Speaker 1: Broadcasting from the financial capital of the world Bloomberg eleven
Speaker 1: Frio in New York to Washington, d C. Bloomberg to Boston,
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Speaker 1: dot Com. This is Bloomberg Business Week. I'm Carol Masser
Speaker 1: and I'm Tim Stanabek, a story in the magazine this week.
Speaker 1: The Amazon rainforest is one of the globe's greatest natural resources,
Speaker 1: yet in the past forty years we've lost an area
Speaker 1: as big as California to DeForest station. Some scientists suggest
Speaker 1: the Amazon is now close to a tipping point, at
Speaker 1: which point it will become a savannah rather than a
Speaker 1: rainforest and contribute to climate change rather than helping to
Speaker 1: limit it. Brazil's government, especially under President Jay R. Bosonaro,
Speaker 1: is engaged in an active campaign to open up the
Speaker 1: Amazon to privatization and development, first by turning a blind
Speaker 1: eye as lands are rated and cleared, and then by
Speaker 1: systematically pardoning the people responsible and granting them legal title
Speaker 1: to the stolen lands. Poverty, drives. The calls to develop
Speaker 1: the rainforest, and the surging prices of commodities today are
Speaker 1: fueling schemes, many increasingly violent, to grab even more land.
Speaker 1: What sure is that the destruction is accelerating last days
Speaker 1: of the rainforest. The Brazilian Amazon is approaching the point
Speaker 1: of no return, and the government is fanning the flames.
Speaker 1: By Jessica Bryce and Michael Smith. In April, lawmakers in
Speaker 1: the Brazilian state of Rondonia gathered for a hasty vote
Speaker 1: in a squat cube of a building that had sat
Speaker 1: largely empty for months. Few places on Earth had been
Speaker 1: hit harder by COVID nineteen than Portovello, the concrete capital city, which,
Speaker 1: like everything else in the region, has been carved out
Speaker 1: of the Amazon rainforest. But on that rainy afternoon, while
Speaker 1: the city was in lockdown, the legislators felt they couldn't
Speaker 1: wait any long. Her They needed to pass a bill
Speaker 1: that would slash the size of a state rainforest reserve
Speaker 1: known as Jesse Parana and another park farther south, Once
Speaker 1: a vast expanse of sinuous streams and soaring stands of
Speaker 1: mahogany and Castagna trees, Jesse Paranagh extractive reserve has been
Speaker 1: largely transformed into pasture for cattle. Roads cut into the
Speaker 1: bright red mud criss crossed the reserve, connecting hundreds of
Speaker 1: ranches where one and twenty thousand cattle grays. The ranches
Speaker 1: are illegal. The new law would change that. Their owners
Speaker 1: would no longer have to hide the origin of their
Speaker 1: livestock to sell to big beef producers. More important, the
Speaker 1: land grabbers would have a path to legal title. Almost
Speaker 1: half the state legislators are ranchers or got elected with
Speaker 1: agribusiness money. They'd long wanted to wipe the slate clean
Speaker 1: for their rural base, and now they had support all
Speaker 1: the way up to the presidential palace in Brazilia. In
Speaker 1: a few days, President Ira Bulsonaro would appear at a
Speaker 1: US sponsored climate summit to defend Brazil's record on the Amazon.
Speaker 1: For two years, Donald Trump had been a friend as
Speaker 1: Bolsonaro dismantled protections for the rainforest. President Joe Biden most
Speaker 1: certainly would not be. The lawmaker's plan could fall apart
Speaker 1: if Biden ratcheted up the pressure. Listen well ezekiel Nieva,
Speaker 1: a rancher and lawmaker, told his colleagues this is one
Speaker 1: of our last chances to vote. The bill passed unanimously.
Speaker 1: Coronel Marcos Roscha, Rondonia's governor and one of Bolsonaro's staunchest allies,
Speaker 1: signed it into law on May. It's being challenged in court.
Speaker 1: Jesse Parana, formerly large enough to swallow Mexico City, was
Speaker 1: slashed in size by eight nine percent, leaving only a
Speaker 1: sliver of terrain along its western edge. The other state
Speaker 1: reserve mentioned in the bill, Guajarrat Mirim, lost fifty thou
Speaker 1: hectares or a thousand acres. Two days after the Rhondonia
Speaker 1: law passed. Bolsonaro didn't let down the ranchers. He was defiant.
Speaker 1: When he spoke via video link to Biden and other
Speaker 1: heads of state at the Leader's Summit on Climate Bolsonaro
Speaker 1: praised Brazil's work in protecting the Amazon while pointing a
Speaker 1: finger at the developed world's addiction to fossil fuels as
Speaker 1: the key culprit and climate change above all, he lamented
Speaker 1: the Amazonian paradox. The rainforest is one of the globe's
Speaker 1: greatest natural resources, in both the commodities it holds and
Speaker 1: its role in producing oxygen and cleaning the world's air,
Speaker 1: and yet most of the twenty four million people living
Speaker 1: in and around it are poor. The value of the
Speaker 1: standing forest must be acknowledged. Bulsonaro said there must be
Speaker 1: fair payment for environmental services provided by our biomes to
Speaker 1: the planet at large. The message to the world was clear,
Speaker 1: pay us to leave the Amazon alone, or Brazil will
Speaker 1: find its own way to extract that value. There's ample
Speaker 1: evidence that the government is already doing that. A review
Speaker 1: of thousands of public documents and dozens of interviews with prosecutors,
Speaker 1: forest rangers, and members of Bolsonaro's inner circle show that
Speaker 1: Brazil's government is engaged in an active campaign to open
Speaker 1: up the Amazon to privatization and development, first by turning
Speaker 1: a blind eye as public and protected lands are rated
Speaker 1: and cleared, and then by systematically pardoning the people responsible
Speaker 1: and granting them legal title to the stolen lands. Bolsonaro's
Speaker 1: government didn't invent the practice. It's rooted in the nation's constitution,
Speaker 1: and two presidents before Bolsonaro rammed through changes that essentially
Speaker 1: amnestied about twenty five thousand people who had been squatting
Speaker 1: on public properties. A review of Brazilian land records shows,
Speaker 1: but Bolsonaro and his team want to accelerate the process
Speaker 1: like never before by making it easier for big ranchers
Speaker 1: to get in on the game. All that land that's
Speaker 1: been cleared in the Amazon on the law allowed it,
Speaker 1: says Louise Antonio navan Garcia. Wilsonaro's land policies are That's
Speaker 1: how it happened in the United States. It happened in
Speaker 1: Australia when Colonizer's first went out and took that virgin land.
