Rainforest raiders foil the guardians of the Amazon

by Reuters
Thursday, 16 January 2014 12:38 GMT

Officers from Brazil's Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, or IBAMA, guard a yard filled with trees which were illegally logged from the Amazon rainforest during a sting operation against illegal sawmills and loggers in the Alto Guama River indigenous reserve in Nova Esperanca do Piria, Para state, on September 25, 2013. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

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Unlicensed sawmills are part of a gray economy that has come to define development in the Amazon - but that is leading to widespread forest destruction

By Paulo Prada

NOVA ESPERANÇA DO PIRIÁ, Brazil, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Alex Lacerda and Paulo Mau&#233;s drive a silver pickup to an outdoor sawmill near the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Carrying 12-gauge shotguns, they step out and approach a shack, knock and enter cautiously. They are agents for Brazil's environmental police.

A stocky man identifies himself as João Pereira, owner. The agents ask him for two documents: an operating license for the sawmill and a certificate of origin for the lumber stacked outside. "I have the license," Pereira says. "My accountant has the other."


"He's stalling," says Lacerda. "There's no reason not to have the paperwork - you're either operating legally or not."

Pereira's sawmill is one of hundreds like it on the contracting fringe of the world's largest rainforest. Unlicensed mills are part of a gray economy that has come to define development in the Amazon. The activity spans everything from precious hardwoods to illegally extracted minerals to the bare land left behind, itself a commodity for ranchers and squatters who speculate on its future value.







"Brazil let its guard down," says Paulo Barreto, a forestry engineer at Imazon, a research institute that studies deforestation from Bel&#233;m, capital of the state where Ibama conducted the raids. "There is growing incentive to clear land, and the government isn't keeping up."

The result: a spike in deforestation. Using satellites, Brazil's space agency over the past year detected new clearings totaling 2,256 square miles (5843 square kilometers), up nearly 30 percent from 2012. That's more than seven times the area of New York City.


The government and its allies say the deforestation spike suggests an equilibrium has been reached - a minimum level of destruction beyond which future progress comes slowly. "We must expect some annual fluctuations," says Tine Sundtoft, environment minister for Norway, which in 2008 pledged as much as $1 billion to help Brazil fight deforestation through 2015.

Brazilian officials say continued progress depends on greater awareness, education and deterrence. "Society must change," says Francisco Oliveira, director of policies against deforestation at Brazil's environment ministry. "Everyone in the Amazon must understand there are real consequences for breaking the law."



"We can't be everywhere," says Luciano Evaristo, Ibama's director of environmental protection. "We must be smarter and more agile to combat deforestation where it's most intense."



Leading the raids are officials like Lacerda and Mau&#233;s. They are the top two Ibama inspectors in Pará, a state bigger than Texas and California combined. Known for lawless jungle outposts, Pará accounted for nearly half the past year's devastation.

At 4 a.m. on the first day of their mission, Mau&#233;s is at a police station on the outskirts of Bel&#233;m, briefing 16 Ibama agents and a team of 10 state police officers who will accompany them for added security. Until now, none but the senior agents know their destination - a five-hour drive east to one of the most unruly corners of Brazil.

Mau&#233;s reminds them of dangers in an area rife with clashes between loggers, miners, Indian tribes and lawmen. In 2008, after receiving death threats over raids he was leading, Mau&#233;s fled a field office Ibama operated nearby. Loggers soon burned it to the ground.



In April, the army deployed a jungle unit to Nova Esperança for a brief "social and civic" mission, says Lt. Col. Jucenílio Evangelista da Silva, commander of the unit. As Army dentists, doctors and barbers pulled teeth and gave free checkups and trims, the troops reconnoitered.

Now, as Mau&#233;s gives his pre-dawn briefing, 104 of Evangelista's troops are back, setting up a makeshift camp, kitchen and communications center. Local officials, grateful for the April visit, had given the colonel permission to use an unfinished schoolhouse for "an operation."

Evangelista hadn't specified the target: the sawmills, the sole private industry in a town where 98 percent of the municipal budget is financed by federal revenue. "That needed to stay a surprise," he says.



