‘It’s total devastation’: inside the Amazonian war against illegal gold mining | Brazil

TThe brothel, haphazardly built at the foot of Vila Cururu, an illegal gold mining settlement in the heart of Brazil’s most desecrated Indigenous lands, was a hive of depravity just a few weeks ago.

Drunken prospectors gathered around wooden tables, sipping beer and Scotch and eyeing the pole-dancing sex workers before heading with them to the barracks behind the brothel.

The surrounding campground was also full of intruders; Hordes of miners were moving deep into the hillsides and steppes, using pickaxes and explosives, in search of treasure.

“They destroyed everything. They destroyed nature,” said Jackson Katitaurlu, an indigenous leader from the Nambiquara people whose village is a few miles from the chaos in the southwestern Amazon.

But on a recent morning, Vila Cururu was abandoned: The once vibrant outlaw community had been razed to the ground by Brazilian security forces as it struggled to fulfill president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s promise to eliminate illegal mining on Indigenous lands after years of turmoil under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

Walking through the charred ruins of the camp, Lula’s evacuation czar Nilton Tubino recalled how miners fled into the surrounding forests after soldiers launched a ground and air assault in late March to stop one of the most violent attacks on Indigenous lands in Brazil’s recent history.

Other much larger protected areas suffered damage on a larger physical scale, but nowhere was the vandalism more intense than in Sararé, a Singapore-sized area of ​​savannah and forest near the Bolivian border. lost 4% of its forests Between January 2024 and August 2025. A total of about 17.3 square miles (44.8 km) of land has been destroyed since the gold rush began nearly five years ago; That’s an area nearly half the size of Manhattan.

“This is complete devastation,” Tubino sighed as he walked through Garimpo Quatro, one of Sararé’s largest mines, with an 18-inch machete slung across the front of his black suit and three radios strapped to his belt.

Paradoxically, part of the explanation for Sararé’s ordeal lies in the success of Lula’s anti-mining campaign, which he launched after returning to power in January 2023. After Tubino’s team launched Lula’s better-known “trespass” attempt on Yanomami Native lands, some miners flocked south to Sararé, hoping to continue working away from oppression.

Another driving force was the rise of gold prices, which reached record levels in the global instability environment caused by Donald Trump and his unstable foreign policy. “The price of gold, this crazy global context, Trump, these things… [have a direct impact] “It’s all over the Amazon,” said Tubino, who sees a clear connection between global turmoil and the deforestation around it as investors seek a safe haven for their money.

The Guardian spent two days touring the devastation in Sararé with government forces, the only foreign media allowed to visit the war-torn region, where about 200 members of the Nambiquara people live.

Viewed from the helicopter, the staggering extent of the destruction became clear. Endless brown gashes had opened up in the once-lush landscape, dotted with stagnant pools of bronze-coloured water contaminated by the mercury used by miners in their massive sluice boxes.

Over Vila Cururu, named after a poisonous tropical frog with a penchant for burrowing, the pilot gasped as he realized the extent of the illegal operation. “This place is like a slum. It’s like Rio de Janeiro,” he said of the sprawling mining camp as his six-seat plane sped toward dozens of collapsed makeshift structures cobbled together from tarpaulins and planks.

Nearby, half a dozen tunnels had been bored into the face of a rock during a mad hunt for gold.

On a nearby plain, an even larger mine had been dug from the forest by Hyundai excavators and security forces had now set it on fire. The trees had been flattened and replaced by huge mounds of gray and copper rubble where red parrots flew.

“This is a complete desert. I was born and raised here and I couldn’t believe it when I saw it,” said Katitaurlu, explaining how the rivers in his area were poisoned and how wildlife was afraid of the constant noise of music and explosions.

The crisis that began in Sararé during Bolsonaro’s environmentally disastrous 2019-2023 presidency is not the first time the people of Nambiquara have tasted external aggression.

In David Price’s 1989 book Before the Bulldozer, an anthropologist about the small Native group described how outsiders first came to the area in the 1730s, when gold was discovered in the surrounding hills. “Hard work, such as digging and washing gravel, was done by slaves, first Indians and then Africans,” Price wrote.