Speaker 1: All of it came from the state. Navan Garcia, sixty three,
Speaker 1: is himself a rancher. He and his boss came of
Speaker 1: age during the nineteen seventies, when the military government in
Speaker 1: Brazil viewed turning the wild expanses of the Amazon into cities, farms,
Speaker 1: and mines as an imperative of national security. The dictatorship,
Speaker 1: which endured until built military bases, power plants, and a
Speaker 1: network of roadways throughout the thick jungle. Those infrastructure projects
Speaker 1: fueled what's known as the Brazilian Miracle, a period of
Speaker 1: ten percent annual economic growth that still stands out in
Speaker 1: many minds as the nation's golden era. But these were
Speaker 1: some of the darkest days for the rainforest itself. Millions
Speaker 1: of people migrated inland from coastal cities, carved homesteads and
Speaker 1: huge industrial hubs out of the jungle. In forty years,
Speaker 1: the Amazon has lost an area as big as California
Speaker 1: to deforestation. Some scientists suggest the Amazon is now close
Speaker 1: to a tipping point at which it will become a
Speaker 1: savannah rather than a rainforest. It will pump greenhouse gases
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere instead of pulling them down, and so
Speaker 1: called flying rivers, bands of moisture in the air that
Speaker 1: bring rainfall to the continent will dry up. As many
Speaker 1: as ten thousand species may be at risk of dying off.
Speaker 1: Since taking office in January nine, Bolsonaro, a former Army captain,
Speaker 1: has revived the fifty year old world view that Amazon
Speaker 1: development and Brazilian prosperity go hand in hand, and he
Speaker 1: stacked key land management and environment agencies with farmers and
Speaker 1: ranchers who share his vision. Jesse Paranah is the latest
Speaker 1: example of that vision's realization, but it's far from the
Speaker 1: only one. Uniao Bandaranchez, located east of jesse Parana, is
Speaker 1: a dusty blip of a farming community, a cross hatch
Speaker 1: of dirt roads and a few dozen structures, surrounded by
Speaker 1: coffee plantations and cattle pastures. A little more than two
Speaker 1: decades ago, it didn't exist, no roads, no ranchers, just
Speaker 1: rain forest. Today it's something of a model for would
Speaker 1: be land grabbers across Rondonia. Edmo Fererra Pinto, forty nine,
Speaker 1: is proud to take credit for the transformation. Wearing trim
Speaker 1: jeans and a fitted button down shirt, He's intense and
Speaker 1: energetic as he sits in a trendy wine bar on
Speaker 1: a recent evening in Porto Vellu, recounting how he and
Speaker 1: his friends hacked their way through the jungle and divvied
Speaker 1: up land that wasn't theirs. He fancies himself a modern
Speaker 1: day robin Hood who stole from the state to give
Speaker 1: to the poor. I still look back and can't believe
Speaker 1: we've pulled it off, Ferera Pinto says, known as gen
Speaker 1: Jin Fererra Tow was only twelve when he his parents,
Speaker 1: four siblings, and two other families piled into the back
Speaker 1: of an open air fruit truck and traveled the twenty
Speaker 1: five hundred kilometers from coastal Bay Yea estate to Rondonia.
Speaker 1: It was the mid nineteen eighties, and the truck's owner
Speaker 1: made a living, charging a few bucks per head to
Speaker 1: faery migrants such as them to the Amazon. For years,
Speaker 1: government ads on TV and radio and in newspapers had
Speaker 1: promised plots and prosperity for anyone willing to make the journey.
Speaker 1: The Amazon was a land without men, for men without land,
Speaker 1: the ads declared. Millions answered the call to conquer the
Speaker 1: green hell, and the population of Rohondonia swelled from about
Speaker 1: one fifteen thousand people in nineteen seventy to more than
Speaker 1: one point one million in nineteen ninety. Behind the boom
Speaker 1: was the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform or INKRA,
Speaker 1: a government agency the military regime created to speed Brazil's
Speaker 1: industrial revolution. The trip took a week. They sat on
Speaker 1: wooden benches, a tarp offering shade from the scorching sun.
Speaker 1: Like the millions of others making their way to Brazil's
Speaker 1: wild West, they followed a highway built as part of
Speaker 1: a World Bank backed push to thread roads through the jungle.
