The forests in the indigenous lands in Brazil in peril

•Indigenous lands account for 23% of Amazonian forests in Brazil.•Brazilian government policies threaten forests and resources for their protection.•Illegal activities such as mining, logging and soybeans are allowed by indigenous people.•The liberation of exploitation by the capital of wealth in these territories will compromise biodiversity and climate. The Indigenous Lands in Brazil today resemble a steam locomotive, where the government and the indigenous add wood to the boiler and the conservationists push the brakes. Arranged on the rails and along the way of this locomotive are more than 100 million hectares of the largest tropical forest on the planet. In this article we evaluate the advance of soybean cultivation and fire foci in indigenous lands using remote sensing and discuss the possible effects of a liberation of the economic exploitation in these territories intended by the Brazilian government and requested by the indigenous people themselves. We present that even with the prohibition of economic exploitation on indigenous lands, there are large concentrations of fires in those territories which undermine public policies in Brazil, both in maintaining biodiversity as the assumed climate agreements.