Who arrives first to the Amazon: the State or land-grabbers?
Land-grabbing is recognized today as one of the key vectors for deforestation and violence against local and traditional populations in the Amazon. A handful of actions, though less than desirable and necessary, undertaken by the federal government in the context of the Action Plan for Deforestation Prevention and Control in the Amazon Region may create a new prospect for challenging the existing state of chaos in Pará where the illegal land market thrives in the Amazon.
In the last 20 years, over 500 people, among rural workers, settlers, small-scale farmers and leaders of the movement for land reform and human rights, were assassinated in Pará, according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), the social justice arm of the Brazilian Catholic Church. In the same period, around 117.3 thousand square kilometres of forests - over twice the size of the state of Paraíba - were clear-cutted in the state. With no apparent relation, the two sad figures are part of the same socio-environmental tragedy seen in several places in the Amazon. Rural violence and environmental devastation are interconnected, and feature a common cause: the omission, consent and even encouragement by the government for the illegal trade of stolen land.
After breeding in the shadow of mistaken public policies and laws which have been in force for decades (some of them still in force today), land-grabbing, where land speculators (grileiros) invade public lands, force out local dwellers, clear-cut trees and then pay off officials to gain property titles, is recognized today as one of the key driving forces of deforestation and land conflicts, resulting in violence against local and traditional populations . A series of actions taken by the Lula administration based on the Action Plan for Deforestation Prevention and Control in the Amazon Region however, signal to a new angle in facing the land chaos in Pará. The state is considered an emblematic case of the illegal land market. Changes in the situation were signaled by the creation of 19.5 million hectares of Federal Protected Areas (PAs), land surveys at critical conflict locations and the institution of new legal regulation measures. Read more.
Initiatives are being developed as a result of dialogue between the Ministry of the Environment (MMA) and Incra (National Institute for Agrarian Reform and Colonization). The investments and the scale of the actions are not enough to reverse the state of administrative disorganization and the inefficiency of official land agencies – among them, Incra itself – but point to a greater presence of the State in the Amazon region. A few decisions and administrative measures taken by the Justice system in Pará are also driving the battle against the generalised land fraud existing in the state today.
Suspension and cancellation of fake cadasters
According to the MMA, until late October, approximately 66 thousand Rural Property Registration Certificates (CCIRs) claiming possession of lands throughout the Amazon were still blocked. Protocol for standard registration applications is also suspended. This procedure will be maintained until all interested parties present the exact geographic coordinates of their land boundaries obtained through georeferencing. When it is established that there is a plot of land superimposed with State lands, the certificate will be denied, or, if the administrative procedures for titling and registration of ownership are already ongoing, cancelled. Request of the CCIR is the first step in land regularization procedures. The protocol is necessary for obtaining rural credit, registering real estate and banking and commercial transactions.
The restriction was instituted by a joint Decree n° 10, of December 1, 2004, by Incra and the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA) and is enforceable in 370 municipalities of the Legal Amazon. The norm states that the registration of possessory claims to land, totaling more than 100 hectares in the Amazon Region, will be accepted upon presentation, by the squatter, of georeferenced data, in order to verify if the area is located on public lands. In the case of already registered land, the squatter will also be required to show a descriptive memorial for validation. One of the objectives of this norm is to speed up reintegration processes of irregulary occupied lands and reverse environmental damages caused by squatters. The CCIR protocol was one of the documents being used to snatch public lands and to obtain authorization concessions for forest managment, deforestation and the transportation of wood - often illegally extracted. Once the norm was published, Ibama (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Renewable Resources) suspended and cancelled several forest management plans throughout the Amazon; it also refused to release plans in areas lacking the land titles. The measure caused serious havoc, the revolt of the timber industry in Pará and a political crisis between the sector and the federal government (read more). According to Incra’s internal report, protocol requests have dropped drastically throughout the Amazon region after the decree was issued.
“The decree was a well-thrown punch to land-grabbers”, celebrates Edaldo Gomes, general coordinator of the Directorate of Cartography for Land Administration Ordinance [Diretoria de Ordenamento da Estrutura Fundiária]. He believes that Decree n. 10 may be considered a cornerstone against land speculation in the Amazon. “In addition to this instrument, a greater presence of Incra’s and Ibama’s technicians, the Federal Police and the army has contributed to the drop in deforestation”.
However, for José Heder Benatti, professor of Land and Environmental Law at the Pará Federal University and Girolamo Trecani, legal counselor for the Federation of Rural Workers in Pará, also a professor of Land Law at UFPA, the measure has a limited effect on combating deforestation, because those who need a CCIR and credit to produce in the Amazon are well-meaning homesteaders - the family farmers settled under the Land Reform Policy.
