'It's guerrilla warfare': Brazil fire teams fight Amazon blazes - and the arsonists who start them

Tom Phillips in Cujubim

Fri 20 September 2024 at 4:00 am GMT-5·7-min read

The occupants of the vinyl-coated military tents at this remote jungle camp in Brazil’s wild west compare the hellscape surrounding them to catastrophes old and new: the extinction of the dinosaurs, the bombardment of Gaza, the obliteration of Hiroshima during the second world war.

“It’s as if a nuclear bomb has gone off. There’s no forest. There’s nothing. Everything’s burned. 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 to destroy 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 3ft earthwork lies an immensity of 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 white haze.

More:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/guerrilla-warfare-brazil-fire-teams-090008175.html