Brazil's desperate fight against illegal gold mining destroying Indigenous Amazon lands

In the charred remains of Vila Cururu, a sprawling illegal mining camp that once thrived in the heart of Brazil's Amazon, there is now only silence. The settlement—named after a poisonous toad—had been a lawless frontier town of sorts: prospectors drinking whisky at wooden tables, sex workers in makeshift structures, miners burrowing into hillsides with pickaxes and explosives. A few weeks before a journalist arrived, Brazilian security forces descended on the place and burned it to the ground. The miners scattered into the surrounding forest. The operation was part of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's pledge to stamp out illegal mining on Indigenous lands, a campaign he launched after returning to power in January 2023.

The territory in question is Sararé, a savanna and woodland region near the Bolivia border roughly the size of Singapore. Between January 2024 and August 2025 alone, it lost 4 percent of its forests. Since the gold rush began about five years ago, approximately 44.8 square kilometers—nearly half the size of Manhattan—have been destroyed. Nilton Tubino, the government's chief coordinator of these eviction operations, walked through the ruins with a machete and three radios, surveying the damage. What he saw was industrial-scale devastation: enormous brown scars across the landscape, stagnant pools of mercury-contaminated water, tunnels bored into rock faces, and massive hillocks of rubble where Hyundai excavators had torn apart the forest. From a helicopter, the destruction was almost incomprehensible—endless gashes in what had once been verdant land, dotted with the detritus of a mining operation that had employed thousands.

The Nambiquara people, about 200 of whom live in Sararé, have watched their territory transform into something unrecognizable. Jackson Katitãurlu, an Indigenous leader, said simply: "They wiped out everything. They destroyed nature." His brother Saulo, the territory's top Indigenous leader, recalled the constant noise of explosions and music that scared off wildlife and poisoned the rivers. Jackson described returning to land he was born on and finding it incomprehensible—a complete desert where forest had stood. The Nambiquara have endured centuries of outside assault. In the 1730s, when gold was first discovered in the surrounding hills, enslaved Indigenous people and Africans did the heavy work of extraction. In the early 1900s, explorer Cândido Rondon arrived to build a telegraph line, bringing diseases—influenza in the 1920s, measles in 1946—that decimated entire communities within days. In the late 1970s, a military dictatorship bulldozed a highway through their lands. The Nambiquara population collapsed from perhaps 10,000 at the start of the twentieth century to about 600. Now they face a new threat.

What distinguishes this crisis from previous incursions is the scale and the violence. Modern hydraulic excavators have enabled destruction at an unprecedented industrial pace. More alarming still is the suspected involvement of organized crime. Drug trafficking factions from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo have been advancing into the Amazon in recent years. The Red Command, a Rio-based gang recently designated a foreign terrorist group by the Trump administration, is suspected of controlling some of Sararé's mines. Tubino said he had not yet seen hard proof of this, but the violence is undeniable. In 2024, five heavily armed men were killed in a gunfight during an environmental special forces raid. Days earlier, four people were murdered in what appeared to be a goldmine turf war. Saulo Katitãurlu heard reports of miners carrying automatic rifles, shotguns, and pistols. Jackson recalled receiving a death threat from a miner: "otherwise I'll come to your village and kill the lot of you." Indigenous hunters found a corpse near their village, wrapped in a tarpaulin with a deep slash wound to its chest. When police arrived, the body had vanished.

Tubino's crackdown—the tenth major operation he has led under Lula—has temporarily expelled most miners from Sararé. But as his convoy rolled through the territory, police radios picked up chatter between lookouts in the hills reporting on the Guardian's journalists. Tubino himself crawled into a pitch-black 100-meter tunnel and found tools suggesting miners were still working, perhaps at night to avoid detection. Troops discovered an underground bunker with a generator capable of powering the entire settlement. In undergrowth beside a deactivated mine, they uncovered white sacks containing 300 kilograms of ammonium nitrate explosives. The work is painstaking, dangerous, and seemingly endless.

The larger question hanging over everything is political. Jackson Katitãurlu joked grimly about the prospect of Lula losing this year's presidential election to Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former far-right president. "If that happens, we're fucked," he said. During Jair Bolsonaro's 2019-2023 presidency, tens of thousands of miners flooded into protected areas, emboldened by anti-Indigenous rhetoric. Tubino believes Lula's re-election is crucial not only for the Amazon but for Brazil's sovereignty itself. He noted that Trump had used alleged illegal mining complicity as a pretext for abducting Venezuela's president in January. For now, though, Tubino has more immediate work ahead. "Holidays? There's no such thing as holidays," he said, sitting in the wreckage of a destroyed mining shack, mosquitoes swarming around him. Another major operation is planned for later in the year. The question is whether the political will to sustain this fight will endure.