Amazon River pirates terrorize ships by night
Amazon River pirates terrorize ships by night
An elite squad of camouflage-clad police officers from the Environmental Battalion regularly patrols the Amazon River in an effort to stop thieves.
By Simon Romero New York Times November 19, 2016
MACAPÁ, Brazil — The pirates of the Amazon River relish striking after nightfall.
Wearing balaclavas, 15 of the marauders stormed Merinaldo Paiva’s riverboat as dozens of his passengers dozed in their hammocks. Suddenly, they woke to find rifles pointed at their heads.
The gunmen took cash, jewelry, smartphones, fuel, and even food, forcing everyone to lie facedown on the deck. Then they disappeared on speedboats into the Amazon, a waterway so vast that some in Brazil’s frontier call it the river-sea.
“Every riverboat captain knows they’re at the mercy of these bastards,” said the captain, Paiva, 41, who has been plying the rivers of Brazil’s rain forests since he was a teenager. “We’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” he added of the robbery in April, listing other attacks in which passengers had been raped, tortured, or killed.
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