Speaker 1: Once in Rohndonia, the family moved in with an uncle
Speaker 1: who had made the same track a decade earlier. He'd
Speaker 1: been rewarded with land, but by the time Ferrara Pinto arrived,
Speaker 1: everything had changed. After the military dictatorship gave way to
Speaker 1: a democracy, INCRA was given a new mission. Instead of
Speaker 1: colonizing the Amazon with industrial farms and factories, the agency
Speaker 1: was told to reclaim whatever hadn't yet been developed, dice
Speaker 1: it up into tiny lots, and hand those out to
Speaker 1: Brazil's poor for subsistence farming. It was one of the
Speaker 1: largest social welfare giveaways of all time, but the execution
Speaker 1: was bungled. No longer backed by the power of the military,
Speaker 1: INKRA couldn't enforce its rules. When conflicts over land broke out,
Speaker 1: people rushed to claim whatever plots appeared to be free.
Speaker 1: Wealthy owners stripped of their properties fought in court to
Speaker 1: save their stakes, tying the land up for decades. Documents
Speaker 1: were easily forged or altered to make bogus titles look legitimate.
Speaker 1: A resale black market for the dubious claims proliferated. Some
Speaker 1: falsified documents have now changed hands so many times that
Speaker 1: it's impossible to determine the real owners of some parcels.
Speaker 1: A decade after they arrived, Ferrera Pinto's parents found their
Speaker 1: way to an Incra settlement on a massive farm that
Speaker 1: had been granted to a conglomerate during the dictatorship, then
Speaker 1: confiscated after the company failed to develop the land. Ferrera
Speaker 1: Pinto looked around at people who'd been there for years.
Speaker 1: They were still living in tarp covered shacks without water
Speaker 1: or electricity, while waiting for Inkra to tell them which
Speaker 1: plot was theirs. You see that and it hurts, Ferrera
Speaker 1: Pinto says, I don't think my father ever really let
Speaker 1: it get to him, or at least he didn't show it,
Speaker 1: but me it hurt. By then, he and his friends,
Speaker 1: who'd also come with their parents in search of land,
Speaker 1: had been waiting for most of their lives. When they
Speaker 1: heard about a strip of terrain standing free to the
Speaker 1: east of Jesse, Paranah, they hatched a plan. On December third,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine, which locals still remember as an independence
Speaker 1: Day of sorts, Fererra Pinto and three bus loads of
Speaker 1: people drove to the edge of the rainforest and set
Speaker 1: up camp. They built small huts, then started cutting out roads,
Speaker 1: knocking down trees everywhere they went. It took a year
Speaker 1: to hack through the rain forest to the spot that
Speaker 1: is now the heart of Uniau Bandaranchz, which translates as
Speaker 1: Pioneers Union. Along the way, they recruited topographers, lawyers, builders
Speaker 1: and administrators, all of them eager to fill the vacuum
Speaker 1: left by the government and grab a slice of public
Speaker 1: land for themselves. Fererra Pinto was arrested twice for conflicts
Speaker 1: and invasions, but was never convicted of a crime. In
Speaker 1: the end, he estimates his group settled some eighteen hundred families.
Speaker 1: Current law allows anyone who developed land as recently as
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight to apply for amnesty. The people
Speaker 1: of Unillau Bandaranchez made a bet and it paid off.
Speaker 1: Everaldo Pandolfi is sitting on a brown horse at the
Speaker 1: intersection of two dirt roads, watching his son tend to
Speaker 1: cattle in a fenced in lot. That's all his now,
Speaker 1: Pandolfi says as he points to a sweeping field in
Speaker 1: front of him, where the jagged teeth of torched tree
Speaker 1: stumps still poke out from the tall grass. Behind him
Speaker 1: is a plot he transferred to his daughter. To his
Speaker 1: left is a field owned by his other son. Combined,
Speaker 1: they add up to more than two hundred hectares. It
Speaker 1: used to be pure rainforest. He says, I tore it
Speaker 1: all down. An original settler of Unillau, Bandaranchez Pandolfi, who's
Speaker 1: fifty one, paid two hundred and fifty rays about eighty
Speaker 1: dollars back then to a surveyor working with Gene Jean
Speaker 1: to mark his future farm. From there, he followed a
Speaker 1: familiar playbook. First he went for the majestic hardwoods, hundreds
Speaker 1: of years old and as much as eleven feet in diameter.
Speaker 1: They brought in fast cash from exporters. Then he torched
Speaker 1: the land to clear the scrub before planting a weedy
Speaker 1: grass that is a staple in cattle diets. Eventually he
Speaker 1: built a small house with two fish ponds and a
Speaker 1: pen for pigs out back. In a few more years,
Speaker 1: the burned tree stumps may break down enough to make
Speaker 1: way for the pay day coffee or soybeans. That's the dream,
Speaker 1: a neighboring farmer explains. In the south of the state,
Speaker 1: where big farmers reign, the shift to soybeans is already
Speaker 1: under way. But for that you need investment, irrigation, machinery,
Speaker 1: and fertilizer. The little guys rarely get there. The Brazilian
Speaker 1: Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources. The federal regulator,
Speaker 1: known as IBAMA, knows all about the deforestation, but doesn't
Speaker 1: do much to stop it. A study by the independent
Speaker 1: news site Info Amazonia found that between nine and twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: IBAMA issued finds worth seventy five billion ray eyes, or
Speaker 1: about fourteen billion dollars adjusted for inflation, but collected only
Speaker 1: three point three percent of the total. Pandolfi has himself
Speaker 1: been fined three times, adding up to six thousand ray eyes.
Speaker 1: He doesn't plan on ever paying it. How can i?
