‘It’s total devastation’: inside the Amazonian war against illegal gold mining

Illegal mining operations carved out of the Amazon ‘It’s total devastation’: inside the Amazonian war against illegal gold mining The Guardian goes on the ground with Brazilian forces fighting to eradicate mining that has destroyed protected areas of Indigenous land T he jerry-built bordello at the foot of Vila Cururu, an illegal gold-mining settlement at the heart of Brazil’s most desecrated Indigenous territory, was a hive of depravity until just a few weeks ago. Inebriated prospectors huddled around wooden tables, swigging beer and Scotch whisky, and ogling pole-dancing sex workers before going with them to shacks behind the brothel. View image in fullscreen The wreckage of the destroyed bordello in Vila Cururu. Photograph: João Laet/The Guardian The encircling encampment also teemed with intruders as hordes of miners used pickaxes and explosives to burrow deep into the hillsides and savanna in search of treasure. “They wiped out everything. They destroyed nature,” said Jackson Katitãurlu, an Indigenous leader from the Nambiquara people, whose village is a few miles from the chaos in the south-western Amazon. One recent morning, however, Vila Cururu was deserted: the once-bustling illicit community having been razed by Brazilian security forces as they fought to fulfil a pledge by the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , to eradicate illegal mining in Indigenous territories after years of mayhem under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. Brazilian troops search an illegal mining camp in the Sararé Indigenous territory of the Amazon As Lula’s eviction tsar, Nilton Tubino, hiked through the encampment’s charred ruins, he recalled how miners fled into the surrounding forests after troops launched a land and air assault in late March to halt one of the most ferocious attacks on Indigenous lands in Brazil’s recent history. View image in fullscreen Nilton Tubino walks past the remains of buildings in Vila Cururu. Photograph: João Laet/The Guardian Other much larger protected territories have suffered damage on a greater physical scale but nowhere was the vandalism as intense as in Sararé, a Singapore-sized chunk of savanna and woodland near the border with Bolivia that lost 4% of its forests between January 2024 and August 2025. A total of about 17.3 sq miles (44.8km) have been destroyed since the gold rush began about five years ago – an area almost half the size of Manhattan. “It’s total devastation,” Tubino sighed as he marched through Garimpo Quatro, one of Sararé’s largest mines, with an 18-inch machete strung across the front of his black fatigues and three radios strapped to his belt. Paradoxically, part of the explanation for Sararé’s ordeal lies in the success of Lula’s anti-mining crusade, which he launched after returning to power in January 2023. After Tubino’s team kickstarted Lula’s “disintrusion” drive in the better-known Yanomami Indigenous territory , some miners flocked south to Sararé, hoping to continue working far from t