THREATS AND PROMISES IN BRAZIL’S LAWLESS AMAZON

1-NOVO PROGRESSO, BRAZIL — In early August, Adecio Piran wrote an article for this Amazon town’s news website announcing a “Day of Fire,” to be started on August 10. The post suggested a coordinated criminal effort among local landowners and cattle ranchers to burn newly cleared rainforest — much of it on public land. The unnamed organizers of the collective action, Mr. Piran wrote, wanted to draw the attention of President Jair Bolsonaro.

2-“Because of the larger deforestation rate in this area, people were saying they had to burn fires at the same time to get the attention of the president,” Mr. Piran said, “to show there are producers here who want to push ahead with cattle, with the land and be productive in the region.”

3-But days later, as smoke and fires across the Amazon caught the world’s attention, bringing international outrage and condemnation of Mr. Bolsonaro’s gutting of Brazil’s environmental protections, Mr. Piran said he was threatened and told to take his article down from the Folha do Progresso news site. When Mr. Piran refused, he received death threats. He temporarily fled town and sought protection from the police.

4-In September, I traveled to this dusty frontier town with a film crew for The Dispatch to look into the so-called Day of Fire and to meet with rural producers who appeared to brazenly flout Brazil’s environmental laws.

5-This year, the nearby Jamanxim National Forest, a federally protected rainforest larger than the size of Puerto Rico, lost 45 square miles of forest cover, the worst deforestation among all protected lands in the Brazilian Amazon. Brazilian satellites confirm much of that cleared land was set ablaze on August 10.

6-By the time I arrived to Novo Progresso in early September, Brazil’s independent Public Ministry had announced a federal investigation into a possible criminal conspiracy to burn fires, and rural landowners and ranchers were denying the Day of Fire ever happened. Novo Progresso’s civil police had already concluded it was a mere coincidence in timing. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/06/video/amazon-rainforest-fires-burning.html?searchResultPosition=1