Last October, when former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil’s national election, environmentalists around the globe breathed a sigh of relief. Under Bolsonaro, who had weakened environmental protections and pushed to open Indigenous lands to industrial exploitation, deforestation within the Amazon had exploded. Lula has pledged to safeguard his country’s rainforests, but, as Spanish journalist Heriberto Araujo says in an interview with Yale Environment 360, the job won’t be easy.
For his recent book, Masters of the Lost Land, Araujo spent 4 years traveling from his home in Rio de Janeiro to Rondon do Pará, a town within the eastern Brazilian Amazon, to grasp how, in lower than 60 years, the most important rainforest on the planet has been transformed into an engine of economic growth. Tracing the story of land rights activist José Dutra da Costa, or “Dezinho,” who, before his assassination in 2000, led a revolution amongst landless peasants, Araujo involves see how a handful of ranchers managed to grab huge swaths of pristine rainforest and why deforestation, violence, and lawlessness remain pervasive within the region.
Heriberto Araujo.
Heriberto Araujo
In relation to reining within the destruction, Araujo tells e360, stopping those holding the chainsaws should be only the start. “The important thing issue can be ensuring the bad guys are unable to learn from global markets. Because if there’s a strategy to launder your deforestation-linked timber or beef and to sell it, you could have an incentive to proceed doing that.”
Yale Environment 360: What made you choose to jot down this book?
Heri Araujo: I had begun making trips to the Amazon to report on deforestation, and at one point someone at Greenpeace told me a couple of town named Rondon do Pará and an activist there whose husband had been murdered — her husband had died in her arms. So I traveled to Rondon and located Maria Joel. Eventually I noticed that this little town allowed me to elucidate the entire story of the Brazilian Amazon. By way of deforestation, all the pieces is pretty recent. It began within the Sixties. And each time I learned a couple of recent person or event related to the phenomenon, I could all the time discover a link to Rondon or Maria Joel.
e360: It should have been difficult to report.
Araujo: It was a sophisticated process. It helped that I had been a reporter in China for seven years. I learned to cope with censorship and other forms of dangers — possibly not the danger of being murdered, but of being expelled from the country. And I learned to avoid announcing my presence as a foreign reporter. I speak decent Portuguese, and I form of appear like a mean Brazilian, so people were relatively open to talking with me.
“Today, something like 45 percent of the land in Brazil is controlled by 1 percent of the population.”
e360: Tell me concerning the progression of Rondon over the a long time.
Araujo: As often happens in that area — the eastern fringe of the Amazon — it began with an infrastructure project. In Rondon, it was an unpaved road, named the Nut Road. There have been several trails that collectors of Brazil nuts would follow to enter the rainforest. Within the late ‘60s, the state began to take into consideration developing a road to permit these nut gatherers to extend their production. As soon as people became aware that it could be possible to assert a plot on the side of the road, they began to maneuver in. On the time, Rondon was a frontier. It was inhabited by Indigenous populations.
The issue got worse when the federal government, the military dictatorship, presented a master plan to develop the entire Amazon Basin. It introduced tax incentives and financing, including some from international lenders, to construct highways and distribute huge areas of land to settlers. It was very improvised. People were fighting for access to the identical land. The Indigenous populations needed to cope with settlers coming in with arms and willing to kill them. I talked to the primary woman to construct a house there. She was 90-something. She told me that she had bought a gun to defend herself from the opposite settlers because everyone was armed. People were reluctant to recall those days, they usually were unwilling to discuss what had happened with the Indigenous populations, because they realized the tribes had suffered. I started to grasp that the official story being told on the town probably wasn’t what had actually happened.
Maria Joel Dias da Costa in front of the farmworker union’s constructing in Rondon do Pará.
Heriberto Araujo
E360: Dezinho, as president of the farmworkers’ union, instituted a series of land occupations that proved very successful. How did that work?
