An Amazon tribe fights back against illegal logging

The Ka’apor tribe of Maranhao, Brazil, which depends on the Amazon rainforest for its livelihood and culture, is using both traditional and high-tech methods to fight back against illegal logging in their territory.

“All of the logging that now takes place [in Maranhoa] is being done illegally,” says Jonathan Watts, Latin America correspondent for the Guardian. “It greatly affects the livelihoods of the people in the forests, because the last remaining areas of forest are all in indigenous territory. It's the territory of the Ka’apor people.”

Maranhao, in the far north of Brazil, is the poorest state in the country, and until about 40 or 50 years ago it was quite heavily forested. But in recent decades it has been largely cleared for cropland and for grazing pastures.

In the past decade, Brazil has taken serious steps to reduce illegal logging, such as establishing wider indigenous territories, imposing much higher fines on illegal loggers and using satellite imagery to locate areas that are being cleared. As a result, Watts says, deforestation in Brazil has slowed dramatically.

But the sheer size of the forest, the persistence of corruption in the agencies responsible for enforcing the law and the huge potential profits for criminal enterprises combine to make the practice nearly impossible to stop.

So the Ka’apor has had to find ways to defend its territory on its own. And when the tribe finds illegal loggers, they deal with them aggressively, Watts says.

“They round up as many [of the tribe] as they can, they head out — having painted their skin in war paint — they arm themselves with bows and arrows and heavy clubs, and then they surround the logging trucks,” Watts says. “They force the loggers to come out, they disarm them if they have weapons, and then they warn them not to come into their forest.”

If the tribe finds loggers they have caught and warned before, they will strip them, beat them and drive them away, Watts says. In every case, they burn the loggers’ trucks and tractors.

Loggers often come armed with automatic weapons, but the Ka’apor usually outnumber them. For the loggers, Watts says, it’s not worth their while getting into a dangerous confrontation, so in most cases they give up their arms. At other times, however, they have responded with lethal force.

The big business people behind the illegal logging operations are not pleased, and locals believe they have retaliated by hiring assassins to kill the Ka’apor tribe’s leaders, Watts says. No one knows for sure, however, because none of the killings that have occurred have been prosecuted.

With the help of the environmental group Greenpeace, the Ka’apor have also begun using advanced technology in their battle against the illegal loggers. They tried placing about ten GPS tracking devices onto logging trucks so they could trace where they are going and gather evidence to prosecute the people hiring the loggers. They also set about a dozen camera traps — the kind usually used for capturing images of rare wildlife — to try to catch the trucks going into the forest empty and leaving with a full load of logs. But more often than not, Watts says, environmental criminals elude capture and prosecution.

But there are promising developments, Watts says. First, indigenous groups like the Ka’apor are being more assertive in defending their territory; and second, prosecutors in Brazil, who have a lot of independence and a lot of power, have begun to act more aggressively, too, by swooping in on corrupt local officials and exposing them in secret raids that are prepared long in advance.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.