THe has arbitrarily built a brothel at the foot of Vila Kurul, an illegal gold-mining settlement in the heart of Brazil’s most desecrated indigenous territory, which until just a few weeks ago was a den of depravity.
Inebriated prospectors huddled around a wooden table, drinking beer and Scotch and watching sex workers pole-dance before joining them in a hut behind the brothel.
The remains of a destroyed brothel in Villa Krull. Photo: João Laet/The Guardian
The surrounding encampments were also filled with raiders, as hordes of miners used pickaxes and explosives to dig deep into the hillsides and savanna in search of treasure.
“They wiped everything out. They destroyed nature,” said Jackson Katitaururu, an indigenous leader of the Nambiquala tribe. His village is a few miles from the chaos of the southwestern Amazon.
But on a recent morning, Villa Krull was deserted. After years of unrest under the government of his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, the once-thriving illegal community had been razed by Brazilian security forces fighting to fulfill President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s pledge to eradicate illegal mining in indigenous territory.
Brazilian military raids illegal mining camp in Amazon’s indigenous Salare region
Walking through the burnt remains of the encampment, Lula’s displaced emperor Nilton Tubino recalled how the miners fled into the surrounding forest in late March after the army launched a land and air offensive to stop one of the most ferocious attacks on indigenous land in Brazil’s recent history.
Nilton Tubino walks in front of the ruins of Villa Krull. Photo: João Laet/The Guardian
Other much larger protected areas have also been affected on a larger physical scale, but nowhere has the destruction been more intense than in Salare, a Singapore-sized savannah and forest area near the border with Bolivia, which lost 4% of its forest between January 2024 and August 2025. A total of about 17.3 square miles (44.8 km) has been destroyed since the gold rush began about five years ago, nearly half the area. The size of Manhattan.
Tubino sighs as he marches through Garinpo Cuatro, one of Sarale’s largest mines, swinging an 18-inch machete across the front of his black military uniform and strapping three radios to his belt.
Paradoxically, part of the explanation for Salare’s ordeal lies in the success of the anti-mining movement that Lula launched after returning to power in January 2023. After Mr. Tubino’s team launched Mr. Lula’s “non-trespassing” operation in the well-known Yanomami indigenous territory, some miners flocked south to Salare, hoping to continue working far from the crackdown.
Another driver is the soaring gold price, which has reached record levels amid global instability caused by President Donald Trump and his erratic foreign policy. “The price of gold, this abnormal global situation, Trump, these things… are having a[direct impact]across the Amazon,” said Tubino, who sees a clear link between global turmoil and the disappearance of surrounding forests as investors seek a safe haven for their money.
Double quotes it’s a complete desert. I was born and raised here and couldn’t believe it when I saw this Jackson Katitaurulu
The Guardian spent two days touring the destruction in Sarale with government forces, the only foreign media organization allowed to visit the hotly contested area, home to about 200 Nambiquala people.
Viewed from a helicopter, the astonishing extent of the looting was revealed. The once lush landscape was torn with seemingly endless brown slits, dotted with ponds of stagnant bronze water contaminated with mercury, which miners used in giant sluice boxes.
Over Vila Krull, named after a poisonous tropical toad with burrowing properties, pilots gasped as they realized the scale of the illegal operation. “It’s like a favela. It’s like Rio de Janeiro,” he said of the vast mining camp, as the six-seater plane swooped toward dozens of destroyed temporary structures cobbled together with tarpaulins and boards.
A view of Villa Krull, named after a poisonous tropical toad with burrowing properties. Photo: João Laet/The Guardian Photo: João Laet/The Guardian
Nearby, six tunnels had been dug into the rock wall by eager gold seekers.
Entrance to a tunnel dug by illegal miners. Photo: João Laet/The Guardian
In a nearby plain, an even larger mine was gouged out of the forest by a Hyundai excavator and set on fire by security forces. The trees were flattened and replaced by huge mounds of gray and copper-colored rubble, over which red macaws soared.
A charred excavator at the Garinpo Cuatro ruins. Photo: João Laet/The Guardian
“This is a complete desert. I was born and raised here and when I saw this I couldn’t believe it,” Katitaurulu said, describing the territory’s rivers being polluted and the constant noise of music and explosions scaring wildlife.
The Sarale crisis, which began during Bolsonaro’s ecologically devastating 2019-2023 presidential term, is not the Nambiquala people’s first taste of external aggression.
In David Price’s 1989 book on the small indigenous people, Before the Bulldozer, the anthropologist explained how outsiders first came to the area in the 1730s, when gold was discovered in the surrounding hills. “The hard labor of digging and washing gravel was done by slaves, first by Indians and then by Africans,” Price wrote.
