After months of planning, everything was ready. The investigators had their targets, their schedule and their plan: fly to 49 of the illicit gold mines that were poisoning the Amazon rainforest, destroy the equipment and shut the operations down.
The most important thing, the environmental investigators stressed before that August mission in Para state, was discretion. The illegal miners, who had carved a path of environmental destruction across Brazil's Indigenous lands, could not be tipped off.
