The helicopter swooped into one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian special forces commandos leaped from its metal skids into the caiman-inhabited waters below. Their target, lurking in the woodland along Brazil's Bóia River, was a hulking steel mining dredge, caught red-handed as it drilled into the riverbed, pulverising it in search of gold.
Onboard, troops from the national environmental agency, Ibama, and the federal highway police found tools typical of this illegal industry: three bottles of mercury, 10g of gold and an enormous drill bit used to pulp the riverbed below. But a more modern contraption also caught their eye: a sleek white receiver made by Elon Musk's satellite internet firm Starlink, which is at the centre of an intensifying showdown between Brazilian authorities and the US billionaire that last week resulted in his social network X being blocked in South America's biggest country. "It's a satellite internet antenna that provides communications to this whole criminal network," said a special forces combatant as he showed off the device his unit had seized – one of scores taken from such criminals this year.
"We find it everywhere now. Every mining dredge has at least one of them," the police officer added of the antenna that was being used to connect the barge and its security cameras with an absentee owner in a city hundreds of miles away. As recently as two years ago, few in the backlands of the Amazon – where high-speed internet has long been an unthinkable luxury – had heard of Starlink or SpaceX, the rocket company that is Starlink's parent and has sent more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites into space to beam down signals to secluded spots such as this.
Today, Starlink's antennas are everywhere: at illegal mining operations, but also in isolated Indigenous villages, jungle lodges and ranches, and even military bases scattered across a vast rainforest region larger than the EU. View image in..
. Tom Phillips , Dan Milmo.
