As world leaders gathered in France to remember the 80th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, a Brazilian band of brothers assembled deep in the jungle to stage a fight of their own on the Amazon’s river beaches, landing grounds and creeks.
“Tomorrow’s our D-day,” declared the group’s commander, Felipe Finger, as his airborne special forces unit prepared to mark the second anniversary of the murders of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips with what they hoped would be a famous offensive against the criminals obliterating the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth.
Like the original D-day, foul weather forced the fighters to postpone intricate plans for an aerial assault that would eliminate more than 100 illegal gold mining operations in and around the Javari valley Indigenous territory, a Portugal-sized hinterland near Brazil’s borders with Colombia and Peru. It was here that the British journalist and Brazilian activist were shot and killed in June 2022.
But 24 hours later, the skies cleared and the strikes could begin. Helicopters carrying rifle-toting combatants took off from a remote riverside airfield and raced towards their “theatre of operations”: an inhospitable wilderness where a distinctly unwelcoming troika of narco-traffickers, pirates and venomous creatures lay in wait.
“We plan to sterilise this whole buffer zone around the Indigenous territory,” Finger announced before making a beeline for one of the frontlines of a conflict crucial to both the survival of Brazil’s remaining isolated tribes and the planet as a whole.
Another operative, a thickset muay thai practitioner and biologist called Alexandre Marques, said the mission would be called Operation Waki after a revered Javari valley Indigenous chief whose name Pereira had given to one of his sons. “We know there could be armed resistance in some places … and we have to be prepared,” said Marques, 49, one of the longest-serving members of the special inspection group (GEF) – the elite squad from Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, that was leading the charge.
The Guardian took to the skies over some of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon to witness the opening salvo of what is intended to be the largest clampdown in the Javari valley region since the murders of Phillips and Pereira two years ago.
After taking off from Carauari, a far-flung river town in Amazonas state, the group’s helicopters darted west over a seemingly never-ending woodland that conceals an almost inconceivable abundance of biodiversity. “You can fly for two hours here and see nothing but jungle … If you really, really need to land, you’ll have to do it on top of a tree,” the pilot teased as his aircraft swept towards a trio of rivers that lead to the Javari valley’s eastern flank: the Bóia, the Jandiatuba and the Jutaí.
Ibama’s rangers said that as gold prices hit record highs, illegal miners were creeping further along those waterways towards protected Indigenous lands. Some had already infiltrated the Javari territory – reputedly home to the world’s largest concentration of isolated peoples – risking deadly violence or the introduction of diseases that could quickly wipe out such communities.
Hugo Loss, Ibama’s monitoring chief, said efforts to shield the Javari valley territory from invaders were one of the final battles in a centuries-long attack on Indigenous lives that began when Portuguese explorers reached Brazil in 1500.
“This is the last refuge. We’ve spent more than 500 years trapped in this logic of the theft of resources and the extermination of Indigenous peoples – and in Brazil the last bastion is located in the Javari valley,” said Loss, who was a close friend of Pereira.
Loss warned that without government intervention, “we will inevitably witness an ethnocide – the extinction of these peoples in very little time”. “The same logic of 1500 is playing out in the Javari valley in 2024.”
About an hour’s flight from Carauari, the group’s first objectives came into view: a constellation of metal monsters that were annihilating the Bóia River in their hunt for gold. As prospectors scrambled for cover, troops swooped down on one multi-story dredger and captured 17 suspects, including three young female sex workers, who were ordered to sit on the hull with their hands on their heads.
“I’ve got a son … and this was the only opportunity I could find,” whispered one 20-year-old woman with a tattoo of a geisha on her uncovered back. Visibly shaken, she described being recruited nearly 600 miles (1,000km) away in the state capital, Manaus.
A tour of the vessel – which rangers estimated had cost 4m reais (£580,000) to build – offered a wretched snapshot of the socioeconomic hardship and human exploitation driving the destruction of the Amazon.
