Crackdown lets rainforest reclaim illegal road in rare win for the Amazon

In 2022, an illegal road cutting the length of a full marathon through two strictly protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon threatened to do what conservationists feared most: Split the Xingu Socioenvironmental Corridor, a mosaic of Indigenous territories and conservation units covering some 26 million hectares (64 million acres), in half. Four years later, satellite images reveal the 42.8-kilometer (26.6-mile) road is gone, swallowed by regrowing forest — something rarely seen in the region.

Its disappearance runs counter to everything that typically happens when a road appears in the Amazon. “Here, the road is the beginning of everything, the beginning of the devastation,” Bruno Ferreira, a researcher at the conservation nonprofit Imazon, part of the MapBiomas mapping network, told Mongabay.

Usually, roads give birth to a set of new roads (legal or illegal) that spawn from the main one, creating a fishbone pattern in satellite images. Imazon research suggests that 95% of deforestation in the Amazon happens within 5 km (3 mi) of a road, meaning that illegal cattle ranching and logging would have been virtually unstoppable had this one road been consolidated.

For the organizations monitoring the region around the Xingu, a key tributary of the Amazon, the now dead road is proof that the alliance between civil society and a willing government can reverse destruction that once seemed irreversible — and a reminder of what is at stake as Brazil heads into a tightly contested presidential election in October.

A corridor hanging by a thread

The road was first detected in early 2022 by SIRAD-X, a deforestation monitoring system run by the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) that keeps watch over the protected areas of the Xingu Basin and feeds the work of Rede Xingu+, a network of conservation NGOs. Branching off a local route known as the Canopus Road, west of the Iriri River, its initial purpose was to service an illegal open-pit gold mine known as Garimpo da Jane (or Jane’s Mine). The mine was reactivated in 2021 inside the Terra do Meio Ecological Station, which falls under one of the most restrictive categories of protected areas in Brazil.

An aerial survey by SIRAD-X in May 2022 confirmed the scale of the operation: Alongside the expanding road, an illegal port operated on the Iriri’s east bank, with a ferry transporting fuel, machinery and vehicles; meanwhile, the mine ran at full steam, complete with sheds and a landing strip in good condition. By June 2022, the road had crossed the entire ecological station and pushed into the neighboring Iriri State Forest.

Devastation soon followed. In July, 286 hectares (707 acres) were cleared at the end of the road. More than 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) were cleared in August and another 242 hectares (598 acres) in September, just days after enforcement raids failed to halt the destruction. Soon, just 7 km (4 mi) of intact forest separated two deforestation fronts, advancing from the land-grabbing hubs of São Félix do Xingu and Novo Progresso municipalities — the last barrier preventing an irreversible rupture of the corridor’s connectivity, as Mongabay reported at the time. ISA warned the Xingu was hanging “by a thread.”

“That road exemplifies the tragic moment we lived through under the Bolsonaro government,” Luísa Molina, an anthropologist who coordinates the territorial rights protection team of ISA’s Xingu Program, told Mongabay.

She said that with federal enforcement paralyzed under former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, who served from 2019 to 2022 and was a close ally of land grabbers and the most aggressive leaders in the agribusiness sector, there was no one in government to turn to.

Knocking on doors

Civil society groups sensed an opportunity with the change of government in January 2023. In early February, weeks after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office, Molina went to the Ministry of Environment carrying a map of the road and its risks. “We knew the country was in ruins and that they’d have to choose their priorities, so we went straight there and said: Here’s a huge problem to start your government with,” she said.

The pressure worked. In May 2023, ICMBio, the agency that oversees federal protected areas, launched an operation with support from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, and its elite security agents. In addition to raids on criminals, the operation established a permanent control base on the banks of the Iriri River, physically blocking access to the road for anyone not connected to the territory.

The operation began in May 2023 and remains active, IBAMA told Mongabay in a written statement. The agency said monitoring of the area now combines satellite imagery and deforestation-alert systems managed by the Federal Police, with reports submitted by public agencies, local communities and civil society organizations. ISA’s own satellite analysis, its field teams and IBAMA all confirmed the route has fallen obsolete. Moreover, according to ISA, no activity has been detected at the Garimpo da Jane mine since the deactivation.

The strategy’s impact appears to have spread beyond a single road. According to IBAMA’s answers to Mongabay, the opening of new illegal roads in the municipalities of the Xingu Basin fell sharply between 2022 and 2023 and has remained stable since. More recently, the agency turned its attention to illegal logging, a key driver of deforestation. In February, an operation inspected and fined 79 illegal or irregular sawmills in Pará state. The agency says its strategies contributed substantially to cutting deforestation in the Amazon by half — a downward trend MapBiomas data confirm across 2023 and 2024, with a further decline expected once 2025 figures are finalized.

