http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/10/06/loggers/?utm_source=Active+Subscribers&utm_campaign=6b52169160-MR_100715&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_35c49cbd51-6b52169160-64063349
Defending the Amazon.
Dom Phillips
In Brazil, militias of indigenous people take up arms against illegal logging, but their tactics raise fears of greater violence.
A beat-up sign on the edge of this Amazon reserve warns strangers not to enter. For years, loggers ignored it and barreled straight into the protected indigenous territory, cutting tracks ever deeper into the diminishing forest.
But on a recent day, visitors approaching Juçaral village, just inside the reserve, encountered an improvised checkpoint operated by a militia called the Guardians. Wearing disheveled uniforms and face paint, members of the 48-man militia sauntered out, shotguns in hand, to check every arriving vehicle.
The Guardians are one of two indigenous groups on this eastern fringe of the Amazon that have taken radical action to reduce illegal logging. They have tied up loggers, torched their trucks and tractors, and kicked them off the reserves.
As a result, such logging has sharply declined in these territories. But the indigenous groups have faced reprisal attacks and death threats for their actions, raising fears of more violence in an area known for its lawlessness.
The clashes highlight the continuing grave threat to the Amazon, the world’s biggest remaining rain forest, which plays a crucial role in maintaining the world’s climate and biodiversity. From 2005 to 2012, deforestation plunged in Brazil, as the government increased its conservation efforts and cracked down on illegal loggers. But since then, the numbers have begun to creep up again. In 2014 alone, almost 2,000 square miles of Amazon rain forest were cleared by farmers, loggers and others.
Indigenous groups play an important role in preserving Brazil’s Amazon rain forest; their reserves make up roughly one-fifth of its area. Silvio da Silva, a village chief from Arariboia and an employee of the Brazilian government’s indigenous agency, said that a year ago as many as 130 logging trucks left the southern end of this reserve a day. Thanks to the Guardians, that has fallen to around 10 to 15 trucks a day.
In a rare visit to the reserves permitted by the indigenous tribes, Washington Post journalists found that many residents support the militias. But others are uneasy about relying on informal armed groups to resolve a problem that should fall to the Brazilian government.
“I am very scared of a serious incident,” said Nonato Sales, 65, a local cattle farmer.
The Guardians formed in 2012 “to minimize the critical situation of illegal deforestation” on this rain-forest reserve, said Olimpio Iwyramu Guajajara, 42, the group’s general coordinator.
The militia contains men from the Guajajara, an indigenous tribe. A smaller Guardians militia operates in the nearby Caru reserve, also in the northeastern state of Maranhão. In 2013, a second group of indigenous people, the Ka’apor, began using similar tactics on their reserve, Alto Turiaçu, 150 miles away.
Indigenous groups like those in Arariboia have faced a growing threat to their livelihoods as loggers have pressed into their territories, where most of the remaining hardwood in this part of the Amazon is concentrated.
The threat has been even worse for the Awá people, hunter-gatherers who roam through remote areas of the reserve. The loggers were “expelling the isolated Indians, finishing the food supplies that sustained them, all the hunting, fruits and fish,” Iwyramu said. Brazil is home to more isolated or “non-contacted” indigenous groups than anywhere else in the world, around 80, according to Survival International, a British-based group that champions the rights of tribal peoples.
President Dilma Rousseff recently promised to end illegal logging in the Amazon by 2030. A report last year by the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit group based in Washington, concluded that indigenous communities were highly effective at conserving their own forests. “They say the forest is their life,” said Sarah Shenker, who works at Survival.
Yet the government’s agency for indigenous affairs, the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI, has a budget this year of just $159 million to protect 900,000 indigenous people. With such limited resources of its own, the agency has decided to provide support to the Guardians in Arariboia, including ammunition, boots and fuel for their motorbikes and all-terrain vehicles.
The armed groups are using aggressive tactics to protect their land.
A few weeks ago, a team of Guardians surrounded some loggers in their hammocks in the Arariboia reserve. “We tied them all up,” said Fernando Marciano Guajajara, 30, one of the Guardians. The militiamen went on to burn the loggers’ vehicles.
“They were very angry,” he said.
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