Lessons for Democracy From the Brazilian Amazon 

There was a time when the most dangerous part of Hugo Loss’ job was the grueling rainforest terrain and armed men blasting riverbeds and razing trees for profit. 

But Loss, an analyst with Brazil’s elite environmental enforcement agency, learned recently that being effective at his job has made him a target, whether he’s helicoptering into the Amazon rainforest or walking on the streets of São Paulo. 

Loss is one of more than a dozen governmental employees, journalists, judges and politicians named in a new federal police report as the targets of a sprawling spying campaign waged by the administration of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

The list of targets includes federal lawmakers, the former São Paulo governor and four members of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, the highest judicial body in the nation.

According to a court document made public in July, federal police are probing a “criminal organization” alleged to have illegally monitored the computers and telephones of Loss and the other named targets. 

The organization allegedly used resources from Brazil’s federal intelligence agency, known by its Brazilian acronym ABIN. The document doesn’t contain direct allegations against Bolsonaro, but the court document says that the “parallel ABIN” investigation targeted people involved with investigating Bolsonaro’s family members and “causing trouble” for his administration. 

Bolsonaro, whose populist far-right personality has drawn comparisons to former U.S. President Donald Trump, won Brazil’s 2018 presidential election on promises to develop the Amazon rainforest and a platform known as the BBB—Bibles, bullets and the main driver of Brazil’s deforestation, beef. Those policies put Bolsonaro at odds with some of his own governmental agencies. That includes IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, where Loss has worked since 2013. 

At IBAMA, Loss helped plan and execute military-style operations aimed at monitoring and dismantling the vast networks of illegal loggers, wildcat miners, poachers, land grabbers—and increasingly drug traffickers—driving deforestation and assaults and other crimes carried out against Indigenous people.  

But just over a year into Bolsonaro’s presidency, key career IBAMA officials were either summarily dismissed or moved from the field to desk jobs. Loss was transferred to the state of Minas Gerais and banned from going into the rainforest.

The personnel changes and firings were largely seen as retribution. Loss had led investigations implicating top officials in the Bolsonaro government, including then-environment minister Ricardo Salles, who was linked to a timber trafficking network exporting Amazonian hardwoods to the United States and Europe. Salles resigned in 2021 and denied wrongdoing. He remains under investigation.

Loss has since been reinstated in an operational role at IBAMA. His work has ramped up under Bolsonaro’s successor, leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula), who took office in 2023. 

But while Lula has promised to protect Indigenous territories and bring deforestation rates down, Loss says IBAMA and other agencies are now stretched too thin to achieve those goals. 

The governmental gutting under Bolsonaro—similar to the conservative Project 2025 policy proposals made for a future Trump administration—have left a lasting mark. Loss said that over a year and a half into Lula’s term, those agencies have not been rebuilt. 

At the same time, criminal networks that flourished under Bolsonaro have organized and become more sophisticated: Last year, Brazil declared a humanitarian crisis in the Yanomami Indigenous territory due to severe hunger and diseases exacerbated by illegal gold mining. 

Loss talked with Amazônia Latitude and Inside Climate News about the roller-coaster of the past few years and the lessons for defenders of democratic institutions worldwide. The conversation, conducted in Portuguese, has been translated into English and lightly edited for length and clarity. 

You’ve worked at IBAMA under both Bolsonaro and Lula. What were the big differences you noticed between those two administrations?

Under Bolsonaro’s government, we had great difficulty working because there were persecutions. In the end, we didn’t have the freedom to carry out the operations that had to be done. 

Now, under Lula, that is totally different. There are no more persecutions of personnel. There are no outright restrictions on executing surveillance operations, and we can work unimpeded in that sense. 

However, today there are other problems. The Bolsonaro government gutted and reshaped the structure of IBAMA, reducing the number of personnel and funding, and those changes haven’t been fully reversed under Lula.

We also still lack the resources to increase or intensify surveillance operations. Today, an IBAMA inspector and environmental analyst earns a salary of around R$5,000 ($885 USD) per month. Those agents put themselves in dangerous situations but don’t get paid a fair salary compared to the salaries of federal police. We also have not had any public recruitment for new employees since 2022. 