More misery came after Nambiquara was “discovered” by explorer Cândido Rondon, who was sent to build a telegraph line to the border region in the early 1900s. Price wrote that this mission “brought new and terrible diseases against which Native Americans had no defense. There were influenza epidemics in the 1920s that wiped out large groups in a matter of days. The measles epidemic of early 1946 was so devastating that survivors were unable to bury the dead.”

More disease and violence occurred in the late 1970s, as the military dictatorship destroyed a major highway across its territory with support from the World Bank. Price wrote that in just a few years, the Nambiquara went from being a “free and proud people” to being “oppressed by western society.” Their population had fallen from perhaps 10,000 to about 600 at the beginning of the 20th century.

Today’s emergency has two new and disturbing elements: the use of state-of-the-art heavy-duty hydraulic excavators that enable destruction on an unprecedented industrial scale, and the suspicious arrival of heavily armed organized crime groups such as Rio de Janeiro’s Red Command.

Drug groups from Rio and São Paulo have been pushing into the Amazon in recent years, and some reports claim that Red Command, which the Trump administration recently designated a foreign terrorist group, has seized control of Vila Cururu and other Sararé mines, causing bloodshed.

Tubino downplayed Red Command’s possible role in the region and said he had seen no concrete evidence of Sararé operating gold mines. But the increased violence is undeniable. When environmentalist special forces raid the area in 2024, five heavily armed men He was killed in a gunfight. A few days ago, four people were killed during the gold mine war.

Sararé’s top indigenous leader, Saulo Katitaurlu, said he had heard reports of miners wandering the area with automatic rifles, 12-gauge shotguns and handguns. He was convinced they were faction members and recalled receiving threats from a miner who warned him not to talk about the demolition, “otherwise I will come to your village and kill you all.”

Saulo’s brother, Jackson Katitaur, said that a few days ago, Native hunters found a body near their village, wrapped in tarpaulin and with a deep wound on its chest. When the police came to collect the body, he had disappeared.

Nambiquara leaders said the crackdown has been largely successful in deporting the miners for now. So what happens if the troops inevitably leave?

“Good question,” Jackson replied. “I think they will come back if the operation is stopped. They will come back 100 percent.”

Even more frightening was the possibility that Lula would lose this year’s presidential election to Bolsonaro’s senator son, Flávio, and that the leftists were not far ahead in the polls. “If this happens, we’re screwed,” Jackson joked sharply, recalling how Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric encouraged the historic gold rush that saw tens of thousands of miners flock to protected areas.

Tubino said he believes it is crucial for Lula to be re-elected if interagency crackdowns on illegal mining and deforestation continue in a way that protects Indigenous and other traditional communities in the Amazon. Stating that he believed that Brazil’s sovereignty was also in danger in the October vote, Trump stated that Nicolás Maduro used his allegation of complicity in illegal mining as an excuse to kidnap the Venezuelan president in January this year.

But the vigorous 65-year-old man has more pressing concerns for now.

Despite the 10th crackdown spearheaded by Tubino under Lula, some trespassers still lurk in Sararé. As his convoy moved towards Vila Cururu, police radios picked up conversations between lookouts in the hills. “There’s a man in a flak jacket taking pictures and two different-looking men,” one of the observers was heard announcing, apparently referring to the Guardian’s reporters.

Further on, Tubino entered a 100-metre-long, claustrophobic, pitch-black tunnel dug out of a cliff and found tools that suggested the miners were still at work, perhaps working at night to avoid detection.

Nearby, soldiers uncovered an underground bunker containing a generator capable of powering the entirety of Vila Cururu.

In a bush area next to another deactivated mine, soldiers found white sacks containing 300 kg of ammonium nitrate explosives. “This is a painstaking job,” said Tubino, as the soldiers made the discovery after seeing new footprints on the dirt road. “Someone passed through here in the last few days,” he added, before ordering the explosives to be destroyed.

Lula’s anti-mining campaign is a harrowing, dangerous and seemingly endless exercise for the men and women on the front lines of the Amazon battle against the multibillion-dollar illegal industry. But with another major mission planned for later this year, Tubino promised the work would continue.

“Holiday? There’s no such thing as a holiday,” he joked, sitting in the rubble of a recently demolished mining shack, mosquitoes fluttering around his black arms.