The Amazon Basin, where, after a lull in illegal logging, an epic struggle has re-ignited. Remote communities are again battling to stop loggers stripping the rainforest of its ancient timber. If only it was that simple. Many villagers are vowing to stop the loggers, but others depend on revenues from the illegal trade. The result is that some towns are in civil conflict, with neighbours clashing over the exploitation of their unique environment, one of the largest remaining wilderness’ on Earth. Aaron Lewis ventured up the mighty Amazon to bring us his report on what's developed into a life-and-death struggle.

REPORTER:  Aaron Lewis

It's been called the lungs of the earth. But the Amazon is also a lawless jungle, where criminals and profiteers plunder the forest for its riches. This is Valdeci dos Santos Gomes. He's on his first trip back to the river near his home in nearly two years. It's dangerous for him to even be seen here, especially with a journalist. After his village began reporting illegal logging operations to the federal police, Gomes received death threats, had to flee his home and go into hiding.

VALDECI DOS SANTOS GOMES (Translation): They told me each metre of wood seized would raise the price on my head. I am not afraid to die, that is what I tell my family. My biggest fear is losing the Amazon as my children would not survive.

As we push out into the current a barge appears up ahead. No logging barges are allowed down this river but Gomes says that more and more are flouting the law.

VALDECI DOS SANTOS GOMES (Translation): We are in an area of conflict with loggers controlling stolen land. Most of the forest is stolen by people like those we just saw on the barge.

After years of a slow decline in logging in the Amazon basin, the last six months have seen a boom in the illegal timber trade. The state of Para alone exports billions of dollars in illegal hardwood. It seems that everywhere people are cutting down trees without permission. I found this villager felling a tree to build his home. He wasn't legally allowed to do this but the locals can live with that. It's the massive-scale logging that happens every day that's the real problem in the Amazon with commercial logging sending armies with chainsaws to cut timber for export, almost always illegally.

VALDECI DOS SANTOS GOMES (Translation): They end up devastating everything because the tree that falls brings down the smaller trees as does the machinery that drags the timber. And they clear roads in the forest so what is left at the end..... nothing. They destroy everything.

The Amazon River is the heart of the illegal logging trade. But because the river is poorly patrolled, and forged documents are easy to obtain along the way, by the time that the logs get to a port like this one – it's almost impossible to separate the legal from the illegal timber. So the logs are simply loaded on a boat and exported to countries like the United States, Europe and even Australia.
Once the valuable timber has been removed the land is given over to cattle ranchers and soy farmers. All over the Amazon people are being run off their land in growing numbers.

HERCULANO DA SILVA (Translation): For example, this is my brother-in-law’s..so they get here, clear everything, put a fence around it and claim they own the whole land. Then they use it for pasture, then pass it on to other people.

When the land grabbers came to Herculano da Silva's village everyone was threatened at gunpoint and many fled to the nearest city of Altamira.

HERCULANO DA SILVA (Translation): I consider the 59 people who grew up and who live on the land today, to be my own family..there were more but many abandoned the community because someone set fire to their house and belongings. They set my sister’s house on fire with everything inside so she moved to Altamira and now she is starving because she can’t go back because she is afraid.

Da Silva grew up in a village in the Amazon forest. He says the shock of the sudden move to city life is too much for him and most people in his community.

HERCULANO DA SILVA (Translation): In the city, you guys understand everything but we people from the forest, if you put us in the city we’ve never been in before, we are lost. But here, anywhere you put us, we are at home because we know how to decipher the forest.

Land-grabbing is a highly organised criminal enterprise with a few strong hands at the top who seize and transform sweeping tracts of forest. Maria da Silva was approached five years ago by a front association who claimed to represent the government. This 'association' offered her a small plot of her own in exchange for clearing and planting the land. She and her family moved in, burned the forest, and planted staple crops like cacao, manioc, and fruit.

REPORTER (Translation): Did you but the land?

MARIA DA SILVA (Translation): No, what they did was, how can I explain..they donated a piece of land to us and then we come and work, sent by the association who say they are responsible.

REPORTER (Translation): Which association?

MARIA DA SILVA (Translation): The one on the card you saw.

REPORTER (Translation): Can I see it again and did you pay any money?

MARIA DA SILVA (Translation): Only to have this card made, 20 reais. After that I paid for two months at 10 reais per month.

REPORTER (Translation): And who did they say this land belonged to?

MARIA DA SILVA (Translation): They said the government owns it.

Maria's land is in fact part of an Indian reserve, and not the property of the so-called association that first approached her. But when I mention this, she is adamant that she wouldn't leave without a fight.

MARIA DA SILVA (Translation): I am working really hard there, no one can kick me off for nothing, I’ll die first. I’m not leaving after so much work, my husband is turning 60 in November, how can we leave empty-handed after working for so long?

The next day Herculano da Silva takes me deep into the jungle that he's lived in his whole life. Herculano sees the value of these trees as more than just their raw timber.

