Roots (of cassava) and wings: “Brazil, the guardian of the Amazon”

Monitoring deforestation and the activities of illegal gold diggers, protection of indigenous communities, emergency medical evacuations, fight against the covid-19 pandemic … Fernando Bezerra has flown over the Amazon for 35 years. He decided one day to change sides: he worked for those who devastate the forest, he became one of his guardians. Monday at 8.50 pm in “Les Planes du bout du monde” on France 5.

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The Amazon is beyond our comprehension. The world’s largest tropical rainforest spans nine countries and is thirteen times the size of France; it is populated by a hundred thousand Indians, belonging to 180 tribes, each with their own language and traditions; there are 2,000 species of fish, 45,000 plant species, and so on. It’s no longer a secret: this territory is increasingly threatened and its inhabitants with it. When investigators from the NGO Greenpeace have to go to the forest to document these threats, they appeal to Fernando Bezerra, a pilot from Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian Amazon, who flies over this vastness of water and vegetation. lush for 35 years and knows its beauty but also its dangers – emergency landings are impossible and any crash is fatal. Some of his pilot friends were swallowed up there.
François Guillaume’s documentary opens with a particularly striking mission: an overview of the Yanomami Indian reserve, a territory as large as Portugal, granted in 1992 by the Brazilian state in full ownership to this tribe but yet more invaded every year. by gold diggers. While the Yanomami are estimated at 27,000, the artisanal miners are now around 20,000! And their activity is almost industrial. The surface mines follow one another in a macabre way: felled trees, river banks ripped open, sludge loaded with heavy metals, oil pools, lakes poisoned by mercury …, but also illegal landing strips, planes, helicopters … Overflight requires caution. Gold diggers, unwilling to see their activities revealed through the photographs taken by the NGO, can be very aggressive.
If Fernando knows the gold miners so well, it is because he once worked for them, as well as for the timber traffickers, when he was only a young daredevil pilot attracted by easy money: 20% of the value of the goods transported, the temptation was strong … This was before Greenpeace requested it, in 2000, for its experience and knowledge of the forest, precisely, and the pilot became aware of the fragility of the Amazon … and not choose to change sides. Since then, his skills have been used much better: surveillance missions, transport of equipment, medical evacuations, delivery of oxygen cylinders as part of the fight against the covid-19 epidemic …
It was during one of his deliveries that he took the director to São Gabriel, on the border with Colombia, a little accessible village on the banks of the Rio Negro where a community of Tukano and Tuyuca Indians – having left their homes land to escape the ravages of gold miners – has settled. The comfort is greater than in the forest, twenty days’ walk away, but already traditions are unraveling and children are losing their language. Between nostalgia and the dream of a return, we essentially survive from the cultivation and sale of cassava, the “bread of the natives”, which can kill when you do not know how to prepare it.

C.K.G.