Speaker 1: He asks, Sitting barefoot on his porch late in the
Speaker 1: afternoon with a straight shot view of rainforest territory set
Speaker 1: aside for indigenous people, blonde and ten, Pandolfi is unassuming,
Speaker 1: in a little bit goofy, curling his legs beneath him
Speaker 1: as he breaks down how he gets around the finds
Speaker 1: in order to sell his cattle to big beef producers
Speaker 1: whose policies prohibit them from buying from deforesters. I took
Speaker 1: everything out of my name, he says, my car, my house,
Speaker 1: the land. He sells cattle to one of the biggest
Speaker 1: slaughter houses in the area by registering the transactions in
Speaker 1: another rancher's name. It's a well known practice. Laundered beef
Speaker 1: has been found in the supply chains of meat packers
Speaker 1: j b S and Marphyrid Global Foods, and the supermarket
Speaker 1: chain carafor these companies say they vet direct suppliers extensively
Speaker 1: and that such cases represent a very small portion of
Speaker 1: their beef purchases. It would be easy to think of
Speaker 1: Pandolfi as a villain, a callous land grabber who blithely
Speaker 1: destroyed a patch of precious rainforest, But he and his
Speaker 1: neighbors paint a picture in which policy, poverty, and the
Speaker 1: world's insatiable demand for commodities all pushed them toward the
Speaker 1: choices they've made. The only way to get credit from
Speaker 1: lenders is to use cattle or land, even untitled land,
Speaker 1: as collateral. Global markets don't buy enough sustainably produced foods
Speaker 1: such as brazil nuts or assai to keep people afloat,
Speaker 1: whereas the appetite for beef grain in timber seems bottomless.
Speaker 1: In Brazil exported thirty five point two billion dollars of soybeans,
Speaker 1: soybean meal, and soybean oil, and only one eight point
Speaker 1: three million dollars of nuts. Meanwhile, politicians from local council
Speaker 1: members all the way up to the president encourage the destruction.
Speaker 1: A cross check of political databases and Deboma findes shows
Speaker 1: almost one thousand elected officials and political appointees are on
Speaker 1: government blacklists for environmental crimes. It's poverty that truly drives
Speaker 1: the calls to develop the rainforest from both the left
Speaker 1: and the right. Thirty percent of Brazilians live in poverty,
Speaker 1: including thirteen percent to survive on less than two dollars
Speaker 1: a day, according to the World Bank. In the country's north,
Speaker 1: where the rainforest is poverty is especially dire. Clean water, sanitation,
Speaker 1: and electricity are luxuries. Almost one third of the population
Speaker 1: is functionally illiterate, unable to meet day to day eating
Speaker 1: or riding needs. The COVID pandemic became just one more
Speaker 1: item on a long list of scourges that includes malaria, dingey,
Speaker 1: and zica. The commodities boom in the mid two thousands
Speaker 1: brought a wave of prosperity that few Brazilians had experienced.
Speaker 1: The crash a few years later dragged down everyone. Today,
Speaker 1: prices are again surging, and with them schemes to grab
Speaker 1: even more land, Only now the schemes are more daring,
Speaker 1: more organized, and a lot more violent. Carlos Ranhealda Silva
Speaker 1: hikes into the Picas Novos National Park in central Rondonia,
Speaker 1: leaving behind the waist high grass and searing tropical heat
Speaker 1: of a cattle pasture for the cool shade of the
Speaker 1: rainforest canopy. Suddenly he stops, pointing his machete at something ahead.
Speaker 1: The eight armed police officers and three park rangers in
Speaker 1: his entourage freeze waiting for his cue. He motions to
Speaker 1: a lightly trampled patch of grass and farther out a
Speaker 1: faint track across the red dirt a motorcycle he says
Speaker 1: could be someone going after timber or scouting the area.
Speaker 1: The lead ranger breaks off to check it out, trailed
Speaker 1: by two police officers their assault rifles ready. It turns
Speaker 1: out to be nothing, but there's a reason ran Hell
Speaker 1: is on high alert. Informants had been warning that land
Speaker 1: grabbers were massing for another assault on Picas Novos, a
Speaker 1: vast national park that's home to a stunning half moon
Speaker 1: shaped canyon, towering cliffs, and plunging waterfalls. The preserve overlaps
Speaker 1: the territory of the Uru a wau Wau, an elusive
Speaker 1: indigenous tribe that didn't make contact with the outside world
Speaker 1: until the nineteen eighties and still keeps its distance on paper.
Speaker 1: Being both a park and a preserve for indigenous people
Speaker 1: gives a preserve two layers of protection under Brazilian law,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean much, especially these days, ran Hell says.
Speaker 1: At seventy two, ran Hell may be the oldest park
Speaker 1: superintendent in Brazil. His team consists of nine firefighters who
Speaker 1: double as rangers, patrolling a park twice the size of
Speaker 1: Rhode Island. He's been in the job for twenty years
Speaker 1: and fantasizes about retiring and riding the next big Brazilian
Speaker 1: best seller. But the names his bosses in Brasilia put
Speaker 1: up to replace him, he says, are a joke. They
Speaker 1: want to bring in a bureaucrat. The work is physically demanding,
Speaker 1: requiring Ronhell and his rangers to hack their way through
Speaker 1: the jungle and sleep in tents among the poisonous snakes
Speaker 1: and the mosquitos. You need someone who will fight, he says.
