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The Amazon raiders
Squatters seize government-owned land by force in hopes of cultivating
jungle for soybean crop, cash


BY KEVIN G. HALL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

August 22, 2004

RIOZINHO DO ANFRIZIO, Brazil - A stranger armed with a 12-gauge
shotgun marched in and set up his tent inside Francisca Soares' little
dirt-floored house on the bank on this remote tributary of the Amazon
River.

The stranger is a land squatter, and his presence is the beginning of
the end for a jungle teeming with monkeys and macaws. If past
experience is any guide, within a decade the jungle that surrounds
Soares, a 70-year-old woman with glaucoma, will be transformed into
millions of acres of soybeans growing in fields as tame as those in
Kansas or Minnesota.


These 32,000 square miles of rain forest, called Terra do Meio, or
Middle Lands, are the last ecologically pristine zone in the Amazon's
eastern basin. But some officials think their diverse wildlife is
doomed by development.

"What you're seeing is how the process of deforestation and occupation
begins," said Tarcisio Feitosa, head of the Altamira office of the
Pastoral Land Commission, a social welfare arm of the Roman Catholic
Church.

"The first thing is you expel the local inhabitants ... with
intimidation and the power of weapons, and then you open some paths in
the forest to claim your areas," he continued. "Then comes slave
labor, plus deforestation, plus the illegal sale of wood, illegal
logging. It is a coming together of ills."

Squatters take land by force

The squatter who seized Soares' house works for a mysterious Dr. Celso
- his last name is unknown to locals - who is betting that a dirt road
through the thick jungle about 30 miles away will soon be paved. If
that happens, soybeans will be much easier to market, and land values
will soar. In the meantime, Dr. Celso's squatters are taking over
jungle land by the cheapest possible means: gunpoint.

"It fills me with tremendous sadness," said Herculano Porto de
Oliveira, 60, a neighbor of Soares whose father is buried on land
recently posted with a squatter's "No Trespassing" sign.

It's hard to imagine the remoteness of the Amazon jungle area that's
drawing speculators. The nearest streetlight and doctor are about 300
miles away in the shabby riverfront town of Altamira. Getting there
takes two days in a boat with an outboard motor. By the ferries that
Soares and most other people use, it takes a week.

Yet teams of squatters, whose only claim to the land is their
audacity, are marking plots for private sale. Buyers can find Middle
Lands rain forest on the Internet, if they're not put off by Web sites
stating that no land title comes with the sale.

The ads stress that the land is flat. Translation: It's ideal for
soybeans, which need flat land for mechanized planting and harvest.
There seem to be lots of takers: Acreage worth $50 a year or two ago
now sells for $200.

It doesn't seem to matter that the land is government-owned and slated
to become an ecological preserve. What matters is that the new
squatters are heavily armed and unopposed.

In April Brazil reported that, between August 2002 and 2003, jungle
equal in area to Vermont was lost to development. Since the mid-1970s,
an area more than 1 1/2 times the size of California has been
deforested.

The planet's ability to absorb carbon dioxide and resist global
warming also is threatened by the Amazon's clearing, as are species of
plants and living organisms yet undiscovered.

Laws routinely flouted

The Middle Lands are already being lost, warned Steve Schwartzman, an
Amazon expert for Environmental Defense in Washington.

"It is business as usual on steroids...." he said. "It's very clear
that cattle ranching, soy production, logging are pretty much going to
take over" if the government doesn't intervene.

Marina Silva, Brazil's environment minister, acknowledged the problem.
"There is no doubt that this is a challenge," she said, stressing that
the government is committed to ending squatting and land theft. A new
satellite surveillance system provides real-time data on where
deforestation is occurring, she said.

Brazil has strict environmental laws, but they are routinely flouted
because the government lacks the funding to enforce them adequately in
the vast Amazon, an area the size of Europe.

In the Middle Lands, the problem appears to be worsening. "This whole
region is now under invasion," said Afonso Alves da Cruz, 68, employed
by Brazil's equivalent of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Cruz is
an outspoken critic of the soybean revolution in the Amazon, a
position so embattled that he has gotten death threats.

Provoking the dispute is the proposed paving of a 1,071-mile federal
road known as BR 163, on the western border of much of the Middle
Lands. The dirt road, which leads to the Amazon port at Santarem, is
virtually impassable during the rainy season, from November until
June.

"If they pave it, the price of land will go up. If it is paved,
movement [of grains] will triple," predicted Helio Franco da Cruz, a
soy farmer who bought nearly 1,000 acres of titled land outside
Santarem in 2002.

Brazil, which exported less than 6 million tons of soybeans a decade
ago, aims to export 20.5 million tons from its 2003-2004 harvests.
That ranks it second to the United States, which exported 24.5 million
tons.