The ‘Forest Guardians’ of Brazil’s Amazon

In the Amazon rainforest, on Araribóia indigenous land in Brazil’s Maranhão state, groups of Guajajara tribesmen patrol their remote tribal land, seeking to protect it from illegal logging in places with little police presence. They call themselves the “forest guardians,” and some recently took Ueslei Marcelino, a photographer with Reuters, along on patrol. Marcelino was with a group of six men who went into the forest at midnight, searching for illegal logging operations. One night, the forest guardians found and destroyed a logging camp, and on another night, they lay in wait for a caravan on a narrow road, capturing a scout and scaring off a group of loggers, then burning their trucks.