conservation efforts their state once championed,
want to catch up. In 2018, Acre awarded Bolsonaro 77 percent of its vote —
more than any other state. Voters that year also elected a conservative new
governor, Gladson Cameli, who has worked to realize Bolsonaro's vision,
growing the cattle industry and deprioritizing conservation.

Critics have lamented what they call the "Rondonization of Acre." But few
doubt that Bolsonaro will win again here in the October elections.

Pedralino zoomed in on Rondônia. The screen showed vast stretches of
deforestation. He wanted to believe his 3-year-old daughter would know the
Amazon as he had — gargantuan and pristine. But he started to doubt himself.
All of this destruction had happened in just his lifetime. "A forest lost in a
generation," he said.

He returned the view to Acre. An expanse of uninterrupted green.

"Could it be possible," he wondered aloud, "that what happened in Rondônia
will now happen here?"

The screen swept toward the eastern tip of the state, where armed land
invaders were increasingly aggressive, and where, on the ground, it looked to
Valle as if the question was already being answered. He was standing in the
forest, looking at a scattering of colossal logs. The inspectors had been sent
to try to remove them, but had no idea how. "We're not going to be able to
solve anything here," one of the inspectors vented, before they left for the
next point of deforestation, and the next.

Pedralino closed Google Earth.

He stood up from his desk. He gathered his things and headed to the door.
Whether Acre became the next Rondônia or not was no longer his problem. The
Amazon would have to find itself a different martyr.

He walked outside, into the bright afternoon sun, put on his motorcycle helmet
and rode off.

Gabriela Sá Pessoa and Luiz Fernando Toledo contributed to this report.

About this story

Editing by Matthew Hay Brown. Copy editing by Vanessa Larson and Martha
Murdock. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Graphics by Júlia Ledur. Design and
development by Allison Mann. Design editing by Joe Moore. Project management
by Jay Wang.

Click Here to see the story as it appeared an the Washington Post website.

Copyright 2022 The Washington Post

-0- Aug/30/2022 14:10 GMT

[Marvinlungwitz]

I don’t think most Americans are even aware how the disastrous US soy trade policy accelerated Brazilian rainforest destruction.

[Mabouya]

I don’t think most Americans are even aware how the disastrous US soy trade policy accelerated Brazilian rainforest destruction.

+1

When I first read that "cattle ranchers" were responsible for a lot of this I thought to myself "Well, at least as a vegetarian / vegan I'm not as much a part of the problem as I might be." But then I also read that soy farmers are also part of the problem, and of course I do consume plenty of that. And even if you manage to only buy US grown products, stuff like soy really is a commodity and we're all part of a world market, so you're implicated no matter what you do.

[Marvinlungwitz]

Once the US decided to wage a trade war, it didn’t take long for China to find another source for soy, and also that the Brazilian beans are better quality than those from the US (higher protein content). They’re still China’s #1 source (US was #1 pre trade war) despite the meh trade agreement with the US. Brazil, of course, is more than happy to ignore its own deforestation laws to make more soy farms.

The other plant crop that has led to horrible destruction is palm, with Indonesia burning huge swaths of forest for palm.