In March 2022, I was in Acre again visiting farms along the Pacific Highway, southwest from Rio Branco, the state capital. The leading agribusiness consultant, who was key in developing expanding soybean and corn plantations, was showing me his working areas. He proudly told me he had planted most of the incipient soy/corn plantations in the state, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 hectares at the time, but that was just a fraction of the future growth potential. He boasted, “Acre has an agricultural potential [meaning, for GM soy/corn plantations] of 400,000 hectares.” However, he thought those hectares would never be completely planted as long as there were elite landowners who preferred the cowboy lifestyle of a rancher in Brazil.

Yet, a hectare of soybean and corn rotation would yield about 2,300 reais per year per hectare, while a good ranching hectare would yield only about 800 reais of profit. Thus, even with the lionization of the cowboy culture, soybean plantations were steadily expanding over ranches and pushing ranching deeper into the forests. Simultaneously, both the ranchers and the soybean planters were eyeing the large conservation areas for their flat and fertile soils. All in all, it is a no-win situation fueled by money and power and interests coming from ranching and planting that compete with the interests of the forest.

Establishing Ranching as the Regionally Dominant Political Economy in the Brazilian Amazon

What is the key driving process behind deforestation? Looking from the satellite perspective, ranching and the expansion of pasture land, which cover over 85 percent of deforested areas in the Brazilian Amazon, could be argued to be the key drivers (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.1

Map showing the most significant places in Brazil that are discussed in this book. The Pará region is detailed in Figure 2.2 due to the density of different sites.

Figure 2.1 Long description

A map of Brazil highlighting significant, including the Amazon area, Cerrado, and transition zones. Notable cities marked are Manaus, Santarém, Belém, and Brasília. Rivers such as the Amazon, Tapajós, and Araguaia are also shown. Infrastructure such as highways BR319, BR163, and BR230, and the Interoceanic Highway are indicated. National Parks and Indigenous Territories, such as Yanomami and Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, are also highlighted.

Basemap data from openstreetmap.org.

Figure 2.2

A herd of cattle in a large landholder’s pasture in the Brazilian Amazon. Acre, near BR-371 between Rio Branco and Xapuri, March 19, 2022. Brazil has about 160 million hectares of mostly very inefficiently used and extensive pasture land. The nondistribution and ineffective use of these pastures, and their expansion across Brazil, directly drives the Amazon, Cerrado, Atlantic Rainforest, and Pantanal deforestation, as ranchers, for example, move to the Amazon from Bahia. Deforestation is indirectly driven by their claiming land and keeping it from being used more effectively outside of the Amazon.

Photo by author.

Currently, about 20 percent of the Amazon is deforested and about 40 percent is degraded (Rodrigues, Reference Rodrigues2023). Ranching and soybean/corn plantations in the Amazon forests have been shown to be pushed or driven by the overall expansion and actions of Brazil’s ranching and plantation agribusiness (Picoli et al., Reference Picoli, Rorato and Leitão2020), which by 2019 had already deforested most of Brazil’s other forests, as only 19–20 percent of the Cerrado and 8–11 percent of the Atlantic Rainforest remain (Ferrante & Fearnside, Reference Ferrante and Fearnside2019). Instead of contending with these land claims made at the expense of Cerrado and other forests and their countless human and other inhabitants, the agroextractivist system, which is capitalist in its character as it continues to seek growth and profit for national and international financiers, has increased its expanse.

A primitive, predatory form of cattle capitalism in the Amazon creates its own logic of hyperextractivism, in the sense that soils are extracted of their vitality and forests of their life (see Figure 2.3).

Figure 2.3

Ranching in the Amazon has expanded very deep into the rainforest and is not an effective use of the space. Acre, near BR-371 between Rio Branco and Xapuri, March 19, 2022.

Figure 2.3 Long description

A cattle ranch in the Amazon rainforest. The image shows a large, fenced pasture with a herd of cattle grazing. In the background, there are scattered trees and building-like structures associated with the ranch. The sky is overcast, adding a dramatic effect to the scene. The location is near BR-371 between Rio Branco and Xapuri.

Photo by author.

The system drives a general pulling from nature to feed itself as a ranching extractivist system causes widespread degradation. This ranching extractivism was described to me in November 2019 by Carlos, who works for the Kaiapó Indigenous peoples’ association in Novo Progresso, as we drove to the shoreline of the closest river to do an interview:

Pasture-based and inefficient cattle ranching appears to be the primary proximate driver of deforestation in the Amazon (Barbosa et al., Reference Barbosa, Soares Filho, Merry, Azevedo, Costa, Coe and Rodrigues2015). It is present throughout the region, due to the low level of capital required, little need for preparing the soil, and easy extension to steep areas and recently deforested lands (Rivero et al., Reference Rivero, Almeida, Ávila and Oliveira2009). However, behind the proximate causes of pasture land and cattle production, which are driven by the price of meat internationally and nationally, is a deeper mechanism. There are systemic features of the Brazilian political economy wherein land value rise, land speculation and rentierism, illegal land grabbing and clearcutting, can be argued to be as important, or even more important, than the ineffective current Brazilian model of one-cow-per-hectare ranching. The rise in land prices produces more profits and possibilities for capital accumulation than ranching itself. However, fencing, planting grass, and placing cattle on the land are key tools to secure land holdings in deforested areas. For this reason, I suggest calling the key cause of deforestation the creation, expansion, and consolidation of the ranching-grabbing RDPE. Since 2000s, the expansion of deforestation following the parameters of this system has been largely premised on the pushing factor of another RDPE, the soybean, corn, and other monoculture plantations stemming from the south and pushing the frontier of the ranching-grabbing deeper. The presence of these monocultural plantations makes it possible for the land grabbers to gain revenues from increased land valuation, as the soybean planters continue to buy the land. While specificities apply to which land is valued more, the general valuation in the economic sense drives and explains the bulk of where deforestation takes place. These valuations are based especially on the political decisions that accompany major developmental decisions about infrastructure and land tenure regularization schemes.

Forest policies flow from the larger world system of global capitalism, which assigns particular, lower value-adding roles to countries in the Global South, particularly by means of a mix of subsidies and loans, to form regionally dominant, yet developmentally misguided sectors within the primary sectors (see Bunker, Reference Bunker1988). The Brazilian state in the 1960s and 1970s – like many other states guided by the policies of the World Bank, FAO, and other international development cooperation agencies and businesses – had strongly supported the tropical livestock sector installed as a means to “develop” the country (Simmons, Reference Simmons2004). In the Amazon, the subsidized credit lines and political pressure to ranch led to major deforestation (Hecht, Reference Hecht2005; Nepstad et al., Reference Nepstad, Stickler and Almeida2006) and the consolidation of power for an elite group of landholders.

Initially in the 1970s and 1980s, large areas were deforested in the Pará and Mato Grosso states, driven by the expansion of ranching to the Amazon (see Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4

Map showing the most significant places in Pará that are discussed in this book.

Figure 2.4 Long description

A map of Pará highlighting significant, including cities such as Santarém, Itaituba, and Altamira, along with highways such as BR163 and BR230, and notable landmarks such as the Cargill Port, Tapajós National Forest, and Belo Monte Dam. Various indigenous territories including Munduruku and Ituna-Itapecu are also featured in the map.

Basemap data from openstreetmap.org.

The speculation practices of large ranchers – backed by state political and economic support (Hecht, Reference Hecht1993; Hoelle, Reference Hoelle2011; Mahar, Reference Mahar1989; Schmink & Wood, Reference Schmink and Wood1992) – created a foothold for a ranching-grabbing RDPE to develop in the Amazon. The Brazilian state created (or was pushed by the rural elites and international financiers to create) the foundations of RDPEs of ranching in several Amazon regions (e.g. in Acre, in the 1970–1990 period) by vast subsidies and political support for land grabs by rural elites from southeastern Brazilian estates. In the Brazilian case ranching did not and does not expand endogenously; rather, its economic prowess was and is created by strong state and international policies that favor the expansion of this system at the cost of other systems. State and international policies provide the infrastructure and promote an overall developmental framing for this key activity (Taravella & Arnauld de Sartre, Reference Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre2012).

The deforesting expansion of the ranching RDPE is partially based on the ample federal-level subsidized credits for Amazon producers and the race to the lowest value-added (ICMS) tax rates for cattle raising, commerce, slaughterhouse, and sales activities between Brazilian states. In the state of Pará, for example, this crucial tax rate was cut from 17 percent in 1989 to only 1.8 percent in 1999. Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre (Reference Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre2012) cite this as a key reason for the profitability and expansion of ranching in the Amazon. However, the economic subsidies for ranching do not solely explain its continued expansion. For example, Hecht (Reference Hecht1993) depicts how ranching continued deforesting activities even when state subsidies were lower. I argue that this is principally because most profits and capital gains come from the speculation and rentierism of those utilizing the ranching/land-grabbing mechanism. Establishing ranches is an effective means to gain access to other benefits, such as taking over conjoining properties or gaining subsidies, credit, tax breaks, and financial gains from land sales (Hecht, Reference Hecht1993). For these reasons, I do not refer to only the ranching alone as the RDPE, but rather the wider system, which I call ranching-grabbing. In the following chapters, I will discuss both ranching and the grabbing separately and as an intermingled system, which constitutes an RDPE.

A key here is to understand the lock-in and path-dependency systemic qualities of RDPE sectors. Once an extractivist RDPE has been set into motion by extensive subsidies like those given to the SUDAM’s (Superintendency of Development for the Amazon, the federal state-created local authority to finance Amazon “development”) mega-ranching projects in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s, it is hard to reverse the deforestation trend, for example, by withdrawing the subsidies. Hecht (Reference Hecht1993) notes how when the extensive state subsidies were withdrawn in early 1990s from the SUDAM ranching expansion, deforestation increased as the ranching economy had already taken root. Furthermore, the ranching economy was promoted by a series of local economic factors and dynamics and, to a large extent, it was no longer governable by the World Bank and others, despite global changes in attitude toward pasture subsidizing as a form of development cooperation. This example supports my argument on the importance of analyzing RDPEs as key components of global and regional economies.

A key hotspot and example of a regional ranching RDPE is the São Félix do Xingu region, which has been extensively studied by scholars of Amazon ranching (e.g. Schmink & Wood, Reference Schmink and Wood1992; Schmink et al., Reference Schmink, Hoelle, Gomes and Thaler2019; Taravella & Arnauld de Sartre, Reference Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre2012). Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre (Reference Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre2012: 5) emphasize that the cattle sector, more precisely, the large ranchers, easily becomes “dominant” in the local economic, societal, and political systems, which is what happened in São Félix do Xingu. The large ranchers in the area worked together to create an exclusive class association to drive their interests. This move was motivated by rumors of a growing thrust toward the establishment of conservation areas in Terra do Meio where the ranchers wanted to extend their ranching-grabbing activities. These kinds of lobbying associations are powerful and generate dominance and hegemony locally and are also linked to the national Rural Caucus in the Congress. Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre (Reference Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre2012) identify a key feature of ranching power through the São Félix do Xingu case, which is helpful as it details how the “regional” and local aspects of RDPE systems operate by spreading the notion that they provide a local development function. A large ranchers’ association, called Xinguri, frames the local scale where they operate as “powerless and legitimate” and the broader national and international scale as “powerful and illegitimate.” To keep their power, it is important for Xinguri to delegitimize this broader scale because it frames them as Amazon deforesters, a framing that would undermine their status at the local level if it was accepted. Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre (Reference Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre2012: 12) show how the large ranchers strategically use these discourses to frame themselves as the harbingers of “local development,” when in fact they are not even “local,” as in most cases they do not live in or even near the region. In addition, the source of their regional power is derived by policies made outside the region, such as national-level subsidies attained through legislative lobbying to further the “pastoralization of the Amazon.” By their locality discourses, the Xinguri can further consolidate their grip on their distant territorial locations while creating autonomous space for continuing to dominate and expand. For a long time, the discourse pushed by the large ranchers has had a grip on the highest political and judicial systems in Brazil (Taravella & Arnauld de Sartre, Reference Taravella and Arnauld de Sartre2012). This can be clearly seen in the efficient vertical organization of the local dominant agroextractivist systems under the National Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA).

This system is kept afloat due to ample available financing from banks, which support cattle due to their liquidity and relatively secure quick returns. Cattle are considered “money on [in] the hand,” as they can be sold easily, thus the capital investment has little risk in that sense. This kind of money-making cycle is supported by the world’s dominant political economy – the financialized capitalist world-ecology. In the Amazon, due to strong initial support by dictatorship governments and international lenders, ranching has been turned into the most liquid available form of capital formation, as it can quickly turn money capital (M) into an increased amount of money capital (M’) through a commodity capital (C) cycle, which follows a Marxian M-C-M’ profit-making logic. The rancher “knows that he will finance the opening of that area in a short while, the guy puts there about 100 heads of cattle, and after a while the guy has three hundred, and can pay the bank back.” This logic was explained by Carlos from the Kaiapó Institute. On top of this already profitable cattle system comes the much higher potential of increased land prices and rents, especially in key frontier expansion areas.

Land-Grabbing, Ranching, and Agribusiness Expansion: Speculative Land Value Rise

The degree to which a land area is clearcut, and its proximity to major highways, explain about half the reasons a particular piece of land is valuable. A detailed analysis in Novo Progresso found out that the more clearcut and the closer to the highway, the more the land was valued. Other significant factors that affect land valuations were also identified by Macul (Reference Macul2019). These are, in order of importance, proximity to urban areas, proximity to other roads, the size of the area, and the number of certified farms; these factors, in conjunction with the earlier observations, explain over 80 percent of land value. In 2019, in this key resource and commodity frontier area, I witnessed agribusinessmen planting soybean in clearcut areas even directly beside the BR-163 highway. Clearcutting an area, and building highways and roads, are essential to explaining how land value is created in the Amazon deforestation frontier areas. These RDPEs, based on ranching-grabbing, yield high rents for land value speculation, which are realized especially when a soybean RDPE arrives to the region or the land grabs gain the status of de jure ownership (e.g. by state legalization) or de facto control (e.g. by selling the false title). These acts fortify the existing RDPE of ranching-grabbing, which gains profits and can move deeper into new frontier areas, thus increasing the clout and accumulated economic and social capital of the deforesting extractivists.

