On Feb. 15, 2021, Brazilian cattle farmer Bruno Heller shared a contract with one of his employees, selling the Serra Formosa ranch to him. More than two years later, when Heller was targeted by a major Federal Police probe into land grabbing, it became clear that this was the first step in a sophisticated plan to steal and deforest a large chunk of public land.

The date on the contract, March 16, 2006, was far earlier than the date it was actually drawn up. But there were other issues. According to investigators, the contract was a work of fiction. The 3,000-hectare (7,300-acre) property was never sold to Heller’s employee, who acted as a mere front — a common tactic in the Brazilian Amazon to evade punishment for criminal activities. Heller knew his next steps wouldn’t go unnoticed. He was preparing the ground so authorities would place the blame elsewhere.

Investigations have shown that the rancher’s area of expertise is land grabbing in the southwest of Pará state, at the margins of the BR-163 road — one of the Amazon’s main deforestation hotspots, where large plots of rainforest are cleared for cattle ranching and soy crops.

There, in the municipality of Altamira, near Castelo dos Sonhos district, Heller and his family members registered more than 24,000 hectares (59,300 acres) in their names, an area larger than the U.S. city of Boston.

Authorities concluded that most of it spans unallocated public land, areas that belong to the federal or state governments and haven’t been converted into protected areas, like Indigenous territories or conservation units. Due to this weak protection, these areas attract land grabbers and account for around 30% of the Amazon deforestation.

In Heller’s case, most of his real estate was built over a federal plot called Gorotire and part of it over the land reform settlement of PDS Terra Nossa. An area that should belong to all Brazilians, it was illegally converted into Heller’s private property.

Ione Nakamura, an agrarian prosecutor from the Pará Public Ministry, told Mongabay that private property in Brazil requires proper documentation of the state handing the land to an individual before that individual can sell it to others. She noted that people occupying these areas often don’t have these papers, which means they don’t actually own the land — despite having documentation of the purchase from another individual. “They don’t own the land because it’s public land,” she said. Nakamura added she’s encountered many such cases in her 10 years working in western Pará.

In an email to Mongabay, Heller’s lawyer stated “the family group has exercised legal, free and peaceful possession of family rural property” since the 1970s and that all the circumstances are being clarified before the authorities. (Read the full statement here.)

When the Federal Police launched Operation Retomada in August 2023, Heller hit the headlines as the “Amazon’s largest deforester.” He wasn’t the first to get this title. Fellow ranchers Ezequiel Antônio Castanha and Antonio José Junqueira Vilela Filho have also been targeted as the Amazon’s largest deforesters.

“The competition is fierce,” Girolamo Domenico Treccani, a professor of agri-environmental law at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), told Mongabay.

Besides grabbing areas larger than some municipalities, Heller, Vilela and Castanha share another thing: the professionalism with which they conduct their business. Heller’s strategic planning, described in detail by the Federal Police investigation, would rival the business acumen of many corporate CEOs.

A few weeks after the fake ranch sale was agreed, Bruno Heller’s daughter and right hand, Tatiana Heller, sent a text message to lawyer Rafaele Dalmagro, according to the police. “We’re going to do some work here on the farm, and there will be some problems with IBAMA hahaha,” she wrote, referring to the federal environmental agency. “So we wanted to talk to you to see if there’s anything else we could do to make it better.”

The outcome of Tatiana and Dalmagro’s meeting is unknown; according to Dalmagro’s lawyer, she only “provided legal advice and consultancy [services] focused on environmental and administrative law.” But the work on Heller’s ranch started 10 days later, on March 15, when seven men equipped with chainsaws began to chop down a large chunk of forest.

According to the investigation, the workers were hired through a man known as Mazinho, who charged at least 80,000 reais (about $14,800 at the exchange rate at the time) to coordinate the job. These intermediaries, known in the local jargon as “cats,” are very popular in the Amazon. In Heller’s investigation, the chainsaw operators would later testify that they were working eight hours a day, seven days a week, in the heat of the rainforest.

When agents from the Pará civil police showed up to file a report against the illegal deforestation two months later, the workers were still there — a raid already expected by Heller’s family. “We’ve received the visitors we’ve been waiting for,” Tatiana wrote to Dalmagro at the time.