The absentee owner was likely to be making a fortune plundering the rainforest’s resources but there was scant sign of those profits here. The lower deck resembled an abandoned factory: a filthy, grease-smeared engine room powering the suction pumps and excavator scouring the riverbed and banks for gold. One grimy-fingered miner, a father of four called Sales Dias Costa, said he had come hoping to buy his family a house. “But it hasn’t worked out,” murmured the weather-beaten prospector who looked at least a decade older than his 29 years.
Costa admitted he was defiling nature. “But this is the only way we have to earn a living,” he shrugged as bright orange flambeau butterflies danced around the detainees.
At the top of a rusty metal ladder lay an even more degrading scene: the dredger’s main deck had been converted into a floating bordello strewn with strawberry and watermelon flavour condoms and bottles of whisky and cheap table wine.
A mercury amalgamation drum used to recover gold sat outside one cabin. “Be careful, it’s still hot,” said Bruno Gianfaldoni, Ibama’s aerial operations chief, as he studied the contraption. On a mattress inside, a dog-eared Bible lay open at a chapter from the Gospel of John describing how the infirm flocked to the pool of Bethesda seeking a miracle.
“What a load of shit,” one woman snapped as security forces ordered the boat’s occupants to abandon ship before it was torched. “Now I’ll be stuck here dying of hunger, thirst and cold – without any clothes, without a boat, with nothing!” the 21-year-old complained.
Ibama officials insisted incinerating such barges was essential to stop them causing further damage or moving closer to Indigenous lands. Gianfaldoni compared such crackdowns to cardiac catheterisation. “The rivers here in Amazonia are like the arteries of a heart … that are blocked by the dredges,” he said. “We are unclogging these arteries so life can return.”
Soon, the gold dredger turned brothel had become an Amazonian inferno. A plume of black smoke billowed above the forest canopy, giving the scene a hint of Apocalypse Now.
As flames ripped through the steel monstrosity, Ibama’s helicopter-borne fighters and members of a rapid response team from the federal highway police returned to the skies to chase their next target. Within minutes they found it: an even larger dredger half-hidden in a riverside patch of forest.
One of its five occupants, a 60-year-old called João de Souza, said claims miners were poisoning the river with mercury were fake news. “I had a brother-in-law who [accidentally] drank half a cup of mercury and the doctor said it was no problem at all,” Souza prattled. “He gave him a laxative, told him to sit on the bog and it all came out in one go.”
His colleague, Arlindo Botelho, claimed he had no option but to keep mining having dropped out of school in his teens. “I’m not a thief. I’m not a murderer. So I’ll just have to find work in another mine … Illegal mining will never end,” the 59-year-old insisted.
That night Ibama’s troops camped out on the spider-infested dredger, playing cards, cleaning their weapons, and exchanging war stories from their time on the Amazonian front.
They rose before dawn and by lunchtime three more mining vessels had gone up in smoke. After “sterilising” the Bóia River, they planned to push on towards the Javari valley. Among their top targets was a dredger operating near an area where isolated tribespeople were thought to roam.
“If we make a difference to the life of one child – or one area that needs preserving – whatever little we have done was worth the effort,” said Marques, a member of the special forces unit since it was created a decade ago.
Marques said fighters were not paid extra to take part in such dangerous missions: “But I can’t bear to see so much injustice and so much destruction. It affects me. It affects all of us – and we really want to play an active role and be instruments of change.”
For all their determination never to surrender, flag or fail, Finger admitted doing battle in a rainforest region larger than the EU – and doing so with only a handful of helicopters and a dozen or so highly trained but underpaid special forces – was a sisyphean undertaking. Thousands of Ibama employees have gone on strike in recent months to protest against low salaries and bad working conditions.
“With the resources Ibama currently has, this war is already lost – all we’re doing is delaying catastrophe,” Finger said, as troops doused the dredger in petrol and prepared to set it ablaze. “We are rolling a stone up a hill with our ideals.”