In the 2000s, the ranching-grabbing frontier expanded further, as soybean/corn/cotton monocultures, sugarcane ethanol, and eucalyptus plantations took over pasture land and pushed ranchers deeper into previously forested areas. This happened especially in areas adjacent to these commodity frontiers and states, with deforestation spreading to adjacent areas like Rondônia, and to the Mato Grosso and southeastern and southern parts of Pará. In addition, the deforestation also leapfrogged to the Santarém region in western-mid Pará by the Amazon River. The reasons deforestation came to this area also was due primarily to the building permits given, irregularly, to Cargill in 1999 for a soybean export port in Santarém (Schramm et al., Reference Schramm, Andrade, Martins and González Pérez2021). In parts of Pará and Roraima, oil palm plantation expansion has been the sector driving ranching deeper into Indigenous and other protected lands. However, the plantation agribusiness push for the spread of ranching-speculative deforestation was not the only reason for this expansion. The 2000s especially saw the rise of Amazon ranching as a key global economic source of beef and leather, due in part to the overall global commodity boom, where land and commodity prices increased dramatically before and especially after the 2008 financial crisis (Borras et al., Reference Borras, Franco, Gómez, Kay and Spoor2012). In this setting, Amazonian land prices were lower than elsewhere, which meant land could be more easily grabbed, by buying or violence or a mix. The climatic conditions were also suitable for pasture-based production, which supported the choice to rear cattle. Moreover, the proliferation of hoof and mouth disease in many countries, which affected their exports of meat, also contributed to the perception that Amazon beef was a safe source of meat (Hoelle, Reference Hoelle2011).

However, the issue is still more complex, and the proximate evidence of pasture land can hide deeper processes that are not directly or even necessarily linked to ranching. In addition, there are regionally differing sectorial as well as intersectorial and complex pushing factors for deforestation. A key deeper process is the speculative, mostly illegal, and violent land grabbing, which is done for the sake of seeking rising land value. Amazonian ranching should be considered as a component, or a subset, of the speculative Brazilian grabbing-ranching system. Brazil’s ranching is a particularly unproductive form of capitalism (see Dowbor, Reference Dowbor2018) and more of a rentier and speculative system. As Hecht (Reference Hecht1993: 689) elucidates, the Amazon livestock investment is a form of “land use that produces few calories, little protein, and little direct monetary returns compared with other forms of agriculture while producing maximal environmental degradation,” a description that continues to apply to most regions of Brazil today (see Ollinaho & Kröger, Reference Ollinaho and Kröger2021; Reference Ollinaho and Kröger2023). Yet, big exporting ranchers are making very large profits, especially in the past few years.

Key Actors Driving and Curtailing Ranching-Grabbing

Who are the concrete key actors within this RDPE of ranching-grabbing? Several of them are large landowners who are also leading politicians; thus, accumulating both political and economic capital. There are crucial international buyers and companies such as China and Cargill, respectively. The actors who are working to resist deforestation, at the state and grassroots levels, are also important factors in determining how deforestation plays out. In the Brazilian Amazon, ranching has become by far the biggest cause of deforestation, at least by the number of hectares that have been deforested. As an official from the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio)Footnote ¹ explained to me in Itaituba in 2019, “the biggest clearcuts we saw this year were for ranching, by the pattern of clearcut, these are sharply rectangular areas forming and you see a great devastation.” Many argued that the biggest rancher in the Itaituba region is its mayor, Valmir Climaco, whom I interviewed in November 2019. The discussions with him revealed the crucial importance of the link the Amazon has to the broader world system. These links are visible in the tightening import rules in the EU and boycotts by several Western companies, which are due to Bolsonaro’s deforesting policies. However, this has not slowed the export of materials too drastically as the beef and leather are now sold to China. This international flow of commodities is a key factor to explain the continued devastation caused by ranching, although a substantial part of the meat is consumed in Brazil and the Amazon itself. During my interview with the mayor, I asked if exports are important for this business, to which Climaco responded, “That is the best business, a success, we are eyeing [for further exports, as it is] much better remunerated. Very interesting.” He argued that the international market is yielding 40 percent more profits, “and we are smiling!” I asked if the price was good: “Very good! The price doubled.” He said that in 2019, 70 percent of cattle were raised for international export and the other 30 percent for internal markets. However, in 2020, 100 percent were intended for the international market, all sold to buyers in China who had recently visited his farm. He said that it takes 39 days for the boat to take the meat from Manaus to China. “I ordered to make a raft that carries 500 oxen” by the rivers. Thus far, he had been selling the cattle to French company Carrefour in Manaus but was shifting to sell through Belém’s Santana port to the Chinese company Okusan.

In December 2023, I interviewed Felicio Pontes, a federal prosecutor at the Federal Prosecution Service (MPF), who was responsible for safeguarding the rights of Amazonian populations against threats by large investment projects. During our interview, I asked who the grileiros are, he explained, “In general, today in Brazil the grileiros are large farmers, those who need all the time more land for cattle. These illegally grabbed lands have been used primarily for cattle.” Their presence is visible in key deforestation frontiers inside Indigenous lands. For example, Senator Zequinha Marinho (Liberal Party, PL) from Pará has tried for a long time to help large ranchers grab lands in the Ituna-Itatá Indigenous Territory, where isolated Indigenous people live (Bispo, Reference Bispo2022). In 2022, I talked with agents from the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) who had documented – during their several weeks-long expeditions to the area – the presence of the Indigenous people who wanted to remain in voluntary isolation. The problem was very thorny and the agents asked to remain unnamed, which was also required in 2022 under the Bolsonaro regime. Even the FUNAI director himself would not listen to the technical reports, but rather tried to help the senator and his ranching speculators. In January 2022, after demands by the federal public prosecutors, a court ordered that FUNAI needed to reinstate the prohibition of outsiders entering the Indigenous land and they needed to drive out the grileiros. Even though entry by outsiders to the Ituna-Itatá Indigenous Territory has been officially restricted since 2011, the area has become one of the most deforested Indigenous lands in the Amazon. The grileiros took note of the weak resistance organization and used clearcutting to turn the area into an unliveable space for the Indigenous groups, as they are dependent on the forests for their livelihood. Between 2016 and 2022, over 21,000 hectares were opened for pasture using fire and illegal logging. Since the area is not yet officially approved, despite the longstanding ban on outsider use, there is still a theoretical chance for regularization of the illegally grabbed lands. Bolsonaro-appointed FUNAI president Marcelo Xavier made a decision in 2020 that took away the protection and allowed legalized privatization of nonapproved Indigenous lands. Subsequently, several courts have deemed this decision illegal (Bispo, Reference Bispo2022). Nearly the entire Ituna-Itatá Indigenous Territory has been self-declared private property in the Rural Environmental Registry system (CAR: Cadastro Ambiental Rural), which shows the extent and extension of illegal land grabbing in Brazil. This example also clearly shows the links between deforestation activities and the highest levels of government, including electoral and institutional politics. A tremendous amount of work is required for progressive state actors to try to resist and overcome judicial and institutional politics. This case shows the complex politics in places where states do not functionally mean the same thing as governments, but are more complex, internally battling sites or arenas (Baker & Eckerberg, Reference Baker, Eckerberg and Duit2014). Even under authoritarian governments, some space tends to remain for resistance from within and outside of the state.

As Brazil’s 39th president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (hereafter Lula), regained power in 2023, and the MPF kept defending the rule of law, in September 2023 the Federal Police started entering the Ituna-Itatá reserve and removing the land-grabbing ranchers. As Federal Prosecutor Felicio Pontes from MPF explained in December 2023, “We have now managed [to push] the government to do the disintrusion, right? The removal of the farmers for the Indigenous land, they are right now doing this.” That area was selected as a key site for intervention due to the critical situation of fast deforestation and land grabbing. Pontes saw that now, as FUNAI will be given time to process the Ituna-Itatá studies, Indigenous land will officially be approved, no longer remaining in the study phase. There are currently about 400 Indigenous lands in the study phase, while the number of staff at FUNAI is “very small” and today the institution is “very weak,” which explained for Pontes why “they do not manage to do [the studies] at the speed we want.” The MPF is responsible for defending the rights of Indigenous and other populations, as a state ombudsman. One important function of the MPF is assisting local resistance when they request help in class action suits. Pontes explained that when both local resistance and the federal or state-level prosecutors are active, they have won in 80 percent of the cases in court. Thus, MPF is highly effective in helping to secure the rights of especially the active forest peoples in the Amazon. For example, even during Bolsonaro’s tenure, the MPF brought a case to court against the Bolsonaro-named FUNAI president, who also was a Federal Police officer, because he wanted to remove the consideration of Ituna-Itatá as an Indigenous land. The MPF won that court case, but often they do not even need to go to court, as simple recommendations given to authorities are enough, especially during periods of more lenient governments. In 2023, Lula appointed an Indigenous FUNAI president, Joênia Wapichana, which is a radical transformation in FUNAI politics. The MPF is also involved in trying to improve the legal setting, their analysts (working under prosecutors), such as Rodrigo Oliveira (interviewed in December 2023), have authored new law projects (such as PL 3025/2023, to make money laundering more difficult and ease the tracking of illegal gold chains).

In addition to the MPF, another key actor group is composed of Federal Police investigators, who specialize in targeting environmental crime. In Santarém in December 2019, I interviewed Gustavo Geiser, a forensics expert on forests at the Federal Police forensics department. He explained that it is more important to burn or destroy the deforestation-causing machinery and equipment than to catch the small operators of deforestation. During Lula’s first terms (2003–2010) there was a major police operation and task force targeting and closing small-scale illegal loggers and sawmills in Pará, as detailed in the book Arco do Fogo written by Federal Police officers active in the operation, which had the same name as the book (de Souza & Borda, Reference de Souza and Borda2019). However, since the operation, new sawmills and operations have taken their place, because focusing on these smaller players brings shorter-term results. In the long run, targeting the large sawmills that export wood was more efficient based on Geiser’s experience in the Belém area, where the effects of this kind of work that targeted the large sawmills could still be seen in 2019, even under Bolsonaro. Geiser argued that the focus should be on tracking, detecting, and exposing illegal documents, instead of running around the forests. The chief of Manaus, another Federal Policeperson, explains in his book how it is essential to detain illegal wood at ports (Saraiva, Reference Saraiva2023). According to Saraiva (Reference Saraiva2023), establishing Command and Control in the Amazon, especially through the Federal Police actions between 2008 and 2017 in the Arc of Deforestation Operation, was not sufficient. The actions became isolated, and thus lost in the vastness of the Amazon, and were “not enough to break the economic motor of the criminals.” This refers also to the crucial importance of first combating the economic and political power, instead of taking an isolated, modern, neoliberal governance approach to criminality. This is because, “when the police, inspectors, and military steps to the region, the loggers are already more than alerted.” As a chief Federal Policeperson operating in various regions of the Amazon, Saraiva focused on causing economic and financial losses to the organized crime by destroying machinery and making it harder to launder money. He found it was most important to hit the already processed, value-added deforesting commodities, such as planks in ports, rather than the unprocessed logs in the middle of the forest, of which about 75 percent are wasted anyway. Therefore, hitting further up in the value chain is more impactful, as “the wood arrives at port after investments also in logistics and transport and, of course, it was already negotiated, has a buyer” (Saraiva, Reference Saraiva2023: 160–161). This strategy makes the damages multifold for the whole chain of illegality in the economic, social, and political senses.

Using the approach of tracking illegal documents, among other projects, Geiser did a satellite report on the Jamanxim illegal logging area on Munduruku lands. I had visited this area on a trip before our 2019 interview, so I was interested to ask him about his experiences there. In 2019, under Bolsonaro, he tried to enter an area of logging he had detected, but he did not get the support of the Army for providing a helicopter as had previously been the case. The Workers’ Party (PT) governments had offered logistical and armed forces support for the police forces targeting environmental crime. During Bolsonaro’s regime, last-minute cancellations of these resources were the rule rather than the exception. This was due to exceptional orders from Bolsonaro to not allow helicopters to be used in such environmental crime situations. In addition, the Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, who was forced to resign in June 2021 when US and Brazilian courts started investigating him and his staff for money laundering and illegal export of wood from Amazon (The Guardian, 2021), had forbidden the IBAMA to use helicopters or to burn equipment used in illegal deforestation.

In August 2023, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office moved the case to court, where Salles was accused of four crimes: including being a key constitutor of organized crime, facilitating illegal trade, advancing personal gain while in public office, and obstructing inspection by public officials while in office. At the same time, Bolsonaro-appointed president of IBAMA, Eduardo Bim, was charged in this scheme for criminal acts of illegal wood exports (Peres, Reference Peres2024). This case shows the depth of government capture by criminally minded entities during the Bolsonaro regime.

Having now covered the key actors and dynamics, I will delve deeper into the RDPE.

Land Value Rise for Ranch Holders

I will now explore the rise of ranch land value caused primarily by agroextractivist plantation expansion as the key cause of deforestation. In April 2022, I did a series of extensive interviews with a rancher and agricultural engineer whose lands were located in the southeastern fringes of the Amazon. He explained how the value of his 2,260-hectare ranch had more than doubled in a year, as soybean planters started to look for land in the area where his ranch is located. He did not want to be identified by name as he was living in tense rural areas, where shootings and even killings take place between ranchers grabbing lands from each other and nonranchers. However, he assured me he was not involved in this activity, which was corroborated by some of my other veritable sources. I will refer to him here as the “modern rancher,” as he stands in comparison to the trope of a “predatory” or “primitive” rancher.

This modern rancher I interviewed explained how it would be much easier and more profitable for him to just rent his land to soybean planters, instead of continuing with ranching. In fact, most of the neighboring ranchers were already renting out their pastures. Ranchers are calculating how much they earn per hectare for cows, and compare this with how much they would earn by renting out the land, also including the value of land in the equation, since they can get more and better loans for expansion as the value of their land increases. They also consider the role of fertilizers, improvement of cow genetics, and other factors and expenses they would have to take care of themselves if they did not rent out the land:

It is important to focus on these intersectorial processes to understand the drivers of deforestation. I will first focus on the land value and speculation issues since they seem to move much more money than ranching itself. The modern rancher explained that ranching is a poor but secure business for his region. The main utility comes from ranching’s ability to “occupy land.” He explained, “This is a business that produces very little, but it is very safe, it will always give those 200 thousand [reais]. So, it gives only a little bit, but it does serve to occupy the land very well.” This is precisely the issue in Brazil, in the RDPE that I call ranching-grabbing, with an emphasis on land value speculation. One can earn more with very little effort, due to the rising land values. Thus, ranches serve their owners very well and are the most accepted and de facto functioning judicial-political means of holding onto land and being able to claim proper compensation if one is compelled to give up one’s land to establish land reform settlements or conservation areas. In addition, the laws of the National Institute for Colonialization and Agrarian Reform have favored deforestation, both for large landowners and smallholders. Land clearing has been a legally backed way to secure not only the cleared land, normally for pasture, but an area six times the size of the clearing (Hecht, Reference Hecht1993), which is considered to be the legal reserve required by law. In the Amazon, 20 percent can be deforested, while the other 80 percent should be protected; however, this is not respected in practice and one can legally do logging activity on the “protected” 80 percent, provided it is not clearcut. The 1988 constitution defends land clearers from expropriation that make “effective use of land,” which in practice means they deforest the land and then put cattle on it. Therefore, for a long time deforestation has made sense in this legal setting, as it helps to secure land access, control, and capital accumulation.

