- In Brazil’s state of Maranhão, one of the last slices of remaining rainforest is under threat from invasions and fires, which has complicated efforts to protect this area of rich biodiversity from the advance of agriculture and cattle ranching.
- Over the last 12 months, satellites detected 122,083 high-confidence deforestation alerts within the Gurupi Biological Reserve, home to species such as the Kaapori capuchin (Cebus kaapori), one of the world’s most critically endangered primates.
- Authorities have struggled to gain control over the region, which has been marked by a complex history of illegal logging and land settlement. More than 6,000 people still live within the conservation area.
- As deforestation advances, the climate is changing and leaving this region of the Amazon Rainforest drier and more prone to wildfires, which pose a risk to neighboring Indigenous territories like the Carú reserve.
BOM JARDIM, Brazil – Amid corn fields and pastures, miles of barbed wire enclose an island of pristine rainforest, likely next in line to be razed. Just beyond, in the Gurupi Biological Reserve, a web of dusty roads splinters the canopy, leading deep into one of the last slices of protected forest in this part of the Brazilian Amazon — and signaling that it, too, is under attack.
The Gurupi Biological Reserve stretches 341,650 hectares (844,235 acres) across the southwestern corner of Brazil’s Maranhão state. Under federal protection since 1988, this region of dizzying biodiversity offers habitat to countless species like the red brocket deer (Mazama americana), the golden parakeet (Gauruba guarouba) and the Kaapori capuchin (Cebus kaapori), one of the world’s most critically endangered primates.
It was here, in 2017, where researchers rediscovered the Belem curassow (Crax fasciolata pinima), a large, pheasant-like bird with a funky hairdo that was presumed extinct for 40 years.
The reserve is also part of a crucial ecological corridor made up of seven protected areas, some of them home to Indigenous people living in voluntary isolation from the outside world. The Gurupi reserve is meant to shield especially vulnerable regions that lie beyond it from invasions and illicit exploitation.
“What’s left of the Amazon forest in Maranhão is within this region,” said Caroline Yoshida, a technical adviser at the Institute of Society, Population and Nature, a nonprofit working with Indigenous groups in an area comprised by an assemblage of protected areas called the Gurupi Mosaic. “The rest has been turned into farms already.”
Yet, since its creation, the Gurupi reserve has been under pressure. Within its limits, settlers have built villages, cattle ranchers have turned forest into pasture and illegal loggers have laid waste to valuable tree varieties. More recently, drug traffickers have moved in, too, razing swaths of land to make way for marijuana plantations.
Researchers estimate the reserve has already lost about a third of its forest cover, while 70-80% has suffered selective cutting by loggers.
And despite efforts from authorities to crack down on illegal activities over the years, the relentless destruction has continued. Satellite data from the University of Maryland visualized on Global Forest Watch show clearings proliferating across the Gurupi reserve over the last 12 months.
“The process of occupation is ongoing; it’s still alive,” Yoshida said. “People are invading. And if there is an opportunity, they will stay, they will settle in.”
Degraded by the destruction, slices of the Gurupi reserve have become prone to wildfires, some of which have spread into neighboring lands under protection. The fires, usually set by farmers using slash-and-burn methods to renew unproductive pastures or plantations, can easily burn out of control during the dry season, spreading far beyond the area that was initially set ablaze.
In Maranhão, as in the rest of Brazil, the annual fire season is off to a dramatic start this year, fueling worries for what may lie ahead. The state has registered 3,484 hotspots in the first half of this year, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. While this is just slightly more than the number recorded over the same period last year, it represents a 20% jump on the number of fires recorded in 2022.
With the Gurupi reserve parched by months of punishing drought and uneven rains, the fires could be especially bad this year, said Eloísa Mendonça, an environmental analyst at the Chico Mendes Institute for Conservation and Biodiversity (ICMBio), the federal agency in charge of managing the area.
“The rain came later — and there was much less of it this year,” said Mendonça, who is based in the Gurupi reserve. “So, we are very worried about what might happen in the coming months.”
Decades of occupation
The first attempts to shield this slice of the Amazon from destruction can be traced to 1961, when Brazil’s government placed 1.6 million hectares (3.95 million acres) of the region under federal protection. The aim was to safeguard this remote swath of rainforest and the Indigenous people who relied on it for their survival.
