Over the past century, the Ticuna, the biggest tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, have fended off threats from loggers and illegal miners in some of the most remote tracts of the vast rainforest. But the latest challenge is more intense than anything they have experienced before.
“Drones were flying around this area last year,” says Major Jonatas Soares, the regional military police commander speaking in the village of Ourique, about 1,100km west of the city of Manaus. Drug traffickers, he adds, “were stopping off there, storing their cocaine and then putting drones up to check what was going on before continuing their journey”.
Informants said there were 200 kilos of the drug stored there, but police were unable to locate the stash.