“It’s guerrilla warfare”: Firefighters in Brazil fight fires in the Amazon region – and the arsonists who start them | Brazil

TThe residents of the vinyl-coated military tents of this remote jungle camp in Brazil's Wild West compare the hellscape around them to disasters old and new: the extinction of the dinosaurs, the bombing of Gaza, the destruction of Hiroshima in World War II.

“It's as if a nuclear bomb had exploded. There is no forest left. There is nothing. Everything is burned. It is chaos,” said Lt. Col. Victor Paulo Rodrigues de Souza as he gave a tour of the base on the front line of Brazil's battle against one of the worst wildfire seasons in years and a relentless assault on the largest tropical rainforest on Earth.

For weeks, forests and farms here in the Amazon region – and throughout Brazil – have been ablaze like never before. The reason is a highly explosive cocktail of extreme drought affecting almost 60 percent of the country, the climate crisis and a seemingly insatiable appetite to destroy the environment for immense financial gain.

Outside the camp, an excavator has set up a defensive position to protect the 100 or so firefighters and police officers who live here from possible attacks by the illegal loggers and land grabbers who have cut down and burned huge areas of rainforest in recent years to create farmland and pasture. Behind this three-foot-high wall of earth lies a massive destruction: tens of thousands of hectares of forest and farmland go up in smoke, obscuring the sun and filling the sky with a toxic white haze.

“It's been burning here for over 40 days,” Souza said as his firefighters prepared for their latest mission to put out fires that are also wreaking havoc in neighboring Bolivia and Peru. “Yesterday, you couldn't breathe at the base. Everyone was wearing masks… At 9 a.m. it was like night because you couldn't see any sunlight.”

The Guardian spent three days at the Rubber Soldier Ecological Station camp near a logging outpost called Cujubim to monitor government efforts to bring the flames under control before they cause even greater damage.

Cujubim is named after an Amazon bird – the Red-throated Guan – native to this part of Rondônia, one of the nine Amazon states. The city's streets pay homage to the rich birdlife that inhabits the region's jungles: Musician Wren Avenue, Dark-winged Trumpeter Road, Woodpecker Way.

The bird theme masks a threatening reality caused by the race of criminals to make money in the region's supposedly protected forests. A sign welcoming visitors to Cujubim is riddled with bullet holes. On a recent morning, two men were shot in the head at the junction of Curassow Avenue and Jabiru Stork Road.

On the dirt road that winds north from Cujubim to the fire station, there is little bird life to be seen, apart from a pair of macaws, their scarlet plumes contrasting with the pale white smog. The road takes its name not from nature but from a notorious forest destroyer named Chaules Pozzebon, who locals say built it to access the pristine jungles beyond.

Pozzebon, once called the “biggest deforester in the Amazon,” was arrested in 2019 and sentenced to 99 years in prison for leading an armed criminal organization, but was recently released after his sentence was reduced. “He spread fear and terror here… He was the boss of the forest,” a police officer said of Pozzebon, who owned more than 100 sawmills and reportedly employed an armed militia to protect the wilderness he controlled.

After a bone-jarring 90-minute drive along the Estrada do Chaules (Chaules Road), the firefighting base comes into view: a dusty campsite beside the Curica River, connected to the outside world via a Starlink satellite dish.

This internet connection allows firefighters to detect fires as they break out in their area. Last week, satellite images showed that the situation was worsening despite their efforts. “In our first week here, we were able to reduce the number of fires to 17 a day. But since yesterday it has gone from 17 to 59 – and today it is over 80,” Souza said, blaming “reprisals” by environmental criminals angry at the government's efforts to put out the fires.

Three large trees were cut down across jungle roads to prevent firefighters from arriving. Elsewhere, steel rods were turned into improvised spike strips designed to puncture firefighters' tires. “It's like a guerrilla war. They're trying to stop firefighters from putting out the forest fires because they want to clear the area,” said the fire chief, who carried a pistol on his hip.

Hours later, at a fire south of the camp, Souza discovered the melted remains of a plastic gasoline can next to the carcass of a decades-old Brazil nut tree that had burned to the ground. Motorcycle tracks were visible nearby, but the firelighter was long gone. “It's like a favela in the jungle, full of back alleys and alleys,” Souza said, comparing the vast rainforest area to one of Rio's labyrinthine shanty towns. “The intruders know every single track, so it's almost impossible to catch them.”

The forest fires – more than 120,000 have broken out since August, most of them in the Amazon region – are easier to locate, although not always in time.

The next morning, a convoy of firefighters and police left the Rubber Soldier base and drove for two hours through a post-apocalyptic landscape of fallen trees and scorched earth. After passing a rotting horse carcass that had apparently been bitten by a snake, the group discovered an illegal sawmill in the heart of a vast expanse of freshly logged forest. Lumber and empty beer cans littered the patio. The fire had burned out, but the damage had been done.

“I can't tell you how it started. I just know it came from over there,” says Damião de Andrade, 53, a migrant worker from Bodocó in Brazil's impoverished northeast, who was detained by police for questioning at a neighboring ranch.

Experts say the lack of rain due to the natural climate phenomenon El Niño and scorching temperatures during what is expected to be the hottest year on record have fueled the wildfires. But the vast majority of the fires were deliberately set.

Carlos Nobre, one of Brazil's leading climatologists, suspects that the explosive increase in fires – which is not only here in the Amazon region, but also in the Pantanal wetlands, the tropical savannah of the Cerrado and as far south as São Paulo – could be part of a criminal counterattack to sabotage the Brazilian federal government's rigorous crackdown on deforestation and illegal mining.

Since leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became president in January 2023, deforestation in the Amazon has fallen sharply after four years of soaring under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. According to Nobre, environmental criminals viewed Lula's government – and other South American leaders who also fought against deforestation – as a “war enemy,” as opposed to Bolsonaro, whose anti-environmental policies they viewed as a friend. A drought that authorities say is “the most intense and extensive” in Brazilian history and the associated heat waves provided such criminals with a golden opportunity to wreak havoc. “It's war – they want to overthrow these governments,” Nobre said.

This week, Lula's Environment Minister Marina Silva accused the arsonists of committing “climate terrorism” and called for harsher penalties for such crimes.

While federal investigators try to identify those responsible for this year's inferno, hundreds of intrepid, soot-smeared firefighters continue to battle the flames with machetes, leaf blowers and chainsaws.

“It's like entering a cemetery… Everything here was once alive. Now everything is dead,” said José Baldoíno, a 41-year-old firefighter, as he led his nine-man team into the latest blaze, where bright orange flames swept through charred brush.

As night fell, Baldoíno, who works for a federal forest fire unit called Prevfogo, ordered his squad to retreat for fear of being crushed by falling trees. They had been working since 6 a.m. But the next morning, the men woke up before sunrise, put on flame-resistant uniforms and ran back to the front lines.

The Bible says that “the world will perish in fire, and what we are experiencing today is not far from the Scriptures,” said Baldoíno, recalling the record-breaking forest fires that have ravaged countries as far apart as Canada and Portugal.

After a month in the jungle, Baldoíno admitted that his men's bodies were exhausted but vowed they would not give up the fight. “Our souls cry out for a happy ending.”