Land grabbers are looking for the most lucrative speculative futures where land buyers will enter the area and they can realize their earlier grabs on land, whose legality is usually doubtful. Yet, the potential-seeming legality is reinforced by acts of selling the lands several times, which produces legal-looking papers for these sales, while gaining support from notary officers, politicians, police, and other elite powerholders, at all levels of the state. Therefore, to understand why large swathes of forest are still being clearcut in the Amazon, it is extremely important to understand the presence and push of the soybean/corn plantation frontiers inside and next to the Amazon. The soybean process ensures continued interest by the professionalized sector of land grabbers (called grileiros in Brazil) specializing in the violence needed to dispossess people and retain the lands obtained through land title frauds. These frauds allow grileiros to continue their work to undermine the rule of law and clear forests for the purpose of creating salable commodities, usually in the form of forged land titles. This process was ongoing in 2022 in the Amazon–Cerrado transition forest area where the modern rancher’s farm was located. It was often the case that landholders in the area had inherited their land from a prior generation of pioneering land grabbers from southern Brazil. He explained to me the kind of thinking these landholders were faced with, “Soybeans make much more money, each hectare of soybeans gives 1,500 reais. Look at the difference. Today I earn 145 reais per hectare [with ranching]. If I leased it for soybeans, starting tomorrow, I would earn 1,500 reais without doing anything and the guy was still fertilizing my land [fertilizing he now must pay for himself, when ranching].” However, the modern rancher was not going to rent out his land, unlike the others, as he explained that he likes the ranching business and intended to intensify it with rotational pastures and fertilizing and breeding cattle with good genetics. This affinity for cattle capitalism, ranching, and cowboy culture as a lifestyle, is an important topic I will discuss later in this chapter. Typically, many ranchers, who might be living elsewhere in Brazil or abroad, are on the lookout exactly for the opportunity to not have to worry about production while receiving monthly payments to their accounts for rental agreements. The ranch itself, even if highly valued, does not produce significant yearly earnings if holders continue to ranch in the typical style for Brazil. The modern rancher explained that there is a sectorial joke among the ranchers in Brazil that “A fazendeiro [large farmer] lives poor to die rich.” This joke helps to expose the cost calculating logic that is driving the expansion of plantations, which drives deforesting land grabbing deeper in the Amazon. The modern rancher laid out these dynamics clearly in our conversation:

Ranching in the Amazon is often not economically viable without major economic and political incentives, with the largest part of revenue increase coming from rising land prices and rents (Carrero & Fearnside, Reference Carrero and Fearnside2011; Hecht, Reference Hecht1993). In 2019, I interviewed the manager of Bela Vista Farm, which is an 80-hectare intensive showcase farm with feedlots and 350 oxen that is located by the Transamazônica Highway west from Itaituba. During our interview he explained that they need to spread fertilizer and calcium every year, as well as replant the grass in several places where the soil is weaker or the oxen step more often. He shared that pesticides are “needed twice a year … due to the forest, since the forest will trouble the grass and the grass lowers.” This was the only farm in Itaituba that had rotational lots, which was rare due to the cost, yet did provide benefits, since, “if left at large, all open, ox will stomp a lot. Stomping, stomping, and not eating. So having fences he goes there and return.” However, this kind of rotational system, which allows for keeping more cattle than possible on the open area, is not in the interests of ranchers in the Amazon or Brazil. This is because the overarching system is not “modern ranching,” but instead it is a system of ranching-grabbing, wherein speculation is more important than anything. In this ranching-grabbing system, cattle serve more as placeholders than being the commodity through which most value is created. According to the Bela Vista manager, most ranchers do not have the money to put the rotational system into practice, but in some cases, money is not the only limiting factor. Most ranchers also do not have the proper knowledge, so they do not know how to do these kinds of rotations in practice. Based on this, a basic characteristic of an extractivist RDPE is that it locks in wasteful and/or unproductive methods of production and it is not set up to incentivize effecting change.

In Amazon ranching, most returns typically come from financial speculation, not from meat sales. This dynamic of rapidly rising five- to tenfold increases in land prices, prompting ranchers to expand further in the Amazon, after land sales or leases to soybean farmers, has been in operation in the Cerrado–Amazon region, especially since the early 2000s rapidly expanded soybean boom (Nepstad et al., Reference Nepstad, Stickler and Almeida2006). This is a particular setting with strong extractivist and capitalist transformations where forests are seen as obstacles (see Figure 2.5). The excerpts given from frontier ranchers expose the kind of mentality and business logic within which are situated the key powerholders who are territorialized into key positions in the Amazon. Very few of them take climatic-ecologic crises seriously into consideration in their actions, although, based on my interviews, increasing droughts, fires, floods, and other volatilities in production conditions are known and felt by practically all of them.

Figure 2.5

Freshly deforested and burned rainforest next to the main highway leading to Belterra, Pará, which will be turned directly into a soybean plantation. The area was still smoking as I passed it. This is becoming a more and more common sight as direct deforestation for soybean plantations increases next to main roads. Brazil, December 18, 2023.

Photo by author.

Soybean-Pushing and Ranching-Pulling Dynamics in the Amazon

While especially the soybean frontier pushes the ranching frontier deeper into the Amazon, the ranching, as conducted in the Amazon, creates a need to resituate itself. In the internal logic of Brazil’s typical cattle capitalism, it takes about 10 years to generate a good genetic quality for the herd, which often coincides with the need for major new investments in the form of fertilizing and turning to intensive ranching instead of extensive ranching. Yet many ranchers do not have the money or knowledge to institute this intensive ranching. Therefore, when soybean farming becomes an option, the ranchers have the “tendency … to look for cheaper land,” which is the logic of the dominant system. In 2022, I interviewed a rancher in northern Goiás, in the Amazon–Cerrado transition area, who explained to me:

A further driving factor from within cattle capitalism itself is the ways in which it causes soil degradation. A modern rancher explained that 20–25 percent of his area is exhausted due to erosion and cannot be used without buying fertilizers, seeds, terraforming, and replanting new grass. It is more aligned with the logic of cattle capitalism – where “ranching gives only little money, so one does not want to invest” – to just go to a new area instead of making the necessary investments. The modern rancher explained that in Brazil, ranching offers on average 100 to 300 reais per hectare, while with soybeans one earns between 2,000 and 3,000 reais per hectare. Due to this reason, he saw that soybean planting is a more important process than ranching even though pastures cover over 160 million hectares and soybean plantations around 45 million hectares. However, due to the enormous difference between the profit rates, the 160 million hectares of pasture in total is less profitable than the soybean areas. For this reason, he saw the soybean sector as one of the key movers of development and more powerful politically than ranching, as it is “richer and better organized” (see Figure 2.6).

Figure 2.6

Monoculture soy/corn plantations are being expanded over pasture land, in places that used to be rainforest, thereby expanding the soybean frontier deeper in the Amazon. Acre, near BR-371 between Rio Branco and Xapuri, March 19, 2022.

Figure 2.6 Long description

A pasture land with expanded monoculture soy/corn plantations near BR-371 in Acre, Brazil. A large piece of farm machinery apparently a harvester with a large bin or hopper and an auger is prominently featured in the center. On either side are vast fields. The fields extend towards the horizon, where a faint line of trees or vegetation can be seen. The sky is overcast, with a uniform layer of clouds, suggesting a cloudy day.

Photo by author.

The ranching and soybean sectors also differ in their demands for technology and infrastructure needed for the volume of production. The modern rancher calculated that he produces about 90 kilograms of meat per hectare per year, while soybeans would produce about 4,000 kilograms of beans (approximately 8,818 pounds) per hectare. This radical difference in volume means that even before the soybeans themselves are planted, the expansion of the soybean sector pushes massive infrastructural expansions, especially ports, paved roads, railroads, canals, electricity, and other major changes in the physical space. However, these pushes would not be possible without having the fundamental requirements fulfilled, which are land availability, access, and control. The resource frontier – where nature is turned into extractable “resources” both physically and mentally – comes before or during the expansion of the commodity frontier (Kröger & Nygren, Reference Kröger and Nygren2020). Ranching in Brazil is a sector that primarily engages in land grabbing, holding, and transferring. Through these processes it creates and expands resource frontiers. The recurrent amnesties offered by Brazilian parliaments to illegal land grabbers incentivize the continuation of the practice of grilagem (the falsification of documents), especially in the so-called arc of deforestation, which currently runs from the western state of Acre to Southern Amazonas, from the state of Pará until Santarém at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers, and then east from there, and in places even hopping over to the northern bank of the river.

Ranchers have also been typically less dependent on banks and other outside entities than soybean cultivators, since they do not need to take such large loans. The modern rancher called the plantation holders “super dependent” on banks in comparison to ranchers. He explained that the banks continually pushed him to take out more loans, but his personal rule was to have no more than a maximum of 25 percent of the value of his herd in loans. At the time of our interview, he only had about 15 percent of the value in loans. Typically, ranchers take loans that equal about 50 percent of their herd value, while soybean producers have several times the value of their crops. As a rancher, he could get loans at an interest rate of about 10 percent per year, while normal Brazilian public sector retirees would need to pay about 30 percent. Ranchers would take this cheap money even if they did not need it, as they could easily invest the money borrowed at 10 percent to gain 15 percent, while pocketing the 5 percent. This was described as “working with the money of the bank as this is cheap.” The modern rancher explained that these comparatively low interest rates are a “privilege that no other sector has,” not to speak of common people. This cheap money makes it possible for the rancher “to be bigger than he is” and grow the herd even if he does not need to. This difference in terms of access to cheap money is a key element when trying to explain the centrality and growth of the ranching-agricultural sector in Brazil in comparison to other sectors. This access to relatively cheap money also helps to explain the consolidation of its territorial dominance. There continues to be a push for deforestation due to the preferential access to low-interest rate loans for ranchers, guaranteed by the aggressive rural lobby. This arrangement also helps the expanding soybean frontier, since the debt generation makes it more likely for low-producing pasture land to be transmitted to soybean producers if the rancher cannot pay the loans. Ranchers get the loans cheaply, since they have the large landholdings registered at the bank as collateral, which the bank can seize.Footnote ²

I discussed these issues related to interest rates and loans with other actors involved with ranching and soybean cultivation in different parts of Brazil. One of them was an agricultural expert, a consultant-company owner called André, who was the key operator expanding nascent soybean and corn plantations in Acre. I traveled in Acre with the consultant in March–April 2022, through the new soybean fields at the westernmost frontier of the soybean expansion in Brazil. André had deep, actual knowledge of the entire chain of operations, in both ranching and field cultivation, and was advising the largest landowners, those who had been resisted by the rubber tappers such as Chico Mendes in the 1980s in Acre. André advised these landowners on how to improve the productivity of their ranching and how to turn their land into soybean/corn plantations and expand deeper in the state. He even walked them through making plans for expanding inside conservation areas, such as the CMER. I traveled with him in the countryside, visiting farms and their owner-patrons, getting to know the way of life, thinking, and talking about these issues. André explained that he, or the large farmer, can get loans with an approximately 5 percent interest rate, which is a factor that helps to explain why soybean production expands and becomes gradually more dominant than ranching. For example, against a farm worth 80 million real, a 50-million real loan normally is taken, with the farm serving as the collateral. With the loan, farmholders can buy the needed capital goods for the ranching–soybean plantation transformation, including harvesters that cost 2 million, tractors that cost 200 thousand, silos that cost 6 million reais, and other smaller things. This is framed as the “modernization” of the business, and consultants, like him, take care of everything. When I was in Acre in 2022, time and again I saw new, but still unused harvesters – which I had never seen in this area previously – that were ready to be deployed to harvest the first crop of corn and soybeans.

Since the 1990s, the value of land has risen dramatically in Acre, which was due at first to the expansion potential and expectation of soybeans and later was related to their actual expansion. André explained how in the late 1990s and early 2000s a hectare of Acrés best agricultural-potential lands, next to the Interoceanic Highway running to Bolivia and Peru from Rio Branco, cost about 100 reais, while later in 2012, when he started to work in the state, the price was up to 1,000 reais per hectare. In April 2022, the price was 20,000 reais or more per hectare, which is an impressive rise from 100 reais. While the value of land does vary, even land next to the rural ramal access roads has increased significantly. These ramal roads are typically not even paved, but rife with mud and bumps, running sometimes legally and often illegally across conservation areas in the Amazon, especially in many parts of Acre. André explained that even in 2002 one could buy land 4–6 kilometers away from this type of road for 500 reais per hectare, but now the same land costs more than 15,000 reais per hectare.