But keeping invaders at bay soon proved a challenge, as the region was gripped by frenzied development. Fearing threats to its sovereignty, the military dictatorship that came to power in the 1960s pushed to populate the Amazon, dubbing it “land without men for men without land.” Over the next two decades, it built a series of roads slicing through the rainforest, opening up access to this remote region.
Migrants from other states arrived in droves, lured by promises of plentiful work and land they could raze, plant and call their own. In the 1980s, the construction of the Carajás Railroad, spanning 891 kilometers (554 miles) from Maranhao’s capital to the neighboring state of Pará, further intensified the wave of migration and created a new frontier of deforestation in the region.
And, with the rainforest splintered, illegal loggers could now travel deeper, to its most pristine areas, in search of valuable tree varieties. Soon, timber illegally extracted from areas under protection became the economic engine of nearby towns like Buriticupu.
“Back then, it was like the Wild West,” said Lieutenant Daniel Holanda dos Santos, who is part of the environmental battalion of Maranhão’s military police and participated in operations in the Gurupi Mosaic in the early 2000s. “We used to catch them, the loggers, trying to take trucks full of timber out of the rainforest.”
By 1986, some 47.1% of the area under federal protection was already populated by loggers, farmers, settlers and cattle ranchers.
In a bid to strengthen protections, the government demarcated six Indigenous reserves in the 1980s, expelling outsiders from these areas. The remaining rainforest was also placed under federal protection with the creation of the Gurupi Biological Reserve, where all human activity, save for scientific research and conservation work, was barred.
Over the years, authorities succeeded in expelling some large landowners from the northern portion of the Gurupi. But other small-scale farmers, many of whom had been wrongly given plots of land by state agrarian reform agencies even after the reserve was created, were never removed. Today, there are still some 6,300 people living within the limits of the Gurupi.
“In theory, it’s supposed to be just forest and biodiversity,” Mendonça said. “But the reality is that there is occupation.”
Ananias Pereira da Silva founded the Vila Aeroporto settlement in the mid-1990s, at a time when there was just “bush and loggers” in the Gurupi reserve. “There was nothing there,” the 81-year-old pastor told Mongabay in an interview. “So, we started working the land. We carried water on our backs, we planted rice so we could feed ourselves.”
The community, numbering 331 families, was settled there by the Maranhão Institute of Colonization and Lands, a state organ responsible for redistributing public lands to poor families for subsistence farming. With funds from the state, the community built roads, power lines and wells, constructing their village deep in the Gurupi reserve.
“That area belonged to no one,” said Silva, whose family lives on 100 hectares (247 acres) within the Gurupi reserve. “At the time, there was no talk of any reserve.”
A longstanding land dispute
For nearly two decades, federal agencies have demanded that villages like Silva’s be relocated to areas outside the reserve. But state authorities have rebuffed such requests, arguing that Maranhão does not have enough public lands to resettle these communities.
Meanwhile, the communities within the reserve remain in limbo, living in constant fear of eviction, says Adriana Marques dos Santos, 32, president of the residents’ association in Vila Aeroporto.
“Most of the people who live here in this area were born and raised here,” said Santos, who arrived in Gurupi reserve as a newborn in 1992. “Everything you have is inside this place. We have roots here. We have nowhere to go.”
Some, like José Duerta Alves, a 61-year-old rancher who raises 200 head of cattle on a 145-hectare (360-acre) plot of land inside the reserve, say they would give up their plots of land only if they are fairly compensated by authorities.
“This reserve was illegally created on top of the people already here,” said Alves, who bought his plot of land from another settler in 2000. “We just want what’s fair.”
The legality of the reserve came under scrutiny in 2013, when a lawmaker proposed a bill that would have scrapped the reserve, arguing that federal authorities failed to follow due process and compensate large landholders at the time of the reserve’s creation. However, the proposed legislation failed to draw enough votes in Congress and was eventually shelved.
Now, some of the settlers are demanding a revision to the boundaries of the Gurupi reserve that would leave their communities outside the region under protection. But Mendonça said the idea of redrawing the limits of the reserve has “been discarded” since it would set a risky precedent. “It’s a huge risk to the reserve and to the biodiversity of the Amazon in Maranhão,” she said. “So it’s not a simple, easy solution.”
As Brazilian agribusiness has gained more sway in the country’s legislative houses, attempts to reduce the size of conservation areas, or scrap them altogether, have become increasingly common. Environmental advocates told Mongabay a review of the Gurupi reserve’s limits could open the door to a dramatic reduction of the area under protection, with lawmakers friendly to agricultural interests likely to push for previously degraded lands, where the forest is now recuperating, to be excluded too.
