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ness giants, mining corporations, and developers big
and small. Not one “square centimeter” of indigenous
land would be designated if he became President, he
said. Bolsonaro won 79% of the vote in União Ban-
deirantes in the October election. Soon after his in-
auguration, an empty logging truck without license
plates trundled down a dirt road in União Bandeiran-
tes, in the predawn gloom of a February day. A few
days later, deep in the Karipuna’s forest, the sound
of a chainsaw was unmistakable. Ancient trunks next
for the chop had been daubed with paint, and tire
marks were rutted into the soil. Illegal loggers had
been there minutes before.
Seen from the air, the Karipuna land is an em-
erald tapestry. But on every side of it, the forest is
gone. Now, vast tracts of their territory
are also being deforested, despite strict
federal protections. The implications are
grave. Much of Brazil’s remaining forest
exists in reserves.
Since coming to power in January, Bol-
sonaro has been ruthless in gutting pro-
tections, intervening to block an IBAMA
operation against loggers in Rondônia,
firing 21 of the agency’s 27 state heads
and creating a new body to pardon envi-
ronmental fines. Across the Brazilian Am-
azon in recent months, tribal lands and
national parks have been invaded like
never before. “It’s very sad, outrageous,
to watch all the effort made over so many
years by different governments being de-
stroyed,” says Marina Silva, a former envi-
ronment minister who pioneered the fall
in deforestation.
The Karipuna were already under
threat. Last year, the equivalent of 70,000
tennis courts was razed. When TIME vis-
ited in February, the tribe felt isolated and
fearful the new President would hasten
their demise. “We are surrounded,” Katicá said, ges-
ticulating toward the settler town. “They are already
on our territory. This is how they will arrive to exter-
minate us.” Her fear is not misplaced. The Amazon is
riven by deadly conflict over who controls the land.
More than 1,300 people have been killed in such con-
flicts since 1985, and Rondônia is the crucible. There,
hired gunmen ensure the interests of the powerful.
Nilce de Souza Magalhães, a campaigner against a
hydroelectric dam under construction in the state
capital, was found dead beside the Madeira River.
Adelino Ramos, a peasant leader in favor of land re-
form, was executed at a market in front of his chil-
dren. And in western Rondônia, 18 rubber tappers
have been killed since 2002 in protected reserves.
“Today the fight has got so much worse,” says their
leader Agenor Firmiano da Silva. “We are on the verge
of giving up.”
Technically, the law is still on the forest’s side.
Indeed, the federal police raided União Bandeiran-
tes in August to arrest illegal loggers. But with just
five Karipuna families on a vast territory coveted by
many, campaigners believe any ground ceded here
could prove to be the first domino in an assault on
the very principle of protected reserves. “If the Kari-
puna territory falls, it will be the first of many,” says
Danicley de Aguiar of Greenpeace.
Just down the road, 20 years after its beginnings as
a gritty frontier, União Bandeirantes is showing signs
of nascent wealth. Painted bungalows with neatly
tended gardens dot its rural outskirts, and pastures
home to nearly a quarter of a million cattle stretch
to the horizon. At the evangelical church, in a cha-
pel with 113 pews made from the trunk
of a single angelim tree, the congregation
weeps as a service reaches its climax. The
pastor, Bernardinho, thanks the Lord the
town is flourishing. “Now,” he says, “we
are prosperous.”
As the seasons changed, crimson fires
lighting up the night sky across Rondônia
showed that prosperity will always come
at a price. August is burning season, when
Amazon farmers use a rare period of dry
weather to set fires to clear fields ready
to plant crops. But 2019 was different;
satellite data showed more than 46,000
fires in the Amazon, an alarming 111% in-
crease over last year.
Initially Bolsonaro was unflustered.
After all, he had already dismissed pre-
liminary 2019 deforestation figures as
“lies” and sacked Galvão, the head of
Brazil’s space agency, INPE, for defend-
ing the data. “The President’s accusation
was very serious,” says Galvão. “Scientists
felt thrown into hell.” Those preliminary
INPE figures suggest a 92% increase in
deforestation over the first eight months of 2019
compared with the same period in 2018. It is not
yet clear if deforestation has returned to the heights
of 1995 to 2004, but Bolsonaro’s support for unfet-
tered development appears to have made an impact.
“The whole environmental structure of the country
is being destroyed,” says Paulo Artaxo, a Brazilian
member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change.
The fires sounded alarms abroad. French Pres-
ident Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor
Angela Merkel spoke out. At an event in São Paulo,
Bolsonaro replied, to cheers, that the two “did not
realize that Brazil is under new management.” He
claimed developed nations were using an environ-
mental agenda to “take over Brazil” for its natural
resources. “Sovereignty of the region and its riches is
what is truly at stake,” the President said in August.^
Katicá
Karipuna, the
matriarch of
the Karipuna
people, fears
the tribe’s
lands will be
taken from
them by force