The most marked growth in land prices per hectare started in 2012, which was spurred by legislative changes when the new Forest Code was approved in Brazil. The approval of this Code led to extensive new deforestation due to environmental protection standards being lowered (Kröger, Reference Kröger2017). At the same time, ranches and plantations were expanding, which was a process that had already started at least five years earlier with widespread deforestation, even within conservation areas. On average it takes about five years to deforest an area and turn it into an “open area.” André referred to this deforestation as the primary process required for the land-valuation process to start and continue in a positive feedback cycle. This means that as the demand increases, offers are increased. These changes took place amid the 2008 rise in global commodity prices and profits, following the financial crisis and movement of money into raw materials, which caused a wave of land grabs and land deals (Borras et al., Reference Borras, Hall, Scoones, White and Wolford2011). André explained that once the land has been made available, or “opened,” agricultural expansion is needed for the land prices to soar. He shared that he and his colleagues from the state-level organization of CNA, Brazil’s agribusiness lobby group, whom I also interviewed, were the key players in this process:

A key question that I kept returning to during fieldwork was, “Are there different sections within the Brazilian agribusiness sector?” This question refers to some parts of the agriculture and ranching sector being more “modern” while others were more “primitive.” The division here also reaches beyond just the technology applied in the practice of agriculture, as it extends into the sociopolitical arena, with the latter taking care of the dirty work of violent expulsions and the prior attempting to retain the public image of rule of law and rights respect for the international audiences. The answers to this question varied over the course of my interviews, with some interviewees arguing that yes, there are different facets, while others asserted that the relations of these groups are more intimate and closer than they would appear, as they rely on each other and are overlapping. The land grabbing by the primitive, latter group depends on the push of soybean plantations and ranches deeper into the Amazon for the land buyers, while the deforesting and violent actions and illegalities of the latter group suit the goals of the so-called modern agribusiness to gain access to cheap land and privatize state- and smallholder-occupied lands for large capitalists.

A significant part of the problem is the institutionalization of illegal land grabbing, ensured through legal loopholes and ambiguities. Over 60 percent of deforestation activities in the Amazon are linked to multiple forms of illegal acts: illegal logging, grilagem, and illegal forms of agriculture and ranching, which are connected and advance synchronically (Waisbich et al., Reference Waisbich, Risso, Husek and Brasil2022). The invasion and appropriation of public lands in the Amazon are crimes that precede the other illegal activities. Waisbich et al. (Reference Waisbich, Risso, Husek and Brasil2022) argue that it is difficult to separately analyze the distinct deforesting economies or to combat these crimes individually. They call for a more comprehensive and integrated approach to assess the profound causes of environmental crimes and their links with other types of illicit actions. The attack on human, territorial, and environmental rights defenders is systematic and seems to be a necessity for deforestation to advance, since resistance can be effective in halting deforesting investments on many frontiers and by several means (Kröger, Reference Kröger2020c). Since 2009, of the more than 300 registered murders of environmental defenders in the Amazon, only 14 cases were brought to court, and only 1 resulted in a judgment. None of the over 40 cases of attacks and threats that did not lead to death were judged. It is typical of the police to refuse to register threats or nonlethal attacks. According to Human Rights Watch (2019), this lack of effective action shows the impunity reigning in the region, the systematic failure of Brazil to investigate and make the illegal loggers and grileiros responsible for their violence in the Amazon. The situation has worsened dramatically since the 2016 coup against Dilma Rousseff, and especially after Bolsonaro’s 2018 election. In 2020 and 2022, under the Bolsonaro regime, the yearly rates of cases of violence against Brazil’s rural populations were the highest since 1985 (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, 2023). The Bolsonaro regime was built on the power and support of extractivist regionally dominant political economies (RDPEs) and provided them with national- and international-level discursive support and governmental backup, by making the actions of environmental authorities and activists from “outside” much harder. According to Brito et al. (Reference Brito, Almeida and Gomes2021), the current Brazilian federal- and state-level land laws are inadequate and have even boosted deforestation and illegal land grabbing. They identify six key processes through which the current land laws increase Amazon deforestation: (1) continued permission of public land occupations; (2) giving private land titles for deforested or mostly forested areas; (3) nonexistent requirements for environmental recuperation before handing out titles; (4) lack of monitoring of environmental obligations after titling; (5) subsidies for titled properties’ price without guarantees for sustainable land use; and (6) acts by public land institutes that do not follow legal priorities. Land mafias thrive in this institutional context. To redeem these ills, Brito et al. (Reference Brito, Almeida and Gomes2021) recommend the following changes to land regularization policies: (1) establish a time limit for occupation of public lands and prohibit offering titles in areas where environmental laws are broken; (2) demand market prices for public lands that are sold and focus on sustainable uses; (3) forbid the titling of recently deforested estates and demand environmental law conformity before and after titling; (4) establish concessions without rights for deforestation for mostly forested estates; and (5) conduct ample consultation before privatizing public lands.

These measures, when properly applied, would likely be enough to strongly curb the possibilities of land mafias to deforest. This is because a key problem is the recurring legalization of illegally grabbed lands by the Congress and executive power, which are both in the hands of the powerful Rural Caucus. For example, in 2017, President Michel Temer sanctioned Provisional Measure 759/2016, which evolved into Law 13,465 that favored land grabbing and speculation. This allowed large land grabbers to get titles for their illegal claims for negligible amounts that were well below market values and regularized the illegal sale of settlement lands (Carrero et al., Reference Carrero, Fearnside, do Valle and de Souza Alves2020). The law also allowed greater possibilities for illegal land grabbing, for example, by increasing the size of rural estates allowed for regularization from 1,500 to 2,500 hectares (Sauer, Reference Sauer2019). This eased the creation of latifundios and increased deforestation through grilagem (Observatório do Clima, 2017). Bolsonaro further opened new law projects for allowing grilagem. It is precisely this political setting that allowed for legalizing illegal land grabs, which in turn made ranching in forest frontiers “highly profitable” (Carrero et al., Reference Carrero, Fearnside, do Valle and de Souza Alves2020: 980). Worryingly, this has opened new frontiers, for example in the Arc of Deforestation, which is now expanding to the south of Amazonas state. Furthermore, there are novelties in the expansion drivers as the criminal aspects gain more strength. Carrero et al. (Reference Carrero, Fearnside, do Valle and de Souza Alves2020) found that now the key actors at the local level are wealthy people and groups, who launder money by buying settlement lots illegally. This setting encourages the mafia-like dynamics that I observed in several parts of Pará, such as the Santarém region (Kröger, Reference Kröger2024). Worryingly, these land mafia dynamics seem to be rapidly penetrating deeper into the sociopolitical fabric of Brazil.

There are particular people and groups involved in the illegal and violent grabbing of land using rural terror, threats, and hired guns. These land mafias have been called by many names, including “rural militias,” a term used by Human Rights Watch (2019) to refer to groups organized by large farmholders and others who are involved in illegal logging to protect their illegal businesses. These organized groups serve as a type of private security corps, which uses violence and intimidation to safeguard their criminal operations. These farmholders and loggers are essentially criminal networks that have major impacts on deforestation and a strong influence on local politics through their economic clout. Essentially, they are comparable with urban militias. They hire armed men, including from IBAMA and police officers, who then use the cars, weapons, and uniforms of the police. They threaten and attack inhabitants who oppose their criminal activities, as documented by Human Rights Watch.

Deforesting Mafias in Southwestern Pará

In November 2019, I did field research along the BR-163, traveling by car from Cuiabá to Santarém with a reporter from Finland’s national broadcasting company, Yleisradio Oy, a driver, and a fixer. This was a quite intense period to be on the road as it was during the Bolsonaro era and at a time when many forest fires were being purposely lit, especially in the towns and rural areas we were visiting. We saw many fires as we proceeded, lit by land grabbers to claim these lands, to start producing soybeans after a period with pasture. With flames reaching the recently paved roadsides, we stopped to film the fires and ask the locals what was happening (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1

Fighting against the fires being set in the Amazon. Santarém, Brazil, November 2023.

Figure 3.1 Long description

Two individuals in protective gear fighting a forest fire. One person is using a hose to douse the flames, while the other is observing. The scene is set in the Amazon rainforest near Santarém, Brazil. The individuals are labeled as "Bombeiro Militar," indicating they are military firefighters.

Photo by author.

In one such area, between Novo Progresso and Itaituba, we stopped to film a new forest fire. Our driver was nervous that we asked to stop, as he had passed the same route earlier with other film crews. Pointing to the fire, he said, “It is not advisable to stay close to these things for a long time.” I asked why. “The people are ignorant.… It can result in problems for us. I believe that [you can stay for] ten, twenty minutes maximum. Because, in the last few days, people are reacting in a way that, here is the shotgun law, in Pará.” I asked if this was illegal. Our driver, who had also worked as a gold digger and a soybean truck driver in the region for a long time, pointed to the fire and answered, “It’s illegal, but that’s their admission,” referring to the fire and us recording it as the proof of the crime. “To avoid a future problem, evidence, a person is thus capable of shooting us at the spot,” our driver explained. They are most worried about the local press putting the video on the evening news, which could create immediate problems for them. He continued, “Let’s leave before someone takes photos of our car and that makes things more complicated for us.”

A bit earlier in 2019 a group of reporters had been forced to stay in their hotel in Novo Progresso, rounded up by gunmen, and then escorted away from the town by outside federal forces. Several people on the road also explained to us that if the police arrived, they were likely to blame us for starting the fires because we wanted to film them. At the time, and still, a common belief/framing among the pro-Bolsonaro people, including police and soybean farmers, is that NGOs and foreigners lit the fires in the Amazon. I asked our driver, who often saw these fires while driving the region, about the dynamics of using fire. “The first year they cut the forest … this felling must have taken about thirty days to dry. Then, if no one [the authorities] comes to notify … then he sets fire. [After a] few more days, they plant the area. If someone comes to notify, they don’t work it anymore, but stop.” I asked how a fire setter then becomes the dono (the de facto owner/controller of the area) “Because no one showed up to say [don’t set a fire] they become dono … then he produces a little bit on the land to claim ownership.” At this moment, the fire was getting closer to our car and I asked the driver to move us further away from the flames. Our driver was getting even more worried now, asking us to leave, but our fixer, an experienced guide who was setting up the interviews for the reporter, said he would manage the situation if someone came. The driver was worried the land grabbers could arrive, with guns, which he had witnessed, and responded to the fixer:

At this moment, a man arrived, whom the driver said must be the dono, “Call him [the driver asked me to fetch the reporter], let’s get going, since if two or three more arrive … WhatsApp has already been used to notify the large farmers.” However, we stayed on and started talking to the man, who told us he had been living there since 1974 and had a 364-hectare farm, mostly ranchland, on the other side of the road. He explained that the fire on the other side of the road had been lit by a person from Itaituba, who returned to the city, letting the fire do its work of burning until exhaustion to clear the land. He argued that some clearcutters would need to be investigated, those who “deforest too much,” but not the ones like him who “only fells [sic] 2 or 3 hectares per year,” but “those felling 500 hectares is perverse, it’s too much … since they do not even need it.” After this talk, we also interviewed others living close by and then continued driving, leaving the fire and land grabbers on the roadside (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2

Illegal grabbing and burning of an area of forest by the BR-163 that would subsequently be cleared. Pará, between Moraes de Almeida and Itaituba, November 25, 2019.

Figure 3.2 Long description

A forest fire in Pará, Brazil, along the BR-163 highway. Smoke is billowing from the burning vegetation, with tall trees and dense undergrowth visible in the background. The scene captures the illegal deforestation activity between Moraes de Almeida and Itaituba.

Photo by author.

This episode was telling of the atmosphere and feeling of fear, threats, and killings amid which Amazonians live. While this time we did not have trouble, there was anxiety. This is because there are “land mafias” operating in many parts of rural Brazil, especially in the deforesting frontiers. After filming that fire next to the BR-163, we traveled to the soybean port of Miritituba by the Tapajós River to film the huge exporting facilities from the river, and also the truck lines and the vessels on shore. These crossed the river to the city of Itaituba, continuing from this gold mining, ranching, and deforestation hub west along the Transamazônica Highway. We drove a couple of hours west on Transamazônica and parked on the shore of Tapajós. A small boat on the Tapajós River, steered by a Munduruku Indigenous man, arrived to pick us up for a visit to their aldeia (a village; a term often used for Indigenous villages in Brazil). We wanted to see what was happening on the other side of the national parks, large conservation areas, and Indigenous lands that were being invaded from the side of BR-163 where we witnessed several fires.

In the Munduruku aldeia, we were invited on a patrolling trip up the Jamanxim River with the Cacique (as Indigenous chiefs are called in Brazil), a drone driver, and two others from the Sawré Muybu village, where we were staying. Soon, we encountered a recent logging road and saw illegal gold-mining barges excavating the riverbanks for gold (see Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3

The Munduruku search patrol encountered and tried to break an illegal wood barge on the Jamanxim River, November 2019.

Photo by author.

This process results in leaked mercury, mud, and silt getting into the water, which contaminates the clear waters of the Tapajós, turning them muddy. In addition to the damage from the gold mining, the forest river was choked with boatloads of men shipping acai palm hearts illegally from the Mundurukus’ forest. We stopped by the logging road entrance. The Cacique explained that it is difficult to negotiate with the illegal loggers and miners, which is the reason they normally come with a larger group and in traditional warlike attire, “even if we go to [just] discuss with them, suddenly they can receive us with violence.” I asked whether he had ever been threatened: “I have already suffered from threats. We go to the city [Itaituba] and do not know if we will return. The ‘guys’ come with a helmet, no one know who that person is.” From the small boat, we also saw areas that had been deforested on Indigenous lands by the Jamanxim River, which the Cacique explained have been captured by grileiros, who are selling the lots.

