Leaning on the windowsill of his modest pale-yellow concrete house, Paulo Roberto proudly contemplated his corn and manioc crops. On this early summer day in the southern hemisphere, small, scattered tufts finally seemed to be emerging from the arid ocher earth of Brazil's Nordeste region. "It's the most beautiful thing in the world," said the 73-year-old farmer, as thin as a twig and marked by a long life of toil under the sun.

The farmer had hoped to spend the rest of his life quietly cultivating his plot of land in Parazinho, a small rural municipality in the state of Rio Grande do Norte (population 5,200), cradled by Atlantic winds. But the tropical calm was brutally shattered in 2015, when Brazilian company Energisa installed a wind farm on a neighboring farm. Fifteen 100-meter wind masts with 49-meter blades now encircle the 30 small houses of Roberto's village.

One of them is just 150 meters from his home. A muffled roar, like a huge fan, emanates from the machinery's rotation. "It's driving me crazy," said the farmer, who has lost sleep and cannot even hear his visitors knocking on the door. Sometimes, when the wind dies down or blows too hard, the wind turbine stops working with a sound like an explosion: "I jump up every time!"

In Brazil, champion of green energies, where 83% of electricity production comes from renewable sources, wind power is booming. The result of a proactive policy implemented since 2009, some 1,016 wind farms have been installed across the country, representing 14% of the country's electricity production, far behind hydro (52%) but ahead of natural gas (9%) and solar (6%), according to the national electric energy agency. Brazil is now the world's sixth-largest producer of wind-generated electricity.

Radically changed landscape

In the space of 10 years, installed capacity has increased twelvefold, from 2.5 to 30 gigawatts between 2012 and 2023. But the growth of wind power has not been without incident. An investigation by Le Monde, in partnership with the Brazilian media outlet Reporter Brasil, revealed that, for lack of adequate regulations, this rapid development is the source of a series of environmental and social damages, implicating several French groups from the wind energy sector, particularly in the state of Rio Grande do Norte.

Located at the extreme tip of the Nordeste and battered by trade winds, the small state of Rio Grande do Norte (about the size of Slovakia) accounts for half of the country's wind farms. In Parazinho, the "wind rush" has dramatically transformed the landscape. Wind turbines line the roads as far as the eye can see, crushing the tiny houses with their mass. While in France, the law imposes a minimum distance of 500 meters between wind turbines and dwellings, no such rule exists in Brazil.

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