in tenharim land, the natives confronted with the damage of the Transamazonian

“But what is this thing? » We haven’t left the small town of Apui for half an hour when a breath of worry runs through our 4×4. in the red sand. All around are bones, fragments of shins and jaws, mixed with pieces of rotting flesh and skin. The smell of rot is terrible. In silence, we wonder: who could be behind such a macabre staging?

One certainty: at this stage of the trip, twenty days after our departure, the Transamazonian takes on the air of the Wild West. The wooden villages, crushed by the heat and at first sight empty of inhabitants, seem straight out of a bad western. At any moment, the foreigner expects to see headhunters and pistoleiros for a duel in the sun… Some of these localities have ominous names. One of them, Mata Mata, literally means “kill kill” ; actually the surname of a local turtle looking like a prehistoric creature, covered in bumpy patches.

After several hours on the road, here is Santo Antonio de Matupi, the fifth stop of the trip. Or rather “KM 180”, as we say here, the distance separating this town from the nearest large town, Humaita. Curious place, lost in the middle of nowhere: a dirt track studded with water holes, along which line a handful of concrete houses, businesses and warehouses. During the day, you come across cowboys in large hats, mounted on their horses harnessed in leather. They are often followed by stray dogs, caramel-haired mongrels in search of food.

highway for traffic

Curiously, everything happens at night in Santo Antonio de Matupi. At sunset begins an astonishing ballet. Noisy and muddy trucks slowly go up the Transamazonian. On the trailers are stacked “towers”, as they are nicknamed here, the pieces of “skyscrapers” of the Amazon, tree trunks of several tens of meters. Angelims, ipes, massarandubasnothing but giants of brown, russet, cream and gold tones… all torn from the great forest.

Better to remain discreet. These pieces of wood bound for the sawmills come from a very special place: the lands of the indigenous Tenharim people, where logging is illegal. These are spread over three reserves, on an area equivalent to that of Lebanon, for a population of about one thousand seven hundred people. The largest and oldest reserve, that of Marmelos, was approved in 1996. From north to south, a river of the same name crosses it. From east to west, it is the Transamazonian, which in recent years has become a veritable highway for timber traffic.

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