The Lula government demands big operations from us, especially for the protection of Indigenous territories like the Yanomami, Kayapó, Munduruku and Apyterewa, and in bringing down the rate of deforestation. Those demands didn’t exist under Bolsonaro. But now that they do, the structure of IBAMA hasn’t changed and we can’t meet those increased demands. 

We don’t have enough staff or resources to maintain two simultaneous large-scale operations to remove intruders from Indigenous lands. If a team pulls out, the criminals come back. So in each Indigenous territory where an operation is done, teams have to be kept there to maintain the situation, containing any new invasion attempts.

How have the operations of illegal loggers, miners, drug traffickers and other criminal groups in the Amazon changed over the past decade? 

The Amazon changed a lot after Bolsonaro came to power. Criminal groups have strengthened and organized themselves, and that legacy remains today. We have a greater presence of guns.

During Bolsonaro’s government, the loggers and the prospectors organized themselves into cooperatives, into associations, and then they managed to elect councilors and mayors in small cities. They even managed to elect senators and deputies, people who defend their interests in the central spheres of power. 

Even without Bolsonaro in the presidency, there is now a powerful group of politicians that defend the logic that there is not a need for IBAMA or Brazil’s Indigenous protection agency. 

The biggest challenge we have is to overcome this logic. Today, we are not being directly persecuted or facing reprisals like we did under Bolsonaro. But it is far from an ideal situation. And I don’t know how this is going to be resolved. 

The criminality in the Amazon is getting more sophisticated, it’s branching out, it’s growing in structure. Our governmental agencies aren’t keeping up with that growth because they have not been rebuilt since Bolsonaro gutted them. 

Earlier this month, Brazil’s federal police released a report alleging that, under Bolsonaro, the federal intelligence services carried out operations to spy on and harass journalists, judges and other officials, including you. Have you read the report? 

I’ve only had access to the parts that were made public. I haven’t had access to the full report. It is part of a police inquiry and is being kept confidential. 

Your name is mentioned several times in the public version of the report as a person surveilled in 2020 and 2021 by the Bolsonaro administration. How did you react when you saw that?

I had suspected that I was under surveillance. My cell phone, for example, broke down because it overheated. I saw strange movements in front of my house, with suspicious people and vehicles. I just never imagined that it was part of such a big operation.

I am really worried about what will happen if Bolsonaro or his allies win the next election. I don’t know what I will do. I should make some kind of protection plan, because I’m sure they will target me again. And I keep thinking about it, about my family, what I will do.

The federal police report implies that you were under surveillance because of your environmental and Indigenous protection work at IBAMA. Others named in the report were judges, politicians and journalists—why do you think those groups of people were targeted? 

I believe that there is a connection among the people who were targeted. We all play a role in upholding democracy. 

Journalists have the job of providing society real, neutral information, and this brings society more autonomy in decision-making, thinking and forming opinions. 

In the case of IBAMA career staff, as we combat environmental crime; we prevent private entities from stealing natural resources that should belong to the collective. This private appropriation of a collective resource is anti-democratic. 

“I believe that there is a connection among the people who were targeted. We all play a role in upholding democracy.”

The environment and its natural resources are at the heart of the discussion on the maintenance of democracy, because anti-democratic governments use the gold and the timber illegally extracted from the Amazon to perpetuate their power.

At the time you were dismissed from your position in IBAMA in 2020, it was widely reported that you were dismissed as retaliation for dismantling illegal extractive operations connected to government officials. What was that experience like for you? 

In 2020, I was part of an operation in the Apyterewa Indigenous territory to destroy all the mining there. And later, I was in Yanomami Indigenous territory, where we apprehended several planes and helicopters belonging to illegal miners.

In the Akuanduba Operation that implicated Ricardo Salles, hundreds of loads of timber were exported to various countries without IBAMA’s authorization. My team at IBAMA was planning an operation looking into that, and then I was dismissed. Our operation was never implemented. But federal police found evidence of conversations between Salles and illegal loggers. 

