But along with dried-up rivers and scorched wildlife, Brazilian authorities say the blazes have exposed a more intractable problem: the threat posed by criminal logging syndicates to indigenous communities and the rule of law in Maranhão. Rains have brought the fires under control in recent days. Though legally off-limits to commercial exploitation, the lands are under near-constant siege by loggers and other desperados.
#UNCONTACTED AWA TRIBE SERIES#
Only 20 percent of Maranhão’s original forest cover remains, nearly all of it concentrated in a series of indigenous territories and protected nature reserves.
Ecologists call the state’s seasonally dry woodlands a critical transition zone between the parched savannas of northeastern Brazil and the Amazon’s lush rain forests just to the west. Maranhão, on the eastern edge of the Amazon Basin, has long suffered from drought and grinding poverty. The fires have endangered the survival of at least two groups of uncontacted nomads from the Awá tribe, while forcing settled indigenous communities to join together with government firefighting brigades to contain the destruction and save their villages. Since September, thousands of wildfires have consumed hundreds of square miles of forest located in indigenous territories in the drought-stricken state of Maranhão. Now the contagion appears to have reached new heights, with loggers accused of deliberately torching huge swathes of forest to conceal their theft of timber from protected indigenous reserves. Brazil has long struggled to contain an epidemic of illegal logging, which accounts for the majority of the country’s timber production.
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