The land-grabber clears the forest with his own resources and without authorization. In most cases, he doesn’t cultivate or harvest the land and the documentation that he possesses or fabricates is fraudulent. For instance: public deeds of purchase and sale transactions between private individuals in non-compliance with the legal framework of land agencies, legal sentences recognizing land inheritance unregistered at Incra or Iterpa, land titles processed at public registry offices with imprecise or false information, possession of claimed property registered in public registry offices as titled property, a number of requests for titling and registration of ownership without valid proof of ownership, among a hundred other frauds. Consequently, this measure will only be effective if it is integrated with actions for environmental monitoring and surveillance in order to detect deforestation in real-time.
Another norm recently edited by the government for land regularization procedures for tracts of land up to 500 acres is the Law nº 11.196/2005, authorizing Incra to make concessions for land use or even to grant definitive title deeds, for the effects of the land reform policy, without requiring the need for public bidding. This year, Incra complemented regulation on the issue through two normative instructions that define procedures for the legalization of possessory claims to ownership in public lands of up to 100 hectares and between 100 and 500 hectares. The Constitution allows the allocation of federal land up to the limit of 2.5 thousand hectares; beyond this limit, issued only with authorization from the National Congress. Incra, however, hasn’t regularized land between 500 and 2.5 thousand hectares.
“The idea behind these norms is very good, but, in practice, Incra’s registration processes don’t work and there isn’t a system to monitor the land registry offices. Therefore, they continue to operate without concrete effects”, says Girolamo Trecani, professor of Land Law at the Pará Federal University (UFPA). He explains that in Pará, in most cases, land transactions take place regardless of norms and requirements for a great deal of documentation. According to the law, for example, in every property purchase, Incra’s folio number should be cited, but, according to the professor, this does not happen.
Trecani believes that the Lula administration is not very different from previous ones because it has not managed to organize and gather information on lands, dispersed among Incra, Interpa and the legal system, to seriously analyze the problem. “Who does this land chaos serve? This is the key question.” The expert defends that a commission composed of state agencies and civil society should be formed to collect and analyze this information and try to make a more consistent assessment of the issue. He believes that the recent decision by the Internal Affairs Division of the District Court of the Interior of the State [Corregedoria das Comarcas do Interior do Estado], which blocked registration of all rural property over 2.5 thousand hectares in Pará, opens a new perspective toward changing the situation. Taken in June, the measure by chief judge Osmarina Onadir Sampaio Nery forces people who claim possession of property to present their documentation to Iterpa and prove its authenticity. Registry Offices in Pará were also obligated to send to the State Court information on all suspicious transactions. Osmarina affirms that a generalized real estate fraud exists in Pará. She reminds us to bear in mind that the Federal Constitution has always defined limits for the size of areas that could be transferred to private individuals in the Amazon and they have been systematically disregarded.
Administrative Limitation
On February 17, 2005, the federal government “restricted” 8.2 million hectares along the margins of the Cuiabá-Santarém highway (BR-163) from any activity that involved clearcutting of trees. The measure was instituted as a new instrument of the “temporary administrative limitation” in order to prevent any significant environmental impact until a plan, for the destination of local public areas, was concluded. The plan included a study for the creation of new PAs, the sustainable forest district and land reform settlements. Until then, the region was considered one of the main frontiers of deforestation and land speculation in the Amazon, mainly because of the announcement that the road would be paved. Administrative limitation is being considered a modern land ordinance mechanism because it allows the state to plan the occupation and destination of areas of key importance for conservation.
The measure is part of the environmental package launched by the government in response to the series of assassinations of rural workers and social movement leaders that took place last month, particularly the death of the missionary Dorothy Stant, in Anapu, 700 km southwest of Belém. At the time, 5.2 million hectares in federal PAs were created throughout the Amazon. A task force, comprised of Federal Police agents and the army, was also sent into the region. The Bill on public forest management, approved in February of this year (Law nº 11.284) was also sent to Congress at the time.
Exactly one year later, as a result of the interdiction along the BR-163 highway, seven new PAs were created in the region and the Amazon National Park was expanded, amounting to another 6.4 million hectares of protected areas in the country. The new PAs were incorporated into the first Sustainable Forest District, instituted together with the PAs, containing an area of 16 million hectares, with 5 million being allocated for forest management. The aim of the district is to implement policies that promote the sustainable use of forest products and services. However, any concrete action for the implementation of the Forest District has not been felt by the local population.
In January, the government started using administrative limitation once again, this time in an area of 15.4 million hectares along the Manaus-Porto Velho highway (BR-319). The road was also considered a new potential zone for the expansion of deforestation after the announcement that it would be restored in July of 2005. Soon thereafter, the work was stopped by order of the Federal Justice of Amazonas for lacking environmental licensing. Soon afterwards, in November of 2005, the restriction that prevented the continuation of the work fell through. The work remains the target of a judicial and political battle, with local businessmen and politicians on one side and environmentalists and the Federal Public Attorney’s Office on the other. The Ministry of the Environment guarantees that by the end of the year the studies for the creation of over 10 million hectares of PAs in the area should be concluded. Also according to the Ministry of Environment, in the following months two more forest districts should be created: one with 28 million hectares in Serra do Carajás, Pará, and another with 35 million hectares in Vale do Rio Purus, Amazonas.
