‘Special Ops nerds’ stare down danger to save jungle
ALTO TURIAÇU INDIAN TERRITORY, Brazil — Deep in the Amazon jungle, a squad of nerds is on the loose.
One of its members spent more than a decade as an environmental activist for a tree-hugging nonprofit. Another studied Arctic oceanography in Germany. Their commander is a former high-school science teacher.
But together they have forged one of Latin America’s most feared elite fighting units, on the front lines of Brazil’s struggle to curb the destruction of the Amazon.
The team’s commander, Roberto Cabral, laughed when asked how his assemblage of Special Ops nerds came together.
“In the universe of illegal activities in Amazonia, there’s deforestation, gold prospecting, bush meat hunting, clandestine logging and animal smuggling,” said Cabral, 48, who was shot in the shoulder in 2015 while pursuing gunmen who were razing tracts of forest. “We wanted to combat these dealings with brains as well as boots on the ground.”
I went on a grueling patrol in March with the nine-member unit, which has the decidedly
unglamorous name of Grupo Especializado de Fiscalização, or Specialized Inspection Group.
The squad, better known by its Portuguese acronym, GEF (pronounced JEFFee), operates in some of the most lawless swaths of the Amazon River basin — places so remote that it takes days to reach by riverboat or truck from the nearest settlement.
Facing such logistical obstacles, GEF, which operates as part of Ibama, Brazil’s environmental-protection agency, usually patrols in helicopters, using satellite images and intelligence gathered through Ibama’s regional offices, to detect deforestation and signs of illegal mining.
The unit, which Ibama created in 2014, needs all the help it can get. Deforestation is surging once again in the Brazilian Amazon, climbing 29 percent between August 2015 and July 2016. Nearly 2
million acres of forest were destroyed during that period, according to estimates by the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil.
But even as GEF relies on cutting-edge technology, its missions often resemble an elusively frustrating game of cat and mouse.
On the first day that I accompanied an operation in Maranhão state on the fringes of the Amazon, members of the unit rose at 3 a.m.
Clad in combat fatigues, body armor and bulletproof helmets, they strapped Taurus assault rifles around their shoulders and journeyed for hours in four-wheel-drive pickup trucks from São Luís, the state capital, to Santa Inês, an outpost in the interior.
Heavy rain prevented the unit’s two Bell helicopters from taking off for patrols over Maranhão and the vast neighboring state of Pará. After hours of standing by, the choppers finally lifted off around midday, flying for monotonously long stretches
over lands cleared for cattle ranching.
“You have to see the Amazon from above to get a sense of how much of it has already been devastated,” said Maurício Brichta, 44, an oceanographer who specialized in studying Arctic algae at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research before joining Ibama.
Like nearly everyone else in the unit — which includes forestry engineers, a wildlife biologist, a fisheries specialist, even someone who used to work in advertising — Brichta said he never expected to take up arms to protect the Amazon.
When GEF was created, he made the cut by completing a punishing survival course in which candidates endure jumping out of helicopters, protracted treks through the jungle, foraging for food, treating snakebites, going for long stretches without food and sleep, and training for gunbattles and knife fights.
“Obviously, this kind of work isn’t for everybody,”
said Eduardo Rafael de Souza, 39, a bearded, chainsmoking military veteran who often pilots the helicopters used for GEF’s missions.
The unit’s members returned after the first day on patrol with nothing to show for their efforts.
But GEF’s fortunes shifted on the second day of patrol.
Homing in on indigenous lands where logging crews make forays to illegally extract coveted hardwoods, the squad spotted from the air a makeshift sawmill near the boundary of the Alto Turiaçu Indian Territory, home to the Ka’apor people.
“I saw their helicopter land in a clearing, like a scene out of some Hollywood movie,” said Francinaldo Martins Araújo, 43, who was arriving in his truck to buy scraps of discarded timber from the sawmill as the unit swooped down for its raid.
Members of the squad, some hiding their faces with balaclavas, quickly went to work. They set the sawmill on fire and destroyed two domed furnaces used to make charcoal, before setting out again in the helicopters for their next target.
A few minutes later, they hit pay dirt again when one of the pilots observed a truck on a logging road. The unit jumped out of the choppers in a nearby clearing, as one member punctured the truck’s fuel tank and set the vehicle on fire.
Then the shouting came from the forest. While searching for the logging crew, two GEF members stumbled across a tractor used for hauling felled trees. A chainsaw, still warm from being used minutes earlier, was left stuck in a tree, evidence of a hasty getaway.
“I never dreamed that I would hold a rifle in my hands to defend the Amazon,” said one 44-yearold GEF member, a former environmental activist who declined to disclose his name because of security fears. “But this is war, and war can open your eyes to what needs to be done.”