BRASÍLIA — “Working on an acupuncture basis.” This has been the key strategy used by Rodrigo Agostinho, head of IBAMA, Brazil’s federal environmental agency, for the past two years, to reduce deforestation in the Amazon and fight environmental crimes at strategic points throughout the country.

“I can’t be everywhere at once. I can’t just say, ‘I’m going to look after the Amazon and forget about the rest of Brazil.’ So we started to define priority municipalities, areas with the highest rates of deforestation and define the priority targets,” Agostinho tells Mongabay in his office at IBAMA headquarters in Brasília.

In an hour-long interview, Agostinho details the progress made during his administration, and IBAMA’s challenges in protecting Brazil’s biomes after four years of scrapping and dismantling under former president Jair Bolsonaro.

He highlights measures by the Central Bank and the National Monetary Council to cut off financing for areas that have been embargoed for environmental violations. “We embargo them due to deforestation, and then that person can’t get agricultural financing anymore.”

Agostinho also tells Mongabay about plans to strengthen IBAMA and meet the 2030 goal of zero deforestation before the deadline. For this, they’re investing in cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence to help handle monitoring across the country, the world’s fifth-largest and home to its biggest tropical rainforest. “IBAMA went four years without using satellite images for embargoes. We’ve taken that up again with full force.”

Rodrigo Agostinho spoke with Mongabay’s Karla Mendes in late November 2024. The following interview has been translated from Portuguese and edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: What’s your assessment after nearly two years of leading IBAMA, which for the four years before that had been undermined in favor of deforesters? What were and are the main advances and challenges?

Rodrigo Agostinho: IBAMA has existed for 35 years. Some of IBAMA’s projects are older than IBAMA itself because IBAMA was formed as a sort of offshoot of various institutions.

At the end of 1988, [activist] Chico Mendes was assassinated. The government was prodded into doing something, as the whole world was demanding a reduction in deforestation. Deforestation was driving out many traditional populations in the Amazon, and there was a lot of social conflict. Then IBAMA was created. IBAMA used to have 6,300 civil servants; today it has 2,600, and 1,000 are retiring. In the last decade, we’ve lost 89 offices due to lack of staff. There were no more people to maintain [the offices], there were few civil public exams.

And then I arrived at IBAMA in 2023, after four years of a lot of dismantling here. So the first things we did was think about how do we put IBAMA back to work, to reduce deforestation, to reduce environmental crimes? But at the same time, how do I create an institutional strengthening agenda? Because if I don’t have a strong institution, with a structure, I can’t go any further.

So we started reorganizing. During the transition period, we made a huge effort to improve our budget, to strengthen some internal structures. Since we don’t have enough people, we’ve been working on an acupuncture basis since the beginning of 2023. I can’t be everywhere at once. I can’t just say, “I’m going to look after the Amazon and forget about the rest of Brazil.” So we started to define the idea of priority municipalities, areas with the highest deforestation rates, and we began to define priority targets. We resumed using technology. IBAMA went four years without using satellite images for embargoes. We’ve taken that up again with full force.

We’re using a lot of technology; we’re starting to use artificial intelligence to detect deforestation, to detect environmental infractions. We have very good partnerships, including international ones. We have a partnership with the Japanese space agency to detect deforestation even when the sky is covered by clouds, using radar images. It’s something new that IBAMA isn’t used to doing. So we’re working on it.

We’ve doubled the number of vehicles, doubled the number of helicopters, the structure here has improved a lot. We renewed the entire computer park this year.

We managed, together with the environment ministry, to pass measures with the Central Bank and the National Monetary Council to prohibit the financing of embargoed areas. We embargo them due to deforestation, and then that person can’t get agricultural financing anymore to buy cattle, seed, a truck. This has ended up being very successful, because the fines [issued by IBAMA] they [manage to] put off [and don’t pay].

When we arrived here at IBAMA, there was 29 billion reais [$4.9 billion] in fines thrown that we couldn’t collect on [blocked by the Bolsonaro administration]. We went to court and managed to overturn the policy of the past administration. The defendants went to court, and we won validation to collect on these fines.

