Crackdown lets rainforest reclaim illegal road in rare win for the Amazon
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Facebook Linkedin Threads Whatsapp Reddit Email Page link Cite article Recent satellite images show forest closing over the path of an illegal road that nearly severed the Xingu Socioenvironmental Corridor in 2022.In early 2023, civil society pressure put the road at the top of the government’s agenda, leading to enforcement operations and a sharp decline in new illegal road openings across the Xingu Basin.Conservationists warn the gains remain fragile: Invaded Indigenous territories face violent backlash, illegal mining is regrouping, and this year’s elections could redefine Brazil’s environmental policies.See All Key Ideas In 2022, an illegal road cutting the length of a full marathon through two strictly protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon threatened to do what conservationists feared most: Split the Xingu Socioenvironmental Corridor, a mosaic of Indigenous territories and conservation units covering some 26 million hectares (64 million acres), in half. Four years later, satellite images reveal the 42.8-kilometer (26.6-mile) road is gone, swallowed by regrowing forest — something rarely seen in the region. Its disappearance runs counter to everything that typically happens when a road appears in the Amazon.
“Here, the road is the beginning of everything, the beginning of the devastation,” Bruno Ferreira, a researcher at the conservation nonprofit Imazon, part of the MapBiomas mapping network, told Mongabay. Usually, roads give birth to a set of new roads (legal or illegal) that spawn from the main one, creating a fishbone pattern in satellite images. Imazon research suggests that 95% of deforestation in the Amazon happens within 5 km (3 mi) of a road, meaning that illegal cattle ranching and logging would have been virtually unstoppable had this one road been consolidated.
For the organizations monitoring the region around the Xingu, a key tributary of the Amazon, the now dead road is proof that the alliance between civil society and a willing government can reverse destruction that once seemed irreversible — and a reminder of what is at stake as Brazil heads into a tightly contested presidential election in October. The road was first detected in early 2022 by SIRAD-X, a deforestation monitoring system run by the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) that keeps watch over the protected areas of the Xingu Basin and feeds the work of Rede Xingu+, a network of conservation NGOs. Branching off a local route known as the Canopus Road, west of the Iriri River, its initial purpose was to service an illegal open-pit gold mine known as Garimpo da Jane (or Jane’s Mine).
The mine was reactivated in 2021 inside the Terra do Meio Ecological Station, which falls under one of the most restrictive categories of protected areas in Brazil. An aerial survey by SIRAD-X in May 2022 confirmed the scale of the operation: Alongside the expanding road, an illegal port operated on the Iriri’s east bank, with a ferry transporting fuel, machinery and vehicles; meanwhile, the mine ran at full steam, complete with sheds and a landing strip in good condition. By June 2022, the road had crossed the entire ecological station and pushed into the neighboring Iriri State Forest.
Devastation soon followed. In July, 286 hectares (707 acres) were cleared at the end of the road. More than 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) were cleared in August and another 242 hectares (598 acres) in September, just days after enforcement raids failed to halt the destruction.
Soon, just 7 km (4 mi) of intact forest separated two deforestation fronts, advancing from the land-grabbing hubs of São Félix do Xingu and Novo Progresso municipalities — the last barrier preventing an irreversible rupture of the corridor’s connectivity, as Mongabay reported at the time. ISA warned the Xingu was hanging “by a thread.” “That road exemplifies the tragic moment we lived through under the Bolsonaro government,” Luísa Molina, an anthropologist who coordinates the territorial rights protection team of ISA’s Xingu Program, told Mongabay.
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