Volunteer Divino Humberto tries to douse the fire along a dirt road off the Trans-Pantanal highway
Last month, Benedito Pereira Júnior rallied his 480-strong village in a desperate attempt to save their homes from forest fires that have plagued Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands.
"We panicked. The fire was destroying everything in its path and it was coming straight for us," he said.
With the air thick with smoke, the inhabitants of the Corrego Grande indigenous village, members of the Bororo tribe, banded together to form human barriers, wafting the blaze away from their straw huts and setting up rudimentary firebreaks in the hope of altering the course of the inferno.
Wildfires such as this are an annual occurrence in the Brazilian Pantanal, a vast tropical wetland the size of England and Wales.
But this year’s fire season has broken records after an abnormally long drought and increasing levels of illegal deforestation, causing untold damage to indigenous communities and the surrounding environment.
The number of blazes in the Pantanal has increased by 200 per cent since 2019, and an estimated one-fifth of the entire biome has been destroyed since the beginning of the year.
As the government of far-Right president Jair Bolsonaro continues to dismantle the country’s environmental protection agencies, fires on indigenous lands across Brazil increased 87 per cent last year, according to data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
Silvia Maria Pinheiro, a Catholic missionary who has lived among the Bororo people for 20 years, described the villagers’ desperate evacuation as the blaze roared around them.
"The fire had blocked all of the paths and roads, we were just running through the forest," she said. "When the wind picked up later that night, the flames got so high. It was terrifying."
Aerial view showing a burnt area of the Pantanal destroyed by the fires
Credit: MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP
Around 40 indigenous families then had to face the threat of Covid-19 as they were taken on buses to the nearby city of Rondonópolis, some two and a half hours away by road.
"They were afraid of being taken to the city and getting infected with the coronavirus," said Mr Pereira Júnior. "But there was no other alternative; if they’d have stayed here they would have died."
In an address to the UN General Assembly on September 22, Mr Bolsonaro claimed fires were being started by "indigenous people, burning their own land in search of survival." He also denounced what he called a "brutal disinformation campaign" against his government, led by the press and environmental NGOs.
Mr Pereira Júnior called his words a "sick joke".
"We’ve become afraid of fire and the damage it can cause," he said. "There are traditional ceremonies that we don’t even practice anymore because they involve fire."
The Bororo people managed to save the majority of their huts, but face an uncertain future.
Their diet is based on hunting animals in the forest and fishing in the nearby São Lourenço River, two ecosystems that have been completely destroyed in the fires.
"We still have some rice and beans stocked up," said Mr Pereira Júnior. "But there’s no meat, there’s nothing to fish or hunt. Some of us had to journey into town to beg for food."
The wet season is now about to begin in the Pantanal and the families in Corrego Grande have no materials to build shelter. The straw they collect from the surrounding forest has turned to ash.
"We have no idea what we are going to do," said Mr Pereira Júnior. "We’ve asked for help from the government and nothing has come. But we won’t give up."
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