Aquariquara is one of fifteen small extractive reserves scattered across the municipalities of Machadinho d'Oeste, Cujubim, and Vale do Anari. All fifteen are remnants of the old seringais -- rubber extraction concessions named Seringal Santo Antonio, Seringal Sao Paulo, and Seringal Sao Goncalo -- that once fed the global rubber trade. The residents who work these forests today are descendants of the soldados da borracha, the "rubber soldiers" recruited in the 1940s to supply rubber for the Allied war effort. Created by state decree 7.106 on 4 September 1995, the reserve covers 18,100 hectares of undulating terrain in the basin of the Ji-Parana River, on the left bank of the Machadinho River sub-basin. As of 2002, nearly 98 percent of its original forest cover remained intact.

Life in Aquariquara revolves around latex. Families walk long forest trails called estradas to reach their rubber trees, scoring the bark with practiced cuts and returning hours later to collect the milky sap. On average, each family produces about 3,136 kilograms of latex per year. The Rubber Tappers Association buys this output at R$2.00 per kilogram -- a price that has not kept pace with the labor it demands. Beyond rubber, the forest yields Brazil nuts, copaiba oil, and acai, though as of 2011 these secondary products contributed almost nothing to household income. A 1998 project to manufacture flour from babacu palm nuts showed early promise, with output sold to schools and stores in nearby Machadinho, but the initiative did not scale. The reserve's population tells its own story of economic struggle: from 181 residents in 1994 to 91 by 2000, and just 47 families by 2011.

Forest management offered a possible lifeline. Beginning around 2001, the reserve divided roughly half its area into 500-hectare lots, each to be harvested over one year on a predicted twenty-year rotation. Residents participated in inventories, identified trees by species, demarcated logging tracks, and supervised extraction. On paper, the system was elegant. A 2010 estimate projected R$8,809 per family in forestry income. In practice, families received anywhere from nothing to R$1,000 for their year's work, while some residents employed directly by lumber companies earned as much as R$7,000. The method of allocating profits was opaque, and government supervision was minimal. Some leaders and residents sold abandoned lots to outside farmers and businesses, eroding the reserve from within. By 2011, a survey of key stakeholders found that the extractive community did not perceive the economic potential of sustainable harvesting -- a failure not of imagination but of experience.

When association members traveled to the state capital in April 2015 to address the Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, they did not come to discuss economics. They came to describe terrorism. Death threats had become routine. Sixteen people connected to the reserves had been murdered in the preceding decade. The protected areas, they told the legislators, were being laid waste, and the state government was doing nothing to stop it. Illegal loggers and land-grabbers operated with impunity in a region where enforcement was sparse and the nearest authorities were hours away by unpaved road. The 1995 decree that created Aquariquara had explicitly recognized the "great pressures of predatory activities" on the traditional forest people, noting that these pressures were causing "irreversible loss of plant and wildlife resources" and degrading quality of life. Twenty years later, the decree's own warnings had come true -- and the people it was designed to protect were dying.