Published by National Geographic 

In a major crackdown on illegal gold prospecting that threatens isolated tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rain forest, Brazilian army soldiers and indigenous affairs agents have destroyed mining platforms along a remote river where an alleged massacre of tribal people was reported two months ago.

A gold dredge impounded by FUNAI officials on the border of the Javari Indigenous Land in far-western Brazil, 2002.    Photo by Scott Wallace

Posted to National Geographic

The aerial photographs show villagers gathered in the center of a traditional, circular structure inside the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, a sprawling reserve of rivers and upland forest situated astride the border with Venezuela.

 

Moxihatetema, Yanomami Indigenous Territory, Brazil.  Photo by Guilherme Gnipper, Trevisan/Hutukara

 

The images were taken in mid-September by officials from Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, Fundação Nacional do Índio—known by its acronym, FUNAI—on a surveillance flight over the reserve in the run-up to a joint operation with army troops and police agents to clear out thousands of wildcat gold miners. The same Yanomani Indians had been observed at a village in another location on a reconnaissance flight four years ago. But that communal dwelling was later abandoned, and officials feared for the fate of the group until the most recent sighting. Known as the Moxihatetema, the villagers have assiduously shunned contact with outsiders, even with other Yanomami communities.

Posted to National Geographic

TROMS COUNTY, NORWAYA lone reindeer emerges from the forest, prompting the Sami herders to bring their snowmobiles to a stop in the middle of a clearing. All three are bundled in sheepskin hats and wool capes, called luhka, against the chill wind of a late-January morning in the Norwegian Arctic.

 

Sami Reindeer Herders, Troms County, Norwegian Arctic. Photo by Scott Wallace

 

The daily feeding runs into the backcountry serve not only to bolster the animals’ winter diet. They also discourage the semi-domesticated reindeer from straying too far into the woods, where bobcats, lynx and wolverines lurk. “One lynx can kill up to 100 reindeer in a year,” says Johann, who then describes a particularly violent lynx attack on a doe as she was giving birth.

 

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS?

Troms County is a sprawling region of broken coastline, labyrinthine fiords, and rugged alpine forests, situated some 700 miles (1,150 km) north of Oslo. This is the heart of Sami country, where Lapp nomads once moved their herds across vast distances to the rhythm of the seasons, oblivious to national borders. Those days are long gone. Of the estimated 100,000 Sami spread out across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula, only about 10,000 still herd reindeer for a living. Reindeer meat is an important part of a herder’s diet, as well as the sole source of income for some families. For part-time herders, the animals’ meat and hides augment their earnings from other sources.

Today, reindeer herders find themselves increasingly boxed in by powerful interests competing for their traditional grazing lands. Dams, roads, live-fire military drills, high-voltage power lines, even green energy projects such as wind farms all have nibbled away at grazing territory. Of particular concern to the Sami leadership are a proposed copper mine in Finnmark County to the north and a windmill park just to the south.

So far, no single project has posed an existential threat to the herding culture of the Sami, Western Europe’s only indigenous people who inhabit the Arctic. But the cumulative impacts–a road here, a pipeline there–have reduced Norway’s undisturbed reindeer habitat by 70 percent in the past century and reshaped the way reindeer herding is done.

 

TECHNOLOGY A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

Technology is a double-edged sword for the Sami. On the one hand, it provides herders with the comforts of modern life–warm houses, GPS collars and smartphone apps to track their animals, snowmobiles and ATVs to round them up. On the other, the steady encroachment of industrial infrastructure has reduced their range and freedom of movement, requiring them to move herds by truck and boat between summer and winter pastures. It’s an expensive undertaking, and herders receive just a one-time payout to compensate losses when courts override their objections and approve large-scale projects.

As Norway, one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita, pushes forward with plans to extract more resources and build more industry in the Arctic, Sami leaders fear their languages and culture, largely sustained by herding families, will be sacrificed to produce wealth for the larger society.