Araujo: One in all the principal problems the Amazon inherited from the ‘60s and ‘70s is extreme land inequality. Today, something like 45 percent of the land in Brazil is controlled by 1 percent of the population. For some years, the federal government wanted to separate areas of the Amazon and provides 30- or 40- or 50-hectare plots to family farmers. But that’s not the model that prevailed. What prevailed was a single landowner owning several thousand hectares. So, you had massive numbers of individuals moving in from eastern and southeastern Brazil, hoping to have a plot but checking out that the land was already controlled by a minority.
There was poor governance, but there was also corruption, bribery, and land grabbing. And the dictatorship [which ruled from 1964 to 1985] was obsessive about communism, socialism, anything that looked like people gathering to try to realize something together. Unions and other institutions weren’t allowed to have a say in the best way things were managed.
After which, abruptly at the tip of the Nineteen Eighties, you had democracy. Brazil managed to implement a recent structure that was a game-changer by way of peoples’ rights. Indigenous populations have the suitable to stay in areas where they were living before the expansion of the frontier. About 13 percent of Brazil’s land, mostly within the Amazon, is the property of Indigenous groups. The structure also allowed for the expropriation of farms that were unproductive. The federal government desired to implement agrarian reform and take poor populations living in favelas and provides them plots in order that they could improve their lives.
“Some argue that Dezinho was too blunt or too outspoken. He told his wife and youngsters that he was willing to die for this cause.”
And then you definitely had the church and the left coming together to say, “Hey, we would like what the Structure says. We wish our share of the country’s wealth.” Ranchers who had grabbed those areas years or a long time earlier, and who perhaps weren’t nervous about getting documents because they didn’t think anyone would ever claim them, suddenly realized they could possibly be delivered to court and will lose their land. That’s while you had this violent clash.
In Rondon, you had the acute concentration of land in a couple of hands — some landowners had 200,000-hectare spreads — and laborers and migrant employees were starting to talk out concerning the conditions they were enduring on those farms. Dezinho suggested to the employees that they team together and occupy a few of the plots of probably the most powerful people. That was a strategy to get the authorities to analyze the ownership of the land. He knew beforehand that those lands had been grabbed and were the product of corruption. The Catholic church played a fundamental role, within the sense that there have been well-educated people, especially lawyers, who could help activists work out the situation. They knew learn how to get the authorities to supply official documents regarding the plots. Within the last 30 or 40 years, greater than 350,000 families managed to get plots in Brazil through land occupations, often following the model by which they’d enter an enormous spread claimed by a single person or company.
Décio José Barroso Nunes on trial for his role within the murder of José Dutra da Costa.
Assessoria de Comunicação do TJPA
e360: That’s quite a legacy for land activists like Dezinho and his wife.
Araujo:. Some argue that Dezinho was too blunt or too outspoken. He told his wife and youngsters that he was willing to die for this cause. But in the event you ask Maria Joel and her children, they don’t consider they’re the winners of the story. They remember the struggle of those years, the suffering and the fear. As a father, I could imagine the pain that those children and Maria Joel may need felt, not only when he was killed, but when she decided to stay in Rondon do Pará. Everyone was expecting that this poor little woman would just get her children and go away. But she decided to proceed Dezinho’s fight, because she realized that unless she continued, he would have been killed for nothing. It was painful to report, because I had to take a seat along with her for hours, going back to issues that I knew were very sensitive, they usually were all crying. But I wanted the reader to grasp that the plain alternative wasn’t the one she made.
e360: How did the lads suspected of being behind Dezinho’s murder, land barons Josélio de Barros and Décio José Barroso Nunes, come to consolidate a lot power?
Araujo: Within the case of Josélio, he had had a tricky youth, and he learned to fight to prevail over other violent people. Violence and criminality helped him consolidate a myth such that individuals were frightened of simply hearing his name. He had a controversial way of doing business, but he saw himself as a pioneer and someone contributing to the event of Rondon.
“If Lula desires to put an end to deforestation, one among the principal things that should be tackled is accountability.”
Nunes was way more subtle. He was a contemporary businessman who decided to do business in a really different way. While the opposite entrepreneurs were extracting the most useful logs and reselling them or selling them to brokers, he set out to manage the entire supply chain. He could sell his timber and his cattle at a much higher price, and that allowed him to reinvest in Rondon and change into the number-one entrepreneur. Today he owns the meatpacking industry in Rondon, which exports meat to Hong Kong and leather to Europe.
