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The Briefing:
- Satellites recorded 9,045 fire hotspots across the Brazilian Amazon in the first half of October — 62% more than the same window a year earlier, amid a drought worsened by El Niño.
- Brazil's federal intelligence agency and state police are actively probing whether the fires were deliberately coordinated for political motives, with authorities noting that hotspot counts nearly tripled in the ten days following the October 4 first-round vote.
- Amazon deforestation fell 42% to its lowest level since satellite monitoring began in 1988 — making the October fire surge appear to be a deliberate, separate attack on the forest, not a clearing byproduct.
Brazilian intelligence agencies have entered the investigation into who is burning the Amazon. Ibama president Jair Schmitt confirmed to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo that federal police and Brazil's national intelligence service are now scrutinizing whether there is "something orchestrated and structured" behind the October fire spike. That spike is no longer a two-week environmental story — it is an expanding criminal case, a public health emergency, and a geopolitical flashpoint arriving three days before Sunday's presidential runoff.
The Amazon does not only lose trees when it burns. A peer-reviewed study published October 7 in Communications Earth & Environment found that ozone generated by fire smoke silently erodes the carbon-absorbing capacity of surviving trees — at a rate equivalent to roughly 24% of the CO₂ the fires themselves release directly. That hidden toll does not appear in existing climate accounting models.
A Fire Count That Has Not Stopped Climbing
The October numbers were alarming from the start. Brazil's Amazon surveillance system logged 1,679 fire outbreaks in Amazonas state during just the first two weeks of October — a 253% jump compared with the same stretch in 2025, when only 874 hotspots were recorded for the entire month. By October 19, the state's monthly total had already surpassed 1,900 outbreaks.
Widened to the full Amazon biome, the picture is more alarming still. Satellites captured 9,045 hotspots across the Brazilian Amazon in just the first half of the month — 62% above the same period last year, amid drought conditions intensified by an El Niño cycle that forecasters describe as potentially the strongest on record, with officials warning that the 2027 fire season may prove even more destructive.
An Investigation That Now Involves Intelligence Services
The fires did not follow expected patterns. Field agents observed active blazes inside protected conservation areas arranged in a distinct geometric configuration, inconsistent with agricultural burns that escape their intended perimeter. Environment Minister João Paulo Capobianco conducted an aerial survey of the burn zones on October 11 and told AFP the fires constituted "a deliberate criminal act" aimed at degrading forest and facilitating illegal land seizures.
Ane Alencar, science director at Brazil's nonprofit Amazon Environmental Research Institute, observed that September had registered near-record low fire counts, and that conditions shifted sharply after the October 4 first-round election. She offered a hypothesis: the expectation of a potential change in government may have generated a perception of impunity. "I think the prevailing thought is 'we won't be punished,'" she said. No suspects have been publicly identified. Both state police and federal agencies describe the probe as ongoing.
Manaus: A Megacity Still Under Smoke
Four weeks into the crisis, Brazil's largest Amazonian city has not cleared. Civil defense issued a "severe alert" directly to residents' mobile phones on Saturday, October 21, urging them to remain indoors as Manaus's air quality ranked among the worst on earth. That escalation followed days of school closures, suspended municipal operations, and fine particulate readings that peaked at 196 micrograms per cubic meter on October 9 — approximately 13 times the World Health Organization's 24-hour PM2.5 safe guideline of 15 micrograms per cubic meter.
The 2.3 million residents of Manaus have now lived under smoke for weeks. A federal court gave Ibama and state governments ten days to account for their firefighting actions. The federal government responded by deploying more than 300 firefighters and 11 aircraft to support state fire crews — a mobilization that critics have called necessary but insufficient.
The Deforestation Paradox That Neither Campaign Wants to Ignore
The crisis has unfolded alongside data that complicates the narrative on both sides of the election. Between August 2025 and July 2026, only 3,335 square kilometers of the Amazon were cleared — 42% less than the prior period and the lowest deforestation total since official satellite monitoring began in 1988, compared with 11,568 square kilometers in the final year of the previous Bolsonaro administration. The Lula government's enforcement model has measurably produced results on that metric.
But fires burning through degraded or standing forest are not always classified as deforestation — and the Communications Earth & Environment study confirmed that the carbon damage from what burns, and from the ozone those fires generate, runs well beyond what official accounting captures. The Amazon can be losing ground in ways that do not register on the deforestation dashboard.
Three Days to the Runoff, and the Forest Is Still on Fire
Sunday's presidential contest between incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro — son of the jailed former president — arrives with satellite imagery still showing smoke over the Amazon basin. The Bolsonaro campaign has leveraged the fire crisis to challenge the government's environmental record; his program proposes eliminating illegal deforestation by 2029 through artificial intelligence and satellite monitoring. São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas, a Bolsonaro ally, accused the Workers' Party of negligence, saying the Lula administration "disappeared" while the Amazon burned.
The Lula camp counters with the record deforestation figures and frames the fire surge as a criminal — and possibly political — assault on the forest. What neither campaign has resolved is the investigation itself: whether someone deliberately turned the Amazon into a campaign weapon, and whether Brazil's institutions can prove it before Sunday's polls close.
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