“As all traditional livelihoods of the Sami are nature-based, all activities that disrupt that way of life will be a challenge,” says Aili Keskitalo, the first woman president of the Sami Parliament, which represents indigenous interests before government and industry, though it has no say in final decisions. “We are used to having to adapt. But we cannot adapt ourselves to death.”

Keskitalo said the proposed Kalvvatnan wind farm and associated power lines in Nordland County will severely impact the summer grazing lands of a core group of reindeer herders who still speak South Sami, one of five Uralic languages traditionally spoken by the Sami that are listed by UNESCO as endangered. The wind farm is still under judicial review. A final decision is expected later this year.

The Norwegian government says it’s sensitive to Sami concerns, but warns that to meet its ambitious targets for renewable energy, more hydroelectric and wind power projects will be built.

Such projects often have an impact on reindeer herding, as well as on biological diversity and wilderness landscapes, Minister of Petroleum and Energy Tord Lien acknowledged. In a statement provided by the ministry, Lien said that “thorough discussions with all affected parties are of great importance in the licensing process for applications” of renewable energy projects.

Finnmark County’s proposed Nussir mine holds a potential of 66 million tons of copper ore and lesser amounts of silver and gold. The government green-lighted the project after the company agreed to dump waste tailings into a nearby fjord, rather than into open pits on land. That was meant to minimize the loss of reindeer habitat, but dumping the waste at sea could affect small-scale fishermen, who are also Sami.

“It will still impact the reindeer herders, though not as much,” says Oyvind Ravna, a law professor at University of Tromso and legal expert in indigenous affairs. “Now it will be much more of a challenge for the local fishermen. So they just moved the problem from one place to another.”

 

GUNFIRE ACROSS THE TUNDRA

The Oskal brothers and their cousin Aslak have been locked in a long-running battle over land and grazing rights with the Norwegian Armed Forces. Since the Cold War, soldiers have been training here for a possible Russian thrust across the top of Scandinavia. The crackle of gunfire echoes across the hills on a daily basis as troops in white winter camouflage stage exercises in Arctic warfare within earshot of the reindeer. The drills often force the three herders to take circuitous routes through the forests to stay safe while tending to their animals.

“These are the guys who are going to protect us from the Russians,” Johann Oskal darkly jokes as a caravan of snowmobiles bearing soldiers in helmets and winter jumpsuits zooms past. For the Oskal family, the presence of Norwegian troops represents a more immediate challenge to their livelihoods than a Russian invasion that may never come.

Like other indigenous reindeer herders in Norway, the Oskals enjoy the right to use their traditional lands for grazing animals but the land belongs to the government. The case dragged on for 20 years before the court ruled that military expansion could proceed with the Oskal’s receiving a cash payment.

The Norwegian military has settled four such cases with reindeer herders since 1990, according to Maj. Vegard Finberg, spokesman for the Ministry of Defense. In one case, the herders were forced off the land for good. In the other three, the Sami were awarded compensation. “The main intention,” says Maj. Finberg, “has been to secure the interests for reindeer husbandry co-existing with the Norwegian Armed Forces.”

“We got compensated,” Johann Oskal acknowledges, warming his hands by the fire in a hut on a hilltop deep in the forest. “But you can’t really compensate for the land. It’s gone forever.”

Nicholas Tyler, a wildlife biologist at the University of Tromso, says that such compromises will diminish the reindeer herding culture. “The problem is that you’re compromising on a downhill slope,” he says. “It’s the cumulative effect of all the encroachments that is eroding the basis for reindeer husbandry.”

Danel Oskal stirs the ashes of the fire, his face aglow in its flickering light. He pulls a Bowie knife from a sheath and carves pieces of dried reindeer meat off a bone. More and more, he says, he finds himself thinking about his infant daughter and what life will be like when she is grown.

“I fear the government is taking more and more of our land,” he says. “I’m afraid that in the future, there will be no more land for the reindeer.”  

