Jane de Oliveira set out to protect the world’s largest rain forest from the corporate interests that are burning it to the ground. Then the armed men showed up.
The farmers arrived before dusk, setting up camp in the tall grass. There were 25 of them, and for months they had been attempting to occupy a sprawling farm known as Santa Lucia that had been carved from the Amazon rain forest. All around them, the once-impenetrable jungle had been reduced to barren pastures—part of an orchestrated campaign by large landowners and multinational corporations to slash and burn their way deeper into the Amazon. Every week, another 40 square miles of the world’s largest rain forest—what has long been the most important natural bulwark against climate change—go up in flames. Last year, the fires grew so large that they were visible from outer space.
Here on the ground, in the fading daylight, the farmers strung up hammocks and built a small cooking fire. They were led by a former schoolteacher named Jane de Oliveira. Broad-shouldered and pale-skinned, with a wide face and high cheekbones, Oliveira belonged to the sem terra—a Brazilian social movement that seeks to turn idle farmland over to those who will actually work it. Evidence suggested that Santa Lucia’s owner had created the farm by stealing public land; Brazil’s constitution required that it be turned over to those “without land,” to make it productive.
While the courts debated the matter, Oliveira had led several occupations of the farm, setting up crude encampments built of scrap lumber and tarp. For the farmers, it was a chance to escape the plantation-like working conditions that have long dominated Brazilian agriculture in the Amazon. They dreamed of carving out small plots of their own, where they could grow rice and raise chickens. Unlike the ranchers and miners who were setting fire to the rain forest or clearing it, they would live and work in the jungle without destroying it. Beneath the smoke blanketing Brazil, the sem terra, along with the country’s indigenous peoples, are the Amazon’s last line of defense.
By occupying the farm, they were also putting themselves in the line of fire. A month before they arrived at Santa Lucia, hired assassins had killed nine villagers who refused to leave a part of the rain forest coveted by loggers. Less than two weeks later, a group of cattle ranchers armed with rifles and machetes had entered an indigenous reserve and tortured members of the Gamela tribe. The message was clear: Those who did not make way for big business would be removed by force. Oliveira had received death threats, and her husband had been shot at by a security guard hired by Santa Lucia’s owner.
Like many of the sem terra, Oliveira had watched for decades as the rain forest steadily vanished.
Located more than 1,500 miles from Rio de Janeiro, the Santa Lucia farm occupies a remote and lawless area about 30 miles west of the BR 155, a highway that cuts through what was once dense, lush jungle. In the 1990s, as a single mother in her early 20s, Oliveira had moved to the region and found work as a teacher in the nearby municipality of Xinguara, the traditional home of the Kayapo and Parakana tribes.
The area was undergoing a ghastly transformation. A new railroad had been carved through 550 miles of rain forest to the north, and land speculators had descended on the region to clear-cut the Amazon. Indigenous farmers were stripped of their land, driven off at gunpoint or tied up and forced to watch as their huts were burned. Wealthy landowners used enormous threshing machines and expensive fertilizer to grow soy, which they loaded onto ships destined for China, while small farmers tilled the ground with wooden plows, eating the beans and yucca they grew. The number of cattle in the region soared from 22,500 to 2.2 million—the country’s largest herd. Today nearly 20 percent of the region’s rain forest has been destroyed, and the top 2 percent of Brazil’s landowners hold more property than all the land in England, France, Germany, and Spain combined.
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