Raimundo Teixeira de Souza came to this sweltering Amazon outpost 15 years ago, looking for land. He bought 8 hectares, he said, but more powerful farmers, who roam this Wild West territory with rifles strapped to their backs, forced him to sell much of it for a pittance.
Then someone shot and killed de Souza’s 23-year-old stepson in the middle of a village road two years ago, residents said. No one has been arrested. In fact, the new police chief has no record that the crime was even investigated by his predecessor. It is hardly surprising, the chief said, considering that he has only four investigators to cover an area of rampant land-grabbing and deforestation the size of Austria.
“We are being massacred,” said de Souza, 44, who leads the local residents’ association. “We just want to work and raise our children.”
It has been this way for decades, residents say.
Throughout this huge stretch of the Amazon, the state has been virtually nonexistent, whether in the form of police officers or clear records of land ownership, giving way to a brazen culture of illegal land seizures, often at the tip of a gun barrel.
But using a new law, the Brazilian government is trying to impose order on this often lawless territory and, in the process, possibly nip away at a broader global concern: deforestation and the threat of climate change that comes with it.
For the first time, the Brazilian government is formally establishing who owns millions of hectares across the Amazon, enabling it to track who is responsible for clearing forests for logging and cattle — and who should be held accountable when it is done illegally.
“The government will finally know whose land it is and who is responsible for what goes on there,” said Thomas Lovejoy, the biodiversity chair for the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington.
This county in the state of Para is the worst place for forest destruction in Brazil, and environmentalists say they hope that the new law, approved by Brazil’s Congress in June, will help the government finally enforce its official limits on clearing land.
MESSY
But it is a huge and messy undertaking. Clear ownership records exist for less than 4 percent of the land in private hands throughout the Brazilian Amazon, government officials said. Here in Para, officials have discovered false titles for about 129.5 million hectares, almost double the amount of land that actually exists, federal officials said.
And while small farmers like de Souza are pinning their hopes on the law, many larger-scale land holders say they have sacrificed too much blood and sweat for bureaucrats in Brasmlia, the capital, to force new rules upon them.
“Everything we have today was built from our own desire to work,” said Jorgiano Alves de Oliveira, 68, who raises cattle and grows cocoa on about 240 hectares.
The problem began with the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, which invited settlers to occupy the Amazon but required them to clear forests to gain access to land and credit.
Growing criticism of Brazil’s Amazon policies pushed the civilian government of the 1980s to develop laws that, on paper at least, were among the world’s most protective of forests. But with scant presence of authorities to enforce them, the laws did little to stop the widespread grabbing of land.
“This chaos of legal insecurity was the most important basis for the perverse incentives in the Amazon to pillage rather than to preserve or to develop, and constant incitement to violence,” said Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the former minister for strategic affairs who helped develop the new land law.
Under the law, which applies to more than 60 million hectares, the government will award plots up to 100 hectares free to settlers. Bigger plots will be sold at varying prices, with or without public auctions, depending on their size. Those larger than about 2,420 hectares cannot be sold without an explicit act of Congress. So far, settlers have registered about 4 percent of the land singled out under the law, government officials said.
Since the days of the dictatorship, this huge county in Para state, known as Sao Felix do Xingu, has drawn hardy settlers and prospectors in search of cheap land, good soil, a rich array of minerals and rare Amazon fruits.
But notorious criminals have also found refuge. Leonardo Dias Mendonca ran a vast criminal enterprise from Sao Felix, which included a fleet of planes used to deliver weapons to the Colombian rebels in exchange for drugs, before being convicted in 2003.
Disputes in Sao Felix were traditionally settled with “a lot of death,” said Waldemir de Oliveira, the leader of the Sao Felix agricultural association.
“It was the law of the strongest,” de Oliveira said. “Farmers put guards on the perimeter of their land and no one went in. Those that did were told to ‘Get out or die.’”
CONSTANT THREAT
De Oliveira and other residents say the violence is diminishing but is still a major worry. In November, a local bar owner turned the tables on four men who came to kill him in broad daylight, killing all of them, said Joao Gross, an architect in the area.
In Vila dos Crentes, the loud roar of a generator nearly drowned out a recent meeting of residents gathered in a church.
“We are beginning to understand that we have to get engaged in reforestation and stop deforestation,” de Souza said.
But those goals are clouded by the constant threat of violence. Residents said workers on a nearby farm had been carrying out a campaign of violence and intimidation to try to force them out, and even dumped a poisonous chemical from a plane over the area, killing fish and animals.
In May 2007, residents found de Souza’s stepson dead in the road, shot multiple times.
“No one should make enemies here,” said Eder Rodrigues de Oliveira, 26, who said he grew up with de Souza’s stepson. “Everyone here must be humble.”
At the closest police station, more than 160km away, Chief Alvaro Ikeda said killing was common here, touching a stack of files containing information about 11 suspected homicides under investigation.
Witnesses often are too afraid to come forward.
“I cannot guarantee the witnesses’ life,” Ikeda said. “I cannot even guarantee my own life.”
To that end, the police chief decided to live in the police station. He keeps a 12-gauge shotgun and an assault rifle at the ready.
“Here, we do not let go of our guns,” he said.
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