Federal agents in Brazil exchanged gunfire with illegal miners in the Amazon sta...
ALTAMIRA, Brazil - Federal agents in Brazil exchanged gunfire with illegal miners in the Amazon state of Para on Friday, according to Reuters witnesses, in a dramatic example of how Brazil has stepped up environmental enforcement in the wake of rainforest fires.
“They hid in the forest and shot at the team,” said Hugo Loss, Ibama’s national coordinator of enforcement operations, who accompanied the mission. That came on top of efforts by the government of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro to weaken Ibama, including prohibiting agents from destroying machinery used to commit environmental crimes and grounding the agency’s special forces unit used on riskier raids, according to a Reuters investigation.
That federal support allowed for Ibama-organized raids such as the one on Friday to be carried out, Loss said. The raid was not directly related to the fires.
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