Speaker 1: A few years back, ron Heell discovered an especially well
Speaker 1: organized push to claim sixty thousand hectares of park. It
Speaker 1: was led by a local rancher named Stabla Curos, his
Speaker 1: two brothers, and a ninety two year old grandmother named
Speaker 1: Victoria Pando de Sousa. According to a criminal complaint filed
Speaker 1: in federal court, Pando's family had been granted permits to
Speaker 1: tap rubber in the park in nineteen seventeen, and the
Speaker 1: crew argued that those documents gave them the right to
Speaker 1: buy and sell the land. According to the complaint, they
Speaker 1: tried to divide the park land into small plots to
Speaker 1: sell to anyone who wanted a farm. They hired a
Speaker 1: lawyer to create an association and sent people into the
Speaker 1: park to build a sales office. Hundreds of potential buyers,
Speaker 1: mainly impoverished farm workers in the area, jumped at the offer.
Speaker 1: Kiros dreamed of creating a new farming town to be
Speaker 1: named Rio Bonito or Beautiful River. He would be its
Speaker 1: de facto mayor. Federal officials monitoring satellite images in Brazilia
Speaker 1: tipped off run Hill. A skilled logger with a chainsaw
Speaker 1: can cut through more than two hectares a day, and
Speaker 1: Kiros had a whole team. The destruction was spreading quickly.
Speaker 1: For months, Runhell plotted raids from his office in Campo Novo,
Speaker 1: a remote town of about fourteen thousand people where rangers
Speaker 1: and deforesters live side by side. Runhell mustered a few
Speaker 1: police patrols made up of junior officers who volunteered in
Speaker 1: order to make an extra one rays to day. Any
Speaker 1: time they ventured out, they were met with threats and intimidation.
Speaker 1: From now on, it's going to be fire and steel,
Speaker 1: Kiros warned in a voice message that was cited in
Speaker 1: court papers. From now on, you will respect us, or
Speaker 1: you will suffer the consequences. It took twelve hours to
Speaker 1: drive twenty kilometers over rutted and roadblocked trails to where
Speaker 1: the illegal loggers operated, and once they got there, it
Speaker 1: was all too easy for the gang to flee into
Speaker 1: the thick jungle. Once after run Hell and his team
Speaker 1: managed to arrest someone, Kiros and about thirty others ambushed
Speaker 1: them on the road back to Campo Novo. They carried
Speaker 1: molotov cocktails and surrounded the police vehicles, threatening to set
Speaker 1: them on fire if they didn't get their man back.
Speaker 1: According to sworn statements by run Hill, the standoff lasted
Speaker 1: an hour before run Hell and his lead ranger talked
Speaker 1: Kiros down, but they did give up the prisoner. The
Speaker 1: complaint against Kiros and his associates was fild in October
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. They denied any wrongdoing. They were let out
Speaker 1: of jail in the spring before their trial when the
Speaker 1: government emptied cells because of the pandemic. They've been ordered
Speaker 1: to stay far from the park. But if there's one
Speaker 1: thing the past twenty years have taught run Hell, it's
Speaker 1: that there's always someone in the wings, waiting for the
Speaker 1: guards to look away. Under the glaring sun, several watchmen
Speaker 1: with walkie talkies take cover in two shacks. A rope
Speaker 1: dangling between the shacks forms a makeshift gate to the
Speaker 1: Jacunda National Forest, a two d and twenty thousand hectare
Speaker 1: preserve that's become a flash point in the war for land.
Speaker 1: Past the rope, a dirt trail dips into a narrow
Speaker 1: valley where a river meanders under a sturdy bridge built
Speaker 1: with slabs cut from giant logs. Children jump from the
Speaker 1: bridge into the water while two women fish with a
Speaker 1: green plastic net. A half dozen more wash clothes. A
Speaker 1: few meters downstream, the trail climbs back up into a
Speaker 1: camp called Terra Promatida or Promised Land, where two hundred
Speaker 1: families have settled inside the protected jungle. At the entrance
Speaker 1: to the camp, Fernando Santana, twenty years old and eight
Speaker 1: months pregnant, lounges in a white plastic chair inside a
Speaker 1: two room hut with palm leaves covering the roof and walls.
Speaker 1: She has straight brown hair that passes her shoulders, acrylic nails,
Speaker 1: and a calm conviction. In the room next door, a
Speaker 1: mint green dentist's chair and equipment stand idle outside. Men
Speaker 1: are constructing a clinic to house it all. The camp
Speaker 1: sprouted up fast in the five months since the land
Speaker 1: seekers arrived. They've built a church with a loudspeaker and
Speaker 1: a couple of hundred huts identical in design and arranged
Speaker 1: in an orderly grid. There's an internet tower, a generator,
Speaker 1: a school room, a vegetable garden, and showers for the women.
Speaker 1: The men bathe in the river in a cantina. A
Speaker 1: half dozen cooks prepare a lunch of rice means, beef
Speaker 1: and vegetables, and dented steel pots over wood fires. Their
Speaker 1: work schedule is posted on a tree trunk supporting the roof.
Speaker 1: The pantry is packed with food bought in bulk. Asked
Speaker 1: how they pay for all this, Santana says, everyone pitches
Speaker 1: in with whatever they have. When the meal is ready,
Speaker 1: one of the women steps outside and hollers. Dozens of
Speaker 1: residents hurry over, carrying plastic bowls and plates. Santana has
Speaker 1: known many of these people her whole life. She's from
Speaker 1: a small village outside the park, now drained of its people.
