The Brazilian Amazon is once again suffering an extreme drought that threatens to worsen in the coming months.

In Manaquiri, near Manaus, there are already dry riverbeds, cornered fish and about twenty isolated rural communities.

After a dramatic 2023, Brazil faces the worst drought since 1950 this year and one of the most affected parts of the country is the Amazon region, according to the National Center for Surveillance and Alert of Natural Disasters data.

In the state of Amazonas, the Government has decreed an “emergency situation” in its 62 municipalities due to drought and forest fires. The meteorological specialists had already anticipated it and it has been confirmed.

“Everything indicates that we will have a very serious drought. The rivers will go down like never before,” warned the governor of Amazonas, Wilson Lima.

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The Negro River, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon, today has a level four meters lower than in the same period last year. Throughout Amazonas, the Brazilian state with the largest number of indigenous population, the drought already directly affects about 80,000 families, according to the Civil Defense.

Several hundred of them are in Manaquiri, where from the end of August you can walk along the dry bed of the river that bathes this town (Paraná Manaquiri).

The footprints are marked on the sandbanks, once covered with fresh water and today naked in the sunlight. Where boats loaded with goods used to sail and today you can ride a horse.

Hundreds of herons take advantage of the drought to feed on fish that are restricted to the little river left.

Meanwhile, Ednaldo Freitas, 35, is busy connecting all the hoses he had at home and thus be able to reach the part where there is still water, according to EFE.

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That’s not his only problem. Their children have to walk several kilometers these days to get to school, because the boat that transported them no longer arrives because there is no river.

To go to Manaus, the regional capital, it is still possible to go by another tributary, although it takes an hour longer than usual, which hinders the transport of medicines, food, etc., and harms the local economy.

And with the severe drought, fires have multiplied. This Sunday there were 3,640 active foci throughout Brazil, half of them in the Amazon, the largest tropical forest on the planet. In the state of Amazonas alone there were 237.

In other areas of the country, the flames are also advancing. A fire has burned in four days about 10,000 hectares of the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, near the Federal District of Brasilia, which this Sunday was again shrouded in smoke.

São Paulo and Minas Gerais, the two most populous states in Brazil, have also mobilized a large number of troops to fight forest fires in their territories, on which there are suspicions that many of them have been caused.

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