After the visit to the Munduruku lands, we talked to the environmental officers in Itaituba. They explained the illegal lotting phenomenon, which is common in the Amazon. They referred to the president of the Municipal Council of Jacareacanga, whom they said is given incentives to expand ranching in the region by “bringing people to occupy here. People arrived, demarcated a large area, made small lots for sale.” In this sense, leading politicians seem to be operating the initial land-grabbing schemes, bringing in others who bring arms, fire, cows, fences, and create false title deeds, selling these to still others. The ICMBio officers explained that these dynamics are already established along the BR-163, while in Transamazônica the phenomenon of “people grabbing land illegally (grilagem)” is more recent. This grilagem is done through the cartórios, notary offices that are public concessions:

What the official meant by bad faith is in reference to land grabbers using the information of where public land is located to target these areas for land grabbing, as they are perceived as “free” areas for them to appropriate, since the inspection of irregularities is so sporadic. As politicians seem to be running similar schemes in many places, we also asked federal officials in Itaituba about the city mayor, Valmir Climaco, who is one of the largest landholders in the area and has been reported to be among the top 10 deforesters in Brazil. His holdings include large ranches, gold mines, and other decades-old deforesting operations. These officials, whose names and positions I will not reveal to protect them from the potential of negative repercussions, explained that “the mayor already admitted that he did a lot of illegal work here. He is a madereiro [logger], he has a sawmill.” They also explained how a FUNAI team (FUNAI is a government body that carries out policies related to Indigenous peoples) arrived in the area to study Indigenous lands inside a conservation area where there were already illegal farms: “One of the farms was of the mayor … then there was a declaration [by him] … ‘these people [from FUNAI] need to be received with a bullet,’ so the Prosecution Service filed an action of administrative improbity [against the mayor].” We managed to also interview the mayor himself, although only after hours of waiting and repeated pleas at his office. We visited one of his rural houses and some of his ranches along the Transamazônica Highway. I had a discussion with him, and then after he had left, I continued with his farm manager, especially talking about his ranching business. Interestingly, the farm manager gave quite different answers than the mayor, for example saying they had deforested as recently as 2019, which was the same year as we were speaking, while the mayor insisted that they have not engaged in those practices for years. Based on my prior experience with interviewing and doing field research on the personnel of pulp, mining, plantations, and other rural enterprises, this kind of discrepancy between directors/owners and middle-level managers and technicians is very common, with often more reliable information coming from the field operation personnel. The mayor stated that “the ox gives me most profit.” I asked what the size of his property was, to which he answered, “40 thousand hectares in total. I have three garimpos [illegal gold-mining sites]. I produce 60 kilograms of gold per month.” However, these figures should be taken with a grain of salt, as in other parts of the interview he gave different figures and his farm manager later contradicted many of his claims. However, whatever the exact figures, it is safe to say that his operations are extensive. In addition, there is an indication that they could be nefarious beyond just the land grabbing; for example, an airplane with 500 kilograms of cocaine was found on his property by the police, but he swore he did not know anything about it or where it had come from. In any case, these kinds of mayor-ranchers, who brag about their violent pasts and are seen to still actively make threats, yet win elections and continue without punishments, are emblems of the kind of ranching, logging, gold, and land mafia-type people and groups who operate in the Amazon.

I also interviewed federal, civil, environmental, and other police officers, chiefs, detectives, prosecutors, and responsible government, state, and judicial officials operating in the deforestation areas; for example, in different parts of the BR-163 and in Brasília, among other places. In Novo Progresso, prior to talking with Mayor Valmir Climaco, I talked with Conrado Wolfring, a civil police chief who served for a long time in many of the most problematic clearcutting hotspots in Pará. Wolfring explained to me “That mayor of Itaituba, Valmir, he made fortunes with devastation. And worst, already for two times there was an airplane with drugs on his farm. And he defends the erroneous things, so it becomes difficult….” Wolfring explained how Climaco made these fortunes quickly, “many people told that he ordered to kill to capture land. This is common here, a guy sees a beautiful land and orders to kill, goes there, kills the guy and he is the dono now, saying: ‘I am the dono now.’”

These land mafia-type dynamics are common in Pará’s deforesting frontiers. Wolfring explained these dynamics in Novo Progresso to me in detail, at the civil police quarters where he showed me also the small and stuffy jail where he had a few dozen inmates. The entrance to the cell system was not pleasant and was guarded by a ferocious German Shepherd police dog. During our time together, we drove around town in his patrol car, talking about the local dynamics. Several hours later, he got a call that somebody had committed a suicide by hanging; he asked if I wanted to join him to check the scene. He said deaths in different forms had become a daily task for him, a routinized part of his work. When I asked about the causes of deforestation, he explained:

In terms of illegal deforestation, the police chief explained why it is hard to police these practices, “Unfortunately the deforestation is very large. We have a lot of illegal wood leaving from the region, and a lot of [police] information [is leaked] via radio, the criminal organization has communication by radio and knows all the movements of IBAMA before they arrive.”

In this setting, there are not enough police to protect the environmentalist or human rights advocates who are currently operating or want to operate in the region. It is not only activists who are killed and threatened, but also police officials who are just trying to do their work. Often police who are too active investigating deforestation are in danger themselves as the mafia has even infiltrated the ranks of the police. Wolfring explained that for the police to be able to give protection

Previously Wolfring had worked in the town of Placas, along the Transamazônica Highway, where he uncovered a major deforestation and mafia-like organization. He shared that when politicians intervened in his work, “I went with IBAMA to combat a madereiro there in Placas, and the politician said to me to not mess [with the illegal logger], the mayor talked to me, people from the police also talked to me not to mess [with the illegal logger]. The pressure is large.” He also knew of several other cases where his colleagues, who had tried to retain the rule of law in the region, had been reprimanded and then moved to another municipality. He was also forced to move from Placas to Novo Progresso after uncovering the deforestation. He explained that “there are many grande people involved in erroneous things. A millionaire fazendeiro, who was buying stolen machinery, became so influential that the delegate of Castelo dos Sonhos said to me: ‘If I arrest him, I do not know if I will stay here, I can be transferred.’”

Another general issue the police face is there are too few police officers and they are not well equipped enough. For example, in Novo Progresso there were only two police cars, each with three police officers. These two cars were expected to patrol 400 kilometers along the BR-163. There were only six civil police officials for this huge forest and land expanse, which is one of the places in Brazil with the most criminal activity. In the absence of the state’s monopoly on violence – considered by Max Weber as one key requisite to define when a state exists – and rule of law, crime continues to flourish. It has been shown time and again that the current police forces and actions are insufficient to quell the killings and other crimes.

Crime and Impunity in the Amazon

I have discussed this setting of illegality and the establishment of land mafias in detail, as the ranching-grabbing system is increasingly linked to illegal trade, drug trafficking, and money laundering. Interviews with law enforcement officials made clear how these activities explain a large part of the dynamic with pasture creation by fire, gold mining, and linked businesses. For example, the local police are almost powerless against the illegalities in the south of Pará by grandes (big men): “They launder money, a lot of money.” Wolfring explained that they kill and bury the corpses on the captured land. He related how the big mafia bosses “Stay in the countryside, at times they stay in the city. Sometimes they are from other states and come here to devastate, who already have a farm in Mato Grosso, come here.” He said that the peasants and smallholders do not act in this way, they do not destroy, but rather the trees they cut are to support their own subsistence agriculture. In other words, while the peasants do deforest in a limited way, they are not the key cause of the deforesting RDPE. In the land mafias in this region, colonists from southern Brazil, with origins in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, whom the police chief called polacos brancos (white Polish people) are key actors:

The machine the police chief referred to is a piece of very expensive equipment, which can make a fortune quite quickly for those who steal it. While these thefts are investigated by the civil police, they also are combating the network of criminal activities around deforestation. In the episode related, even though outside police forces were brought in, and some people were killed in the shootings, the result was only a slight calming of the activity. The criminals were not captured and the stolen machine were not recovered. Wolfring explained that a key reason for the situation is that, due to corruption and mafia infiltration, the state and the mafia are becoming enmeshed to a substantial degree:

There is widespread political pressure as the politicians themselves can be key mafia members: “The madereiros buy people involved in politics, they have influence, and they try to elect a mayor for them to be able to do whatever they want.”

This situation, with land mafias dominating the political, social, and territorial aspects of deforesting frontiers, has affected the land, the environment, and human rights activists. In 2019, Dona Ivete Bastos, the president of the Rural Workers’ Union (STTR) in Santarém, explained to me the situation is created by the state’s failure to offer security. She had personally received death threats several times and was under police protection:

This situation makes resistance dangerous and increasingly difficult, as leaders leave or are killed. This situation was amplified during the Bolsonaro government, which caused resistance movements like Brazil’s Landless Movement (MST) to strategically avoid open land occupations to protect the activists in its cadres. Dona Ivete was shocked by the situation in November 2019, under Bolsonaro:

The climate was so tense that even the people making documentaries about these struggles were threatened, such as a couple from Brasília making a documentary with Dona Ivete in the Santarém region: “This couple who made this documentary with me are in Brasília already for months, and it is message after message that they receive saying they will kill them by any means.” The documentary reveals the illegality of land claims in the region and how public institutions are not properly doing their inspection work: “Look, most of them are doing a Cadastro Ambiental Rural [CAR], the INCRA [National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária)] also legalizes, the IBAMA pretends not to see these things. They buy an area, destroy all.” The reference here to IBAMA and INCRA was true especially during the Bolsonaro regime, when their officials were de facto forbidden to try to interfere in the crimes in Amazon. In the longer timeframe, as Police Chief Wolfring explained, IBAMA “is fining all the time, but does not catch all the cases, only about 10 percent or 20 percent. A lot of people are devastating, there are many people who made a fortune with wood, they are deforesting many areas.” Even if the criminals are caught, “they do not stay for long in the prison, these people have a lot of money.”

Besides the impunity described, another problem that creates this situation in which land mafias can thrive is linked to weak documentation, which falls under what the state should be handling. It would be more difficult to get documents in grilagem that would stand under scrutiny if the various types of land records were systematically united by the state, which would be possible according to professor and lawyer Girolamo Treccani, who is a leading expert on grilagem (interviewed by me in November 2023, Belém). Yet, the government does not do enough in the process of documenting properties and communal areas. Wolfring, the police chief, also agreed that the issue could be resolved by a shift in political will, “Because by grilagem it is difficult to get documents, people do not have documents, they only have [their] posse [usage rights], only have contract of buying and selling, and the government is also absent, it could hasten this, to have the documentation.”

Next, I will discuss in more detail the national-scale origins and linkages of land mafias and rural paramilitaries in Brazil, especially their links to the top levels of political power in the capital. This explains how an RDPE of land mafias who are actively and openly grabbing land has spread from southern Brazil to the Amazon since the 1980s. These cases illustrate the dynamics by which federal-level changes can expand RDPE systems to the national scale and to other parts of the same jurisdiction, polity, and political system.

Agribusiness Roots and Links of Land Mafias in Brazil

The rise of land mafias can be seen as revolving around the creation of the União Democrática Ruralista (UDR [Democratic Association of Ruralists]). Another organization with an even bigger role is the Rural Caucus and its Ministers of Agriculture such as Blairo Maggi, Tereza Cristina, and others. It should be noted that, unlike the members of UDR and other rural paramilitary forces, these ministers and others at the ministerial level are not normally directly linked to the most extreme forms of cruelty; however, they are given nicknames such as “queen of the chainsaw” and “queen of poison.” UDR’s director, Nabhan Garcia, can be analyzed as an emblem in this violent land-grabbing process as he is a key ideologue and someone who creates institutional ties by connecting large landholders with politicians and pistoleiros. The Bolsonaro regime named Garcia the director of a new institute for land tenure affairs. Garcia was the key interlocutor between the Bolsonaro election campaign and the rural elites, a role which secured him the new state director position (Maciel & Pires, Reference Maciel and Pires2022). This “gang of Nabhan,” as several of my informants described this political-paramilitary group, characterizes the ways in which illegal and violent land grabbers operate in Brazil. Garcia first gained support among latifundio for forming paramilitary groups for them in order to enact organized violence against the rural poor between the 1960s and 1980s, when the dictatorship, backed by the United States, was hunting down the activists, Indigenous peoples, and peasants who wanted to defend their lands. An expert informant explained the history and workings of this “gang of Nabhan” to me in November 2019 in Brasília:

I asked whether this “gang of Nabhan” could be identified as the group and sector of the political economy that specializes in grilagem. In 2019, I received an answer to this question during an interview on top of the Congress building in Brasília with two experts closely embedded with the parliament as consultants and ex-secretaries of ministries (A and B respectively):

I then asked how the Nabhan gang works to achieve these goals – do they have connections with the political power in Brasília, which allow them to act like this?

Brazil’s CAR registry is a notorious example of how land grabbers utilize purportedly positive legal measures for environmental protection to extend their illicit land occupations and deforestation. According to an evaluation report of the public policy on environmental regularization presented to the Environment Commission (CMA) of Brazil’s Senate, the CAR has been used to legitimize the illegal occupation of public lands (grilagem) throughout the country, especially in the Amazon region (Agência Senado, 2022). Overlapping records of non-destined public forests (FPND), Indigenous lands (TI), and conservation units (UC) revealed that, by the end of 2020, more than 14 million hectares of public lands were illegally registered as private property, with 2,789 CAR registrations superimposed on Indigenous lands, which totaled more than 380,500 hectares (Agência Senado, 2022). Carrero et al. (Reference Carrero, Walker, Simmons and Fearnside2022) found, in a large study on the current hotspot of Amazon deforestation, the frontier of the Southern Amazonas state, that 90.5 percent of the CAR land claims were noncompliant with Brazilian law and 45.8 percent were in protected areas.

The land-grabbing mafia has its roots in the long-standing methods of illegally dispossessing people during period where more state protection was given to peasants, thus increasing land conflicts: first during the 1930s–1960s in São Paulo’s Pontal region, where landholdings had been mostly obtained “on the basis of frauds and the law of the strongest” (Fuhrmann, Reference Fuhrmann2019). During this period, the land grabbers became accustomed to using violent methods to evict Indigenous and peasant populations from the state lands they were stealing, one of their coronels even using the motto, “Earth soaked in blood is good soil” (Fuhrmann, Reference Fuhrmann2019). It is important to note here that the state has often tried to resist this grabbing of public lands and has several times tried to regain the stolen lands. In one of these periods, in the 1980s, when agrarian reform pressures were resurfacing after the dictatorship period had ended, the land-grabbing group created the UDR to fight land reform laws and stop them from being executed by the state. During the 1980s and 1990s, the UDR helped to create and support new rural paramilitary organizations, which were based on the large Brazilian cities’ drug trafficking, other illegal activities, and organized crime structures (Fuhrmann, Reference Fuhrmann2019). Since then, these organizations have spread throughout Brazil – both the land-grabbing paramilitaries linked to large landholders and the organized criminal groups, the latter primarily a result of the dictatorship era and its legacy of a prison system that in essence maximizes the potential for creating organized criminal groups within the horrific conditions of overcrowded prisons. Brazil is the world leader in organized crime violence, with approximately 60,000 people violently killed each year due to these organized crime conflicts. The two most important gangs are the Comando Vermelho, originally from Rio de Janeiro, and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC [First Capital Command]) from São Paulo, both of which have brought governments to their knees and control large parts of the society and economy. However, there are also newer and even more violent groups. During the Bolsonaro era and especially since 2019, organized crime has expanded into the Amazon deforestation business (for the purposes of money laundering and portfolio diversification) and territorial control of drug-trafficking routes.

