- Deforestation is surging around Indigenous reserves in Brazil’s agricultural heartland, threatening one of the last stretches of preserved rainforest in the region.
- The destruction is trickling into protected areas too, including Capoto/Jarina Indigenous Territory, home to Brazil’s most famous Indigenous leader.
- Indigenous advocates blame land speculation on the back of plans to pave a stretch of the MT-322 highway, which runs across the Capoto/Jarina and Xingu Indigenous Park.
- Indigenous people worry the road will ease access into their territories, opening them up to land-grabbers, wildcat miners and organized crime groups.
PEIXOTO DE AZEVEDO, Brazil — The red dirt road cuts through the jungle like a fresh wound, splintering one of Brazil’s most pristine stretches of Amazon rainforest. Clouds of dust rise above the emerald canopy, as roaring freight trucks loaded with soybeans plow through deep craters of hardened mud.
On one side lies the Xingu Indigenous Park, the country’s oldest demarcated reserve. Across the road is the Capoto/Jarina Indigenous Territory, home to Brazil’s best-known Indigenous leader, Raoni Metuktire, who famously walked with president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on inauguration day on Jan. 1, in a symbol of new beginnings for the Amazon and its people.
Together, these two Indigenous territories form a vast oasis of rainforest stretching 3.3 million hectares across the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil’s agricultural heartland. But all around them, the forest is giving way to soy plantations and cattle pastures at a breakneck pace.
“We’re surrounded here,” says Puiú Txukarramãe, Raoni’s nephew and a leader, or cacique, from the Kayapó Indigenous people, who live in Capoto/Jarina. “Inside our area, it’s all forest. Outside of it, it’s all farms. There are farms everywhere you look.”
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