Land survey in Pará
Incra signed an agreement with the Army two years ago to carry out a land survey at a few critical conflict locations in Pará. The initiative is yet another measure announced as a response to the murder of Sister Dorothy and is being conducted to collect socio-economic data on land possessors, to start the land regularization procedures of their tracts of land and to propose new settlements. The audit is being finalized in Belo Monte and Bacajá, in the Transamazonic region, with a total area of 1.5 million hectares. The nun was murdered exactly at the site of the project known as the Hope Sustainable Development Project in Bacajá.
The same work is being carried out at the area under administrative limitation, along the BR-163 highway, in Pará, around the counties of Itaituba, Novo Progresso, Castelo dos Sonhos, Santarém and Bel Terra. The survey is also being conducted in southern Amazonas, in the Humaitá region. According to Edaldo Gomes, R$2.5 million were spent last year in research and this year R$ 7.1 million. Altogether, 40 teams composed of technicians from Incra and the Army are working throughout the Amazon to carry out the surveys. According to Incra’s Land Administration Ordinance Directorate, up to 150 thousand peaceful settlements of up to 500 hectares may be regularized.
For Benatti, the considerable advancement of the present administration lies on land ordinance, that is, on the effective and substantial destination of conservation land, in dynamic frontier areas with social conflict in the Amazon, creating protected areas and normatizing land occupation in the region. However, land ordinance is not a synonym for land regularization, which is the next step towards an effective public management of territory and natural resources. To this end, the government still owes effective measures. Trecani agrees with Benatti when he says that one does not carry out land regularization through decree alone; ground action is necessary, as well as the State’s presence in the region. According to Ibama’s Land Regulating Unit of the Ecosystems Directorate, the annual budget for land regularization of protected areas, which used to be R$ 38 million, is now R$ 900 thousand.
Land-grabbing and deforestation
Conservative estimates by the federal government suggest that around 100 million hectares have been illegally appropriated throughout the country, almost 12% of the total. In 2000, the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA) canceled the registration of 1,899 large rural properties because their alleged owners did not present Incra with updated information. Only 40 million hectares, of the 124 million hectares of the state of Pará, are officially registered in the National Rural Registration System, i.e., 67.8% of the state’s territory has no official control, or, if the land was registered, the process was done fraudulently. The study Public Land Grabbing in the Brazilian Amazon [A Grilagem de Terras Públicas na Amazônia Brasileira] was drafted by the Amazon Environmental Research Institution (Instituto de Pesquisas Ambientais da Amazônia - Ipam), commissioned by the Ministry of Environment and coordinated by Professor José Benatti of UFPA, and a member of Ipam.
The relation between illegal appropriation of land and deforestation in the Amazon is historic. From the beginning of the 20th century, successive legislations demanded that colonists or smallholder farmers applying for property titles demonstrate actual occupancy of the claimed property, such as having a house on the land or an agricultural activity like cattle ranching. For decades, clearing the lands to prove the legitimacy of these claims, was common practice. In the 1970’s, large agricultural and colonization projects, promoted by the military government, led to mass migration to occupy the region. One of the requirements was to prove that the land was productive and actually being occupied in order to have access to the legalization process, tax incentives and official loans. To date, much of this procedure remains, and transfering dominion of public lands to legalize informal rights of possession requires proof of residency and economic production on the location. More recently, however, this demand is accompanied by the mandatory fulfillment of environmental law.
The Federal government admits that around 24% of the Amazon territory is in the hands of private owners, around 35% are protected areas (Indigenous lands and PAs) and between 40% and 45% are unoccupied public lands. The existence of a huge stock of land, with no legally recognized property rights, and the idea that the Amazon would be an open frontier for occupation attracted, over the last 30 years, criminal gangs specialized in illegal appropriation of public lands in the region. From then on, a wide range of real estate scams were used to transform simple ‘acquired occupany’ documents, leasing contracts or land use concessions of a couple of hectares of land, into apparently authentic titles for large landholders, some containing tracts of land the size of European countries. The schemes adopted by these groups range from hiring gunmen, with the connivance of corrupt police, property registry officials and land agency employees, who are protected by politicians and businesses, to investments made by large companies.
One of the ways, so typical in Pará, of trying to establish some kind of legitimate right to illegally occupied land is still herding cows into deforested areas to pasture to give the appearance of a productive enterprise . In general, the invasion of these areas results in conflict with early colonists and traditional and indigenous populations who have inhabited the area for decades or even centuries, but who in the end are intimidated and driven off the land. Often these group leaders are assassinated to quickly make room for the large estate owners to occupy the territory – with virtually no reaction from the government. The term “grilo” (cricket) or “grilagem” derives from the practice of leaving a property title or another type of forged document with the insect, so that the animal eats the paper and drops its excrement on the document, rendering it yellow and appearing to be an old and possibly authentic property document. ISA, Oswaldo Braga de Souza.
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