Delay in land reform fuels new wave of settlers and violence in the Amazon

NOVO PROGRESSO, Brazil — Julia had been sleeping on the ground under a canvas tent, in an encampment surrounded by a dozen armed men. Still, the 26-year-old mother felt it was worth it. “It was worse over there,” she told Mongabay, referring to her hometown in Maranhão state, while looking after her 2-year-old daughter.

Julia had sold her few belongings, including some chickens, to pay for the 2,000-kilometer (1,200-mile) trip to Novo Progresso, in Pará state. It was a decision made on the spot after receiving a message on WhatsApp. “A friend said that Incra [Brazil’s land reform agency] was going to distribute land here,” she said.

The dream of owning a piece of land also brought José, 54, to the settlement set up 12 km (7.5 mi) off the BR-163 highway, which connects Brazil’s bread-basket state of Mato Grosso to ports on the Tapajós River in Pará. He left his family in Porto Velho, Rondônia state, and traveled three days by motorcycle to join the movement.

“We’ve always worked on other people’s land, and half of what we harvest we have to give to others,” José said, adding his family has been dreaming of their own land since the 1980s, when they migrated from Minas Gerais state, some 2,000 km away in southeastern Brazil, here to the Amazon. “It would be a chance to provide comfort for my family.”

Julia and José, who asked that their real names not be used for safety reasons, are among the ripples in the tsunami of migration bearing down on the Brazilian Amazon. In a region where a handful of ranchers control areas the size of large cities, grassroots organizations have long advocated for the federal government to adopt a land distribution agenda. When left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2023, many hoped he would revive the land-reform agenda. However, it didn’t happen.

“Everyone in Brazil has done this [land occupations] because they realize that the government won’t do it,” said Rosangela Alves dos Reis, a member of the Pará chapter of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), a crucial land-reform organization in Brazil created 40 years ago. “Even if the government wanted to carry out agrarian reform, it doesn’t have the power to do so because there is a caucus totally opposed to it,” she said, referring to the strong agribusiness lobby in the Brazilian Congress.

“In the 1990s, there was an increase in demand for land distribution in the Amazon, and now we are experiencing a new cycle, especially in the southeastern region of Pará,” Ceres Hadish, a member of MST’s national committee, told Mongabay.

Across Brazil, Incra has registered some 145,000 families living in settlements where they expect to be granted a plot of land. That’s an 81% increase from 2022, when 80,000 families were in this situation. Pará is the state with the highest number of these occupations, with 29,000 families, many of them backed by MST and also by smaller organizations. That’s the case of Julia and José’s encampment, organized by an association created in January 2024 in Castelo dos Sonhos district, on the edges of the BR-163.

The information that the group was planning a new land reform settlement spread across Brazil through WhatsApp messages, and in a few months the association had more than 500 members. Most are from Castelo dos Sonhos in Pará, but there also families from states like Maranhão, Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Goiás.

“Land and gold are assets everybody wants,” Francisco das Neves Ferreira, the association’s president, told Mongabay in our first interview in April 2024. Better known as Goiano, a reference to his Goiás home state, he wants Incra to establish a new settlement in the region for the associated families. After several unfruitful meetings, however, he decided to guide the group to an existing settlement nearby, PDS Terra Nossa.

However, conquering the longed-for land is never simple when it comes to Pará state, which has the most land conflicts of any state in Brazil. It didn’t take long for a group of large black trucks to arrive, carrying a team of 14 armed men wearing bulletproof vests and uniforms from a security company called Maxford.

“When I arrived, I thought the place was very nice. I even thought we could mark out the plots,” José told Mongabay. “But then came the oppression, and we were surrounded.”

The private security company was hired by two wealthy ranchers who, according to Incra, have been illegally occupying lands inside PDS Terra Nossa. One of them is Ari Friedler, who lives in Paraguay and claims the area where Goiano’s group decided to settle down. In 2008, Friedler’s area was embargoed by the federal environmental agency, IBAMA, for illegally clearing more than 2,500 hectares (about 6,200 acres) of forest.