At the same time, we also started to work in those other areas where IBAMA used to work but were cast aside. In March 2023 we entered the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, which was riddled with mining, with an estimated 30,000 miners inside. Because of the humanitarian crisis, we managed to carry out the operation more than 40 days earlier than the initial plan. We went there and started destroying the mines. And now we are at this very moment, after two years, destroying the second-last illegal mine. And we hope that at the beginning of 2025 we will destroy the last major mining epicenter. We’re also destroying them now in the Munduruku Indigenous Territory and soon in the Kayapó Indigenous Territory. It’s frightening the things we’re finding in the mines. We’re finding a lot of urban organized crime that has infiltrated, laundering drug money, militia money, through gold. We’ve been received with bullets.

We’ve started to take a more strategic approach. For example, I don’t have enough people to inspect all the sawmills in the Amazon. So in 2023 I started inspecting the sawmills here, from IBAMA’s headquarters, using our own system. IBAMA has a timber traceability system that’s known worldwide, it’s a very good system. We put a lot of people to work on the system’s intelligence and detected 100,000 truckloads of illegal timber. It’s a frightening number. We rescinded all these rotten logging quotas. This year we followed up on it. And then we blocked all the quotas, and our team visited all the sawmills where fraud was detected.

But first we did some sorting. Sawmills where the system couldn’t detect any fraud ended up being left for a later stage. But what did we realize? We haven’t yet managed to recover our entire workforce but we needed to act. So we resumed the fight against deforestation, and the numbers came in. At first, only in the Amazon, but now the logging numbers have come down in the Cerrado savanna as well. Just last year, we also managed to reduce deforestation in the Caatinga, Pantanal and Atlantic Forest biomes. We still don’t have detailed figures for the Pampa grasslands, but we believe we’ve managed to reduce deforestation throughout Brazil.

We’ve resumed the fight against illegal mining, illegal logging, illegal hunting, illegal fishing and animal trafficking. Last year we seized a record 94,000 animals. It’s frightening how many animals are being taken out of our forests. And we made the right decision last year to structure PrevFogo [the federal fire department]. Because otherwise we would have taken an even bigger beating than this year’s fires [2024]. It was a frightening crisis. And if we hadn’t structured it here last year, bought a lot of equipment, hired a lot of people, things would have been even worse.

Throughout this period, we have achieved a new structure for the institution. At the end of the year it will have new regulations. At the beginning of 2025 we’ll have our civil service exams. We’ve managed to hire the remainder of the last exam takers, we’ve managed to train another 160 inspectors, and we’re now in the process of reviewing our regulations. Some of the internal rules and the planning were from almost 20 years ago. Last year, we approved a major strategic plan for the institution.

So I think we’ve come a long way. The numbers are still not the numbers we’d like. I say, “Oh, we’ve reduced deforestation by 50%. But reducing from 1 million hectares to 500,000 hectares is still a lot.” At the same time, we celebrate and say, “We need to do more.” And how can we do more with the structure we still have? That’s the challenge. The government supports our activities. We’re getting support from various ministries, it’s not an isolated thing. Environment Minister Marina Silva fights a lot with everyone in defense of IBAMA, ICMBio and the other institutions. We’re getting back on track.

Mongabay: The figures really have to be put into perspective, you can’t just look at the absolute number, because it comes from a scenario in which deforestation rates were skyrocketing.

Rodrigo Agostinho: There really has been a significant reduction. Now, we need to be aware that it’s still too high. We have a bold goal, which is zero deforestation by 2030, but I want to get there sooner. And we want to achieve as much as possible. When we reach the goal, we double the goal, as former president Dilma Rousseff used to say.

It’s because we’re in a hurry. We’re losing biodiversity, we’re losing our forests, we’re losing the forests’ ability to maintain themselves. The forests are unable to maintain humidity; two years in a row the Amazon rivers have dried up. The Pantanal hasn’t had a flood for six years. It used to be a floodplain but no longer floods. So it’s frightening what we’re experiencing.

