Fires in the Amazon: a barrier to climate change up in smoke

Fire is the second stage in clearing the forest, usually for raising cattle. First, choice woods are cut and sold, then the rest is burned. It is cheap, it is effective, and it is hard to catch those responsible.

Cutting down the forest is illegal without permission, and using fire is against the law except in exceptional circumstances.

Yet fire is changing the landscape.

The latest data from August 2018 through July 2019 showed more rainforest was cleared than at any point in the past 11 years. An area larger than Puerto Rico was cut down. Preliminary figures suggest the rate has increased since.

Three teams of Reuters journalists spent weeks travelling thousands of miles across the world's largest tropical rainforest this year, witnessing the devastation of what scientists regard as a vital protection against climate change.

On the Trans-Amazonian highway, near the river port of Humaita, the August night sky did not go dark. The flames from a forest fire, stretching into the distance beside the road, glowed a dusky yellow. For days it burned.

Some people have taken protecting the forest into their own hands. Reuters spent seven days with an indigenous vigilante group fighting to keep illegal loggers off their land in the state of Maranhao.

One night in September, alerted by the rumble of heavy trucks, six Guajajara tribesmen – faces painted for battle – rushed to ambush a group of loggers.

At a choke point in the local network of rutted dirt roads, they lay in wait, a 4x4 blocking the road, rifles and handguns at the ready.

When the trucks arrived, the loggers, who numbered around eight, were first to fire. The Guajajara shot back, forcing the loggers to scatter into the forest. The indigenous warriors burnt the trucks, piled high with freshly cut lumber.