“[Friedler’s ranch] is 100% within the PDS Terra Nossa, and this area was considered an irregular occupation,” Antônio José Ferreira da Silva, Incra’s agrarian conciliator, told Mongabay while visiting the encampment in mid-November 2024.

Friedler’s lawyer, Manoel Malinski, told Mongabay in a WhatsApp message that his client would only speak in court. Mongabay also met the rancher’s brother, Ademar Friedler, at the site, but he declined to comment.

The other rancher is Friedler’s neighbor, Bruno Heller, targeted by a major Federal Police raid in August 2023. Known as one of the Amazon’s foremost deforesters, Heller is accused of grabbing an area of 24,000 hectares (59,300 acres) — larger than the city of Boston — 7.9% of which lies within PDS Terra Nossa. Heller’s lawyers didn’t respond to Mongabay’s request for information.

Courts have already ordered both ranchers to leave the PDS area, but the rulings haven’t been fulfilled yet.

“We have the absurd situation of families with profiles of land reform recipients occupying a land reform settlement that is illegally in the hands of large landowners,” said Maurício Torres, a researcher at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA) and a specialist in land conflicts. “And I don’t doubt, in this stupid logic, that this population will be criminalized,” he told Mongabay while visiting the encampment.

In May 2025, members of Goiano’s group accused him of stealing money from the association and closing a deal with Ari Friedler behind their backs. Pará’s federal prosecutor Thaís Medeiros da Costa told Mongabay she is aware of the claims, but didn’t clarify measures taken on the case. Mongabay tried to reach out to Goiano, but he didn’t respond to our messages.

Covering 150,000 hectares (nearly 371,000 acres), an area the size of the city of São Paulo, PDS Terra Nossa was created in 2006 to host 1,000 families. Eighteen years later, however, only 300 have a plot of the land. According to Torres, land grabbers have occupied 97% of the area: “It’s a shameful situation.”

A dangerous fight

“It’s more tense than we thought,” Silva, the Incra official, whispered upon arrival at the gate to the encampment, guarded by the armed men. By then, Goiano’s movement had been under siege for three weeks. And if Silva — a quiet and discreet man with 18 years of experience in land conflicts — said the situation was tense, there seemed to be real cause for concern.

The gate was closed, splitting the group in two. Some settlers stayed inside; if they left, they wouldn’t be allowed back in. Another party stayed outside, hoping to get in. “We’re very concerned because we know that this region is very tense. People don’t play games around here,” Silva said with a half-smile, while trying to negotiate with the security company a way of assembling both parties of settlers together to organize a general meeting.

The siege would only be lifted 10 days later by the Federal Police, which executed a court ruling ordering the gate to be opened. Meanwhile, Pará’s Federal Public Ministry opened an investigation into the security company. After the police intervention, tensions eased, and the group could finally get together. In December 2024, Incra officials went to the encampment and registered 494 people so they could officially enter the land reform queue.

The risks, however, remained. “The powerful land grabbers are dangerous,” Cícero do Espírito Santo, 68, a member of the Castelo dos Sonhos Rural Workers’ Union, told Mongabay. “If people try to invade an area, they come out under fire. All the areas where we created settlements were taken back from farmers, and they don’t like that.”

This stretch of the BR-163 highway runs between the municipalities of Altamira and Novo Progresso, and since the 1980s the rainforest on either side of it has been occupied by people searching for gold and timber. Over the years, more areas were deforested to open space for cattle and soy, which boomed when the road was paved in the 2000s. Land values skyrocketed, deepening violence over property.

“It’s a region where land is controlled by violence,” Torres said. “Whoever gets a piece of land is not the one who has it registered at the land registry office; it’s whoever is strongest and manages to expel the weakest.”

PDS Terra Nossa, where Goiano’s group decided to camp, is at the epicenter of this turmoil. In 2018 alone, five people were killed here in disputes involving the land reform settlement, and the few settlers remaining live under constant threat.

