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.

For weeks now, forests and farms here in the Amazon - and across Brazil - have been ablaze like seldom before thanks to a highly combustible cocktail of extreme drought affecting nearly 60% of the country, the climate crisis and a seemingly insatiable appetite to destroy the environment for immense financial gain.

At the front of the camp, an excavator has built a defensive firing position to protect the 100-or-so firefighters and police living here from a possible attack from the illegal loggers and land grabbers who have spent recent years cutting and torching huge areas of rainforest to create farmland and pastures. Beyond that 3ft earthwork lies an immensity of destruction: tens of thousands of acres of wood and ploughland that is going up in smoke, obscuring the sun and filling the skies with a toxic white haze.

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That internet connection allows firefighters to detect fires as they break out around them. Last week satellite imagery showed that, despite their efforts, the situation was getting worse. "In our first week here we reduced the number of outbreaks to 17 a day. But since yesterday it's risen from 17 to 59 - and today it's over 80," said Souza, blaming "reprisals" from environmental criminals enraged by the government's struggle to extinguish the fires. Three large trees had been felled across jungle roads to prevent fire crews arriving. Elsewhere steel bars had been turned into improvised spike strips designed to puncture their tires. "It's like guerrilla warfare. They're trying to stop the firefighters getting in to put out the forest fires because they want to clear the area," said the fire chief, who wore a pistol on his hip. Hours later, at a blaze just south of the camp, Souza spotted the melted remains of a plastic gasoline container near the carcass of a decades-old Brazil nut tree that had burned to the ground. Motorbike tracks were visible nearby but the fire-starter was long gone. "It's like a favela in the jungle, full of back alleys and lanes," Souza said, likening the vast rainforest region to one of Rio's maze-like shantytowns. "The invaders know every single trail so it's nearly impossible to catch them."

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/20/amazon-brazil-firefighters