 

Posted to National Geographic

The murder of an environmental activist in Costa Rica has shaken the country’s ecology-minded public and has cast a light on what appears to be the growing overlap between animal poaching and drug trafficking on the country’s Caribbean coast.

Early on the morning of May 31, masked gunmen abducted 26-year-old Jairo Mora Sandoval from a vehicle he was using to patrol a desolate beach to protect nesting leatherback turtles from poachers.

Four international volunteers who were accompanying Mora were bound and taken to a nearby shack, from which they eventually escaped. Mora’s body was found later the same day, facedown in the sand and exhibiting signs of torture.

Almost three weeks later, police continue to search for Mora’s killers.

The murder has triggered shock and revulsion throughout Costa Rica. At recent candlelight vigils for Mora across the country, protesters called on government officials to bring those responsible to justice and to make good on promises to strengthen protections for Costa Rica’s natural treasures and the people who defend them.

“The government has failed in its responsibilities,” said social psychologist Carolina Rizo, as she stood in the rain amid hundreds of other demonstrators at a vigil last week in San José, Costa Rica’s capital.

“It’s been left to young volunteers to do what the state should do,” she said. “To be as ecological as our image suggests would require a commitment to laws and standards. People don’t do the jobs they’re supposed to do.”

With a history of political stability, a relatively low crime rate, and dozens of protected areas teeming with biodiversity, Costa Rica markets itself as an idyllic travel destination for eco-adventures and outdoor family fun.

But many officials share Rizo’s concerns that weak and ineffective enforcement of Costa Rica’s environmental laws belies the country’s image as an eco-friendly tropical paradise, especially on the sparsely populated, impoverished Atlantic Coast.

“It’s an area where there is an extremely low presence of authority,” said Juan Sánchez Ramírez, an investigator with the nation’s Environment Ministry. “The government has neglected the region. People must find a way to live by whatever means they can.”

For many people on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, Sánchez and other officials say, that means trafficking in protein-rich eggs ransacked from turtle nests. Turtle eggs flavored with hot sauce are served in popular restaurants and sold by street vendors along the Caribbean coast.

At the same time, the poachers have been drawn into the tightening grip of drug runners coming north up the coast from Panama and Colombia in souped-up speedboats designed to outrun authorities.

“The geographical position of the country makes it an ideal place for the transit and warehousing of drugs,” said Erick Calderón, commander of Costa Rica’s uniformed police, the Civil Guard, in the palm-fringed coastal city of Puerto Limón.

“But it’s not all in transit,” he said. “Some of it stays here and, worse yet, traffickers are using drugs to pay local distributors. That means it has to be consumed here, which creates and sustains a local market.”

According to officials and residents of the Limón area, cash-strapped users are turning to turtle eggs to finance their addiction, even trading the eggs directly to drug dealers for powdered cocaine. A single nest can yield up to 90 fertile eggs, and egg poachers, known as hueveros, frequently dig up several nests in a single night’s work. The eggs are sold on the black market for $1 each.

Poachers now brandish high-powered weapons that were rarely seen before on Costa Rica’s shores, most notably AK-47s. “The police don’t even have AK-47s,” said Sánchez, the environmental investigator, “but the traffickers have them.”

His claim is borne out by colleagues who worked with Jairo Mora and have reported confrontations with heavily armed poachers while patrolling Moín Beach, a hauntingly beautiful and desolate stretch of coastline just north of Puerto Limón.

The very conditions that have made the area’s beaches a favorite nesting spot for magnificent leatherbacks and other turtles—their remoteness and the lack of artificial light or human infrastructure—make them a haven of choice for smugglers and poachers.

And that makes them ever more dangerous for the environmentalists who are trying to save the critically endangered turtles.

“Sometimes the [drug] boats come directly onto the beach,” said one resident. “That’s why they don’t want anyone out there patrolling. They don’t want people to see what’s going on.”

There’s no comprehensive way to prevent turtle nests from being pillaged, advocates say, without a permanent police presence on every stretch of beach during the four-month nesting season.