The fact that Nabhan Garcia, the president of UDR, became the responsible state powerholder for protecting the rights and distributing land access to landless people in Brazil demonstrates the kind of paramilitary or mafia-like organizations’ successful embedding and production – or even capturing – of the state. Thus, during the Bolsonaro era, land grabs could be seen as a product of differing varieties of mafia–state actor groupings and mafia members within the government. According to Fuhrmann (Reference Fuhrmann2019), henchmen are often recruited from other states of Brazil and are active and ex-military police and firemen. While these groups engage in blatantly illegal activities, for example, carrying and using automatic rifles, which is not generally allowed in Brazil, they frame landless movements such as the MST as “criminal organizations.” With these framings, the paramilitary groups attempt to portray the acts of proponents of the workers’ class as illegal, while implying that their own actions are legal. When taking power in 2019, Garcia promised to “clear up land issues in Brazil.” With this state-legal backing, it is no wonder that all sorts of armed dispossession processes expanded rapidly across vast Brazilian territories, especially in the Amazon, where the use of arms was common even before the start of the Bolsonaro regime.

It is important to emphasize, based on my expert interviews, that while the operating logics and methods of these land mafias seem to have spread across Brazil, there are varying nodes or regional cores of illegal land grabbing that may not be explicitly connected to one organized economy or politics. Several people from an expert organization studying these networks explained in an interview to me that the BR-163 seems to have one such “core,” but they did not think it is a national-scale mafia organization and, if there was, they did not know the exact size of the network or who was within its ranks. A research NGO coordinator from Brasília (whom I will not name due to security reasons) explained to me in March 2022 that it is difficult and dangerous to even attempt to do research on these mafias, due to threats and acts of violence against those prepared to bring their activities to light. Thus, there has not been much research on them:

Another informant emphasized that even though the gang actions may not be nationally coordinated and planned, or even be connected to UDR explicitly, the characterization of this “sector” of Brazilian agribusiness as the “gang of Nabhan” is relevant. Her account of the recent expansion and consolidation of land mafias emphasizes the role of the class inequalities that have continued since colonial times:

Besides this class relation, the mafias are also connected by cultural ideals, for example, the stereotypical strongmen images, like that of Nabhan Garcia.

In this sense, the UDR is an important emblem, a connecting mechanism between the social, symbolic, and physical space expansions of an assortment of extractivisms. This process of withering resistance during the Bolsonaro era, due to the strength of the driving forces of deforesting speculation, shows how, when a region is turned into a capture zone for an extractivist sector such as the plantation–ranching–land-speculation sector, there is relatively little space for resistance to be maintained effectively or without drawing major opposition and violence. This is a sign that a political-economic system has managed to become dominant in a region. Once this threshold is passed, the laws of post-frontier property consolidation take hold of the region and the accumulation of key capital (social, economic, cultural, and symbolic) is passed to the new “owners of power,” which leads to concentration of control and rising inequalities.

Thus far, I have mostly discussed the driving and pulling causes of deforestation by the ranching-grabbing RDPE. In Chapter 4, I will discuss the several enabling factors, including the role of moral economic changes in the Amazon societies, that allow the expansion of ranching capitalism, and the role of Brazilian state and government as enablers.

Enabling Dynamics of Deforestation

Extractivist capitalist agents do not operate in a vacuum; they actively try to shape their operational context and the political system, while seeking support for their expansion from social trends and state resources. There are also processes in the society that have their own impetus, such as moral economic changes from forest-based livelihoods to a greater appreciation for the ranching lifestyle and its accompanying deforestation-based income. States have actively promoted and kick-started deforesting extractivist sectors and provided support and aid to corporations; however, there are also regime differences, which I discuss. A particularly important enabler of deforestation is installing roads and infrastructure by the state–corporate nexus, while the recognition of ethno-territorial rights by a regime can ease the pressure on forests and their people. Ethno-territorial rights not only allow for greater leeway for resistance, but are cocreated primarily by resistance efforts, which I discuss at the end of the chapter.

State Actions as Enablers

It is essential to look at which sectors the state supports and in which ways, to understand which sectors and practices get consolidated, territorially rooted, expanded, and become dominant. For any budding sector to take root, state subsidies, credit, infrastructure, and other perks are typically needed, and in their absence, it is hard to expect new product lines to grow. The Brazilian Amazon states have experienced policies that strongly favor ranching. In Pará, the state’s overall support for agriculture, through credit and other incentives, has been concentrated on ranching, while viable noncattle activities that receive any credit are only a small fraction of the overarching picture (Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Simmons and Walker2016). Thus, in practice, there is no alternative to the RDPE in the eyes and the actual policy mix of the state, which is a sign that this is an RDPE situation within a locality.

To have any hope of challenging the ranching-grabbing and plantation economies, states, and the international development apparatus, should offer at least a fraction of the kind of support, which has been provided to ranching activities since the 1960s, to noncattle- and nondeforestation-based agroforestry production (e.g. fruits, nuts, tree oils). An essential step would be support for creating production transportation chains for nondeforesting products (Pereira et al., Reference Pereira, Simmons and Walker2016); however, this is very hard politically, given the dominance of agribusiness in ensuring that only their product lines get the limited state and international support. A further problem is the pervasive poverty and overall low quality of education in the region, which makes it hard to obtain quality workforces (e.g. for developing product marketing and logistics) and creates pressure on inhabitants to sell out or become corrupt as a means to gain power. Since 2005, I have personally observed numerous development cooperation attempts to foster Amazonian cooperatives that would export rubber, fruit, and nut products. These efforts were often too politicized to function properly. Even though people in key positions, such as treasurers of cooperatives, were chosen by election, the people who were ultimately elected proved to be untrustworthy or incapable of running the operations. This led to the expensive equipment donated being wasted and the estrangement of the professionals involved, who realized that they could not soundly manage the business due to this corruption and/or low-skilled supervision set in place by the local political processes.

Key factors in the process of deforestation are the policies and investment decisions made by the Brazilian federal state, as the state has allowed the ranching-grabbing system to appropriate large areas, for example by building large dams and opening and paving highways. These actions can be seen as necessary enablers for the drivers of deforestation, but alone are not sufficient to explain deforestation (in the absence of extractivist RDPEs). If there are simultaneously enough conservation efforts that are put into practice and upheld by active state–civil society socioenvironmental actors, the dams and highways alone would not cause too much deforestation beyond the immediate points of deforestation (i.e. under roads and the areas affected by flooding when the dams are built). However, the highways, such as the Interoceanic Highway running from Acre to Peru’s Puerto Maldonado and from there to Cusco, have visibly caused far more deforestation on the Brazilian side than on the Peruvian side. This discrepancy is evidence that there is something more at play, which is the ranching-grabbing system I have described. As this RDPE is Brazilian rather than Peruvian, it stays on the side of the Brazilian polity. The ranching-grabbing RDPE is the key driver that has the power to turn infrastructural development into an enabler of deforestation. This dynamic has been misunderstood or downplayed by the so-called progressive proponents of the neodevelopmentalist projects, who have assumed that zoning and control would be enough to avert the risk of deforestation. However, practice has shown that there is a high correlation between highways, dams, and deforestation due to the deforesting RDPEs in power in Brazil. This became evident with Dilma Rousseff’s presidency and the subsequent approval of the 2012 Forest Code, which dramatically weakened forest protection and created new tools for land grabbers, such as CAR (which was supposed to work for environmental protection), and it was especially evident in her ousting from office in 2016, which was driven by the ranching-grabbing landed elites in parliament.

Soybean and ranching interests gained a lot from the coup against Dilma Rousseff; for example, soybean baron and meat company owner Blairo Maggi became the Minister of Agriculture in the post-coup Temer interim government. He has been characterized by Alceu Castilho from the critical agribusiness analysis group, De Olho nos Ruralistas, as a “catalyst of forces that promote agribusiness at any cost” (Gonzales, Reference Gonzales2017). Allegedly, employees in his ministry tried to protect Maggi’s agribusinesses against the public interest (Gonzales, Reference Gonzales2017), which showed signs of state capture-like qualities in the expanding national dominance of agribusiness. Yet, it was the 2019 start of the Bolsonaro regime that made it very clear that the prior years’ infrastructural expansions in the Amazon were a mistake, as they had been made without considering the possibilities of rising deforestation in the face of shifts and changes in political power. Furthermore, several PT policies supported agribusiness and allowed land mafias to continue their land-grabbing operations, as not enough attention was being paid to curb corruption. The lopsided utilization of laws, and tailoring of state policies to favor extractivist activities, are indispensable enabling settings that explain deforestation. As the Rural Caucus is so strong in Brazil, dominating to a large extent what the state and governments can and cannot do, and having hegemony in many areas of the society, it should be held as the key driver of deforestation, with the elite landholders of that system as the key agents. The state is then steered by electoral, institutional, and judicial politics (shaping the content, rules, and power relations within these political games, see Kröger, Reference Kröger2020a) into a powerful enabler of further deforestation, especially by using state funds to build extractivist-supporting commodity export infrastructure and tailoring suitable policies.

Besides regime changes, as illustrated with the above example, what affects the extent of rule of law depends on the issue and investment context at hand. That is, the same government can expand and uphold the rule of law in some parts of the state, but also allows the operation of land mafias and land grabbing in other contexts, such as areas deemed essential for national development (which they cast as sacrifice zones). Scholars of Latin American neoextractivism have emphasized how the rising commodity prices alongside wishes by so-called progressive governments to gain windfall rents and distribute a part of these to new social policies (Gudynas, Reference Gudynas2012; Svampa, Reference Svampa2019) made it possible to form cross-class alliances. For example, the PT became one supporter of neodevelopmentalist agendas like the creation of soybean export ports in the Amazon (Kröger, Reference Kröger2012; Reference Kröger2020c). The PT rule (between 2003 and 2015) was a significant enabling factor in the expansion of land grabbing and deforestation in the Cerrado, which represented a significant shift in the agribusiness frontier from the Amazon. Furthermore, the PT governments pushed for highly destructive neodevelopmentalist infrastructure and dam projects in the Amazon, which led to the violence that attended building the Belo Monte Dam despite several breaches of law. Lula wanted to industrialize the eastern Amazon, aiming for new steel mills, railroads, mining expansions, pulp investments, and agribusiness to take over rural lands, turning the whole area that fell inside a line drawn roughly between Belém, Altamira, Carajás, Palmas, Imperatriz, and São Luis into a key neodevelopmentalist frontier for Brazil and global capitalism (Kröger, Reference Kröger2013a; Reference Kröger2020c). There were judicial orders to discontinue building the Belo Monte Dam, but the government referred to legal provisions from the dictatorship era (1964–1984), which allowed the use of eminent domain for investments that were of high national economic interest (Bratman, Reference Bratman2019; Hall & Branford, Reference Hall and Branford2012).

The State’s Stake in Corporate Deforestation

The state not only enabled and drove deforestation, even during the progressive era, but also became a key owner of deforesting companies, including taking a shareholder position in the biggest meat companies that buy Amazonian beef. Especially notable in this sense was the PT’s National Champions developmentalist strategy, which aimed at creating globally leading companies, especially in the commodity export sector. The PT injected huge amounts of money through Brazil’s National Development Bank (BNDES) into export- and agribusiness-expanding infrastructure, but also into the key corporations, which created mergers. In the crucial meat sector, BNDES gave billions in financing to the meat companies Sadia and Perdigão for them to form Brazil Foods (BRF), a large extent of which was owned by Marfrig, of which the state now owned approximately one-third, due to the state’s stake in BNDES. In 2009, BNDES also injected 2.8 billion dollars into JBS, one of Brazil’s largest meat-packing firms, to allow for foreign expansion, which also made BNDES the biggest shareholder (Phillips, Reference Phillips2019). The PT governments placed very high importance on expanding the cattle industry, for example, by providing in the 2008/2009 Agricultural and Livestock Plan 65 billion reais (USD 41 billion in 2008) credit for ranch production and export increase (Brindis, Reference Brindis2009: 6). As $55 billion reais of this was directed to corporations, it can be said that the state really supported the creation of huge deforesting agribusiness corporations. Due to this support, these corporations have subsequently become even more regionally and nationally dominant and have used this new clout and revenue-making capacity to introduce more flexible laws that work in their favor. The state has also become a key shareholder in the companies’ profit making, forming joint ventures, as by 2009 it owned 10–20 percent of all the largest meat-packing and exporting companies. According to Brindis (Reference Brindis2009), it is these large meatpackers, which are owned by the Brazilian private–state capital nexus, that dominate the Amazon ranching business.

The windfall gains that the commodity consensus offered – especially the high commodity prices between 2005 and 2014 – lured the Latin American progressive governments into the trap of boosting extractivisms as the key national development strategy (Gudynas, Reference Gudynas2015; Svampa, Reference Svampa2019; Warnecke-Berger et al., Reference Warnecke-Berger, Burchardt and Dietz2023). Brazil’s PT government and the beef and leather companies saw a good opportunity to try to make use of the 2009 financial crisis by cheaply buying companies in these sectors globally; thus achieving global dominance. They also acquired foreign funding for expanding the key slaughterhouse facilities in the Amazon. For example, the Bertin Company was given USD 90 million by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank to double production in Marabá, which is in Pará’s fragile and key deforestation hotspot. The BNDES, and another state-owned bank, Banco do Brasil, are by far the key financers responsible for providing credit to deforesting operations (Forests & Finance, 2020). Banco do Brasil gave USD 30 billion to rural credit seekers between 2016 and 2020, while BNDES was the largest provider of investments to deforesting companies, mostly beef and pulp plantation companies. This was on top of the already exceptional exemptions and privileges given to agribusiness company exports; for example, unlike other exporters, they do not need to make federal social security payments (Gonzales, Reference Gonzales2017).

Regime Divergences in Supporting Ethno-Territorial Rights

Meanwhile the PT governments simultaneously upheld the rights of Indigenous and other traditional forestholders to a much greater degree than the regimes since the 2016 parliamentary coup. The Temer and Bolsonaro regimes gave even greater perks and legislative support for deforesting sectors (de Area Leão Pereira et al., Reference de Area Leão Pereira, de Santana Ribeiro, da Silva Freitas and Hernane Borges de Barros Pereira2020; Guimarães Filho, Reference Guimarães Filho2021; Souza, Reference Souza2019). In contrast, during her last month in office before the parliamentary coup, Dilma Rousseff designated 14.8 million hectares of land as Indigenous lands (Fearnside, Reference Fearnside2016). Temer started to reverse these measures, as he was facing impeachment and could only be saved by supporting votes from the Agribusiness Parliamentary Front (the Agrarian Caucus), which he gained, according to Pereira and Viola (Reference Pereira and Viola2021), by announcing a set of laws, decrees, and provisional acts allowing for greater deforestation, just before the vote on his impeachment. In contrast, Lula ordered the Army to drive away illegal land grabbers from conservation and Indigenous areas in the northern Roraima state (Kröger & Lalander, Reference Kröger and Lalander2016). Since 2016, under Temer and Bolsonaro, Roraima has seen a rapid escalation in very violent and destructive gold-mining expansion inside Yanomami Indigenous territories, which has been analyzed as a genocidal process (Bedinelli, Reference Bedinelli2022), and the opening of a new palm oil plantation frontier that drives ranching deeper into the areas Lula helped to protect for tenure holders by sending the Army to reinforce the law (Ionova, Reference Ionova2021).

