"It's as if a nuclear bomb has gone off. There's no forest. There's nothing. Everything's burnt. It's chaos," said Lt Col Victor Paulo Rodrigues de Souza as he gave a tour of the base on the frontline of Brazil's fight against one of its worst burning seasons in years and a relentless assault on the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth.
For weeks now, forests and farms here in the Amazon - and across Brazil - have been ablaze like seldom before, thanks to a highly combustible cocktail of extreme drought affecting nearly 60% of the country, the climate crisis and a seemingly insatiable appetite for destroying the environment for immense financial gain.
At the front of the camp, an excavator has built a defensive firing position to protect the 100 or so firefighters and police living here from a possible attack from the illegal loggers and land grabbers who have spent recent years cutting and torching huge areas of rainforest to create farmland and pastures.
Beyond that metre-high earthwork lies destruction: tens of thousands of acres of wood and ploughland that is going up in smoke, obscuring the sun and filling the skies with a toxic haze.
"It's been burning here for over 40 days," said Souza as his firefighters prepared for their latest mission to put out fires that are also wreaking havoc in neighbouring Bolivia and Peru. "You couldn't breathe at the base yesterday.
This story is from the September 21, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the September 21, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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