Ibama learned, however, that the wood passing through Nova Esperança was of species that remain only inside the Alto Guamá Indigenous Reserve, a 1,000-square-mile area that is home to the nearby Temb&#233; tribe. The woods - species like jatobá, maçaranduba, and andiroba - are prized for flooring, furniture and construction. They can be legal if extracted from managed forests.


"There's a mosaic of forest that must be preserved so that people, animals and plants don't get cornered into unsustainable areas," says Lacerda, a biologist by training.

Mau&#233;s wraps up his briefing. The agents and officers pile into six silver pickups with king cabins. The sun rising, their convoy progresses from the crowded four-lane highway outside Bel&#233;m, to potholed rural routes, to the red dirt road into Nova Esperança.



"They knew we were coming," Mau&#233;s says.




Next door, at the Piriá wood company, a middle-aged couple have stuck around. Mau&#233;s and Lacerda walk over, dwarfed by heaps of timber. The couple sit calmly.

Like the logs at João Pereira's sawmill, none of the trunks here have identity tags. And like Pereira, the owners say they possess the required documents, but that their lawyer, based in Bel&#233;m, currently has them.

"You better call him," Lacerda says.

The woman, Rosa Maria da Silva Santos, complies.


"This is how people eat around here," says Alves Borges de Nascimento, a 35-year-old millworker. "How come the government has resources to come shut us down, but not give us alternatives?"


Santos' lawyer and a timber consultant arrive. They have the operating license and documents for some of the wood. But it doesn't satisfy questions about all 840 cubic meters in her lumberyard.

The tags that were supposed to be on the trunks, says the consultant, "could have fallen off."

"That might happen on one or two of the logs," says Mau&#233;s, "but not all."

The next morning, the agents head into the backwoods.


Although ranchers sometimes preserve woodland, many are now cutting as Brazil races to roll out a digitally mapped registry of its more than 5 million known farms. The registry will help track what's public, what's private and whether new clearings are legal, the government says. In the meantime, landowners are rushing to get ahead of the mapping, expected to take years.

By midday, the agents drive through the Temb&#233; reserve.


Two years ago, a group of 35 Temb&#233; confronted five lumberjacks felling reserve trees. The Temb&#233;, wielding shotguns and machetes, forced them from their land and burned two logging tractors.

In November 2012, Ibama agents joined Valdecí Temb&#233;, a tribe leader, to investigate another incursion. This time, the loggers formed an armed posse to confront them. The standoff ended peacefully, but Valdecí was so rattled that he darted into the jungle and wandered alone for days.

"They could have killed me," he says.

On this afternoon, the agents pull into João Pereira's lumberyard. The police frisk Pereira's workers and search the mill for weapons.

"You won't find any," says Pereira, 58. "I never got anywhere with a gun."

Lacerda orders him to summon the accountant with the documents for his 404 cubic meters of wood. Mau&#233;s, meanwhile, authorizes a buyer with a waiting semi-truck, loaded with $7,000 worth of freshly sawn tauarí, to haul the boards to a warehouse. The buyer may spray the wood for fungi, Mau&#233;s says, but he can't sell it until Ibama clears its origin.


"Is there a license for this?" agent Gunther Barbosa asks the builders.

"I don't know," answers one, eyeing Barbosa's gun nervously.

"You tell whoever sent you to build this that you are going to stop," Barbosa says. "If we come back and this is still standing, we are going to take chainsaws to it."

Over the next days and weeks, the agents begin demolishing sawmills with no permits, including the one being built near Pereira's. They fine Santos and her husband $290,000 for faulty paperwork and possessing illegal wood. They fine Pereira $149,000 for the same violations. They order both mills shut until the paperwork clears.


Sipping a Coke at his girlfriend's house, Nunes, 31, scoffs at the charges.

His disdain illustrates a handicap for Ibama: It often can't collect on the fines. Many get appealed or outright ignored. Compared with the $830 million in fines it levied in the Amazon, Ibama in 2012 reported fine revenues nationwide of only about $34 million.


"What I do might be illegal," says Nunes, "but it's not immoral." (Edited by Michael Williams)

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