'It's everywhere now' Starlink's conquest of the Amazon - and its implications for Brazil and beyond

The helicopter swooped into one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon rainforest.

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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 drilling into the riverbed in search of gold. Onboard, troops from the national environmental agency, Ibama, and the federal highway police found tools typical of this illegal industry: mercury, 10g of gold and an enormous drill bit used to pulp the riverbed below.

They also found a sleek white receiver made by Elon Musk's satellite internet firm Starlink, which is at the centre of a 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.

Said a special forces combatant: "It's a satellite internet antenna that provides communications to this whole criminal network." It is one of scores taken from such criminals this year. "We find it everywhere now - every mining dredge has at least one of them," he added of the antenna, which connected the barge and its security cameras with an absentee owner hundreds of miles away.

A couple of years ago, few in the Amazon had heard of Starlink or SpaceX, Starlink's parent, which has more than 6,000 loworbit satellites in space. Today, its antennas are everywhere: in isolated Indigenous villages, jungle lodges and even military bases, across a vast rainforest region larger than the European Union. Starlink claims to have more than 250,000 clients in Brazil, up from fewer than 20,000 in February 2023. Nearly 70,000 are in the Amazon.