We also have a set of measures to combat deforestation, and one of them is to defund those who are deforesting. If the person is deforesting to raise cattle in an illegal area, in an embargoed area, on Indigenous land, in a conservation area, we seize those cattle. We’ve made huge seizures of cattle and, recently, we carried out our second operation, Operation Carne Fria [Cold Meat] precisely to capture the entire chain, from deforestation to cattle to the meatpacking plant. In some regions, we’ve noticed that there’s already been a reduction in these illegalities, in other areas not yet. But we have made major seizures, major evictions. We resumed something that IBAMA was no longer doing, which was inspecting Indigenous lands. We inspected 109 Indigenous lands in the past two years.

There are Indigenous lands where we destroyed more than 400 machines, like the Sararé Indigenous Territory. In the Apyterewa  Indigenous Territory we removed more than 70,000 head of cattle. We cleared the Alto Rio Guamá Indigenous Territory, and the Yanomami. In the Yanomami territory there are very few miners left, and now we’re in the Munduruku territory.

Mongabay: How many vacancies are in the IBAMA civil servant exam?

Rodrigo Agostinho: Four hundred and sixty vacancies. Normally you can call up another 50%, so that’s 460 plus 230.

Mongabay: Most of the vacancies are for the Amazon region?

Rodrigo Agostinho: Most of them are for rural areas. It was a heavy internal discussion, because people at IBAMA headquarters miss being around other people. Here it’s a beautiful, wonderful campus, a beautiful building, but it’s empty. It doesn’t make sense to bring more people here, I need people in the rural areas. I need people to keep the superintendencies running. There are IBAMA offices today that are completely empty. It’s frightening.

Mongabay: Are these offices empty in the Amazon? In which states?

Rodrigo Agostinho: In several places. In the Amazon we’ve lost offices due to a lack of people — nobody wants to go there — and also because of conflict. In Humaitá, our office was burned down twice. I’ve now got the location points, but I don’t have any staff yet, we’ll have the civil servant exam. I’m going to reopen Humaitá and Tabatinga and other strategic offices. I need to have an office in the Javari Valley, at the mouth of the BR-230 highway, on the Transamazônica road. I need to strengthen my action on the BR-163, in the nerve points of the Amazon today, on the BR-319 itself. People talk a lot about paving the middle of the BR-319, but where it’s already paved there’s a lot of land grabbing and deforestation going on. If I embargo the area, the guy there doesn’t care because the people deforesting today are still at the land-grabbing stage, not at the cultivation stage. The land grabber knows he’s invading public land, he doesn’t care much about fines or embargoes.

Mongabay: On the issue of cattle, how successful are these operations? We know that some cattle farmers end up taking legal action. How has IBAMA dealt with this?

Rodrigo Agostinho: We know that we won’t be able to catch everything. I’ll give you an example of a glaring case right now: Jamanxin National Forest has more than 100,000 head of cattle inside. Araguaia National Park, on Bananal Island, has more than 100,000 head of cattle inside, just to mention a few examples. The Apyterewa Indigenous Territory probably had 70,000 head of cattle inside. We’re taking a deterrent approach. We seize 1,000 head of cattle from one place, and we notice thousands of head of cattle being moved from illegal areas nearby because everyone is afraid of having their cattle seized.

And we’re noticing that some big meatpacking plants in the Amazon stopped buying illegal cattle, which is a good thing. On the other hand, there are a huge number of small meatpacking plants that continue with this practice. This doesn’t mean we can trace everything. I don’t doubt there are many people laundering these cattle. But we can see that it’s working indeed. There were places where we seized about 3,000 head of cattle and noticed more than 100,000 head of cattle leaving embargoed areas, leaving Indigenous lands, everyone afraid of IBAMA.

IBAMA doesn’t own a cattle truck or a meatpacking plant. But we’ve made seizures, we’ve used [meat from seized oxen] for school meals, especially in Pará state. And we’ve been seeing good results indeed. But in practice, it ends up being much less than what is actually illegal. But the deterrent effect has been extremely high.

Mongabay: I did a major investigation into illegal cattle in the Arariboia Indigenous Territory. The Ministry of Indigenous Peoples estimates there are up to 1,000 head of cattle there. There’s the whole problem of the surrounding area, full of sawmills and farms. And the Guardians of the Forest were created precisely because of the state’s absence from this region.

