The helicopter swooped down into one of the most inaccessible parts of the Amazon rainforest, where members of Brazil's special forces jumped off a metal runway and into the waters where the caimans live.
Their target was a giant steel structure hidden in the forests along Brazil's Boia River. A mining dredger was caught red-handed digging and breaking up the riverbed in search of gold.
On board, units from the National Environmental Agency (Ibama) and the Federal Highway Police found paraphernalia typical of the illegal industry: three bottles of mercury, 10 grams of gold and a giant drill bit used to pulp the riverbed.
But they also noticed a more modern device: a sleek white receiver made by Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite internet company, which is at the center of an escalating showdown between Brazilian authorities and the American billionaire that led to the blocking of Musk's social network, X, in South America's largest country last week.
“This is a satellite internet dish that provides communications for this entire criminal network,” the special forces fighter said, showing off the device his troops seized – one of many they have seized from such criminals this year.
“You see them everywhere now. Every mining dredger has at least one on board,” the officer added, referring to the antennas that were used to link the barge and its security cameras with its absentee owner in a city hundreds of miles away.
As recently as two years ago, few people in the Amazon deep reaches, where high-speed internet has long been an unthinkable luxury, had heard of Starlink or its parent company, SpaceX, the rocket company that has launched more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites into space to beam signals to these remote locations.
Today, Starlink antennas can be found everywhere, from illegal mining sites to isolated indigenous villages, jungle lodges and ranches, and even military bases scattered across a vast area of rainforest larger than the EU.
Starlink claims to have more than 250,000 customers in Brazil, up from fewer than 20,000 in February 2023. Of those, around 70,000 antennas are in the Amazon, and the company operates in more than 90% of municipalities.
“Starlink is revolutionary in the way it brings high-quality internet connectivity to almost every remote corner of the world,” said Pedro Doria, a prominent Brazilian technology writer. “It's revolutionary, but many people in Brazil are [the political capital] Brasilia, especially in the Amazon, understands that it can no longer survive without Starlink.”
Ronald Lemos, a technology lawyer and innovation enthusiast, traveled to the rainforest region to program He spoke about Starlink's Amazon revolution in the series “Expresso Futuro,” surfing the Internet during a trip up the Rio Negro to the Colombian border and marveling at the rapid adoption of the technology.
At one port, Lemos met a physical therapist who had quit his day job and was traveling from town to town along the river buying up all the Starlink terminals he could find, then selling them for three times their original price.
“[There is] “There's a really high demand for connectivity in the region,” Lemos said. “It's definitely changed the image of the region, and I think that's a good thing,” he added, praising the educational and business opportunities Starlink is opening up in previously isolated communities.
But Lemos went home unsettled by what he saw.
First, they were concerned that Starlink's large-scale presence in the region could provide U.S. companies with highly sensitive information about a resource-rich area that has long been considered central to Brazil's national security and sovereignty.
“Starlink knows the location of their equipment all over the Amazon, and with that information and a little bit of data mining they can actually pinpoint the location of mineral resources,” Lemos said.
“Companies like Starlink may know more about the Amazon and its occupation by human activities at this point than the Brazilian government actually knows.”
Second, Starlink's near-total control of the satellite internet market for Amazon gave Musk enormous and potentially dangerous influence over the Brazilian government.
“What we have seen in the last few days unfortunately shows that Elon Musk's behavior has become extremely erratic and immature,” Lemos said of his refusal to follow orders from Brazil's Supreme Court and his often vulgar attacks on the country's judges and leftist president.
“[This] Erratic behavior [means] It would be very difficult for the country to actually rely on someone like him for such an important application as connecting the Amazon River.”
Brazil is not the only country where such concerns have been expressed about over-reliance on Musk.
Starlink has more than 3 million customers in about 100 countries, but it's Ukraine that has proven just how valuable the technology can be to nation-states: the country has more than 42,000 Starlink terminals used by soldiers, doctors and energy workers and is seen as a core piece of infrastructure to counter Russian aggression.
In 2022, a few months after the conflict began, Musk threatened to stop covering the costs of Starlink operations in Ukraine, but quickly backtracked. There have been multiple reports of tensions between the Ukrainian military and Starlink over the scope of Starlink's use, including an incident in which Musk refused to allow Ukraine to launch an unmanned submarine attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol.
“You don't want to be dependent on one vendor, whoever it is,” said Dmitri Alperovich, a cybersecurity expert and chairman of the think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator. But there's no global rival to Starlink. Countries could at least follow the U.S. government's lead and contract with Starlink's military arm, StarShield, to allow the U.S. to own and control the satellites, Alperovich said.
last year, The New York Times reported. Taiwan, concerned about threats to its undersea internet cables, had been in talks with SpaceX about using Starlink, but the talks had been hampered by fears that Mr. Musk would face pressure from Beijing to halt the service. China is a crucial market for electric-car maker Tesla, in which Mr. Musk holds a 13% stake.
Makena Young, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said Starlink is in a unique position.
While it's not unusual for large corporations to have geopolitical influence, “it's rare to see them make major political decisions with potentially increased visibility and impact when they're led by highly visible and potentially divisive figures,” she said.
When the race for Starlink finally gets underway — with Amazon looming as a potential rival — the Musk factor could influence which service customers choose.
Lemos said he hoped Musk's battle with Brazil's Supreme Court would serve as a “wake-up call for all democracies” and called on the Brazilian government to look for other providers of low-earth-orbit satellite connectivity in the Amazon.
Lemos argued that Musk's weaponization of X made it increasingly clear that the billionaire was using his social network as a “tool of partisan foreign interference seeking to stomp down divisions.” He highlighted how Musk had amplified far-right content during the UK riots.
“I worry that Starlink is part of the same conspiracy.”