Fragile gains, violent backlash

For Molina, the road is one of several cases that shows civil society mobilization can reverse environmental destruction, but also that every gain requires constant defense. She points to the Trincheira Bacajá Indigenous Territory as a measure of how fast the Bolsonaro years erased decades of protection. “Until 2019, that territory had almost no deforestation,” she said. “Between 2019 and 2022, it became one of the five most deforested areas in the country. It’s a perfect example of what happens to an Indigenous land when a government lets invaders run loose.”

In early 2023, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the government to remove illegal miners, loggers and ranchers from seven Indigenous territories, several of them in the Xingu Basin. The operations, known as de-intrusions, destroyed the bridges, houses and other structures that the invaders used and sharply reduced deforestation in territories such as Apyterewa, Cachoeira Seca and Trincheira Bacajá. But the work doesn’t end there, Molina said: “You remove the invaders from inside the territory, but then the territory ends up encircled, surrounded by groups with predatory interests in those places.”

In Apyterewa, that encirclement has turned violent. According to ISA’s statements to Mongabay, the territory has suffered repeated attacks since 2024, including the killing of a staff member of Funai, the federal Indigenous affairs agency. Illegal mining, meanwhile, is regrouping inside territories cleared of invaders. At the same time, monitoring by Rede Xingu+ has flagged new mining fronts opening since 2025 inside protected areas, with mercury contamination spreading through streams that feed the Iriri and Xingu rivers.

The scale and sophistication of those operations have changed beyond recognition, said André Villas-Bôas, executive secretary of Rede Xingu+ and a co-founder of ISA. “Today wildcat miners are almost industrial operators, with near-corporate technology to move rock, dig out ravines, wash and process the ore,” he told Mongabay. “This scale was unheard of 10 years ago.”

Logging remains the trigger for a familiar sequence in which roads opened to haul timber become the entry point for land grabbing, even inside conservation units, he said. “Wood isn’t a drug you can hide under a car seat,” Villas-Bôas said. “It moves an enormous logistics chain — trucks, traffic, sawmills, exports. How is it that the state still can’t discipline this more forcefully?”

Molina draws a sharp distinction between the kinds of enforcement each threat demands. “Removing intruders is a war operation, while timber theft is a guerrilla operation,” she said, meaning that the illegal logging is stealthier, harder to patrol and to dislodge once it takes root in a territory.

She is emphatic that the problem is neither expertise nor commitment. “It isn’t knowledge that’s lacking,” Molina said. “IBAMA and Funai have deep, highly specialized expertise in enforcement. What’s lacking is enough staff and a budget that Congress keeps squeezing.”

IBAMA says it has hired 831 new staffers since 2023 and requested authorization for another 560. It launched FortFisc, an 825.7-million-reais ($159 million) program to strengthen remote monitoring, information systems and operational resources.

For Villas-Bôas, securing the corridor over the long term means going beyond enforcement to recognize and reward the communities who keep the forest standing. “Their way of life sustains and regenerates the forest,” he said. “That has to be recognized. It’s what makes these communities less vulnerable to being co-opted.”

An election-year crossroads

Hovering over every conservation gain in the Xingu is October’s presidential election. Polls suggest it could go either way in a contest between Lula’s reelection (and fourth non-consecutive term) and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the former president’s son — his father can’t run after being sentenced to prison in a coup d’État trial.

For Molina, the risk is greater than simply a return to the recent past.

“From the standpoint of territorial protection, we run a serious risk of getting a government even worse than [Jair] Bolsonaro’s, because this time the Supreme Court won’t be able to take the stance it took before,” she said, referring to court rulings that, during the Bolsonaro years, forced protection measures for invaded territories.

Villas-Bôas frames the threat as ideological as much as political. A government aligned with agribusiness and opposed to collective land rights, he said, sees as targets for assimilation the various forest-dependent traditional peoples such as Indigenous tribes, Afro-Brazilian Quilombola groups, and sustainable forest resource-gathering communities known as extractivists. “There’s a colonization project in their heads,” he said. “For them, those people have to become like us. To them, it means development. It’s deeply worrying.”

A continuity government, meanwhile, would begin from a far stronger position than in 2023, Villas-Bôas said. “They lost at least two years just reassembling the machine that had been dismantled,” he said. “The machine is ready now — we can go much further than we’ve been able to so far.”

In 2022, ISA warned that the Xingu corridor was hanging by a thread. Four years on, the thread has held and, at the site of the road that nearly cut it, the forest is growing back. Whether that remains an exception or becomes the rule across the Amazon may well be decided at the ballot box.

Banner image: Illegal dirt roads are a key part of the logistics of deforestation in the Amazon. Image by Fernando Martinho.

Correction (7-3-2026): A previous version of this article stated that André Villas-Bôas said that “loggers are almost industrial operators,” but, in fact, he was referring to wildcat miners. His quote has been corrected. 

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Cite this article

Rafael Spuldar (2026). Crackdown lets rainforest reclaim illegal road in rare win for the Amazon. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-322254

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