This is a grim report of the Amazon fires by Christopher Bucktin from Porto Velho in Brazil.
As I trudged through the fires raging in the Amazon, the intense heat not only wrenched every last drop of perspiration from me, it also scorched my skin, melted my shoes and burnt my clothes.
After a week in the rainforest – alongside the firefighters desperately trying to save this precious resource from destruction – I feel like I have been led to the gates of Hell.
I’m in Brazil, deep in the heart of the Amazon’s most fire-ravaged area, and the devastation seems endless.
This part of the world’s greatest rainforest looks like a smouldering wasteland.
Many of the fires are believed to have been started by armed crime gangs intent on clearing the forest to illegally sell the land to cattle ranchers.
We drove hundreds of miles through Rondonia state, in northern Brazil, to witness the scale of the disaster, which is nearly as much a calamity for us in Britain as it is for South America.
Yet, according to the country’s foreign minister Ernesto Araujo: “The Amazon is not burning, not burning at all.”
His claims are backed up by Rondonia’s governor, Marcos Rocha, who dismissed the “fuss” over the fires as a foreign ruse to hinder Brazil’s economy.
Retired police colonel Rocha previously told The Guardian: “If we look at the situation in other countries, their forests are burning much more than in Brazil. You go to London or other countries, and what do you see? Smoke from burning, from industry. How can they demand of us what they haven’t done themselves?”
Despite the official denials, the firefighters in Rondonia’s capital Porto Velho – a small band of dedicated men and women at the city’s Brigade Municipal – have no doubt about the severity of the crisis.
Fire chief Rosenberg Barbosh said: “It has been relentless. We have attended dozens of fires [a day]. Hundreds of miles of rainforest have been destroyed, and we have probably not seen the worst of it yet.
Like with the vast majority of the fires it was unknown who started the blaze.
During our race to the scene, we saw several discarded petrol cans, plastic containers and buckets all steeped in the smell of fuel.
Armed land grabbers are known to be acting across Rondonia. They illegally start fires to clear the forest, before then selling the land to farmers and ranchers.
But victims are too afraid to report the crimes. Adriana Ferrerira, 48, lost everything after his farmstead was burnt.
He said: “My coffee plantation has gone, the bananas have been destroyed as well as the pineapples. Everything I have worked for seven years has been destroyed in seven hours. I took out a loan to pay for the land, and now I don’t know how I am going to pay it back. This will bankrupt my family and leave us destitute.”
Brazil now has 85% more fires burning than this time last year.
Rondonia has had more than 6,800 fires so far in 2019, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.
NASA says the state is one of the most deforested in the Amazon.
As the rate of land clearance reaches one and a half football fields a minute, many analysts fear we are nearing the tipping point.
And firefighter Agnaldson Braga said it is a vicious circle.
He explained: “The drier the land gets, the more susceptible it is to fire. The more fire, the less forest. A self-fulfilling cycle has already begun. The question is when does it become irreversible.”
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