Lula’s 2023 victory raised hopes for better Amazon protection, especially due to Marina Silva’s positioning as the Minister of Environment and the creation of a new Ministry of Indigenous Affairs, headed by Sônia Guajajara. In early 2023, Lula started a vehement crackdown on the gold miners responsible for the Yanomami genocide by trying to drive out over 20,000 illegal gold miners from the Yanomami lands, but this action has not completely solved the problem. Many frontier states, including Roraima, voted predominately for Bolsonaro, due to the high concentration of Bolsonaristas. This continued show of support for Bolsonaro is one example that highlights how the struggles over land and achieving a durable rule of law in the Amazon continue. These struggles do not solely affect the Amazon, as the rest of Brazil has a similar dynamic, but in some ways they are more pronounced in the Amazon due to the high concentration of multiple-use conservation areas, Indigenous territories, and state forests.

These government policies, including the analysis of key international negotiations, need to be studied in their international setting. The failure of the 2023 Amazon countries summit in Belém to come to any meaningful guidelines or rules on curbing Amazon deforestation is an example of how drawn governments are to extractivist paradigms and international forces. This failure showed how extractivist RDPEs are better able than mere electoral politics to explain the sociopolitical dynamics that are driving key policies. The role of international developmental agencies, and of the Amazonian governments, continues to be focused on so-called developmental projects, which often in practice cause large-scale deforestation. For example, the IIRSA (Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America) is a development project whose primary aim is to connect the Amazon commodity frontiers, through new infrastructural projects, to export hubs on both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Several national and international development banks, investment banks, and companies are participating in this high-level opening of deforestation, as detailed by Simmons et al. (Reference Simmons, Famolare and Macedo2018); including, among others, BNDES, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank, the China Development Bank (CDB), the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB), the Swedish Export Credit Corporation (SEK), and companies such as Odebrecht, Bunge, and Cargill. The 2023 Lula government coalition so far seems to be strongly engaged in continuing to open the Amazon via these types of infrastructural projects. It seems that the key lessons on how to curb rather than enable the expansion of deforesting RDPEs have not really been learned, as neodevelopmentalism is still pursued as the key growth strategy.

Of the Amazon countries’ heads, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro did suggest a ban on Amazon oil drilling in 2023, but Lula did not back this, as his regime supports oil drilling in the estuary of the Amazon River, which is yet another extractivist megaproject in the Amazon. The government overruled court decisions and granted oil-prospecting rights to Petrobras without conducting environmental impact assessments. Such major oil developments, in addition to wreaking havoc in the unique biodiversity hotspot of the Amazon estuary, would bring a major influx of people, infrastructure, capital, and thus deforestation to the most affected Amapá and Pará states. These government policies suggest that the Amazonian governments do not yet understand the unique and important role that this forest holds in terms of endemic species and global climate tipping point aversion. Pereira and Viola (Reference Pereira and Viola2021) agree that the strategic importance of the Amazon has not yet dawned on the region’s presidents; a situation that has started to change with Petro’s election in Colombia. In Brazil, the actions of Marina Silva as Environmental Minister in Lula’s Reference Lula da Silva2023 starter Cabinet also seemed promising, although her scope of action was severely delimited by the Rural Caucus and PT developmentalist powerholders. As part of the EU–Mercosur trade pact negotiations in November 2023, Marina and Lula demanded that the EU drop its demand for greater deforestation-curbing measures. Meanwhile, key social movements supporting the PT, such as the MST, members of whom I talked to in Belém in November 2023, were not critical of the oil prospecting or even the drilling initiated in the Amazon estuary. Rather, they saw this as a countermove to Western-based hegemony in energy geopolitics that would ensure the increase of national wealth and oil production within the BRICs countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), which stands as a counterforce to what they conceived as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-driven, Western, and double-standard imperialist politics. The fate of the Amazon is still closely tied to these international settings where states and governments jump at quick returns and growth possibilities, while sacrificing forests and justifying their actions in relation to competition in the international setting.

Next, I will discuss how the contradictory state policies of simultaneously expanding roads and conservation areas in the Amazon have played out and further enabled RDPE expansion.

State Designation of Roads and Conservation Areas

Multiple-use conservation areas offer possibilities for effective conservation if they are inhabited by people who resist deforestation and who have sufficient opportunities to sustain themselves through nonlogging activities, which has proved difficult in many cases for various reasons. There are several types of conservation areas with some key differences. The national forests (FLONA) allow for greater logging and extractivist activities within their borders but are otherwise often in practice similar to RESEX. An example of this is the FLONA Tapajós south of Santarém, which has Indigenous communities and rubber-tapping traditional populations who are allowed to live inside its borders due to their customary rights. Officially, the people living inside FLONAs should be moved, but in practice other laws protect their residence. Brazilian laws give ample de jure rights for posseiros to retain their place and it is hard to evict people even from protection areas or state forests, provided they can prove that they have stayed in a place long enough to establish land control rights (Silva et al., Reference Silva, Silva and Yamada2019) and they can defend these effectively. The national forests are destined for future extractive operations and thus, since the 2010s, a logging scheme has expanded rapidly inside the FLONA Tapajós, degrading its ancient forests and allowing for the export of illegally logged wood by Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) through certified, yet corrupt, local sawmills who place the legal and illegal wood into the same piles (see Figure 4.1). These activities are driving the Indigenous populations within the area to create Indigenous lands and make claims for their recognition within the state forest (Kröger, Reference Kröger2018).

Figure 4.1

Logs from an FSC-certified timber operation in the FLONA Tapajós, Pará, February 2018.

Figure 4.1 Long description

A scene from an FSC-certified timber operation in FLONA Tapajós National Forest, Pará dominated by a large pile of felled logs. The logs vary in size, with some appearing quite thick and others thinner, and they are stacked somewhat haphazardly on the ground. Many of the logs show visible cracks and imperfections on their cut ends. On the right, a person wearing a light-colored hard hat, a t-shirt, and pants is inspecting the pile of logs. A dense forest is visible in the background. The impression is that of industrial activity taking place at the edge of a natural forest environment.

Photo by author.

Despite these problems, most of the multiple-use conservation areas have been major obstacles for the expansion of land grabbing across the Amazon. They were mostly a product of the broad socioenvironmentalist movement of the 1980s–2000s, which also helped the PT to gain more power (Domingues & Sauer, Reference Domingues and Sauer2023). Once in power, the PT politicians started drafting a framework where they would create a barrier to key deforestation and land-grabbing sites, turning huge swathes of lands close to federal highways into different kinds of multiple-use conservation units. However, as stated, the PT also simultaneously expanded infrastructural projects, which started with paving key highways such as the BR-163 and allowing irregular and highly destructive soybean harbors to be built along the Tapajós River in Santarém and Itaituba. The fallout of this development could be observed in the 2016 parliamentary coup, which I see as a result of the weakness of key progressive parties in significantly altering the political-economic decision-making power, which led to an accumulation of power by large corporations and agribusiness elites as their expansion projects were amply financed by the state.

One of the key politicians in the process of creating both new Amazon infrastructural projects and de jure/de facto forestholders’ rights and protection areas was Airton Faleiro, a PT member of the Pará state legislature and later an MP in the national parliament, from the Santarém region. His interview sheds light on the fine line the neodevelopmentalist PT government was trying to walk, appeasing both large farmers and peasant constituents. In my November 2019 interview in the parliament in Brasília, he explained the process:

When Lula was elected, I was elected state deputy for the region, [and] a process began to discuss the paving of the two highways. Initially there was only one, only the BR-163. Later we managed to include also the Transamazônica (BR-230), because the BR-163 was seen a lot as a corridor for the export of soybeans, grains from the Brazilian Midwest, while the Transamazônica was not, it had a colonization, a diversified production of cocoa, family farming with cattle, black pepper, food production and such. So, we also fought to include the Transamazônica in the PAC [the Project of Growth Acceleration], so to speak, so as not to have asphalt just to solve the problems of exporting from the Brazilian Midwest.… BR-163 is completing the paving, right? The government of Lula and Dilma left only 140 km unpaved there. The rest was all paved. The Transamazônica, we have only 50 percent paved. It’s all kind of stopped.

Well, what I would say happened there in the meantime, right, is … along with the asphalt debate, there was a discussion about how to make asphalt in the heart of the Amazon and at the same time ensure its preservation. Then came the debate on the creation of, I will call here the macro-ordering of territorial and environmental occupation. And then the federal government worked out a process of public hearings, etc., and created and earmarked these lands because they were unallocated public lands. These were as-of-yet undesignated, yet still occupied public lands. So, some agrarian reform settlements were created, also REBIO was created, on the border between Mato Grosso and Pará, in Serra do Cachimbo. FLONA Jamanxim came, FLONA Altamira came, FLONA Itaituba came [were created]. So, in other words, a macro-ordering was made, right? There is [also] a garimpeiro (gold miner) reserve there that is not from the Lula government, it is from before, etc. The forest district for forest management areas was created. Then there was a macro territorial and environmental planning.

However, as later events showed, it was increasingly ineffective to create conservation units without establishing sufficient policing support against intruders and removing the land grabbers who were already inside the area. The asphalting proved to be a more powerful tool for deforesters. However, these conservation units did play some role in curbing, or at least allowing for progressive state actors to try to curb deforestation. However, the key problem is that roads are for land grabbers like sugar for ants, making them come in packs to try to grab the roadside areas as fast as possible, marking them for themselves.

At this point of the interview, Faleiro turned his attention to addressing what I call the power of regional political economies; that is, the deforesting extractivist groups, which did not and have not accepted the macro-ordering of territories by creating set-aside areas, a green corridor. Instead, they have continued to push for land grabs:

And these segments, let’s say … that had a greater greed, they didn’t want this ordering, right. So, they always reacted against the order, you know? And many people do not even recognize the importance of this order. If it hadn’t had that territorial and environmental planning, that place might not have had it anymore, it wouldn’t have the amount of forest it has today. No.

Well, then the Baú Indigenous Reserve was approved, yes, there was a reorganization there and in the Munduruku [lands]. So, from this reordering, these two Indigenous areas were also included in the macro-ordering package.

Well, so these [greedy] sectors, in public hearings, always took a stand against it [the macro-territorial ordering], in what they called the “stunting of the economy.” They didn’t want it. Because? Because they wanted to farm, right? It was like that, to cut down and put pasture or else for logging, disorganized and illegal, right? And, also, mineral exploration, mainly gold, they mine a lot of gold also very illegally, etc.

So, even so, the macro-order was made and then we approved another important one, we approved it in the Legislative Assembly of Pará, I was a deputy, and I approved this, the economic and ecological zoning. So, there’s the economic and ecological zoning of BR-163, right? Made by all federal agencies, it wasn’t even very expensive, right?

Why was this a good thing? Because in our reading, if you had not done that, what would have happened? In addition to being a corridor for the economy of the Brazilian Midwest, it would also be the object of deforestation. Not just for livestock, but for grain production. Because grain production was already moving there to Santarém, there in Belterra … right? And it was coming from the Midwest.… So, what happened? This macro-zoning is also ecological, it dictates what can and cannot [be done], where it can and where it cannot, understand? So, they never accepted this macro territorial and environmental planning, right? That’s important to say, right?

In this sense, it was first essential in my analysis of ultimate causes to turn more attention to the political-economic groups most relevant for understanding this illegal land grabbing. This is a faction within the broader agribusiness and large landholders’ lobby that is essential for their expansion. This faction does the dirty work but distinguishes itself from the so-called more modern or legal parts of the business. For this reason, I have addressed in detail the characteristics of this mafia-like illegal and violent land-grabbing sector in Brazil. Next, I will discuss the resistance efforts against deforestation.

Resistance to Deforestation

Both the progressive parts of the state and the civil society, which together compose a broad socioterritorial movement for socioenvironmental justice, have long advocated for curbing Amazon deforestation in Brazil (Hochstetler & Keck, Reference Hochstetler and Keck2007). This process gained the most traction during the first Lula period. A series of methods, especially by a pro-forest civil society and a progressive state–actor coalition, brought the Amazon deforestation rates down by 84 percent between 2004 and 2012. However, it should be noted that these measures resulted in shifting deforestation to the Cerrado rather than stopping it completely (Dou et al., Reference Dou, Da Silva, Yang and Liu2018). This is extremely problematic, since conserving the Cerrado is essential for avoiding the ecological tipping points (in terms of creating a water deficit) in southern and southwestern Amazon (Malhado et al., Reference Malhado, Pires and Costa2010).

In both civil society and state actions it is important to “interfere with the economic logic,” not, if we are talking about state actions, to “just send the police and the army to prohibit burnings,” Ladislau Dowbor, one of Brazil’s leading economists, shared with me in 2019 in São Paulo. He understood, as I also argue, the cruciality of changing the economic logic to gain environmental and political changes – not simply using command and control tactics. Therefore, actions like boycotting deforestation-causing products and production lines were seen as effective means and threats by both the large ranchers and civil society. To this end, Amazon rancher Valmir Climaco said to me that boycotts have and would immediately cause major losses to Amazon ranching business. Neuri Rossetto, a top leader of the MST, Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement, told me in 2019 interview in São Paulo that

New hopes were raised when Lula won again in 2023. Lula’s words, following the coup attempt on January 8, 2023, in Brasília when thousands of Bolsonaristas ravaged the Congress, presidential palace, and Supreme Court premises, aided by a significant part of the armed forces, suggested that he might be fighting strongly against the deforesting extractivists:

These words by Lula were a strong and novel reaction to agribusiness, mining, and logging illegalities, promising to curb land mafias in Brazil. The claims are confirmed by reports on the people participating in the protests, including notable ranchers, illegal land grabbers, and loggers, operating in the Amazon and involved in violence (Lula da Silva, Reference Lula da Silva2023).

