Brazilian Amazon at risk of being taken over by
mafia, ex-police chief warns
Alexandre Saraiva gives alert on organised crime in
region ahead of anniversary of killings of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira
Tom
Phillips in Rio de Janeiro and Jonathan Watts in Altamira
Thu 1 Jun
2023 13.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/01/brazil-amazon-crime-dom-phillips-bruno-pereira
The rapid
advance of organised crime groups in the Brazilian Amazon risks turning the
region into a vast, conflict-stricken hinterland plagued by heavily armed
“criminal insurgents”, a former senior federal police chief has warned.
Alexandre
Saraiva, who worked in the Amazon from 2011 to 2021, said he feared the growing
footprint of drug-trafficking mafias in the region could spawn a situation
similar to the decades-long drug conflict in Rio de Janeiro, where the police’s
battle with drug gangs and paramilitaries has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
“I
experienced how the state lost control of public security in Rio de Janeiro,”
Saraiva said. “And in the Amazon today – if nothing is done in terms of public
security – we are facing a continent-sized Rio de Janeiro, with the aggravating
factors of borders with major drug producers and an extraordinarily difficult
jungle setting.”
Saraiva
warned of dire consequences for the rainforest and its inhabitants if criminal
gangs were allowed to grow into powerful armies like the rebel factions in
neighbouring Colombia. “We will have criminal insurgents … [whose] ideology is
money,” he said.
“We will
have areas of conflagration, of major conflict between groups which are
fighting over areas of illegal gold and timber extraction. In the middle of
this, we will have Indigenous victims. And we will face immense logistical
difficulties in combating this,” warned the police chief, the author of a
recent book called Jungle: Loggers, Miners and Corruption in a Lawless Amazon.
The alert
came ahead of the first anniversary of the killings of the British journalist
Dom Phillips and the Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, whose deaths
exposed widespread environmental devastation and the growing reach of organised
crime groups in the Amazon.
A year
after their killings, the Guardian has joined 15 other international news media
organisations and more than 50 journalists in a collaborative investigation
into organised crime and resource extraction in the Brazilian Amazon, in an
effort coordinated by Forbidden Stories, the Paris-based non-profit dedicated
to continuing the work of reporters who are threatened, censored or killed.
Quick Guide
What is the Bruno and Dom project?
Figures collated for the Bruno and Dom project by
the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety (FBSP) paint a bleak portrait of organised
crime’s deadly impact on the region, showing that:
With more than 8,000 deaths, the rate of
intentional lethal violent crime in the Brazilian Amazon’s nine states was more
than 50% higher than in the rest of the country last year – a murder rate
similar to that of Mexico.
In Amazonas state, where Bruno Pereira and Dom
Phillips were among 1,432 people killed last year, the murder rate was 74%
above the national average. 2021 was even more violent with 1,571 victims and a
violent death rate of 36.8 per 100,000 inhabitants – five times that of the US.
Federal police troops – sent to the Javari valley
region by Brazil’s new government – travel down a waterway near the river town
of Atalaia do Norte.
Federal police troops – sent to the Javari valley
region by Brazil’s new government – travel down a waterway near the river town
of Atalaia do Norte. Photograph: João Laet/The Guardian
The number of people killed by military and civil
police grew 71% in the Amazon between 2016 and 2021, compared with 35% in the
rest of Brazil. The Amazon’s prison population grew 35.1% between 2016 an 2022
compared with 14.1% elsewhere, helping prison-run factions to flourish in
overcrowded jails.
Brazil’s two most powerful crime factions – São
Paulo’s PCC (First Capital Command) and Rio’s CV (Red Command) – now operate in
all nine Amazon states, as do at least 15 other regional crime groups,
including Os Crias, the Família do Norte and Class A Command.
Last year,
the FBSP revealed how the Amazon now contained 10 of Brazil’s 30 most violent
municipalities. They included remote illegal mining and drug smuggling hubs
such as Jacareacanga and Japurá, and Novo Progresso, a deforestation hotspot
from where Phillips reported for the Guardian in 2020. All three towns had
staggeringly high murder rates of more than 100 per 100,000 inhabitants.
The advance
of organised crime groups in the Amazon was laid bare by the killings of
Pereira and Phillips last year in the Javari valley, an Austria-sized sweep of
rivers and rainforests on Brazil’s border with Colombia and Peru, the world’s
top two cocaine producers.
Brazil’s
environment minister, Marina Silva, told the Guardian that violence had long
been “a hallmark of the predatory occupation of the Amazon”, pointing to the
assassinations of activists such as Chico Mendes in 1988 and Sister Dorothy
Stang in 2005.
The
military dictatorship’s decision to colonise the Amazon in the 1960s –
supposedly to stop hostile foreign powers commandeering the sparsely populated
region – sparked a deadly struggle for land and resources, devastated
Indigenous communities and caused deforestation to soar.
However,
Silva said the “overlapping of multiple forms of criminality” in the Amazon now
meant the state needed to increase its presence in affected regions. She
highlighted the new government’s battle to evict illegal miners with links to
the PCC from the Yanomami Indigenous territory.