“The poachers are always watching us from the trees,” said Vanessa Lizano, head of Moín’s Costa Rican Wildlife Sanctuary, who was a close friend of Mora’s. “So if we hide the nests or move the eggs to another place on the beach, they find them anyway.”

For Lizano and her colleagues, the preferred method is to gather eggs shortly after they’ve been laid—or even while the mother turtle is laying them—then bury them in a hatchery that’s guarded by volunteers.

But one night last year, masked assailants raided the hatchery at gunpoint, confiscating cell phones and walkie-talkies while making off with the entire trove of 1,500 eggs.

Activists have reduced their own nightly patrols along Moín since Mora’s death, even as police have stepped up their presence. Like NGO personnel and volunteers, the police typically employ foot patrols out on the sand, shadowed by a vehicle that must maneuver through dense palm groves along a narrow dirt track paralleling the beach.

It’s an assignment fraught with risk, said police commander Calderón, and also with frustration.

“The poachers can see our headlights from far off,” he said. “They hide their eggs and run into the forest. They pick up where they left off as soon as we’re gone.”

While much of Costa Rica’s Atlantic Coast is protected as part of the national park system, Moín Beach is not.

Supporters of Jairo Mora Sandoval are petitioning the government to make the 15-mile-long beach a national park to honor the memory of the valiant young man who gave his life to protect the turtles he loved so much.

Posted to National Geographic

Natives seek protection from irate loggers

Ashéninka indigenous leaders are calling on authorities to guarantee their safety after receiving alleged death threats from irate loggers whose wood was impounded this week at a sawmill in the timber hub of Pucallpa on the Ucayali River.

National Police agents and investigators from the environmental crimes prosecutors office seized more than 750 logs (930 cubic meters) at the Forza Nova sawmill on the Manantay River this week after members of the Alto Tamaya-Saweto indigenous community claimed the wood had been illegally extracted from their land. As I reported in “Mahogany’s Last Stand,” in National Geographic, April 2013, the natives of Saweto have been locked in a struggle to gain title to their land and expel illegal loggers who have been pillaging their forests in a remote headwaters region along Peru’s border with Brazil.

Official documents from the prosecutor’s office in Pucallpa recorded statements from Saweto community chief Edwin Chota Valera and treasurer Jorge Ríos Pérez indicating they had received death threats from the man who claimed ownership of the wood, which officials valued at $100,000.

“Someone from Saweto will die, and I will denounce you as a drug trafficker,” logging boss Hugo Sorio Flores allegedly told Chota, who claims to have GPS coordinates to identify the exact locations where the timber was extracted. A third community official, Leandro Comacho Ramírez, says he was threatened last Friday, April 5th, by Eurico Mapes Gómez, one of the loggers the Ashéninka accuse of cutting the timber and selling it to Sorio Flores.

Chota said the people of Saweto hope the regional Ucayali government will soon title their homelands and shut down logging operations in the Alto Tamaya region. In the meantime, the community is living through moments of high anxiety.

“The timber and loggers are now under investigation,” Chota wrote in a statement from Pucallpa. “But who will protect the people of Saweto and their leaders from the armed and dangerous loggers?”

Lumberjacks have long since hauled off the most valuable timber from the Alto Tamaya watershed. The haul impounded by officials this week includes several lesser-known species that are nonetheless of incalculable value to the ecology of the Amazon rain forest, includingishpingo, copaíba, tornillo and estoroque.

According to University of Richmond professor David Salisbury, who serves as an advisor to the Ashéninka of Saweto, officials from the prosecutors office and the environmental protection service are at odds over what to do with the timber. Fearful the logs could vanish if left in the hands of  local environmental protection agents, prosecutors are urging the Ashéninka to dispose of the timber. Salisbury says such a plan is fraught with risks for the natives, underscoring the need to move forward with final titling of the land and a definitive expulsion of the loggers.