“They almost caught me,” settler Maria Márcia, who leads the resistance to land grabbers inside the PDS, told Mongabay while pointing to the trail she used to escape her most recent ambush. “My luck was that I ran and hid in the woods. But that day, I thought I was going to die.” In 2020, she almost died after a driver pushed his truck over her car on the BR-163. “‘You have to die, you wretch,’” the truck driver told her right after the crash, according to Márcia.

“In more than 20 years of research, I have rarely come across a group as violated, terrorized and besieged as the PDS Terra Nossa settlers,” said Torres, who has been following the case for years.

Incra conceived Terra Nossa as a sustainable development project, or PDS by its Portuguese acronym. The agency planned it as a place for settlers to practice family farming on their plots while collectively managing a large area of forest to extract fruits, nuts and oils. The PDS model flourished in the Amazon in the 2000s as a way to provide plots for landless people while preserving the rainforest. Land grabbers, however, saw them as an easy target and began advancing over the PDSs, expelling settlers or convincing them to sell their plots (which is forbidden by Incra).

“We were very happy,” Márcia said, recalling the few years before the arrival of the land grabbers. “It was all forest here. The women walked in the middle of the forest, harvested chestnuts and açaí, and then sold them. We didn’t go hungry.” Today she has to rely on food donations to get by.

In 2023, 45% of the PDS Terra Nossa was covered by pasture for cattle ranching, according to the civil society network MapBiomas. The situation is even worse at PDS Brasília, a 19,800-hectare (49,000-acre) settlement also just off the BR-163, where 75% of the land has already been converted into pasture.

PDS Brasília has 379 plots, originally one for each family. “But there is a concentration of plots within the PDS,” Raimunda “Mariana” Rodrigues, president of the women’s association at PDS Brasília, told Mongabay on her house’s balcony. “There are people who have 10, 20, 50 plots.”

Some families were expelled by the land grabbers. Others sold their plots after failing to make a living from the land without government support. “There’s no point in Incra just throwing the people there,” Mariana said, adding there needs to be more financing and technical assistance from the federal government.

PDS Brasília was established in 2005, covering an area larger than the New York borough of Brooklyn. It had been taken back from a single rancher, and as with PDS Terra Nossa, the settlement’s history is marked by violence, starting with the trade unionist after whom it was named. Bartolomeu Moraes, better known as Brasília, was killed in 2002 after years of opposing powerful local ranchers. He was kidnapped, tortured, and then shot 12 times in the head.

“Blood poured here to make it a family farming settlement,” Mariana said. “We don’t want this to become a ranch again.”

The long wait for land

On Oct. 20, 2024, Rafael received a phone call from his mother: “‘Rafael, we’re leaving at dawn today to go there. Everyone is leaving. Let’s do this?’” He didn’t think twice: packed a few clothes, grabbed some food and a small stove, and headed to the camp with the other association members.

“There is a huge demand for land here in the BR-163 region,” Silva, Incra’s agrarian conciliator, told Mongabay after being greeted with cheers and shouts of joy at his arrival at the settlement.

Rafael, who lives in Castelo dos Sonhos district, spent years studying to work the land, first by becoming an agricultural technician and then enrolling in an agronomic engineering course. However, financial struggles forced him to work as a mechanic while nurturing the dream of growing apples, grapes and vegetables. “People with very little financial power can’t buy a piece of land,” said the 35-year-old, who asked that his real name not be used for safety reasons.

Many of those living in the encampment migrated to the Amazon decades ago, fleeing poverty or domestic violence and dreaming of owning land. But they were not the only ones crossing the country searching for opportunities.

Landlords, mainly from southern Brazil, also took the opportunity to expand their production over the cheaper lands of the Amazon. This migration started mainly in the 1960s and continues today, with soy producers from Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, coming to Pará recently after seeing their lands devastated by floods and droughts.

“The rich guys took everything,” said José, whose family came from Minas Gerais in the 1980s. “Incra was supposed to call my father [to give him a plot of land], but it never did.”