Speaker 1: Everyone came here, she says. To the villagers, Jakunda and
Speaker 1: its vast, untouched jungle felt like an affront. For nights,
Speaker 1: they had camped out in the fields at the edge
Speaker 1: of the park, debating strategies while waiting for enough families
Speaker 1: to join them before going in and staking acclaim. They
Speaker 1: figured the more people at the outset, the easier it
Speaker 1: would be to resist eviction, and they were right. A
Speaker 1: few months after they settled in, police rolled up and
Speaker 1: ordered everyone to leave. The residents assembled on the narrow road,
Speaker 1: crossed the log bridge, and met the officer's head on
Speaker 1: at the checkpoint. While the group chanted land land land,
Speaker 1: The outnumbered officers climbed back into their vehicles and drove off.
Speaker 1: Brazil's deforestation machine is complex, and it's impossible to know
Speaker 1: exactly who's directing its movements. A large part is certainly
Speaker 1: driven by the everyday Brazilian who longs for land, but
Speaker 1: that alone can't explain the sheer scale of the destruction
Speaker 1: or the recent sophistication in the attacks. A few decades ago,
Speaker 1: when undesignated government land was bountiful, it was easy for
Speaker 1: a lone farmer to drive some mistakes in the ground
Speaker 1: and claim it as his own. But those plots are gone.
Speaker 1: What's left in Rondonia are protected parks and territories. Environmental
Speaker 1: crime prosecutors now describe a fraud that turns poor Brazilians
Speaker 1: into foot soldiers for criminal gangs, logging companies, and in
Speaker 1: austrial farming operations. It's the stuff of novels, the type
Speaker 1: of book Carlos Ronhel dreams of writing if only he
Speaker 1: could retire. The people on the ground don't have the
Speaker 1: financial wherewithal to pay for the kind of operations you see,
Speaker 1: says former state prosecutor Ida Maria Moser Towada Louise, who
Speaker 1: tried for two decades to stop the land grabs and
Speaker 1: jess Parana before finally giving up and moving away from
Speaker 1: the Amazon. Someone is bankrolling them. At the core of
Speaker 1: the scams is the Byzantine Land Management System INCRA, left
Speaker 1: standing in the chaotic transition from dictatorship to democracy. There's
Speaker 1: a huge discrepancy between reality of fact and the reality
Speaker 1: in our documentation, says Tatiana di Narnia Versiani Ribero, the
Speaker 1: lead federal prosecutor on the Quiros case. Criminal gangs figured
Speaker 1: out how to mind the documentation and exploit the confusion. First,
Speaker 1: the gang's combed through public records looking for loopholes such
Speaker 1: as kirous Is one year old rubber tapping permits. Then,
Speaker 1: with phony paperwork in hand, they recruit desperate families and
Speaker 1: convince them the land is up for grabs. They bust
Speaker 1: them out to remote reserves, promising to pay for supplies
Speaker 1: and food. The claims are always challenged in court, but
Speaker 1: they sit in legal limbo for years. By that time,
Speaker 1: the camps have grown into villages and it gets more
Speaker 1: politically complicated to evict hundreds of families with children. All
Speaker 1: the while, the masterminds are raiding the forest of its hardwood.
Speaker 1: When they're done, they move on to their next target.
Speaker 1: Many of the families can't make it on their own
Speaker 1: and end up abandoning the land they fought so hard for,
Speaker 1: or selling it cheap to big farmers amassing soybean and
Speaker 1: ranching empires. At Terra Promatida, Santana says the camp has
Speaker 1: no leaders. These people just want what others have. People
Speaker 1: arrive daily to join them from all over. One of
Speaker 1: the guards, a man in his early fifties with wire
Speaker 1: him to glasses, journeyed with his family from Venezuela, a
Speaker 1: country in complete collapse. The head cook at the cantina,
Speaker 1: a woman from Porto Vellu named Elis Angela. She didn't
Speaker 1: want to give her last name, says she'd been waiting
Speaker 1: her whole life for this opportunity. As soon as I
Speaker 1: heard about it, I left everything behind, she says. Many
Speaker 1: learned about Terra Promatida from WhatsApp groups. A few made
Speaker 1: the trip after watching the camp's YouTube channel. They planned
Speaker 1: to carve up the jungle into twenty hectare plots for
Speaker 1: family farms, and say they have every right to be there.
Speaker 1: As proof. Santana is eager to show off a crumpled
Speaker 1: steel marker drilled into the earth in the back yard
Speaker 1: of one of the huts and stamped by Inkra tracked
Speaker 1: four mark seven. It may have been part of a
Speaker 1: settlement once or a marker when the land was surveyed,
Speaker 1: but it likely lost any validity when the park was created.
Speaker 1: Across the camp there are signs of cut logs and
Speaker 1: patches of scorched earth. Satellite images compile held by Global
Speaker 1: forest Watch show hot spots of tree cover loss all around.
Speaker 1: Santana acknowledges the jungle is being stripped of its hardwoods,
Speaker 1: but says the settlers aren't the ones doing it. There's
Speaker 1: a big sawmill nearby. She says they're using us as
Speaker 1: an excuse. Navan Garcia Bolsonaro's land policies are at the
Speaker 1: Ministry of Agriculture is a stout, fast talker with a
Speaker 1: bushy mustache and a penchant for khaki hunting vests. On
Speaker 1: a June day, he walks into a barbecue for ranchers
Speaker 1: at the ji Parana Fairgrounds in Rondonia, and the crowd
Speaker 1: gathered under a long ramada whoops and cheers. The dirt
Speaker 1: parking lot is brimming with four wheel drive Toyota Highlixes
Speaker 1: and Ford Rangers, and next to it a row of
Speaker 1: ten four quarters of beef slowly roast over a bed
Speaker 1: of coal. In the crowd are politicians, mining executives, and
Speaker 1: ranchers who have expanded into solar power and construction in
Speaker 1: one of the world's most unequal society. These these are
Speaker 1: the guys who've made it big, who have built empires, who,
Speaker 1: as Navan Garcia tells them, carry Brazil on your backs
Speaker 1: and sustain it with your sweat. Some boast of properties
Speaker 1: in the tens of thousands of hectares, which is possible
Speaker 1: only if they were granted during the dictatorship, or piece
Speaker 1: together from failed smaller farms, or are untitled land grabs.
