Ms Silva was greatly helped by a combination of remote sensing and a Brazilian NGO, Imazon. Brazil’s space agency published figures on deforestation, but only on an annual basis, nearly a year in retrospect and without a map, so nobody knew exactly where the trees were coming down. Beto Verissimo, who founded Imazon to use science for the benefit of the rainforest, realised that NASA’s Modis satellite collected data that could be published monthly and would also show were the damage was being done. In 2007 Imazon started processing NASA’s data and publishing them within a few weeks of being collected.
Partly because of rising prosperity and partly because of international attention, Brazilians were getting more interested in the fate of the Amazon. Newspapers started putting Imazon’s data on their front pages. State governors had to respond to them on national news programmes. Month after month, Mato Grosso and Pará were found to have the highest rates of deforestation.
In 2008 the government ratcheted up the pressure, publishing a list of the 36 municipalities with the worst records. Seventeen, including Paragominas, were in Pará state. Being blacklisted did not just bring public humiliation to the citizens of Paragominas, it also hit their wallets. Businesses in municipalities on the list were not eligible for cheap credit from state-owned banks.