Based on the courts, Nunes was guilty of masterminding the murder of Dezinho. But he did so without exposing himself, using a middleman and a gunman. Court documents say that Josélio [who had threatened Dezinho and bragged about killing other people] was involved in crimes himself.
e360: There are glimmers of hope within the book, with criminals getting convicted, however the wrongdoers all the time appear to evade justice in the long run. By way of Brazil’s judicial system, are you hopeful that things are improving?
Araujo: I’m optimistic. I had the prospect to talk with many judges, state and federal. And I saw a recent generation who’ve been educated in democracy and who realize the challenges of implementing the rule of law, they usually’re attempting to fight these items. One judge told me that when he thought he was being threatened by one among the large landowners, his colleagues told him, “Hey, simply ask to be relocated and ignore this issue.” And he said, “I couldn’t do this, because if I did so, I can be accepting that somebody, a rancher, is in a position to dictate the principles. And in a democracy, things don’t work that way.” So I see hope. In some areas, Brazil is a really advanced democracy. But there are other areas, especially by way of governance and the rule of law, where it needs to enhance.
A cattle ranch in Estancia Bahia within the Brazilian Amazon.
Daniel Beltrá / Greenpeace
e360: Scientists say the Amazon could also be reaching a tipping point where it turns into savanna, with far-reaching implications for ecosystems and the worldwide climate. What can Lula, and the international community, do to make sure that doesn’t occur?
Araujo: If Lula desires to put an end to deforestation, one among the principal things that should be tackled is accountability. Brazil has some of the advanced forest-monitoring systems on the planet. They’ve satellites, algorithms, task forces. Once where the deforestation is going on, you send your team and also you get the petty offenders, those holding the chainsaws. But they’re not those it’s essential to get. Because often the system and the courts are responding in such a way that those accountable for the crimes are in a position to remain at large, even in the event that they’re convicted. If you could have the financial resources and good lawyers, you’ll be able to dodge a jail term. Lula needs to carry those that commit crimes accountable — environmental crimes and all of the related crimes, from fraud to corruption to murder.
One other key factor is global markets. In 2022, Brazil will export something like $160 billion in agribusiness, all the pieces from soy to leather to orange juice. There’s no strategy to stop deforestation if there’s a marketplace for illegal products coming from the Amazon. The European Union is about to pass laws that for the primary time will ban, or a minimum of attempt to ban, products related to deforestation. That is a crucial step forward. But China is the principal buyer of Brazilian products. The dimensions of Brazil-China bilateral trade is something like $120 billion per yr. So the important thing issue is to make the sure that the bad guys are unable to learn from global markets. Because if there’s a strategy to launder your deforestation-linked timber or beef and to sell it, you could have an incentive to proceed doing that.
“People on the local level, from Indigenous populations to family farmers, must know there may be financial help coming from Western countries.”
The markets also need to reward those that follow the principles. There must be a way by which, if we’re importing açaí, we pay a premium to those that are producing it in a correct way. [People] are deforesting because they need a job. In the event you offer people a likelihood to have a legal job, that’s an awesome strategy.
Lastly, people on the local level, from Indigenous populations to family farmers, must know there may be financial help coming from Western countries. That was something I learned quite early when traveling to the Amazon. I used to be interviewing illegal loggers, recording with my iPhone, and one guy told me, “You ought to know why I’m doing this? You’ve got an iPhone, right? I assume you could have a automotive. I assume you could have a house. I also wish to have, along with an awesome forest, a likelihood to enhance my life.”
It’s difficult to answer that. I mean, it’s fair. So, the international community needs to seek out a method. My concern is what is going to occur if, for instance, the USA, Japan, the European Union, and India together say, “Okay, we’re going to implement a comprehensive technique to punish offenders and reward those that follow the principles.” But then China, which is the principal buyer, simply ignores it. That can be a challenge. And having lived in China, I can see it happening. I hope that I’m fallacious.