Speaker 1: These are the guys Bolsonnaro wants to boost. Under legislation
Speaker 1: the President introduced in twenty nineteen that's now making its
Speaker 1: way through Congress, industrial scale farmers may for the first
Speaker 1: time be able to get in on the legal land
Speaker 1: laundering and win clean titles to public tracks that were
Speaker 1: originally intended for settlements or reserves. The proposal opens the
Speaker 1: door to more farmers sitting on properties between about three
Speaker 1: hundred hectares and hundred hectares all combined, that's an extra
Speaker 1: sixteen million hectares of Amazon land that could soon be titled,
Speaker 1: including properties that were defour stedd as recently. As the
Speaker 1: most dangerous change, however, according to Rawni Rougau, a land
Speaker 1: management and environmental policy expert at the Federal University in Mina,
Speaker 1: gier Ey's is that the government wants to make it
Speaker 1: a no check process, meaning INCRA officials will no longer
Speaker 1: be required to go out into the field and inspect
Speaker 1: the properties before issuing titles. They'll rely only on satellite images.
Speaker 1: It works for the land grabbers to not have INCRA
Speaker 1: doing its job, Rugau says it becomes an incentive to
Speaker 1: keep stealing land. As Special Secretary of Land Affairs Navan
Speaker 1: Garcia is leading the charge to rally support for the bill.
Speaker 1: With no previous political experience other than a failed congressional
Speaker 1: run in two thousand six, he's managed to amass an
Speaker 1: almost cult like following among his fellow ranchers and an
Speaker 1: impressive level of influence with the president. The two bonded
Speaker 1: during bolsonaro'een campaign over a shared love of guns and
Speaker 1: disdain for foreign governments they say are threatened by Brazil's
Speaker 1: agricultural prowess. Behind it all, all the lies about the
Speaker 1: Amazon is a dirty war fueled by geopolitics and hypocrisy.
Speaker 1: Navon Garcia says no other country in the world has
Speaker 1: the potential to boost production the way Brazil does and
Speaker 1: that scares people. Arguments such as this one are a
Speaker 1: common thread at the lunch in g Parana. One rancher
Speaker 1: talks of a powerful milk and cheese industry in southern
Speaker 1: Brazil that doesn't want competition from the north. Another says
Speaker 1: American soybean farmers, unhappy that their Brazilian counterparts picked up
Speaker 1: the slack and undermine the U. S IS trade war
Speaker 1: with China, are slandering the country. They say the situation
Speaker 1: in the Amazon isn't portrayed fairly abroad, that the burns
Speaker 1: aren't as bad as the media makes them out to be.
Speaker 1: That the best way to preserve the forest is to
Speaker 1: put private property owners with resources in charge of it.
Speaker 1: When you have a title and you can say this
Speaker 1: property is mine, that alone can put an end to
Speaker 1: illegal fires. Rotia, Rondonia's governor, says in an interview at
Speaker 1: the barbecue. Among the sponsors of The event was the
Speaker 1: Association of Rural Landowners of Rondonia, whose president is Adelio Barrofaldi,
Speaker 1: a beef tycoon who owns about forty thousand hectares across
Speaker 1: several farms. A few days earlier, on a trip to
Speaker 1: a nine thousand hectare property that was once federal public land,
Speaker 1: he explained how he acquired it eight years ago from
Speaker 1: smaller farmers who had abandoned their holdings. Now he's building
Speaker 1: a three million rayal feed lot able to hold fifteen
Speaker 1: thousand head of cattle. Central to the private property argument
Speaker 1: is that owners will have the incentive to enforce Brazil's
Speaker 1: Forest Code. The law requires property owners to preserve eight
Speaker 1: percent of their land while allowing for the rest to
Speaker 1: be deforested. In Barofaldi's case, that's more than thirty thousand
Speaker 1: hectares of jungle. He says he pays to maintain, employing
Speaker 1: guards to protect it from bands of invaders trying to
Speaker 1: tear it down. I pay for security and the taxes
Speaker 1: on that land, which doesn't earn me a cent of profit.
Speaker 1: He says. There had been an uptick in violent conflicts
Speaker 1: on private property, and a few days before the barbecue
Speaker 1: the National Guard had descended on Rondonia for a ninety
Speaker 1: day mission. Navan Garcia and his ranching backers draw distinctions
Speaker 1: when talking about who's doing the land grabbing. There's a
Speaker 1: big difference, they say, between farmers and ranchers moving in
Speaker 1: on public land and leftist radicals targeting private property, whether
Speaker 1: titled or not. Navan Garcia was sited in a two
Speaker 1: thousand and five congressional investigation for alleged ties to militias
Speaker 1: that hunted down squatters on farms in his state, sam Paolo.
Speaker 1: He denies the accusations and was never charged with a crime,
Speaker 1: but he vehemently defends the use of force when asked,
Speaker 1: a person's land is his life, it's his family's life,
Speaker 1: he says. If someone invades your property, you have the
Speaker 1: right to react and stop that invasion, even finish him off.
