‘It’s guerrilla warfare’: Brazil fire teams fight Amazon blazes – and the arsonists who start them

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.

“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. Everyone was wearing masks … At 9am it was like it was night because you couldn’t see sunlight.”

The Guardian spent three days at the Rubber Soldier Ecological Station encampment near a logging outpost called Cujubim to witness government efforts to control the flames before they cause even more harm.

Cujubim is named after an Amazonian bird – the red-throated piping guan – which is native to this part of Rondônia, one of nine Amazon states. The town’s streets pay tribute to the abundance of birdlife that inhabits the region’s jungles: Musician Wren Avenue, Dark-winged Trumpeter Road, Woodpecker Way.

The avian theme obscures a menacing reality caused by the criminal race to cash in on the region’s supposedly protected forests. A sign welcoming visitors to Cujubim is riddled with bullet holes. On one recent morning two men were shot in the head at the intersection of Curassow Avenue and Jabiru Stork Road.

There is scant sign of birdlife on the dirt track that meanders north from Cujubim towards the firefighting base bar the occasional pair of macaws whose scarlet feathers contrast with the pale white smog. That road takes its name not from nature but from a notorious forest wrecker called Chaules Pozzebon, who locals say built it in order to access the pristine jungles that lie beyond.

Once dubbed “the Amazon’s biggest deforester”, Pozzebon was arrested in 2019 and jailed for 99 years for running an armed criminal organization, although he was recently released after his sentence was slashed. “He sowed terror around here … He was the boss of the forest,” one police officer said of Pozzebon, who owned more than 100 sawmills and allegedly employed a militia of gunmen to guard the wilderness he controlled.

A bone-jolting 90-minute drive up the Estrada do Chaules (Chaules’s Road), the firefighting base comes into view: a dusty campground beside the Curica River, which is connected to the outside world by a Starlink satellite dish.

That internet connection allows firefighters to detect fires as they break out around them. Last week satellite imagery showed that, despite their efforts, the situation was getting worse. “In our first week here we reduced the number of outbreaks to 17 a day. But since yesterday it’s risen from 17 to 59 – and today it’s over 80,” said Souza, blaming “reprisals” from environmental criminals enraged by the government’s struggle to extinguish the fires.