Brazil

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

Author: Tom Phillips in Cujubim Source: The Guardian
September 21, 2024 at 08:51
Screenshot 2024 09 21 085317
Screenshot 2024 09 21 085317

Firefighters and police in Rondônia battle fires intensified by both the climate crisis and a criminal assault on the rainforest.

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.