Rodrigo Agostinho: They steal wood, there are countless access points. In the Karipuna Indigenous Territory in 2024, what we did the most was destroy access points for logging; I think we destroyed 200 points, which people used to take wood from inside the Indigenous land. So it’s very complicated. But, for example, in Operation Carne Fria we’ve now seized 8,000 head of cattle. People may say “Brazil has more cattle than people, so 8,000 is nothing.” But for the guy who loses those cattle, it’s a lot.

Mongabay: In relation to Arariboia, is there any specific action to remove illegal cattle?

Rodrigo Agostinho: It’s part of our inspection plan. It’s one of the most important Indigenous lands, one of the most important protected areas in Maranhão state. There’s nothing left in Maranhão, just Arariboia and Gurupi Biological Reserve. So it’s very sad what’s happening there. The Indigenous people are under increasing pressure, Funai [Indigenous affairs agency] has no police power — Funai’s employees don’t carry guns — and they end up being pressured by these illegalities.

On some Indigenous lands, we’re also detecting the co-opting of Indigenous people — not all, but some. On Bananal Island, people rent out Indigenous people’s tax IDs to place cattle on the territory. In the Munduruku and Kayapó territories, many Indigenous people have taken control of the mining and are mining inside, destroying all the Indigenous land. So we end up dealing with a lot of very sensitive issues. But our presence is very important in the case of these territories. We’re trying to crack down on almost all the mining operations inside Indigenous lands, so that people can feel our presence, even if it’s, as I said, in the form of acupuncture.

Mongabay: In the case of Arariboia, in addition to the illegalities within the territory, we also analyzed the surrounding area in this investigation. And we did some tracking in and around the area showing this. The farmers in the area put their cattle in the Indigenous land during the day and take them out at night. And there are lots of new fences inside Arariboia.

Rodrigo Agostinho: Yes, or they leave the cattle there for months and then, before selling them to the meatpacking plant, they take them to another farm, where they’re laundered. They leave the cattle in the feedlot for six months, and then they’re released to go to the meatpacking plant. Or they send it to the meatpacking plant, and the meatpacking plant buys it knowing that it’s illegal cattle and leaves the meat for the domestic market.

So we also see other problems that aren’t necessarily environmental problems. Embezzlement, not declaring cattle in the area, buying cattle that haven’t been vaccinated. There’s a whole range of irregularities that end up being committed in these remote corners. But in other places where the government structure is more advanced, we are already seeing changes.

Mongabay: One of the issues derived from environmental crimes is the increase in violence. Our Arariboia investigation revealed this correlation, as the number of killings of Indigenous Guajajara is very high.

Rodrigo Agostinho: It’s very sad. And it’s not just there. There are a lot of Indigenous people outside their villages, a lot who have been expelled from their territory; there’s conflict all the time, because of timber, because of gold. So it’s a very delicate situation.

Mongabay: How do investigations like this help IBAMA in its work to combat environmental crimes?

Rodrigo Agostinho: It helps because we don’t investigate. IBAMA does a lot of intelligence work, we try to collect as much information as we can, there are many people who send claims to IBAMA. Much of the evidence we receive we forward to the police or prosecutors so that they can do more investigative work. IBAMA doesn’t tap anyone’s phone or bank details. So for us, sometimes it’s very difficult to carry out investigations, and sometimes investigative journalism work can pull threads that are important for the next day.

And we’ve found other nonenvironmental crimes in the course of these investigations. So we end up finding cases of people under threat. Sometimes we inspect fish processing plants and find cocaine. What we’re seeing today, this mixture of organized crime and environmental crime, is something that didn’t exist in the past. Before, it was land theft, wood theft, it was very primitive. But today we see large criminal groups involved. And then we end up needing a lot of support from other institutions. We won’t be able to handle it all on our own.

Mongabay: This story has also shocked me a lot. I have also received information about organized crime in various parts of the Amazon.