Many state officials are also resisting and trying to curb illegal deforestation; for example, the Federal Police have had many operations to uncover the ranching illegalities. I was told by civil police chiefs that deforestation actions should be taken by the Federal Police because they have more resources/people, are better structured, and are specialized. However, even with all this, they cannot continue to take care of everything as there are so many violations. In 2017, the Federal Police uncovered a major and rampant corruption scheme within the meat industry, which was certifying meat without effective inspection (Gonzales, Reference Gonzales2017). There are state actors who would like to stay active to quell illegalities independently of the regime, but the Bolsonaro era showed how much their power can fluctuate, as in practice institutions are not as independent as they should be according to the constitution.

In this situation, civil society actions have been crucial, especially in the hinterlands – cast as resource frontiers. In the Munduruku Indigenous villages south of Itaituba along the Tapajós River, which I visited in November 2019, the Indigenous people told me about their struggles against deforestation, including a long struggle against a hydroelectric dam that would destroy their way of life and grab their lands. A series of important activist strategies surfaced from these discussions with socioterritorial movements in the Amazon, such as that which occurred in the Sawré Muybu Indigenous village. Rozeninho Munduruku, a young Indigenous activist, explained to me the importance of auto demarcation of Indigenous lands as a form of resistance and observing the perimeter. The Rousseff government did not want to demarcate these lands as it was pushing for a major dam in the Tapajós, which the Munduruku were resisting. He explained the process, which took several years, culminating in 2016 during the Dilma period when the government finally officially ratified the Indigenous land, just two weeks before being ousted:

This demarcation of Munduruku lands set an important precedent to create rights for the original inhabitants of a region. In this case, it was also important as the creation of that area meant that the major dam project did not advance, which was a step toward preventing deforestation and degradation as it would have wreaked havoc on a very large area. Dams in forest areas are key projects that advance ranching and land-grabbing interests, opening huge areas for deforestation, as the Belo Monte and prior dams have shown (Bratman, Reference Bratman2015; Fearnside, Reference Fearnside2015). Dams and the process of building them can be seen as a particular system, a political economic sector which is trying to expand in the Amazon and is partially dominant. In this sense, the Munduruku success is a key example of anti-extractivist action as it created a nonextractivist space and allowed nonextractivist agency to influence the outcome.

Rozeninho Munduruku explained to me the reasons behind the success against the Tapajos Dam. He said the key reason was that they put “a lot of pressure” on the situation. This included the auto demarcation of their land, where they cut a walking path on the borders of their territory and patrolled this border regularly. In practice, these patrols have managed to stop heavy illegal logging schemes, the Cacique explained, “Here we confiscated 14 heavy machines [to log woods]. On the day we took out them [the illegal loggers], we had 140 leading fighters, coming here during the night when they were trying to get the machines out of here.” I traveled with the Munduruku several hours by a small boat upriver from the aldeia on Jamanxim River to where the action had occurred, to see the logging roads and the land laid to waste, including a barge they had destroyed: “This all here was our campsite then, all filled with our people, no one slept here that night.” The Cacique said they would establish an outpost with a few families living there on a rotational basis for a few weeks at a time. While there, they would live from and plant forest gardens, which would help to prevent the existing logging road being used to further expand logging. This action by the forest people of setting watch posts in logging hotspots is key to control deforestation. These watch posts, manned by the people living there, are much more efficient than the creation of empty picnic areas, which are also unjust, a form of “fortress conservation” (Büscher, Reference Büscher2016), and prone to corruption. We explored this key place for a couple of hours but did not venture deeper into the forest by the logging road, since we heard a sound of a motorboat and needed to escape by another waterway before they could spot us. The Munduruku drones helped to check what was happening from the air.

In this setting of violence and absence of law, a crucial strategy, according to the Munduruku, was targeting the key economic and technical capital owners of the dam-building system, who in this case were in Europe. Rozeninho explained: “The elders and us others went a lot to the exterior, to Europe principally, to denounce the companies that sold or built turbines that generate electricity. We said that “you will destroy us” and other peoples. We placed a lot of pressure. I think that this fight that we showcased abroad functioned as in Brazil it did not work.”

Many emphasized to me that in the Brazilian Amazon international actions are essential when it comes to forest policies. They can effectuate quick results and are essential to force the government –under pressure by the dominant extractivist political economic systems – into action. Meanwhile, local strategies should not be forgotten. During our days in the village, Aldira Munduruku, a young mother who had trained herself to protect the village by using drones to detect the presence of illegal loggers, also explained to me in a separate interview some of the other important strategies of activism for forest protection. She mentioned that if their village had internet access, they could do much more, for example spreading the drone imagery faster (see Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2

Aldira Munduruku, operating the drone that is used to detect the presence of illegal loggers, with the Sawré Muybu Cacique Juarez Munduruku. Jamanxim River, south of Itaituba, Pará, Brazil, November 27, 2019.

Figure 4.2 Long description

Photograph of Aldira Munduruku operating a drone, standing next to Sawré Muybu Cacique Juarez Munduruku. They are near the Jamanxim River, south of Itaituba, Pará, Brazil. Aldira holds the drone, focused on its operation, while Juarez observes. A boat is visible on the riverbank behind them.

Photo by author.

Currently, the villagers were quite isolated and often had to rely on the illegal loggers, even for basic things like radio access. In other parts of the Amazon, such as Acre and the Peruvian Amazon, prior research has shown that the expansion of drone use and other methods of remote sensing by villagers is effective in forest protection. These effects are amplified when coupled with telecommunication centers and when done correctly (González & Kröger, Reference González and Kröger2023). Rozeninho emphasized the importance of setting up “audiovisual groups” that can then gain more sophisticated tools and access to the internet to denounce the invasions, such as an important episode when the patrols removed illegal loggers: “I saw a video of her [Aldira] showing what happened here recently when they did the taking out of madereiras and if they had had access to internet, they would have already made the denunciation more safely. And as they cannot do this directly, we must give the material to an outsider to pass.”

The need to give this information to outsiders creates the problem of the information not passing fast enough, which increases the possibilities of corruption and leaks. There are still many places where NGOs and others have not brought drones nor set up communication links; the latter would save time, as currently the Indigenous people and RESEX inhabitants need to physically walk long distances to adequately check for intruders. The lessons related to resistance strategies that follow, shared by Aldira, are also indicative of the things that outsiders can do to join the struggle more effectively. It is also useful for NGOs and development cooperation actors to understand these.

First, she mentioned that it is important to gather together many Indigenous leaders – elders whose talk is powerful, emotional, and “many times” affects people, even some of those governing. Interviewed separately, I talked also to the Cacique of the aldeia, whose response to my question on what they do when threatened by arms is an example of this powerful, emotional speech: “If we die for territory, for the struggle, we die trying to defend the territory, not that what is others’. These people on top, they kill one, another appears, they kill two more, two hundred appear. If they kill a leader, ten leaders appear due to one. All the time increasing.”

Other caciques in different parts of the Amazon used similar framing and similar speech. In 2023, Cacique Gilson Tupinambá from the aldeia Papagaio near Santarém in the lower Tapajós, explained the pressure they were facing:

Due to their key role and impactful speeches and guiding actions, caciques and other social movement leaders are especially targeted by pistoleiros, as Gilson shared:

Second, Aldira explained that due to the threats, it is important to create documentaries with outside helpers, spreading news by “video documentaries of what has been happening and could happen” to the villagers and forests. Dona Ivete from Santarém, who has been featured in several documentaries on female Amazon defenders, also mentioned the crucial importance of video documentaries, created with the help of outside experts.

Third, Aldira mentioned the importance of protesting, a strategy which has been found essential in resisting extractivist expansions (Kröger, Reference Kröger2013b; Reference Kröger2020a): “We already made many protests to happen here in Itaituba. The BR-163 was already closed close to Itaituba, I think for 10 days. It was a lot of people, and peaceful, nothing [violent, bad] happened, all knew to converse.” With these protests they managed to attain their goal, which was to reinstall a coordinator to FUNAI, as the previous coordinator had been forced to leave by the government.

In these ways, social movements are a crucial part of the actual working of rule of law. Protest acts and mobilizations with varied strategies of resistance are themselves expressions of democracy in action and tend to result in more democratic state and territorial governance. Aldira emphasized that protesting is essential and typically has good results, while absence of protesting seems to result in being harassed by the government, “We are getting results in many protests. If not protesting, the government is always on top of the Indigenous, always against the Indigenous.” The Kayapó, a powerful and established Indigenous group, also emphasized the importance of protesting and street blockades, when I talked to their spokesperson, Carlos, in Novo Progresso in 2019: “They shout, they already closed this highway here many times. There was already a row of more than seventy kilometers of trucks full of soybean not passing here. For the Kayapó it is very clear, what is ours is ours, what is yours is yours.” These speeches demonstrate the importance of rights discourse; the understanding of territorial control, sovereignty, and autonomy to which the Indigenous people have the right; and, based on which they see, and frame, show that physical protesting that causes disrupting is completely justified. The aim is to affect government policies, to get the state to act: “They seek for help, and we already had many situations … when they shout, fast the government comes to solve the problem, the justice and so on.” In Santarém, Dona Ivete from STTR echoed the efficacy of protesting strategy, “That what can effect a change are the marches, the manifestations, those struggles that we people do to confront them.” There, the inhabitants of the Tapajós-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve, with leaders who are members of the CNS, the National Council of Extractive Populations’, stopped a barge full of illegally logged wood by madeireiros going down the Arapiuns River. Ivete explained, “They [the resistance] made a movement in 2009 that burnt [illegal] barges.” During visits to the site along the Arapiuns River in 2005, 2007, 2011, 2018, 2019, and 2023, I talked to several people who had been involved: those who lived next to the river and could see the logs leaving their areas, who stopped the barges, and who set the fires. These tactics were successful in establishing de facto control and stopping the illegal logging.

There have been many larger campaigns in the Amazon by forest people to directly confront the installation of deforesting RDPEs in their regions. The STTR had a campaign in the northern parts of BR-163 and the Santarém region to quell the heavily deforesting and violent entrance of soybeans after the 1999 installation of an irregular Cargill export port in the city. Dona Ivete explained, “Our role was to denounce and make a confrontation, for example through campaigns such as ‘Do not give away your land,’ which was to conscientize the people about the value of land, the impacts of leaving the rural zone to go to the city … the idea was to oppose.” This kind of politicizing is essential to try to make people conscious about issues such as land value.

It is also important to create networks and share lessons, to gain broader support on a national, Pan-Amazonian, and international level. Many informants indicated that much more needs to be done in this sense, to bring together the currently fragmented and isolated civil society networks, actions, and activists. Dona Ivete shared how they have organized seminars inviting other movements, such as, “Weaving resistance against capital”: “[W]eaving since we see that the movements are fragmented, each one doing on their way. So, we want to join the forces so that the Indigenous movements, those who were affected by dams, trade unions, fishers, federations, have a unified voice and try to resist, and we can be seeing the localities where we can do our resistance.”

Next, I will summarize this chapter on ranching-grabbing in the Brazilian Amazon and its curtailment.

Summary

This chapter has argued that a RDPE of ranching-grabbing has gained hold of substantial parts of Brazil, and is the main explanation for Amazon deforestation. Ranching and agribusiness, including soybean exports, are seen as having the greatest importance for the Brazilian economy and society, and therefore they are framed as national projects and strongly supported by state subsidies, tax perks, infrastructural projects, legalization of illegal land grabs, and other robust political and economic policies from government at the federal, state, and municipal levels. This has led to several regions becoming territorially dominated by ranching-grabbing, especially regions in the Arc of Deforestation, and in other areas where pastures or plantations cover large areas. The sector frames the attempts to curb deforestation by highlighting how international actors infringe on national and local sovereignty. However, locals have little say over these developments, as large beef and soybean-trading corporations are the true key players, with the most power to influence decision-makers into making anti-environmental and pro-agribusiness laws. Simultaneously, from a financial perspective the state banks offer cheap lines of credit for these endeavors. As Hecht (Reference Hecht2005) argued, in this setting the “Real space for politics is relatively narrow,” which is a situation that has worsened since 2005, as shown in the 2016 coup of Dilma Rousseff, the pro-ranching measures of Temer and Bolsonaro, and the 2023 election of the most pro-agribusiness and conservative Congress. In concert, these factors have created a setting where alternatives are not seen by the most powerful as alternatives at all. Although in practice there are also several large areas with interests other than ranching, for example, large multiple use conservation and Indigenous areas, these places are increasingly threatened, as the inner logic of ranching-grabbing requires a continuous expansion to new resource frontiers, partly because older pastures become degraded, but mostly since the primus motor of the whole system is the insertion of new land from which to draw speculative rents. Specific land-grabbing groups, called land mafias, are responsible for this process, where the larger the scale the more benefits are provided. Bolsonaro further cemented this organizational model between political and agribusiness elites. Typically, these are one and the same, as they have common interests that tighten in what can be called a feedback cycle (de Area Leão Pereira et al., Reference de Area Leão Pereira, de Santana Ribeiro, da Silva Freitas and Hernane Borges de Barros Pereira2020). The problem is international, since the deforesting ranching expansion groups, such as Brazilian beef corporations, are still largely funded by European and other international banks. This creates a specific situation of investment lock-in, as investors and credit lending banks want returns from their investments, which means they are not interested in curbing illegalities.

These dynamics are also resisted by many state and nonstate actors from inside and outside the Amazon region. Furthermore, the heat waves, droughts, and fires that are indicative of the Amazon Rainforest tipping point to savannization and desertification are making ranching and plantations themselves less profitable and productive. Paradoxically, this agro-suicidal process could potentially support the tendency to curb deforestation. However, whether these material changes can really lead to meaningful changes in the business model depends on politics and economic power, wherein, as I have shown here, the biggest hurdle is to cut off the key pillars of power in the RDPE of ranching-grabbing. Policies which target the political economic bases of power, such as cutting state subsidies, credit, corporate support, infrastructural access projects, tax exemptions, export perks, and trade deals have a very high potential to curb deforestation. The adverse direction, where the power of agribusiness is increased in key political economic decision-making, does not – according to my theory – promise success for curbing deforestation, even if conservation areas are increased or other pro-civil society actions are taken. To be able to devise policies that get to the core of the issues and effectuate change, it is essential to understand these deeper causes of deforestation and the systemic causalities and dynamics behind forest losses.