HERCULANO DA SILVA (Translation): The oil is used for insect bites, centipedes, scorpions, all different kinds of bug bites. When you get a rash you rub the oil on your body, it is used to repel mosquitoes as well. For throat infections you can rub the oil on your throat, it is good for the flu and everything else.

Herculano also shows me the bark that his community uses to treat malaria and other plants that provide traditional cures. All of which is lost when the land is cleared and burned. But there are other costs. The Amazon is the largest carbon-capturing area in the world. Last year 17,000 fires were spotted by satellite, all burning at the same time. When the trees are burned, their trapped carbon is released and at the current scale, this is a major contributor to global warming. Members from 13 communities living along the Amazon River are gathering to form a plan to fight back. We travel for two days by boat to attend a meeting in a small village in the eastern Amazon. They've chosen this secluded church hall because they know it's unlikely the loggers or land grabbers will find them here. It's dangerous to talk openly because the industry provides the only jobs in the region and many of the villagers are on the side of the loggers.

ROSA VIEGAS (Translation): We have to have secrecy because unfortunately my people, not everyone suffers as deeply as many of us do. They do not know what we are experiencing and they will sell us out. Sadly there are people like that.

There is a growing group of profiteers – ranchers, farmers, and land grabbers - who are seizing whole areas of the Amazon at gunpoint. These villagers don't want to leave their homes but with no-one enforcing the law they're afraid and there is no-one here to protect them.

MAN (Translation): As our parents raised us here on our land, in our area, in our house, we also want to leave this to our children. But we are being bullied by larger farmers, by logging companies, even soya producers in our region, and when we take action, this happens. We are made to suffer even more.

ROSA VIEGAS (Translation): Today our fight is life and death, we used to have our land and now we have been kicked off it. And today, is it fair for us to see our children crying and asking for food when we have got no land to harvest any or plant any?

Rosa Viegas is looked to as a leader here. She has spent the last three years doing everything she can to stop illegal logging. Her community has had little help, even from the state police. Last year when Rosa and her community tried to blockade the river and stop barges carrying illegal wood, they were appalled to find that the police were acting on behalf of the loggers instead of the community.

ROSA VIEGAS (Translation): The police out guns to our heads with their fingers on the trigger and told us to shut up and not say anything. But at that moment I protested and said lots of things, but they just protected them and took the barges away.

When one of the barges was burnt by the protesters it was a major triumph. It struck fear into the logging companies. Domingas de Oliveira lives up-stream from where the barge was burnt.

DOMINGAS DE OLIVEIRAS (Translation): Yes, they were really angry here, they would pass by the river and call out ‘Barge burners’. But they were too afraid to stop, afraid of the barge burners.

Oliveira's husband still fishes the river, though that has got harder and harder every year. They say that entire communities are now getting ill from the waste and pollution of the nearby loggers.

DOMINGAS DE OLIVEIRAS (Translation): Before we knew it they had taken over all around and now the whole area has been decimated. It has been completely stripped of everything and that is why we are getting so many illnesses.

REPORTER (Translation): Which illnesses?

DOMINGAS DE OLIVEIRAS (Translation): Fever, diarrhoea, some children die of this.

REPORTER (Translation): Why?

DOMINGAS DE OLIVEIRAS (Translation): Because of the water that comes from there, it is ugly, it is cloudy.

Another few kilometers up the river from these villages sits a logging yard that stretches as far as the eye can see. In this single yard sits 65,000 cubic metres of ancient hardwood. The wood was impounded by the state environmental authorities but they don't have the resources to move it so it's rotting away in the yard. Rosa takes me to another yard hidden in the forest outside of Santa Maria.

ROSA VIEGAS (Translation): These tags are what the loggers use to formally register that the wood is legal. Unfortunately these tags are fake, there is a history of forged documents, fake receipts. With one permit they would take barge-loads of logs, with a single invoice they’d take millions of trucks full of wood from the forest.

Most timber companies have a small area that they have the legal right to log. And that small plot provides the cover for stealing timber from the surrounding area. Paperwork is forged so that every log, sometimes in the thousands, appears to come from that one small legal operation.

ROSA VIEGAS (Translation): In this yard, if you look there is more than 10,000 cubic metres of wood and there are hundreds like this throughout the forest, there are too many to count.

Like so many others, Rosa's attempts to protect the forest have come at a high cost.

ROSA VIEGAS (Translation): This picture shows the heads that have been circled, our heads, as we were the people singled out for death threats. This is me, Rosalia, Bade’s children, Jossarafe, Borges, our leaders who have been marked for death, also Mauricio Torre who was not even in the area. They thought it was his picture and circled his head. They put out a news letter with the names of those marked for death.

Recently, under increasing pressure, Brazil's national environmental police, IBAMA, were given the green light to bust anyone that they could find flouting the law. Here they are working at night to recover the illegal logs that were hidden in the forest. The criminals that stash the logs here often shift their timber under the cover of darkness, and the environmental police are hard-pressed to get to the timber first.

