‘Can’t live without it’: alarm at Musk’s Starlink dominance in Brazil’s Amazon

Satellite internet service’s antennas are everywhere, from illegal mining sites to isolated Indigenous villages

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.