The distribution of public land has, at one time or another, been official government policy in almost every Amazonian jurisdiction. Some epochs and jurisdictions favoured small holdings over large estates and vice versa, but the entire process, and the system it spawned, is characterized by inefficiency, political patronage, class privilege and corruption.

Across the region, hundreds of thousands of small family farmers have been waiting for years to obtain documents validating their land claims. Those fortunate to have obtained certified titles often pay a modest bribe to move their documents along a bureaucratic chain of requirements, formularies, taxes, charges, validations, surveys, etc. A certified title materially impacts the price of real estate, and people are willing to pay speed money, particularly if there is a document that is lacking or does not conform to a specific regulatory ruling. Their claim may be wholly legitimate, but without the coima (also known as ‘propina’), the document can languish for weeks, months or even years. These types of mundane transactions are seldom reported in the press, much less to judicial authorities.

More flagrant abuses of the land tenure system are perpetuated by land grabbers who manufacture property deeds using several well-known fraudulent schemes. These professional thieves sell the newly minted landholding to third parties, who are fully cognizant they are purchasing a misbegotten asset. The land grabber, the functionary and the buyer are all engaged in a type of ‘grand theft’, because the amount of money is substantial, including not only a bribe, but also the sale price and the true value of the land. The damage is compounded if the parcel is claimed by an Indigenous group or traditional community.

This type of land fraud is very common in jurisdictions where local elected officials collude with their constituents to expedite land grabbing. This is certainly the case in Chiquitania (Santa Cruz, Bolivia) and the Ucayali Province (Loreto, Peru), where Mennonites and Interculturales are engaged in yet another scramble for public lands. It is also occurring along BR-230 and BR-319 in southeast Amazonas. Support by local officials is often flagrant, such as when the prefect of Novo Progresso (Pará) collaborated with migrant settlers to organize a dia do fogo on landscapes adjacent to BR-163, where settlers burned illegal forest clearings on land within the INCRA-sponsored Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentável (PDS) Nossa Terra.

Invariably, buyers will profess to have purchased the property in ‘good faith’ and, not infrequently, will prevail in court because their documents have been validated by a state agency. This type of legal manoeuvre, which underlies hundreds of thousands of land transactions across the Pan Amazon, can emerge as a problem years or even decades after the land was originally occupied. For most landholders, this is a low-risk liability that can be ignored because it is so common. Nevertheless, it occasionally creates a public relations nightmare for high-profile business ventures, as recently discovered by Brazil’s largest producer of palm oil, Agropalma.

The Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (INCRA) is the government agency charged with certifying the legal status of rural properties in Brazil, a task that remains incomplete after multiple initiatives to modernize its administrative procedures. The agency has been involved periodically in corruption scandals, such as the one organised by Jader Barbalho between 1987 and 1988. In 2014, federal prosecutors staged Operação Terra Prometida, which led to the arrest of eighty individuals in Mato Grosso who had participated in a conspiracy to appropriate ~100,000 hectares of public land. The scheme attempted to distribute 100-hectare plots within the Projeto de Assentamento (PA) Itanhangá, an INCRA collective landholding intended for landless rural workers. Instead, the plots were given to middle-class farmers who were ineligible because they already owned land or had incomes above the limits defined by law. Among the beneficiaries were two brothers of the agriculture minister at the time and a prominent politician affiliated with the Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB).

That scandal motivated the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU) to conduct a broader audit of INCRA’s operations, which revealed that potentially a third of all historical land grants made through its settlement programmes were fraudulent. Evidence of wrongdoing was obtained by comparing national identification numbers of the individuals who had received land with other information. The audit found that more than 1,000 politicians and 140,000 civil servants had improperly received public lands, while more than 37,000 parcels were awarded to individuals who were dead at the time of their application. The accumulated opportunity cost to the nation was estimated at approximately R$ 135 billion. Unsurprisingly, land fraud was most prevalent in the Legal Amazon.

The graft that plagues the smallholder programmes should be evaluated in the context of the influence peddling that accompanied the land grants of the 1970s and 1980s, when the military regime awarded business magnates and political allies enormous tracts of land. Presumably, these transactions were legal, and many tracts were purchased from development corporations or state land agencies that existed before and parallel to INCRA. Land grants or purchases of that magnitude do not happen without political influence. They may technically be legal, but they are still corrupt.

Banner image: Where rainforest meets the sea, in Brazil. Image by Rhett A. Butler.

“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).

To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.