Instead, ICMBio is committed to working with state authorities to relocate families that were wrongfully settled “within due legal process and respecting people’s constitutional rights,” Mendonça said. “We understand many of these people are vulnerable, they are fearful about the future,” she said. “But we have to work towards removing them. Because that’s what the law requires us to do.”
But some settlers, like Silva, say they won’t give up their land at any cost.
“They want to turn us into refugees,” said Silva, his voice trembling. “But we’re not leaving; there’s no way we’re giving up this land.”
A changing climate
As the forest recedes, both within the reserve and around it, those who have lived here for decades are witnessing the climate changing.
Elizabeth da Silva arrived in Vila Varig, a village just outside the reserve, in 2000. Back then, the rains poured down during the wet season, drenching the earth. Planted in the fertile soil, açaí and cassava grew in abundance. In the nearby river, fish were plentiful too.
“We used to see deer, paca, monkeys — they were all right over there,” she said, pointing to a patch of receding forest across the road. “It was wild here; it was all forest back then.”
But the wildlife has mostly vanished in recent years, as soy fields and cattle ranches have replaced much of the rainforest around her village. The soil has hardened, too, battered by drought.
“The deforestation made everything vanish,” she said. “Now, we can’t plant anything. They spray poison with their planes and all our plants die. The birds have all disappeared, they have nowhere to hide. It breaks my heart.”
Studies >show that, across this part of the Amazon Rainforest, the annual dry season has become about a month longer over the past half-century. When rains finally arrive, they are now more likely to be scarce and uneven, providing little relief from drought.
Even though tropical rainforests don’t naturally catch fire, a combination of deforestation and a drier climate has made the vegetation more prone to burning. While a few decades ago, blazes set by farmers would be snuffed out by the humidity, they can now spread with ease through the parched canopy and reach neighboring protected areas.
In the village of Maçaranduba, in the Carú Indigenous Territory, memories are still fresh from an especially bad wildfire that invaded the reserve in 2015. The flames engulfed pristine forest that the Indigenous people who live here had fought hard for decades to protect from invaders, loggers and ranchers.
“We spent more than a month trying to put out the fire,” said Paula Guajajara, 28, part of a group of women warriors of the forest. “We were almost losing hope when, all of a sudden, it started pouring rain.”
Following the fire, the community formed an Indigenous fire brigade made up of 15 men. The group has worked hard to reduce the risk of wildfires and educate relatives in the nine villages scattered across the 173,000-hectare (427,000-acre) territory about how climate change is altering the behavior of flames, often used by Indigenous people for subsistence planting and traditional rituals.
Still, fires coming in from neighboring areas like the Gurupi reserve remain a constant threat, said Antônio Barbosa Guajajara, 37, who has been working as a firefighter on the brigade for nearly a decade. In 2018, the group was forced to fight a major fire invading Carú from the Gurupi reserve.
“The fires start in these areas where there’s pasture, where people invade,” he said. “The fire is so fast, it spreads really easily into our area. And these areas are far away, so it takes time to get there and combat it.”
Over in the Gurupi reserve, ICMBio has been deploying its own brigades for years, recruiting and training firefighters from nearby towns and from the settler communities themselves. But controlling the flames, increasingly fueled by climate change, across a vast region like this has posed a challenge.
As it seeks ways to curb wildfires, the agency has begun pushing for the creation of a volunteer brigade entirely made up of settlers occupying the reserve. The hope is that the brigade can teach others in the communities about the responsible use of fire, Mendonça said.
“We want them to understand that fire is as much a risk to them as it is for the forest,” she said. “And if we don’t protect the forest, we’re going to lose it.”
Banner image of a Kaapori capuchin, (Cebus kaapori), one of the world’s most critically endangered primates. Image by Ricardo Ferreira Esteves via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0).
Editor’s Note:This story is powered by Places to Watch, a Global Forest Watch (GFW) initiative designed to quickly identify concerning forest loss around the world and catalyze further investigation of these areas. Places to Watch draws on a combination of near-real-time deforestation alerts, automated algorithms and field intelligence to identify new areas on a monthly basis. In partnership with Mongabay, GFW is supporting data-driven journalism by providing data and maps generated by Places to Watch. Mongabay maintains complete editorial independence over the stories reported using this data. Sign up for GFW’s monthly email updates featuring these stories.
Feedback: Use this form to send a message to the editor of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page
Credits
