How 3 Landowners Engineered The Destruction Of 15,000 Acres Of Amazon Forest & Made $20 Million

[hatrack]

ALTAMIRA, Brazil — The warehouse donated to house the Castelo dos Sonhos farmers’ market for local growers has stood empty for nearly 15 years. Opened in 2008 and spanning 480 square meters (5,170 square feet), the farmers’ market on the outskirts of the city of Altamira in Brazil’s Pará state operated for just seven months; there simply wasn’t enough açaí berries, honey, fruits or vegetables to fill its tables. Since then, the building has sat empty, in stark contrast to the bustling pace of the lumber dealers, beef wagons and soybean trucks plying the BR-163 highway, and the constant buzz of chainsaws, whose wary operators emerged from the rainforest when we drove along the dirt roads that run parallel to the highway.

“There’s nothing to sell because nobody wants to be farmers anymore,” says a local who asks to remain anonymous. “Some of the people who used to farm or gather food are cutting planks in lumber mills; others are working for miners or cutting down trees.” In this part of Brazil, the fear of speaking out against the big landowners is founded on a very real danger; a common threat here goes: “If you don’t want to sell the land, fine. The widow sells it cheaper.”

It was here, alongside the stretch of BR-163 running between the districts of Castelo dos Sonhos and Vila Isol in southeastern Pará, that the destruction of the largest continuous swath of Amazon Rainforest to date in Brazil took place. An area larger than Manhattan, this clear-cut was identified by MapBiomas, a research collective that tracks land-use changes via satellite imagery and has used its platform to gather and validate rainforest destruction alerts since 2019. The program draws from different monitoring systems, including the DETER system at Brazil’s space institute, and the deforestation alert system at Imazon, a research center that promotes conservation and sustainable development in the Amazon.

EDIT

Not even two federal task forces against major deforesters in the Amazon were able to intimidate those illegally appropriating land in southwestern Pará — the Castanheira operation in 2014, aimed at a group led by Ezequiel Antônio Castanha, and Rios Voadores in 2016, which attempted to break up a ring led by Antônio José Junqueira Vilela Filho. Instead, this region was the stage for the notorious “Day of Fire” in 2019, when a group of farm owners set hundreds of coordinated illegal fires, resulting in an international outcry. In 2020, Greenpeace would identify “new deforestation and land dealing practices” in the region, characterized by the fact that they were carried out “over extremely short periods of time.” Responsibility for Brazil’s single-largest case of deforestation — which consumed some 3.5 million trees and killed more than 200 species of animals per hectare — falls on the shoulders of three men, according to IBAMA, Brazil’s federal environmental protection agency, and SEMAS, the Pará State Secretariat of the Environment.

EDIT

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/02/the-20m-flip-the-story-of-the-largest-land-grab-in-the-brazilian-amazon/

[CrispyQ]

1. Men in their 40s & 50s.

Do they have families? Children? Grandchildren? I ask the same question of Joe Manchin & all the repubs in congress, & all the oil executives, everyone who puts profit over our planet.