Lawlessness, violence, courage: A battle for the Amazon

Laborers looking to carve out small farms in the Amazon at the Brazilian government's behest have run afoul of big ranching, mining, and timber companies that exploit both land and workers. 

Among the tragedies of Amazon deforestation is the human cost – workers who heeded the Brazilian government’s call to develop the land and found themselves caught in the clutches of corrupt ranching, logging, and mining interests. Many who were lured to the region hoping to build small farms and raise food for their families were forced by economic circumstances to work on vast cattle and logging estates. They were not allowed to leave and kept in virtual servitude. 

Abuse of the land and abuse of the people who live there go hand in hand. That’s the message of Spanish journalist Heriberto Araujo’s “Masters of the Lost Land: The Untold Story of the Amazon and the Violent Fight for the World’s Last Frontier.” His book examines how Brazil got to this point and explains why the challenge is not just preserving biodiversity and keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, but also respecting the rights of the humans who live in Amazonia.

“Masters of the Lost Land” presents the findings of Araujo’s three-year investigation into the murder of Jose Dutra da Costa (known as “Dezinho”), a human rights activist and union organizer who lived in the Amazonian frontier town of Rondon do Pará. 

Dezinho’s heroic efforts to gain justice for rural workers demonstrate the complexity – and danger – of standing up to the power of the Amazon’s ruthless new elite. 

Rondon is located at the eastern end of the “arc of deforestation,” a crescent-shaped belt on the southern edge of the Amazon rainforest. Over the years, major highways were built, leading to an influx of settlers seeking small plots, as well as cattle ranchers, loggers, gold miners, and commercial soybean growers. 

The migration was sparked by Operation Amazonia, which was launched by the Brazilian government in 1966 to settle the jungle and fill “the largest demographic void in the world,” as it was considered at the time. (Never mind the fact that Indigenous people were already living there.) The slogan of the campaign was “Land for people, for people without land.” But the real beneficiaries were big logging interests and agribusinesses, which cut down the rainforest to produce commodities for export.

Araujo describes Rondon in its early days as a noisy, stinky boomtown of sawmills and livestock auctions where would-be fortune hunters flocked from poorer parts of Brazil. Much of the land around the town was stolen by moneyed land-grabbers (called grilleros). The grilleros forged documents and bribed local officials to lay claim to public lands controlled by the Brazilian government, including territories occupied by Indigenous tribes. Araujo cites a police investigation that found that 5 million acres had been illegally seized in the region near Rondon alone.

The sad fact, the author writes, is that Brazil has many progressive laws on the books and good people in its agencies committed to safeguarding the natural environment. It also has a vast network of protected areas in the Amazon, at least on paper. But it remains a country in which the rule of law is often weak in rural areas and where the government presence is marginal at best. Land theft – and the violence that accompanies it – are everyday affairs. 

In the early 2000s, Brazil experienced high levels of economic growth, fueled in large part by its abundant natural resources and the rapid expansion of large-scale agriculture. Today, Brazil is the world’s third-largest exporter of agricultural products, behind the European Union and the United States, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the breakneck speed of economic development has brought widespread environmental destruction in its wake, as well as a widening gap between rich and poor.

Nowhere are these inequities more glaring than in Rondon – Araujo calls it “a nest of gunmen” – which resembles the American Wild West during the 19th century. Disputes are often settled by pistoleros, assassins hired by ranchers to eliminate those who resist their stranglehold on power. 

Dezinho and his wife, Maria Joel, knew little of this dark reality when they came to the Amazon in the hope of rising out of poverty. Dezinho took up lucrative, if dangerous, work in the logging industry. But he was soon appalled by the pervasive violence and the wretched working conditions that his fellow workers suffered under.  

Araujo describes Dezinho as an outgoing man and a born leader with an idealistic streak. He was elected president of the local workers union, where one of his first acts was to organize landless families to stage occupations of ranches that were thought to be held by grilleros. The objective wasn’t to occupy the land so much as to “pressure the authorities to enforce the law and expropriate the area to distribute plots” among the families. 

Unsurprisingly, this tactic enraged the landed gentry, who informed Dezinho that if he continued on this course, he was a marked man. Friends advised him to flee the town for his own safety, but Dezinho refused to cave in to the threats. He was assassinated in front of his home in November 2000 – a tragedy that attracted the attention of Brazil’s national press.

Evidence mounted that Dezinho was killed at the direction of a lumber baron, who was eventually convicted on two separate occasions in local courts, but has yet to serve jail time. 

Dezinho’s soft-spoken widow, Maria Joel, the mother of four young children, toyed with the idea of leaving the region, which she detested from the beginning. Unwilling to let her husband’s murderers win, however, she decided to fight back. 

Maria Joel replaced her husband as the leader of the farmworkers union and took up the mantle of his crusade. Her efforts brought international attention to the plight of migrants in the Amazon. Under her leadership, grants have been made to 10,000 poor families, restoring their right to farm their own land. Maria Joel has received numerous death threats and lives a precarious existence under 24-hour police guard.

With the reelection of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) in 2022, who served a previous term from 2003 to 2010, hopes have revived that Brazil’s government can succeed in putting the brakes on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest – which the president has pledged to do. But this cautious optimism is tempered by the fact that impunity for big landowners continues to be the norm in rural Brazil, and the justice system remains broken.

Araujo’s book can be a tough and dispiriting read given the viciousness that it chronicles and the Byzantine legal meanderings and complexities it documents. The story is not an easy parable in which good triumphs and evil is punished. It is, however, a raw account of the critical struggle between law and lawlessness on the world’s last great frontier.

Lula’s job – and Brazil’s great challenge – is to end the corruption that is eating away at the Amazon’s future. Confronting these dark forces won’t be easy, and establishing the rule of law in a region where it has largely vanished won’t happen overnight. But Dezinho and Maria Joel’s story leaves room for hope that, with courage and perseverance, things can change.