After Nambiquala was “discovered” in the early 1900s by explorer Candide Rondon, who was sent to the border area to build telegraph lines, conditions became even more dire. That mission “brought new and deadly diseases to the Indians against which they had no protection. In the 1920s, influenza epidemics wiped out large populations within days; the measles epidemic of early 1946 was so devastating that survivors could not bury the dead,” Price writes.
In the late 1970s, disease and violence further increased as the military dictatorship bulldozed a large highway through the territory with World Bank assistance. In just a few years, Price wrote, the Nambiquala people went from being a “free and proud people” to being “overwhelmed by Western society.” Their population plummeted from perhaps 10,000. From the beginning of the 20th century to about 600 years.
There are two new and disturbing elements to today’s emergency. It is the alleged use of state-of-the-art large hydraulic excavators that have enabled destruction on an unprecedented industrial scale and the arrival of heavily armed organized crime groups such as the Red Army Command in Rio de Janeiro.
Drug forces from Rio and São Paulo have expanded into the Amazon in recent years, with some reports claiming that the Red Army Command, which the Trump administration recently designated as a foreign terrorist group, has taken control of the Vila Krulu mine and other Sarale mines, sparking explosive bloodshed.
Tubino downplayed the role of the Red Army Command in the region, saying he had not yet seen any hard evidence that the Red Army Command operated the Sarale gold mine. However, the rise in violence cannot be denied. When environmental special forces raided the area in 2024, five heavily armed people were killed in a gunfight. Days earlier, four people were killed in an apparent gold mining turf war.
Tubino and military discover ammonium nitrate explosive
Salare indigenous leader Saulo Catitaurulu said he had heard reports of miners roaming the territory with automatic weapons, 12-gauge shotguns and pistols. He believed they were members of a faction and recalled being warned by one miner not to speak out about the destruction. “Or I will come to your village and kill many of you.”
Saul’s brother, Jackson Katitaurulu, said indigenous hunters found Saul’s body wrapped in a tarp near the village a few days ago, with a deep gash on his chest. When police arrived to retrieve the body, it was gone.
Nambiquala leaders said the crackdown so far appears to have largely succeeded in expelling the miners. But what happens when the military inevitably withdraws?
“That’s a good question,” Jackson replied. “I think once the surgery is cancelled, they’ll come back. They’ll come back 100 percent.”
Even more daunting is the possibility that Mr. Lula could lose to Mr. Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, as the left does not have a significant lead in the polls in this year’s presidential election. Mr. Jackson made a harsh joke, recalling that Mr. Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous rhetoric emboldened a historic gold rush that sent tens of thousands of miners flooding into protected areas.
Tubino said he believes Lula’s re-election is critical to continuing the interagency crackdown on illegal mining and deforestation and protecting indigenous and other traditional communities in the Amazon. He pointed to how Trump used Nicolás Maduro’s alleged complicity in illegal mining as one of the pretexts to kidnap Venezuela’s president in January, believing Brazil’s sovereignty was also at stake in the October vote.
But for now, the feisty 65-year-old has more pressing concerns.
Despite the 10th crackdown spearheaded by Mr. Tubino under Lula, some trespassers still lurk in Salare. As his motorcade entered Villa Krull, police radio picked up conversations between the hill lookouts. “There’s a guy in a bulletproof vest taking pictures and there’s two guys who look different,” one of the scouts was heard announcing, clearly referring to a Guardian reporter.
Further down the road, Tubino crawls into a claustrophobic, pitch-black 100-metre-long tunnel cut into a cliff and discovers tools that suggest the miners are still at work. They probably work at night to avoid detection.
Nilton Tubino walking through the tunnel. Photo: João Laet/The Guardian
Nearby, troops discovered an underground bunker with a generator capable of powering the entire Villa Krull.
Security forces discover an underground bunker in Villa Krull. Photo: João Laet/The Guardian
In the undergrowth next to another deactivated mine, troops discovered a white bag containing 300 kg of ammonium nitrate explosive. “It’s a painstaking process,” Tubino said when the unit found new footprints on a dirt path. “Someone has been walking here for the past few days,” he added, before ordering the explosives to be destroyed.
Ammonium nitrate explosives were discovered in the undergrowth near Villa Krull. Photo: João Laet/The Guardian Photo: João Laet/The Guardian
Lula’s anti-mining campaign is an arduous, dangerous and seemingly endless task for the men and women fighting a multi-billion dollar illegal industry on the front lines of the Amazon wars. But with another big mission planned for later this year, Tubino vowed to keep working.
“Holiday? There’s no such thing as a holiday,” he jokes, sitting among the remains of a recently destroyed mining hut, mosquitoes swarming around his black sleeves.
