A LETTER FROM THE FIELD — Undercover in the Amazon

SOMEWHERE IN THE AMAZON

Hello, my relatives.

I am writing to you from an undisclosed location deep in the Amazon. I am undercover right now. In all my time doing this work here, I have never had to go undercover like this before. But this situation is dangerous enough that it’s not optional. It’s necessary.

A NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN:

I don’t say this lightly: this is one of the most dangerous stories I have ever pursued. No press credentials. No translator. No outlet backing me if something goes wrong. Just me, my colleague, and the trust of people who have already buried leaders for speaking the truth I’m here to carry out.

I have 9,447 readers. 604 paying. That is amazing, and it’s not enough to match what this story is asking of me. I funded this trip myself because I couldn’t wait another year for someone else’s green light to tell it. That gap between readers and paid subscribers is the weight I carry with me into every one of these undisclosed locations.

These stories exist because I refuse to let them disappear — because a mine can build a road through a poisoned river, and a company can bring in violence and exploitation with no one’s consent, and the world will still look away unless someone puts their body in the room to witness it and bring it back. I have spent 15 years on the ground. I have built the trust and the relationships that barely exist anywhere else in this field. That’s why you won’t find this kind of coverage, reported this way, anywhere else.

This isn’t just my risk. Everyone speaking to me here — the leaders, the workers, the family members — is trusting me with their safety too. The murdered can’t ask you to subscribe. The threatened can’t put in a paywall to protect themselves. I can only ask on their behalf: help me carry this out and get it published.

I need you in this with me now more than any other time, to help sustain this work and make sure this story — and the people risking everything to tell it to me — do not disappear into the same silence that swallowed a grandfather ten years ago.

That’s what truth and reconciliation looks like from where I’m standing.

Come step into the fire with me.

I got here two nights ago, after driving hours on a rough, pothole-scarred road that wound through the Amazonian mountains rushing before the sun went down and left us in the dark. It was an adventure, I won’t lie to you. But we made it to our first location in one piece.

I’m not traveling with a translator this time. I’m not traveling with an outlet’s backing, either — I funded this story myself, because it mattered too much to wait for someone else’s permission. I’ve been trying to get here to cover this specific story for over a year.

My colleague on this assignment is Indigenous. His own community, back home, is under threat from a different mine entirely — that fight is his too, just not this one. We came here, to another province, because this is where his other relatives are from. This is where his grandfather was murdered ten years ago for opposing this mine. He was on his way to testify at an international gathering when he disappeared. They found his body bound, tortured, gagged, left in a ditch near the river. There has never been justice for what happened to him.

The night we arrived, one of his relatives from the community met us in secret, in our hotel room — a small, cramped space. We went over everything: how to move the next day, what I could and couldn’t say, the cover story. I would pose as a tourist. Never a journalist. Suspicion here is a death sentence for the people who talk to me. Everyone who speaks to me has to stay anonymous. We went through the safety protocols line by line, and then we tried to sleep.

We left before sunrise.

Yesterday we stood at the spot where his grandfather’s body was found.

I sat with community leaders and listened. And I’m telling you — this mine is not hidden. It is everywhere. Mining trucks rule the highways. The signs along the road are written in Chinese, so the company’s own workers can read them. Walk into the tiny shops in these tiny towns to buy food, and the shelves are stocked with imported Chinese products. This land has been quietly annexed by an economy that answers to no one here.

And then there’s the thing that sent shivers through my spine and enraged me. Signs advertising brothels. Nightclubs stocked with women, built to entice the mostly-male workforce pouring into the mines. In the Amazon, near Indigenous territory, you do not see this. Not normally. But here it’s everywhere, lit up along the highway like it’s just part of the landscape now.

This is what extraction brings when it comes without consent. It doesn’t just take the minerals. It brings violence. It rapes the land, and it brings men who prey on women, and it calls all of it progress.

We ran into the military yesterday, blocking the road into territory a local leader was trying to take us through. They told him it was to prevent robberies. He doesn’t believe that for a second. He thinks they’re protecting the mine.

He told us what these last years have cost his people. Rivers so poisoned they can no longer drink from them. Fish that used to feed families, gone. Constant threats hanging over anyone who speaks out. And through it all, the company takes the wealth and leaves nothing behind. These are people who live close to the land, who have always known how to live from it — and they are among the poorest I have ever met. It’s the same story, everywhere I go. Take the resources, leave the poverty.

Today we go back out. More meetings, more testimony — this time with Indigenous people who actually work inside the mine and are living the human rights violations from the inside. They’re the ones asking to meet with me. I am moving carefully. Everyone stays anonymous. Three community leaders have been murdered here in the past ten years for speaking out. This is not a story I take lightly, and it is not one I’ll rush.

I want you to know I am safe. And even here, even now, I feel it — this is a privilege. To be trusted with these stories. Because almost no one else is here to tell them. The world is pulled in a hundred directions by its own chaos, and it’s easy to look away from a river you’ll never see. But the world is still profiting from what’s being pulled out of the ground here. The power, the greed, the minerals headed out to feed all of it — we are all connected to this, whether we want to be or not.

I’m grateful for every one of you. I love you all. I’ll write again soon.

— Brandi