“Blue, our sky is blue forever!” radiates the official anthem of Rondôniaa portion of the Amazon the size of Britain in the western part of Brazil. But the “pure crystalline” heaven celebrated by these texts has disappeared in recent months.
Large swaths of South America are blanketed in smoke from largely man-made wildfires raging from Ecuador’s drought-stricken capital to Paraguay’s Chaco Forest and the hinterlands of the largest tropical jungle on Earth.
The smoke is so dramatic that passenger planes cannot land in Rondônia’s river capital, Porto Velho, and schools have been forced to close. The government polyclinic, run by Dr. Lilian Samara de Melo Lima, has seen an increase in the number of patients with respiratory complaints, migraines and eye infections.
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Aerial view of heavy smoke from fires in the Amazon rainforest covering the city of Porto Velho on the banks of the Madeira River, Rondônia state, Brazil
“Nowadays we can’t even see the other side of the river,” the Brazilian doctor complained as she sheltered from the smog in her clinic.
Lima, 45, was born and raised in Rondônia and has previously witnessed the toxic effects of forest fires, such as cattle ranchers and soybean farmers use the annual Amazon report “fire season” to clear land and extract new properties from the region’s rapidly shrinking rainforests.
“But this year has been truly atypical,” she added, blaming man’s “devastating, rapacious, reckless” march into areas that just a few decades ago were largely unexplored jungles inhabited by little-known indigenous groups.
Related: ‘It’s guerrilla warfare’: Brazilian fire teams battle Amazon fires – and the arsonists who set them
The fires are suffocating for the 500,000 residents of Porto Velho. “We breathe in so much waste,” said pediatrician Marilene Penati, Minister of Health.
The city’s residents are far from the only South Americans suffering from the fires that experts say have been exacerbated by a historic drought linked to the natural climate phenomenon El Niño and the consequences of climate change.
“We have a problem across the continent, it’s not just Brazil,” said Erika Berenguer, a scientist at the University of Oxford who studies the impact of fire on the Amazon.
Berenguer said satellites have detected a record number of fires this year in neighboring countries such as Colombia, Guyana and Venezuela.
Drought and fires have also scorched Paraguay’s endangered Chaco ecosystemthreatened the agriculture-dependent economy and shrouded the capital Asunción in toxic smog.
More than 180,000 hectares (444,789 acres) of dry forest and savannah have been destroyed since early September. went up in smoke around Cerro Chovoreca, a protected reserve near the border with Bolivia. The fire started on recently deforested ranchland before it gets out of hand. Videos on social media showed firefighters run against advancing walls of flame.
The fire has devastated areas used by Ayoreo nomads – South America’s only uncontacted people outside the Amazon – to hunt and forage.
“Our isolated brothers live in that area,” said Choyoide José Fernando Jurumi, the leader of the local Ayoreo Chovoreca community. “It hurts us a lot. What are they going to eat? Where are they going to hide?”
At least Twenty people have been killed in Peru since July while forest fires have destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of land in the Andes and the Amazon. Over the past two weeks, six regions have declared a state of emergency; Lambayeque, Huánuco and Cajamarca in the highlands and San Martin, Ucayali and Amazonas, in the Amazon. Fires have affected 22 of Peru’s 24 regions.
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Top left: Aerial view of a forest fire-affected Amazon jungle in the Ucayali region of Peru on September 17, 2024. Top right: Peruvian President Dina Boluarte and Defense Minister Walter Astudillo during a meeting on the use of helicopters and aircraft to combat of the forest fires in the San Martin region. Below: A helicopter loading a water bag to extinguish the forest fires in San Martin, on September 19, 2024
Peru’s Prime Minister Gustavo Adrianzén sparked outrage by attributing the fires to traditional slash-and-burn practices, although experts say most of them were likely deliberately intended to clear land for agriculture, ranching and illegal crops such as coca, the plant used to make cocaine. . “Most of the fires were started to open the doors for illegal activities,” said Constantino Aucca, who heads the fire Accion Andinaa community-led reforestation model in the Andean countries.
Christian Rivera, an Ecuadorian paramedic, was among those who helped battle the flames in and around his country’s capital, Quito, in recent weeks. “What is extraordinary is the scale of the emergency… I have never seen anything like it in the thirty years I have been working as a paramedic,” Rivera said by phone last week from Cerro de Auqui, the last point hit by fires that have swept the entire have enveloped the world. highland capital in smoke and ash.
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Firefighters try to extinguish a forest fire in Latacunga, Cotopaxi province, Ecuador on September 27, 2024.
“We can see that this is related to global warming,” Rivera added. “As soon as we put out the flames in one place, they start somewhere else.”
Fires have also hit Bolivia’s eastern lowlands, particularly Santa Cruz, the country’s agricultural powerhouse, where most of its soy and beef is produced. On Monday, President Luis Arce flew into the region to officially declare a national disaster.
According to the latest figures from the national government, 4.6 million hectares of forest have been burned across the country – an area larger than the size of Switzerland. The regional government in Santa Cruz says that seven million hectares of pasture and forest have burned there alone, “the worst environmental disaster” in its history.
Penati thought Porto Velho was also experiencing some of the worst days in the city’s 110-year history, but saw the climate disaster as part of a global crisis that required an urgent collective response.
“The earth is sick… the earth is crying out for help,” the health minister warned as she sat in the smoke-covered clinic, citing a recent speech by Pope Francis in which he urged people to change their behavior.
“But we just don’t…listen, do we?” Penati added, expressing despair over the increasingly smoky situation in South America. “I feel so, so sad because we are hurting our planet and we have to take care of it – because we are killing ourselves.”