POLICE (Translation): They always work at night because we work during the day, they sort of monitor what we do during the day and when we go to sleep they extract the wood illegally and hide it. So we are working nights to fight this more effectively.

This is the logging town of Uruara. Federal environmental authorities rolled in last week and shut the place down because 80% of the timber trade here is illegal. Because IBAMA has closed down the saw mills, everyone, from the foresters to shopkeepers, and even the men driving horse carts, have found themselves without jobs.

MAN (Translation): I have just been to a saw mill today and the ladies were almost crying, IBAMA was there and the owners themselves were almost crying, they don’t know what they are going to do. All that wood piled up which they say they will lose and they will even have to pay a fine and might even go to prison. I don’t know what is going on. IBAMA is stupid because there is so much wood, the forest goes on forever and it’s full of wood.

I go to the Serraria Iraja sawmill. There are rumours that this will be the next sawmill to be shut down. The yard is piled with high-quality hardwood and scraps of wood lie everywhere. For every tree that is logged, only 30% of it is actually converted into saleable timber. The rest is scrapped or burned and sold as charcoal. The manager, Jose Reis, admits that the business is illegal but he says that red tape in Brazil makes it impossible to operate legitimately.

JOSE REIS, MANAGER (Translation): The government makes it very hard to get a licence for forest management. They give licences to the big guys but the little ones are left behind. That is what happens in our region, we are forced to work illegally because of this problem.

The rumours are well-founded. IBAMA agents arrive to have a look. IBAMA agents like Paulo Filho have been targeted so often that they now have to travel with armed guards from the local police and army.

PAULO FILHO, AGENT (Translation): It is very dangerous and we have had many co-workers who have had death threats and all that.

I ask Jose Reis about the dangers to the local community when they oppose the logging industry here.

JOSE REIS (Translation): The moment I say ‘Hey, this guy is threatening me’. What should the feds do? Come and take this guy, but no, they just wait until 100, 200, 300 have died, it won’t change.

After hours of recording the timber in the yard, IBAMA pushes out into the surrounding forest. The hunch pays off and they find stacks of the most valuable hardwood hidden throughout the forest. But even the officers working here admit they'll only ever find a tiny fraction of the illegal timber.

OFFICER (Translation): Many times as military policemen and we have been working for sometime, actually we have been working with IBAMA since 2000, we even feel a bit powerless. If there is no serious action from the government, rigorous action with severe reprisals for those committing environmental crimes, I believe the Amazon probably won’t survive another 40 years.

The sawmill is shut down, Jose Reis fined thousands of dollars. The workers idling in the yard know they've just lost their livelihood.

JOSE REIS (Translation): The sawmill has to send these people home, pay them out and they will all be without jobs. The entire region will practically stagnate.

REPORTER (Translation): Are there any other jobs for these people?

JOSE REIS (Translation): No there aren’t because the region is small and 50% of these people belong to the sawmill and 50% of these people will be jobless. Many are already unemployed and now even more will be.

Jose de Souza has been waiting at the mill all day to receive his paycheck but now he's going home empty-handed to his 5-year-old boy, and his pregnant wife Elzina.

JOSE DE SOUZA (Translation): Between you and me, we were caught by surprise, we always see them on TV raiding other regions and cordoning them off. In my opinion, people have to realise that there is only one source of income for the population here in Uruara and that is the sawmills. The town will be really weakened if the sawmills are closed.

Even the IBAMA officers realize that there is a cost to trying to bring order to the lawless Amazon.

PAULO FILHO (Translation): No one is happy when something like this happens, it is a thankless task, but it is our job and we try to do it as best we can. But when we go to bed at night it really is hard to know that breadwinners won’t get any wages the next day and sometimes their families will go hungry. But that is our job, unfortunately. We have to do it.

Because most of the confiscated timber would have eventually made its way off shore, Paulo believes that the solution to the Amazon's problems may have to be found overseas as well.

PAULO FILHO (Translation): The international community plays a role here too, I think that most of the timber that leaves the Amazon is exported to the EU, Portugal, Spain, Holland and many other countries. It goes to the USA, the minerals go to China, to all the big countries in the world. They all but things from the Amazon and they are all equally guilty. They don’t see that side.

When I return to speak with Valecie Gomes three weeks after our first trip on the river, he tells me that he's feeling more unsafe than ever. We were spotted filming the barge that day and now his neighbors are being pressured by the loggers to turn on Valdeci, even to shoot him on sight.

VALDECI DOS SANTOS GOMES (Translation): They wanted to know who was filming there. A man who lives by the river told them that it was me filming with the TV crew. They asked why they didn’t shoot us.



Reporter/Camera
AARON LEWIS

Editor
MICAH MCGOWAN

Fixer/Translator
ALI ROCHA

Subtitling
ADRIANA GASPAR NEUMEYER

Producer
ASHLEY SMITH

Original Music composed by
VICKI HANSEN