The helicopter swooped down on one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian special forces commandos jumped off their metal skids into the waters inhabited by alligators.
Their target, lurking in the forest along the Bóia River in Brazil, was a massive steel cannon. mining dredge, caught red-handed while drilling into the river bed, pulverizing it in search of gold.
On board, troops from the national environmental agency, Ibama, and the federal highway police found typical tools of this illegal industry: three bottles of mercury, 10 grams of gold and a huge drill bit used to dig up the riverbed.
But a more modern gadget also caught their eye: a sleek white receiver made by Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet company that is at the center of an escalating standoff between Brazilian authorities and the American billionaire that last week resulted in his social network X being blocked in South America’s largest country.
“It’s a satellite internet antenna that provides communications to this entire criminal network,” said one special forces fighter as he showed off the device his unit had seized, one of many seized from such criminals this year.
“Now we find it everywhere. Every mining dredger has at least one of them,” the police officer added, referring to the antenna that was being used to connect the barge and its security cameras to an absent owner in a city hundreds of miles away.
Just two years ago, few in remote parts of the Amazon — where high-speed internet has long been an unthinkable luxury — had heard of Starlink or SpaceX, Starlink’s parent rocket company, which has sent more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites into space to beam signals to remote places like this one.
Today, Starlink antennas are everywhere: at illegal mining operations, but also in isolated indigenous villages, jungle shelters and ranches, and even military bases spread across a vast region of rainforest larger than the European Union.
Starlink says it has more than 250,000 customers in Brazil, up from fewer than 20,000 in February 2023. Nearly 70,000 of those antennas are in the Amazon, where the company operates in more than 90% of municipalities.
“Starlink is a revolution in the way it brings good quality internet connectivity to virtually any remote place in the world,” said Pedro Doria, a prominent Brazilian technology writer. “It’s revolutionary and I’m not sure many people in (the political capital) Brasilia understand that, especially in the Amazon, you can’t live without Starlink anymore.”
Ronaldo Lemos, a technology lawyer and innovation enthusiast, traveled to the rainforest region to make A program about the Starlink revolution on Amazon for his series Expresso Futuro. He was stunned by the rapid spread of the technology as he traveled along the Rio Negro toward the Colombian border, surfing the internet as he went.
At one port, Lemos met a physical therapist who had quit his day job, bought up as many Starlink terminals as he could find and was moving from river town to river town, selling them for three times the original price.
“There is a huge demand for connectivity in the region,” Lemos said. “It definitely changed the profile of the region and I think that’s a good thing,” he added, celebrating how Starlink was giving previously isolated communities access to education and business opportunities.
But Lemos returned home worried about what he had seen.
First, there were fears that Starlink’s massive penetration of the region would potentially give the US company access to highly sensitive information about a resource-rich region long considered central to Brazil’s national security and sovereignty.
“Starlink knows the location of its equipment throughout the Amazon and with that information and a bit of data mining, the locations of mineral resources can be determined,” Lemos said.
“A company like Starlink might know more about the Amazon and the occupation of the Amazon by human activity than the Brazilian government actually knows.”
Second, Starlink’s near-complete dominance of Amazon’s satellite internet market gave Musk enormous and potentially dangerous leverage over Brazil’s government.
“The events we’ve seen in recent days show that, unfortunately, Elon Musk has become really unstable and even childish in the way he behaves,” Lemos said of the billionaire’s refusal to comply with Brazilian Supreme Court orders and often crude attacks on the country’s judges and leftist president.
“This erratic behavior means that it is very difficult for a country to truly depend on a person like him for critical applications such as connecting the Amazon, etc.”
Brazil is far from the only country where such concerns are being raised about over-reliance on Musk.
Starlink has more than 3 million customers in nearly 100 countries, but it is in Ukraine where the technology has shown how valuable it can be to a nation state. There are more than 42,000 Starlink terminals in the country, where they are used by military personnel, doctors and energy workers and are seen as a critical piece of infrastructure to combat the Russian invasion.
In 2022, months after the conflict began, Musk threatened to stop covering the cost of operating Starlink in Ukraine, but quickly backtracked. There have been multiple reports of tensions between Starlink and the Ukrainian military over the limits of its use, including one incident in which Musk refused to allow a Ukrainian unmanned submarine attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol.
“You should never rely on a single vendor, no matter who it is,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert and president of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank. There is no global rival to Starlink, though. Countries could at least follow the U.S. government’s lead and contract with Starlink’s military arm, Starshield, where the U.S. owns and controls the satellites, Alperovitch said.
Last year the The New York Times reported Taiwan, concerned about threats to undersea internet cables, had held talks with SpaceX about using Starlink, but the talks were hampered by concerns that Musk could come under pressure from Beijing to cut off service. China is a vital market for Tesla, the electric carmaker of which Musk is chief executive and in which he owns a 13% stake.
Makena Young, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, said Starlink was in a unique position.
While it is not unusual for large companies to have a geopolitical impact, he said, it is “rare for them to make significant policy decisions, the attention and implications of which are likely to increase when they are led by highly visible and potentially polarizing individuals.”
When competition for Starlink eventually emerges (with Amazon among the companies developing potential rivals), the Musk factor could play a role in which service customers choose.
Lemos said he hoped the dispute between Musk and Brazil’s Supreme Court would serve as “a wake-up call for all democracies” and urged the Brazilian government to look for other providers that could offer low-orbit satellite connectivity in the Amazon.
Lemos said Musk’s weaponisation of X had made it increasingly clear how the billionaire was using his social network as “a tool of partisan foreign interference attempting to foment division”. He highlighted the businessman’s amplification of far-right content during the UK riots.
“My fear is that Starlink could become part of that same story.”