The Public
Safety Forum’s president, Renato Sérgio de Lima, said the statistics collected
by his group’s researchers underlined how the arrival of drug factions had made
a bad situation worse, causing Amazon murder rates to soar even as they fell
elsewhere in Brazil.
Lima traced
the advance of such groups into the Amazon to 2016 when a notorious drug
trafficker was killed on Brazil’s border with Paraguay. That assassination
helped the PCC consolidate its control of the drug smuggling route focused on
the border town of Ponta Porã and forced its rival, the CV, to look further
north to the Amazon.
The CV’s
destination was Tabatinga, a scruffy town on the tri-border with Colombia and
Peru, near where Phillips and Pereira were killed last June.
Lima
estimated that the cocaine being smuggled through Brazil was now responsible
for 4% of the South American country’s GDP – with about 40% of those illegal
profits coming through the Amazon.
“We are
talking about something like $25bn being injected into the Amazon’s economy
every year and the region isn’t ready to deal with this,” he said, warning that
the response from the armed forces had been woefully inadequate, with the army
and navy seizing just 41 firearms in 2022.
Aerial
images filmed by Brazil’s Globoplay, one of the news organisations involved in
the Bruno and Dom project, showed a suspected cocaine laboratory and a series
of coca farms that had been carved out of the jungles on the Peruvian side of
the Javari. “If the Brazilian state doesn’t intervene in an urgent and firm
manner, we’re going to have [entire] regions that are run by
narco-traffickers,” said Beto Marubo, a prominent Indigenous leader who was
close to Pereira.
Lima warned
that if nothing was done, “the military’s fear [of losing control of the
Amazon] will become almost a self-fulfilling prophesy. We will effectively lose
sovereignty over the region and the region will be consolidated as the main
narco-trafficking smuggling route in Brazil and to Europe.”
Rodrigo
Chagas, an Amazon-based researcher who is studying the drug gangs’ rapid
expansion for the FBSP, echoed the warnings of “Colombianisation”, which could
see security forces launch a catastrophic “war on drugs” similar to the one
that has blighted Brazil’s neighbour for decades.
“It’s
possible the Amazon will see tremendous havoc. This is a scenario that worries
me, because the public security responses we tend to see are ‘war on
drugs’-style responses – a war which is utterly detrimental to local
populations,” Chagas said.
Saraiva
noted how Brazil’s armed forces had historically been obsessed with the
supposed threat of an “external enemy” annexing the Amazon, a vast region nine
times the size of France. “Meanwhile, we have an internal criminal insurgency
which is corroding the Brazilian nation from within, [and] it’s happening far
faster than we imagine,” warned Saraiva, who was the federal police chief in
three Amazon states, Amazonas, Maranhão and Roraima.
It was
while serving in Amazonas that Saraiva came into contact with Pereira. In 2019,
shortly before Pereira was forced from his job with the government’s Indigenous
protection agency, Funai, the police chief helped the Indigenous defender
launch a major anti-mining operation in the Javari region called “Operation
Korubo”. Sixty illegal mining dredges were destroyed during those raids, which
Saraiva believed put Pereira “in a very delicate position”.
“In the
Javari valley we have a convergence between drug trafficking, illegal fishing,
illegal logging and mining. And in the middle of all this, there was a guy
called Bruno [trying to fight environmental crime],” Saraiva said, remembering
a brave and passionate activist with “selflessness in his DNA”.
Federal
police have named a shadowy local figure with suspected ties to organised crime
as the alleged mastermind behind last year’s killings. Experts say at least
four Brazilian drug factions – the CV, PCC, Os Crias and the Família do Norte –
operate in the region, as well as groups from Colombia and Peru.
Organised
crime’s growing grip on the Amazon was again exposed last month when alleged
PCC operatives attacked government forces during a raid on an illegal mine in
the Yanomami Indigenous territory near Venezuela. Four men were killed in the
shootout, including a PCC leader nicknamed “Presidente”.
A message
intercepted by police and shared with the Guardian showed PCC chiefs urging
members to retaliate against police for “the deaths of our brothers”. “From
what I understand, the PCC isn’t just there to extract gold. Of course they’re
doing this too. But the main thing is to use the illegal airstrips to send
weapons and drugs to other countries, like Venezuela,” said one police source.
The story
of Saraiva, whom Dom Phillips interviewed for the book he was writing about the
Amazon, underlines the growing role of criminal factions in environmental
crime.
Two years
after he stopped working in the Amazon, he still travels in a bulletproof car –
the result of intelligence suggesting the PCC planned to assassinate him, even
though his focus had been fighting environmental crime, not drug smuggling.
“Organised
crime is diversifying into other illegal activities that Brazilian society
tends to see as lesser offences,” said Saraiva, who commanded Brazil’s largest
ever seizure of illegal wood in 2020.
“The mafia
goes wherever there’s money. It doesn’t care if it’s environmental crime,
people smuggling, cocaine. And what they see there [in the Amazon] is gold and
wood that’s being sold for a very high price. It’s obvious that it wouldn’t
take them long to get involved in this.”
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