Rodrigo Agostinho: They’re everywhere. There are places where it’s a bit more precarious, in other places they’re heavily armed. They’re not all like Comando Vermelho [one of Brazil’s most notorious criminal groups], who are armed to the teeth. But these militias are spread all over the Amazon. We haven’t caught a single miner with a mining pan. There’s nothing like that anymore, it’s all big: dredgers, big backhoes worth more than 1 million reais [$168,000]. More than 70 aircraft have been destroyed so far. Destroying 70 aircraft inside Indigenous lands is no small feat.

Mongabay: Have you detected any migration of these miners to other areas where mining operations have been destroyed?

Rodrigo Agostinho: Yes, they migrate. But a lot of people give up too. We found a lot of people working in slavery-like situations. You might have, say, a resident of Brasília who watches an American TV show on gold mining, and thinks he’s going to be rich. He drops everything, sells his Fiat Uno and goes to the Amazon. When he gets there, all the gold he finds he has to hand over to the guy that owns the machinery, in exchange for fuel, food, for his own safety. In many illegal mines we found people asking for help. Many women were victims of sexual slavery. They’re hired to cook, and end up becoming victims of the mining themselves. We’ve found a lot of human degradation, not just environmental degradation. And this is very complicated.

But not every miner is the guy we imagine. Sometimes it’s a local resident who abandons everything and thinks he’s going to get rich. Some people do get rich and then end up buying land, putting up cattle, it’s that cycle that repeats itself. But the majority end up being victims of these big scams. He goes there, he’s not the owner of the backhoe, he’s not the owner of the dredger, the barge.

We noticed [this migration] in some Amazonian rivers. Now, with the rivers drying up, they’ve ended up going up to the headwaters of other rivers. We’ve recently detected a lot of miners going up the Teles Pires River, which was an area we didn’t have this issue before.

Mongabay: What areas do we need to pay attention to?

Rodrigo Agostinho: We’re always on the lookout. We go to the Tapajós region, Itaituba, Novo Progresso. There are regions where the presence of these guys is more frequent.

Mongabay: With regard to the National Congress, what are the main challenges?

Rodrigo Agostinho: This year we made progress. We managed to pass the integrated fire management law and the chemical safety law, which was an important law. IBAMA is also in charge of the whole chemical issue, pesticides. The carbon market has now been approved, and the law establishing climate adaptation plans has been passed. We’ve also had some very complicated situations recently, such as the pesticide law itself. And we’re very anxious about a possible vote on the new environmental licensing law.

In the energy transition, there have been important projects, such as the fuel of the future, hydrogen. And now wind power. I think there are important things, but we’re also very afraid, because dirty energy policies continue to be slipped into these bills. We’ve made more progress than setbacks, that’s my perspective. It was a year when, at the height of the fires, we managed to pass a very important law on integrated fire management. I think that was a very important victory.

Mongabay: Do you have a map of this plan to open offices?

Rodrigo Agostinho: Yes. It’s not just to carry out inspections, it’s often to serve people: people want and need to be served. Not everyone has access to the internet. Fifteen minutes outside Brasília there’s no internet signal. And we need to have a presence in those areas. One of the big problems in the Amazon is that we’re talking about 50% of Brazil’s territory, an area where there’s no government presence. The sizes of the municipalities are very large, the distances are very long. The structure and presence of the government has always been small. The population is either low, varied, or very concentrated in large cities: Manaus, Belém, Boa Vista, Rio Branco, Cuiabá. So we have this difficulty. The figures show that this year more than 2,000 communities were isolated. Can you imagine a riverside community being left without water, a riverside community being left without fish? It’s surreal.

Banner image: Rodrigo Agostinho, head of IBAMA, Brazil’s federal environmental agency, spoke with Mongabay about the progress of his agency and the challenges it faces in protecting the country’s biomes after four years of regression under former president Jair Bolsonaro. Image courtesy of IBAMA.

Karla Mendes is a staff investigative and feature reporter for Mongabay in Brazil and a member of the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network. She is the first Brazilian and Latin American ever elected to the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ); she was also nominated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Chair. Read her stories published on Mongabay here. Find her on 𝕏, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads and Bluesky.

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