The flock of landless people is left with two options. Some venture deeper into the forest, searching for cheaper land, and perpetuating a vicious circle that continues the relentless expansion of the agricultural frontier at the cost of destroying the rainforest. Others end up on the outskirts of urban centers, where they struggle to make ends meet. “Many homeless people are living on the streets,” said Rosangela Alves dos Reis, the MST member. “All these people are waiting for us to resume land occupations so they can have a place to plant and live.”

The situation worsened after the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), whose far-right policies promoted the predatory occupation of the Amazon. That period marked the lowest point yet of the land-reform policy that had been gradually abandoned over the decades. “The Bolsonaro government has denied agrarian reform,” said Ceres Hadish from MST’s national committee.

The number of landless families who were successfully settled, which according to Incra ranged from around 45,000 per year under Fernando Henrique Cardoso (president from 1994-2002) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (whose first administration ran from 2003-2010), dropped sharply to around 7,000 under Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), less than 4,000 under Michel Temer (2017-2018), and just 530 under Bolsonaro.

Lula returned to the presidency in January 2023, amid expectations he would resume the land reform policy. By December 2024, Incra told Mongabay that 52 settlements had been created and 12,360 families had received a plot of land. MST, however, said fewer than 3,500 families had been placed in new settlements as of February 2025. According to the organization, Lula’s administration is inflating its numbers by counting as new settlers the regularization of plots in existing settlements.

“We’re entering the third year of talks with the government, but we’ve actually had very few deliveries,” Hadish said, adding the paralysis of Lula’s government comes amid a new surge in demand for land.

Besides Incra’s official figures, the increase in land demand is also confirmed by data from the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), an organization affiliated with the Catholic Church that advocates for campesino rights in Brazil. The number of occupations of lands claimed by landless people or traditional communities rose from 46 in 2019 to 124 in 2023, while the number of encampments organized by landless people to claim the creation of settlements tripled from six in 2019 to 18 in 2023. In 2024, both measures had fallen to 78 and 10, respectively. The number of land conflicts in Brazil peaked, however, considering the last decade (1,768), with the Amazon accounting for 56% of cases (995).

In early May 2025, a group of peasants was expelled by gunman when trying to occupy a previously land-grabbed area in Southern Amazonas. According to the local news outlet Varadouro, the area had been taken back by Incra, sparking hopes it’d be used for land distribution but the agency has failed to create a new settlement so far.

“There are a lot of people pushing for new spaces for encampments and land occupations. So there is a tendency for the fight for land reform to gain momentum,” Hadish said. The dream of receiving a piece of land, according to MST, is seen by many families as an opportunity to improve their lives far from the expensive large cities.

“We are being sought out a lot by people who have nothing,” said Reis from Marabá municipality, where MST organized two new occupations in 2024.

In January 2025, MST published a letter denouncing what it called a “paralysis in land reform,” and demanding the Lula administration settle the more than 100,000 families waiting in encampments.

There’s no shortage of land to be distributed. The Amazon has 56.5 million hectares (139.6 million acres) of undesignated public lands, the equivalent of the size of Spain. These areas belong to the federal or state governments and haven’t been converted into Indigenous territories or conservation units, for example.

As such, they lack legal protection, which makes them prime targets for land grabbers, who clear the forest to raise cattle, grow crops, or simply flip for a profit. “There is no better business than selling public land, and the biggest driver of deforestation is land grabbing,” said Maurício Torres, the land conflict researcher. “These lands must be taken back and designated for land reform.”

In PDS Terra Nossa, the last Incra survey identified 80 illegal occupations. In March, the state Federal Public Ministry filed a lawsuit to force Incra to finalize the administrative processes against dozens of invaders so that courts can rule on their eviction.

Once that happens, preference for settlement will go to the families who should have already been settled in the PDS but were prevented from doing so by the invaders. That means those like Julia, José and Rafael will have to go to the back of the queue.

“The campers have to be aware that there are 700 families waiting as well. So it’s not as simple as they thought,” Incra’s Silva said. “It’s a bit frustrating for us too. But it’s reality, and there’s no way around it.”

Banner image: Goiano, in front, started the land reform movement and has been the subject of death threats and corruption claims. Image by Fernando Martinho/Mongabay.

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