Posted to National Geographic

Reprisals, “forced contact” campaign feared after attack in Yasuní National Park

Native officials and conservationists fear possible reprisals in eastern Ecuador following an attack by uncontacted tribesmen that killed two Waorani Indians last week.

According to a preliminary investigation by officials from the Orellana Province public prosecutor’s office, the victims were speared to death last Tuesday morning while walking near their village of Yarentaro, located along the Maxus Oil Road within the Yasuní National Park. The victims were identified as Ompore Omeway, 70, and his wife, Bogueney, 64.

An elderly woman named Nemongona is said to have witnessed the attack after she fell behind the couple during their walk in the forest. In a statement released by the Organization of the Waorani Nationality of Orellana (ONWO), the witness said the assailants belonged to a clan of Taromenane , a branch of the Waorani who spurned contact with evangelical missionaries in the 1950s and continue to roam the forests of Yasuní as nomads.

As I reported in “Rain Forest for Sale,” National Geographic, January 2013, the contacted Waorani and their elusive bretheren maintain a complicated relationship, characterized by both fear and admiration. Contacted Waorani villagers often cultivate crops for their nomadic relatives to take as they wish, but they also remain wary of a people who have yet to be “civilized” and resort to violence in response to perceived threats.

ONWO’s statement indicates that the victims had sustained previous encounters with the elusive Taromenane, who reportedly conveyed their growing irritation over an influx of outsiders and increased industrial activity in the zone. The victims may have been attacked because of their inability to effectively channel the complaints. The incident occurred in the environs of an oil processing facility operated by the Spanish energy company REPSOL.

The Yasuní rain forest harbors some of the richest biodiversity in the world, as well as two uncontacted clans of Waorani, the Taromenane and the Tagaeri. But the region also holds large deposits of petroleum, and oil exploration continues to advance within the boundaries of the national park. Government agencies and oil companies are required to avoid activities that would endanger the wellbeing of the isolated indigenous groups. The government of President Rafael Correa has offered to postpone indefinitely oil exploration in the far eastern portion of the Yasuní in exchange for $3.6 billion in compensation from the international community.

ONWO has called on the government of Ecuador to immediately implement “precautionary measures” to protect the Taromenane and Tagaeri and vigorously opposes any efforts to make “forced contact” with the groups, as some authorities are advocating. Meanwhile, Waorani officials are seeking to dissuade relatives of the victims from launching a reprisal raid, which could have disastrous consequences for contacted and uncontacted Waorani alike.

Leaders of another native rights group, the Waorani Nationality of Ecuador (NAWE), say that oil exploration and illegal logging in the region have put mounting pressure on the isolated groups.

Posted to National Geographic

As many as 80 Yanomami Indians are feared dead in a village deep in the jungles of Venezuela, victims of an alleged massacre carried out last month by Brazilian gold prospectors.

According to a criminal complaint filed this week with prosecutors and military authorities in Puerto Ayacucho, capital of the state of Amazonas, the incident occurred on July 5^th at the native settlement of Irotatheri at the headwaters of the Ocamo River in Venezuela’s remote Upper Orinoco region.

Yanomami Father and Son, Upper Orinoco, Venezuela, 2001. Photo by (c) Scott Wallace

The charges indicate that the gold prospectors may have arrived by helicopter, illegally entering Venezuela from Brazil to carry out the raid. Details were provided by three survivors who had gone out hunting early that morning and were away from the shabano – a circular communal structure typical of a Yanomami village – when the attack occurred.

“Survivors of the community who were in the jungle heard gunfire, explosions and even a helicopter in which the miners landed,” Luis Shatiwe, executive secretary of Horonami, the Yanomami rights organization that filed the complaint, told reporters. Witnesses from a neighboring village are said to have seen charred bodies and the burned remains of the shabano.

The presence of Brazilian garimpeiros – or wildcat prospectors – in the headwaters of the Ocamo River has been extensively documented since 2009, when several community members were sickened, apparently by mercury poisoning. Mercury is commonly used by miners to separate gold from ore in the field, creating a serious health hazard in wide stretches of the Amazon rainforest.

