New Amazon atlas offers insider’s outlook free of stereotypes
The Atlas da Amazônia Brasileira (“Atlas of the Brazilian Amazon”), launched this week by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Brazil, breaks down stereotypes by offering readers in and out of Brazil a fresh outlook—this time from the perspective of its inhabitants. The unprecedented publication features 32 articles about the challenges, knowledge, and potential of the planet’s largest rainforest.
The initiative seeks to broaden the debate on climate and territorial justice in a year marked by the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) to be held in the Brazilian Amazon. Among the atlas’s 58 authors are 19 indigenous people, five quilombolas, and two of riverside communities.
In the view of Marcelo Montenegro, Heinrich Böll Foundation’s coordinator for socio-environmental justice and one of the organizers of the atlas, a large number of people still believe that the Amazon is just a forest, but there is a unique richness to the region that often goes unseen.
“People often don’t realize that 75 percent of the Amazon’s population is urban. Some of them have been working for a long time on their relationship with nature, with ways of protecting and preserving the environment and building an increasingly sustainable way of life. They should be given a leading role in these debates,” he stated.
According to the foundation, from 2019 to 2022, the Amazon saw record deforestation (mainly to open up pastures for cattle ranching), illegal mining in protected areas grew by 90 percent (mainly indigenous lands in the Amazon region), and citizens encouraged by the advance of the far right took up arms in large numbers (from 2018 and 2022 the amount of people with gun registrations in the Western Amazon skyrocketed by 1,020 percent).
At the same time, in 2022 the Amazon ed for over a fifth of the murders of environmental defenders worldwide—39 activists were killed in the region that year.
Crises
In 2023, the world saw scenes of the humanitarian crisis experienced by the Yanomami indigenous people, whose territory had been taken over by illegal mining activity in previous years.
In the same year, the Amazon was assailed by an intense climate crisis, with extreme droughts and rivers reaching the lowest levels ever recorded, which, in addition to killing animals, impacted its extensive river infrastructure, leading to a shortage of drinking water and food, as well as difficulties in accessing public facilities.
The damage was not fully remedied, and another drought hit the region in 2024. In the same year, the Amazon biome concentrated the highest number of fires of the previous 17 years, and the impact of the smoke on air quality harmed the health of thousands of people, as it spread through the atmosphere to other states in the Central-West, Southeast, and South of Brazil.
Other biomes that make up the region, like the pantanal and cerrado, also saw record fires.
Thus, the last few years are believed to have drawn a bleak future for the Amazon and its people, due to both the impact of the climate collapse and to the political disputes that prompt environmental crimes—not to mention the economic interests that shape major projects in the region.
“On the other hand, the Amazon is the territory of an effervescent mobilization of social movements, collectives, and socio-environmental organizations at the forefront of discussions involving both regional territorial management and the global climate agenda,” the foundation stated.
“This mobilization entails valuing the perspectives of peoples and communities that build ties with the territory and its beings that are quite different from those that guide the sectors responsible for the imminent climate collapse,” it went on to say.
Organized crime
In the article Organized Crime, authors Aiala Colares Couto, a professor and researcher in geography at the State University of Pará (UEPA), and Regine Schönenberg, of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, outline the dynamics of criminal factions in the Amazon region.
They argue that major drug trafficking routes run through the Brazilian Amazon, and that controlling these routes and the local markets has become the faction’s main goal. With the professionalization of drug trafficking and its relationship with environmental crimes, the region has seen violence move further and further inland.
“Studies show that the Amazon basin has been used by organized crime since the 1980s. At the time, it was a key corridor for the flow of cocaine coming through Brazil’s borders with the Andean countries—chiefly Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, the world’s largest cocaine producers to this day,” the authors pointed out.
According to Couto and Schönenberg, criminal organizations that used to operate in the Brazilian Southeast have become more present in the Amazon, including São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Rio’s Comando Vermelho (CV).
In addition, regional gangs began to organize themselves, establishing power relations and controlling territories, like the Família do Norte (FDN) in Amazonas and the Comando Classe A (CCA) in Pará, which greatly fueled violent conflicts in the Amazon.
Drug trafficking and environmental crimes come hand in hand through illegal activities such as illegal logging, the smuggling of manganese and cassiterite, and land grabbing.
These activities have been financed by organized crime in recent years, mainly through money laundering.
“With regard to the threat to indigenous territories, we should highlight the expansion of illegal gold mining and the invasion of these territories by of criminal gangs. They recruit young indigenous people and change people’s daily lives in the communities,” the researchers noted.
“Also noteworthy is how the various means of transporting drugs have brought these people close to [crime], whether via roads and rivers connected to the indigenous territories, or the use of aircraft that land on clandestine airstrips in protected areas,” they added.
Born in the Menino Jesus de Pitimandeua quilombo, in the municipality of Inhangapi, Pará state, Couto said the state struggles to act swiftly in the fight against organized crime.
“Organized crime doesn’t go through bureaucratic processes to act. The swiftness brought about by its connections ends up overriding government efforts, which depend on financial resources and on the government cutting red tape,” he argued.
The foundation
The Heinrich Böll Foundation is a German think tank operating in over 42 countries. Among its values are promoting dialogues for democracy; defending human rights, socio-environmental justice, and women’s rights; and fighting racism.
In Brazil, it s projects by various nonprofits, organizes debates and produces free publications. In the field of socio-environmental justice, it seeks to strengthen the public debate combining the protection of the environment with the guarantee of the rights of rural and forest people. The foundation has been active in Brazil for 25 years.
