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According to the Guardians of the Forest, the administration supports loggers and facilitates their access to Indigenous lands. “I think our worst enemy at the moment is Bolsonaro’s government,” a Guajajara school counselor and forest guardian said. The Araribóia village chief said that since Bolsonaro took office, their lives have gotten harder: “When he won, non-Indigenous people in the surrounding lands celebrated because they thought they would be able to subdivide our lands.”

So Guajajara tribal members have taken matters into their own hands.

The role Indigenous communities play in rainforest conservation has become more and more essential in Brazil, given the increasingly weakened state of the nation’s environmental agencies. That some remote territories can be difficult for authorities to access makes the land defenders’ work even more important.

“Indigenous people have been extremely judicious in their use of land, leading to high-quality, natural landscapes,” reads a report by Amazon Frontlines, an advocacy organization for Indigenous land rights. “Because of this, indigenous lands will be instrumental in the quest for preserving the last intact forests on earth and, thus, tackling the climate crisis.”

Yet guardians said they are routinely left to fend for themselves in defending Araribóia, which contains almost half the remaining rainforest in the state of Maranhão.

They are an independent, volunteer-run group that’s been in the reserve since 2013, the village chief told Vox. There’s no official record of their existence and they receive no government financing or support, he added.

The Guajajara Guardians protect around 1,500 square miles of rainforest. The group is composed of roughly 130 tribal members, most of whom are men, and reports its findings to the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources and the Federal Police. But the guardians say they often don’t receive help, and when they do it’s too late.

“We have to do this job with our own hands and at a high cost,” the counselor and guardian said. “We pay it with our own lives.”

Indigenous people of Brazil carry a coffin and a flag reading “Bolsonaro Out” during a demonstration in support of tribal land rights outside the Supreme Court building in Brasília on August 26, 2021. Eraldo Peres/AP

Indigenous protesters set a coffin on fire outside the presidential palace in Brasília, Brazil, on August 27, 2021. Eraldo Peres/AP

Activists march near the Brazilian Embassy in London on August 25, 2021, in solidarity with the Indigenous people of Brazil. Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Guardians face threats the moment they leave their homes. “Sometimes we don’t know if somebody, even from our own family, will tell them where we are,” the counselor said. Some guardians now avoid leaving their village and going into the city altogether. Others rely on their wives to run errands, and even then, their wives are threatened too.

Threats usually increase after completing a patrol, when “everybody panics, including women and children,” the counselor said. “We have to sleep in the forest with fear, and our families start resenting the fact that we went on the mission.”

Forty-two members of the Guajajara tribe alone were killed between 2000 and 2018. In November 2019, the tribe — one of the largest in Brazil — made international headlines when loggers killed forest guardian Paulo Paulino Guajajara; in March 2020, leader and teacher Zezico Guajajara, who also defended the rainforest, was shot dead returning to his village.

Many guardians are enrolled in a federal Human Rights Defenders Protection Program that promises to protect their safety and arrange monthly financial assistance for rent, food, travel, clothing, and medicine. Guardians who spoke to Vox questioned the program’s effectiveness — one referenced the high-profile killing of his uncle, Zezico Guajajara, who he claimed was enrolled. “I can assure you that nothing has been done,” he said. “His murderers were arrested, but they haven’t been through a trial yet.” As he sees it, the protection program is a formal requisite that the government uses to collect data, but doesn’t provide actual security or prevention.

Environmental and human rights defenders in the Amazon are extremely vulnerable, Amazon Watch’s Poirier said. More than 300 people have been killed due to conflict over land use and resources in the Amazon between 2009 and 2019, according to data provided to Human Rights Watch by the Pastoral Land Commission. Only 14 of those cases have gone to trial. “The perpetrators of crimes against them are so rarely brought to justice, that it sends a signal these crimes will be tolerated,” Poirier said.

In August, Indigenous groups in Brazil asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Bolsonaro for genocide and ecocide, arguing that he has advanced “an explicit, systematic and intentional anti-Indigenous policy.”

The Bolsonaro administration did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In Brazil, what’s on paper and what’s in practice are two different things. And guardians say that even what’s on paper isn’t enough, making it difficult for Indigenous defenders of the Brazilian Amazon to trust in any follow-through from their own country.

As a party to both the Paris climate agreement and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) — the single most important treaty to protect nature — Brazil has committed to eliminating illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030. The country renewed this commitment in April 2021 at the Leaders Summit on Climate organized by US President Joe Biden, where Bolsonaro pledged to double Brazil’s environmental enforcement budget. The very next day, he approved a 24 percent cut to the country’s 2021 environmental budget — and still wants other nations to chip in funds to help solve Brazil’s deforestation problem.

Meanwhile, the avenue for designating Indigenous-held territories in Brazil continues to be constrained under Bolsonaro. The suite of legislation currently before Brazil’s Congress would block pathways for Indigenous people to reclaim areas that were seized from them before the 1988 constitution. The legislation would also validate the claims of squatters who currently occupy Indigenous lands illegally and permit mining in Indigenous areas without the consent of those living there, as Yale Environment 360’s Jill Langlois reported.

“It’s difficult to get Indigenous land demarcated, recognized, and ratified now,” an attorney and Guajajara tribal member told Langlois. “It will be impossible,” they said, should PL 490 pass and scrap the process that’s used to establish Indigenous lands.

There is no clear timeline for the legislation, though an international coalition of experts and financial institutions, along with the Climate Observatory and the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, is mobilizing against the bills. In late August, thousands of Indigenous people from across the country amassed outside Brazil’s Supreme Court to protest the expected landmark ruling.