This podcast was born out of this concern, a question that many Brazilians do not know how to answer: What is happening in the Brazilian Amazon?
News about the Amazon is part of the daily routine: deforestation, fires, conflicts over land, illegal mining, invasions of protected areas and indigenous lands, wood theft. All this is in the news. They are stories that tell us the facts and make us understand that what happens in the Amazon region affects all life on Earth.

But there’s a difference between hearing and knowing, knowing and understanding, and understanding and feeling. Overall, the news that tells us the facts is not able to make us feel the anguish of those who were born and lived all their lives in the forest and fight to keep it alive.

The series Invisible Amazon, a true story, is an emotional journey in search of this Amazon of almost 30 million Brazilians who live in the forest. We are not travelling alone: Beka Munduruku, a 19-year-old indigenous activist, guides us through her world, tells us about her people, and warns us about the present and future dangers faced by the Amazon Rainforest.

When we established the path of our travel through the Amazon, it became clear that it would be impossible to visit the 10 cities with the highest rates of deforestation and fires in 2020. But this ranking revealed that most of them were concentrated in a single Brazilian State: Pará, which, in the last 15 years, also ranks as the absolute leader in number of fires and deforestation in the Amazon.

This is why we chose to start our immersion in the forest through Altamira, the largest municipality in Brazil in terms of territorial extension and also the champion of fires in 2020. From Altamira, we traveled about 2,500 km on dirt roads, with new and old asphalt, crossing wooden bridges in precarious conditions and land devastated by fire or deforested by soy or pasture.

We visited Itaituba, the so-called Pepita City, and its Gold Street, where parked trunk-trucks sell safes. Then we crossed the vast Tapajós River and saw the presence of mining everywhere, evident in the stretches where the green water of the river turned milky and muddy. We met mayors supporting the minning activity, or defending to change forest for soy plantations, or even arguing to legalize invaded public land. We visited a large settlement for small farmers that is full of large farms and cattle. We saw the sky fill with smoke from the fires burning the forest, and we met firefighters who travel miles with scarce equipment to put out these fires.