Brazilian prospectors have been invading Yanomami lands on both sides of the thinly-patrolled border for the past several decades. Roundups and crackdowns by police and military temporarily interrupt the operations, but enforcement efforts are stymied by the vast distances and a lack of resources committed to safeguard the rugged upland forest region.

The ongoing presence of miners in Yanomami lands has sown strife among natives suffering from disease, despoiled forests and rapidly changing social mores. There are an estimated 20,000 Yanomami living in small communities scattered throughout southern Venezuela and northern Brazil.

“This is a slaughter against the Yanomami people,” said Shatiwe.

Posted to National Geographic

As Brazil braces for president Dilma Rousseff’s forthcoming decision on whether to sign or veto recent legislation that would alter the country’s Forest Code, rights groups are decrying a surge in illegal land grabs that is wrecking environmental havoc and threatening vulnerable tribal populations.

According to the rights organization Survival International, a gold rush mentality seems to have taken hold of loggers, ranchers and settlers in the eastern Amazonian state of Maranhão, as intruders bore their way deeper into reserve areas set up to protect the forests of the Awá tribe. In addition to 355 contacted members of the tribe, about 100 Awá remain uncontacted, making them one of the very last groups of nomads still roaming the forests of the eastern Amazon. The majority of the 60 or more uncontacted tribes that still survive in the Amazon inhabit the more secluded and remote western regions on the vast Amazon Basin.

This aerial photograph shows the boundaries of the Awá Indigenous Land, one of four protected areas where members of the tribe live. More than 30 percent of the reserve has been invaded by loggers, ranchers and settlers. Credit: Survival

Survival has launched a public campaign in recent days that includes a video featuring British film star Colin Firth, best known for his portrayal of a stammering King George in the blockbuster hit “The King’s Speech.” Looking into the camera, an earnest Firth urges supporters to call on Brazil’s Justice Minister to send agents into Maranhåo to halt the destruction. “One man can stop this,” says Firth, “Brazil’s Minister of Justice. He can send in the Federal Police to catch the loggers and keep them out for good.”

According to Survival, logging trucks continue to rumble out of Awá land carrying centuries-old trees with astonishing impunity, “continuing the destruction of the rainforest and its most endangered tribe, the Awá.”

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 miles to the west, a climate of fear has gripped a series of communal settlements outside the boom town of Lábrea in the state of Amazonas. According to Amnesty International, activists are facing a wave of intimation, including assaults and death threats. Several communal leaders have gone into hiding amid a campaign aimed at ousting residents of legally-recognized extractive reserves from their land. “Many have fled the region in fear for their lives,” says an AI report.

President Rousseff has until May 25th to act on the changes to the Forest Code passed last month by the Brazilian Congress. One of the most troublesome provisions calls for an amnesty for violators who have been illegally clearing the rain forest to make way for cattle pasture and soy plantations. Environmental groups fear the amnesty will send a message of impunity to those who operate outside the law, triggering a fresh and evermore determined assault on the Amazon. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 55% of the Amazon could disappear in the next two decades at current rates of destruction.

In the view of environmentalists, loosening controls on rain forest clearing would further compound the destruction of huge swathes of the Amazon occasioned by a surge in hydroelectric dams under construction or planned for construction in the coming decade. Brazilian officials say that hydropower represents a cleaner way to produce energy that burning fossil fuels. But the only place left to build dams in Brazil is in the Amazon, and opponents say the Rousseff government is underplaying the environmental and social costs of those projects.

“The Amazon region, which seemed infinite only a few decades ago, is now facing the prospect of extinction,” wrote Brazilian journalist Leão Serva in the New York Times late last year. “Projections that seemed apocalyptic at the end of the 1980s — that the forest would disappear by 2030 — are now coming true.”

According to WWF, the Amazon rain forest contains 90-140 billion metric tons of carbon, playing a critical role in stabilizing the global climate.