“We already knew this would happen,” the lawyer answered before advising them to follow orders to show up at the police station the next day: “I know these people. The ones who fined you. There is no problem for you to go, but they’ll demand money,” Dalmagro warned. Her lawyer told Mongabay in an email that “her services were technical and no crime was committed.” (Read the statement here.)

In his testimony at the police station, Heller said the area didn’t belong to him, but to Humberto Luiz Missassi, the employee who had “bought” the land three months earlier, according to the fake sale contract.

According to the Federal Police, Bruno Heller paid 8,000 reais (about $1,480) to the police agents, who, in exchange, committed to making “a very chill report” about the deforestation they’d uncovered in the act. After the deal, Dalmagro gave Heller’s chainsaw operators a green light by saying the family could “continue service without problem.”

By mid-June, 3,134 hectares (7,744 acres) of forest, an area 10 times the size of New York City’s Central Park, had been razed.

Technical consultancy

Professional land grabbers like Bruno Heller rely on many service providers ranging far beyond lawyers, “cats,” and the men sent into the forest to cut down trees. “It is an organized crime that works with task division,” said prosecutor Nakamura. “It is not for amateurs.”

Heller’s main partners were the Dalmagro family from Novo Progresso, a municipality 150 kilometers (about 90 miles) from Castelo dos Sonhos. Besides offering legal advice through Rafaele, the family owns an engineering office run by her father, Bianor Dalmagro, and her brother, Julio César Dalmagro.

The company Guará Agroserviços specializes in georeferencing rural properties, which involves tracing the boundaries of a ranch by its geographical coordinates and transforming the data into a virtual map. “The whole land-grabbing scheme needs this technical member because land grabbing also takes place in a cartographic dimension,” said Maurício Torres, a professor at UFPA who has been studying the dynamics of land grabbing in southwestern Pará for the past 20 years.

Georeferencing is required to enroll properties in the Environmental Rural Registry, known as the CAR. The system was created in 2012 by the federal government to help monitor deforestation, but has since been subverted into a land-grabbing tool.

Since the CAR is self-declaratory, anyone can register a property without having to prove they’re the real owner of the area. The document provides a fake veneer of legality to illegally seized public lands. It’s common, for example, to find seized areas in the Amazon advertised with the wording “CAR and GEO,” meaning they’re registered in the CAR system and have been georeferenced by an engineer like Bianor Dalmagro.

“The problem is that the CAR is self-declaratory, and this system has allowed a lot of dirt in it,” said agri-environmental law professor Treccani, for whom the problem is not the registry itself, but its misuse. “That’s why the CAR is now considered one of the biggest instruments of land grabbing.”

By May 2022, Bianor Dalmagro had registered 530 CARs in the southwest of Pará, 90% of which overlapped with public lands, including protected areas. At least 14 of these entries were in the names of Heller family members; 12 of them are neighboring properties that together form a single enormous plot, according to authorities.

“He [Bruno Heller] seems to rely on numerous members of his family group, people who don’t even live in the state of Pará, but act as ‘fronts’ or oranges in the formal ownership of the rural properties,” stated the Federal Police, referring to the Brazilian slang laranjas (oranges) to refer to fronts.

Guará’s office was first targeted by the Federal Police in 2021, in an investigation of a criminal organization accused of deforesting 15,000 hectares (about 37,000 acres) inside Jamanxim National Forest. According to investigators, the Dalmagros were in charge of registering illegal properties for that group on the CAR system, several of them in the names of fronts.

When Operation Retomada was launched two years later, the Dalmagros’ office was once again raided by police, this time for allegedly supporting Heller’s land grabbing.

In an email sent to Mongabay, Bianor and Julio’s lawyer stated that Guará Agroserviços has provided only technical services, hasn’t fabricated any information, and cannot be held responsible for the actions of its clients. (Read the full statement here.)

The big carpet

The Dalmagros’ services weren’t limited to georeferencing. Two months before the Hellers started deforesting the Serra Formosa ranch, Guará Agroserviços sent Bruno a map showing the area’s division into 11 plots.

