Recent satellite images show forest closing over the path of an illegal road that nearly severed the Xingu Socioenvironmental Corridor in 2022.In early 2023, civil society pressure put the road at the top of the government’s agenda, leading to enforcement operations and a sharp decline in new illegal road openings across the Xingu Basin.Conservationists warn the gains remain fragile: Invaded Indigenous territories face violent backlash, illegal mining is regrouping, and this year’s elections could redefine Brazil’s environmental policies.
In 2022, an illegal road cutting the length of a full marathon through two strictly protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon threatened to do what conservationists feared most: Split the Xingu Socioenvironmental Corridor, a mosaic of Indigenous territories and conservation units covering some 26 million hectares (64 million acres), in half. Four years later, satellite images reveal the 42.8-kilometer (26.6-mile) road is gone, swallowed by regrowing forest — something rarely seen in the region.
Its disappearance runs counter to everything that typically happens when a road appears in the Amazon. “Here, the road is the beginning of everything, the beginning of the devastation,” Bruno Ferreira, a researcher at the conservation nonprofit Imazon, part of the MapBiomas mapping network, told Mongabay.