Speaker 1: About one hundred and sixty seven thousand claims for titles
Speaker 1: are awaiting an incre decision. As many as twelve percent
Speaker 1: of them involved farms not currently allowed by law, making
Speaker 1: up sixty of the area being claimed. Almost thirty percent
Speaker 1: of the land shows no signs of use before, meaning
Speaker 1: the law change isn't about giving security to families who've
Speaker 1: been on the properties for decades. Says it's about amnestying
Speaker 1: more recent and bigger invasions. Once INCRA approves the title,
Speaker 1: the owner essentially buys it from the federal government. In
Speaker 1: a municipality in Para State, for example, a hectare from
Speaker 1: INCRE costs as little as forty six ray eyes, It's
Speaker 1: more than one hundred times that in the open market.
Speaker 1: Barrofaldi is requesting title to four hundred and seventy acres
Speaker 1: of government land west of Porto Velu. An INCRE database
Speaker 1: shows some two hundred politicians in the Amazon have also
Speaker 1: filed paperwork for titles to public land, including Rondonia State
Speaker 1: Assembly member who voted for the Jesse Paranah bill. At
Speaker 1: least two of the outstanding claims are for properties inside
Speaker 1: national parks. One member of Brazil's National Congress even listed
Speaker 1: an unregulated property in his electoral declaration. The analysis of
Speaker 1: title claims is far from complete, mainly because data on
Speaker 1: properties is so hard to come by. Bolsonaro's government has
Speaker 1: used the pandemic as cover to clamp down on access
Speaker 1: to public information related to land grabs, and Rondonia State
Speaker 1: has been among the most aggressive in locking away its documents.
Speaker 1: What is sure is that the destruction is accelerating. In
Speaker 1: recent years, Bolsonaro put the Ministry of Agriculture in charge
Speaker 1: of the environmental regulator, cut firefighting and management budgets, reversed
Speaker 1: plans to protect large sUAS of indigenous lands, and proposed
Speaker 1: opening up indigenous lands to mining. Roughly ten thousand, five
Speaker 1: d square kilometers of rainforest were destroyed in the first
Speaker 1: six months of one on course to eclipse eleven year high.
Speaker 1: A study released in July by Brazil's National Institute for
Speaker 1: Space Research shows that parts of the Amazon where the
Speaker 1: burns of the worst have flipped into net carbon emitters,
Speaker 1: contributing to climate change rather than helping to limit it.
Speaker 1: Many of the land grabs go far beyond what even
Speaker 1: Bolsonaro's administration has proposed pardoning. The thinking is that even
Speaker 1: though greenwash titles for say a national park may not
Speaker 1: be in the pipeline now, it's only a matter of
Speaker 1: time before they are, with no real consequence or enforcement,
Speaker 1: why not stake the claims now. What's astonishing is that
Speaker 1: these are self confessed crimes. Raja says. People go in
Speaker 1: and say I'm seizing this land. And they're rewarded for
Speaker 1: it because the lawmakers keep moving the line forward. Gamar Lopez.
Speaker 1: Manuel walks a half kilometer from the rutted dirt road
Speaker 1: along a rare patch of forest still standing in jesse Parana. Manuel,
Speaker 1: who was fifty four, bought the one hectare terrain in
Speaker 1: two thousand and five Ford Rays from a man who
Speaker 1: had no right to own it in the first place.
Speaker 1: It was a deal sealed with a handshake and no documentation.
Speaker 1: He says he had no idea it was a state
Speaker 1: reserve when he arrived, but then again, no one ever
Speaker 1: told him to leave. He's cleared a small pasture where
Speaker 1: his neighbor graze his cows for twenty five ray eyes
Speaker 1: ahead per month, but his focus is on the forested
Speaker 1: part of his land. This is where my dreams begin.
Speaker 1: Right here, Manuel says, there's space for a grove of
Speaker 1: three thousand cocow tries to earn him a good living.
Speaker 1: He figures, plus chickens, pigs, and milk cows for his family.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want to do it in the typical way
Speaker 1: by illegally clearing and burning it all, not least because
Speaker 1: he'd like to avoid getting fined by Ibama, but his
Speaker 1: dreams have been elusive. They don't have loans for cocaw,
Speaker 1: only cattle, he says, and cattle can't be produced in
Speaker 1: the jungle. Cocao, yes, but not cattle. Lawmakers pushing to
Speaker 1: develop the Amazon often say they're trying to help people
Speaker 1: such as Manuel, but they've been saying that for decades.
Speaker 1: While inequality has grown worse. Without government programs to help
Speaker 1: people work the land sustainably, chances are Manuell will eventually
Speaker 1: clear cut it all or abandon it. Already in the
Speaker 1: eastern half of jesse Parana. Already in the eastern half
Speaker 1: of jesse Parana, farms are being consolidated into industrial sized ranches.
Speaker 1: Most small farmers end up selling to the big ones.
Speaker 1: Manuel says, we can't survive. They can. That story in
Speaker 1: the magazine this week. Find more in the current issue
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg Business Week magazine. It is on newsstands, online
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot com and on the Bloomberg Terminal, and
Speaker 1: be sure to to listen to our Bloomberg Business Week
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Speaker 1: Global News, and you can also see me at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Quick Take available at Bloomberg dot com, slash qt, and
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Speaker 1: I'm Tim Stanobeck and I'm Carol Masser. This is Bloomberg