I was “in the cooler” for 414 days after my dismissal on April 30, 2020. They banned me from going to the Amazon. They also removed me from other positions I held in Brazil’s human rights Protection Board and Environmental Licensing Board. I asked that instead of being dismissed, that they move me to Mato Grosso; my request was denied. I asked to be moved to Pará; my request was denied. I tried other parts of the Amazon as well and it didn’t work out.

I only managed a move to Minas Gerais. When I got there, the superintendent helped me get out of the cooler. He said to me: “What we know here is that you cannot go to the Amazon. You can carry out operations here, but you can’t go to the Amazon.”

I went back to the Amazon when Brazil’s Supreme Court removed the then-president of IBAMA, Eduardo Bim; the director of environmental protection, Olímpio Magalhães; and the coordinator of surveillance operations, Leslie Tavares. That was in May 2021. And that’s when I started being monitored again.

Have you considered leaving your job at IBAMA out of fear that you will face further reprisals?

No, not out of fear. Leaving this work would be like a climber stopping mountain climbing. 

My work is creating and executing surveillance operations in the Amazon. So, I invest everything: I really study the land, the territory, I talk to the people. To work in the Amazon, it’s no use reading books about the Amazon. You need to know the land.

And you must have contact with the people. You must have situational awareness about where you are. This knowledge only comes from years of working at IBAMA.

So, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.

I would like, in the future, to train Indigenous peoples, to try and transfer this knowledge to them so they can protect their territories themselves.

Where do things stand now with regard to illegal activity in the Amazon?

I think that the criminals are much more organized and networked within official channels of power, including federal, state and local governments. 

To combat that, Brazil needs to strengthen its public institutions and their independence. Democracy as a whole needs to be strengthened. 

This entails not only more resources, like buying more helicopters, but increasing staff and developing defenses against criminal groups trying to penetrate the government. Public institutions must be able to carry out work that is strictly technical and focused on enforcing the law. 

Given the revelations in the July federal police report, are you taking any steps to protect yourself from surveillance?

We are always alert. Before I knew I was being surveilled, I always watched for suspicious people. I keep my social media private and don’t post anything on social networks to protect myself.

What are you seeing now with regard to illegal mining and deforestation in the Amazon?  

Criminal organizations have become strongly associated with mining activity in Brazil. This is relatively new.

To fight against this, updating regulations to that reality can help. For illegal gold mining, it’s urgent that there be controls placed on sales and trade in the heavy machinery and equipment they use. 

Another important thing is that only career officials should be allowed to lead agencies like IBAMA. That protects the institution. But as it is now, anyone can become president of IBAMA. 

If the leader of IBAMA is a career employee, they would have gone through some training, through a selection process, and they would have adapted to the institutional culture. If anybody in Brazil can become the president of a technical organ like IBAMA, then it will only be individuals who serve political interests who get placed in that position.

 What do you expect from the Lula government over the next two and a half years?

Just as Bolsonaro’s government left a legacy, Lula will leave a legacy and he must create a good legacy—one of lasting environmental protection.

Today, we have the capacity to carry out surveillance operations in some Indigenous territories, but we don’t have the capacity to be everywhere we need to be. And I don’t see anything in place within the institution of IBAMA to ensure these operations will continue if Bolsonaro or an ally comes back to power. So, it is necessary to create perennial forms of control and monitoring that endure regardless of who is in power.

Protection of the Amazon will not be sustained only with surveillance operations like we are doing today. A more robust legal apparatus is needed, with more robust institutions. 

We need to have the capacity to carry out long-term operations that won’t be jettisoned in two years’ time with a political reversal. 

Katie Surma

Reporter, Pittsburgh

Katie Surma is a reporter at Inside Climate News focusing on international environmental law and justice. Before joining ICN, she practiced law, specializing in commercial litigation. She also wrote for a number of publications and her stories have appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times and The Associated Press, among others. Katie has a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, an LLM in international rule of law and security from ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, a J.D. from Duquesne University, and was a History of Art and Architecture major at the University of Pittsburgh. Katie lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Jim Crowell.

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