It would guide the work of the contractor hired to coordinate the clearing. “The guy who wants to take the job there wants to divide it because he wants to see what the bush looks like, to get an idea [of the work],” Bruno Heller told one of Guará’s employees in a text message.

Once the deforestation was underway, this same employee started sending Heller satellite images of the area so he could follow the work almost in real time. “It seems that the guys have slowed down … I thought it was getting closer to finishing, but there’s still a bit to go, right?” a Guará employee said to the rancher at the beginning of May 2021. According to the Federal Police, Dalmagro’s team “was aware, complicit, and even assisted in the deforestation carried out in the area under investigation.”

Once the trees had been felled, Heller started to plan his next step: burning the remaining branches and stumps. His main concern, once again, was how to go unnoticed by environmental agents.

Heller advised Mazinho, his man on the ground, to set the area ablaze only after nearby ranchers had ignited their pastures, to distract the authorities. “It has to be at the time when the people are going to set [fires] too, right, to confuse them, right?” he said.

Six months after agreeing to the phony sale with his employee, Heller followed the deforester’s playbook and bought pasture seeds to scatter over the burned land; nearly 90% of deforested areas in the Brazilian Amazon are converted into pasture, according to the research institute Imazon. In Heller’s case, cattle raised on his illegally deforested areas ended up in Carrefour supermarkets, according to Brazilian news outlet Repórter Brasil.

“The grass has grown well. It seems to be well-formed,” Heller said many months later. “It’s just the big carpet, everything’s fine.”

The sacred institution of land grabbing

Professional land grabbers like Bruno Heller flourish in the Amazon. Less than one year after Operation Retomada, for example, another raid in the same stretch of Pará state targeted a criminal organization suspected of destroying 15,000 hectares of rainforest.

“There are many Bruno Hellers operating throughout the Amazon,” said Torres, the UFPA professor. Stealing public land is seen as something usual and even positive in some parts of the region, he added. “There is an acceptance of land grabbing as something heroic, which is a vector for development.”

The history of the Amazon’s colonization explains part of this culture. During Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), people from other parts of the country were encouraged to migrate to the rainforest to occupy vast areas of supposedly empty lands, completely ignoring the Indigenous communities who had been living there for thousands of years.

“People have the perception that there is a lot of unowned land in the Amazon, and this creates the mistaken impression that they can get there and appropriate the areas,” Nakamura said.

According to the prosecutor, most land grabbers don’t even intend to farm in the area, but seek to profit from flipping the land to another person. “It is the land-grabbing industry,” Nakamura said, explaining the primary way of adding value to the land is to clear the forest. “Land is valued on the market as soon as it is deforested, in a logic that is completely contrary to the one of climate justice.”

Deforestation is also used to prove that the land has been productively occupied for a certain number of years, a legal requirement for those who want to title the land. Brazilian law currently allows the regularization of areas illegally occupied until 2011, but lawmakers from the agribusiness caucus, a powerful congressional bloc, are constantly trying to loosen this regulation.

Even when land grabbers are caught, like in Heller’s case, it’s rare to see them having to return the areas they stole from the state. “The person will be arrested, fined, but no one will take his land. The crime has paid off, and in a short while he’ll be grabbing a new area,” Torres said. “No one will question the sacred institution of land grabbing.”

Nakamura said the crime is boosted by a combination of political collusion and the dismantling of the public agencies that should act to regenerate these areas. Penalties for these crimes are too lenient, she added. “It would be interesting if this crime were treated like drug trafficking, these crimes that are extremely serious for society and are closely associated with organized crime.”

Heller was arrested on the day the police raided his house in August 2023 and found an unregistered gun and around 340 grams of gold. He was released the next day.The case is still ongoing as he awaits trial. According to the Federal Public Ministry in Pará, if Heller were ever convicted of land grabbing, prosecutors would ask him to return the land to the state.

The federal land agency, Incra, stated in an email that it has opened an administrative procedure to recover the area illegally occupied by Heller in the land reform settlement PDS Terra Nossa.

Banner image: Cattle grazing in the Amazon. Image by Fabio Nascimento for Mongabay. 

A web of front people conceals environmental offenders in the Amazon

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