A rural worker was found dead on Wednesday (29) in the town of Labrea, Amazonas state, northern Brazil. Nicknamed Jacozinho, José Jacó Cosotle, 55, left his house last Sunday morning (26) to pick up chestnuts, but didn't return home. He was a resident of the Marielle Franco encampment. His body was found next to a motorcycle with a gunshot wound to the chin. The case is under investigation.
On January 14, another worker was killed in the region. Small farmer Francisco do Nascimento Melo, known as Cafu, was shot dead in the rural area of the municipality of Boca do Acre, Amazonas state, next to Labrea. His son, a 14-year-old teenager, saw the scene. Four days after the murder, farmer Valdir Silva, or Valdirzão, turned himself into the police.
Hours later, while the suspect was giving testimony at a police station, Civil Police Chief Paulo Mavigner posted a video on his Instagram profile, sharing general information about the case. “Valdir Silva is responsible for the killing of Cafu, a fact that happened amid an agrarian conflict and which generated big repercussions in the city of Boca do Acre,” he said.
Boca do Acre and Labrea are two of the 32 municipalities in Amacro, an area between the states of Amazonas, Acre and Rondônia, where agribusiness activities are expanding, particularly cattle ranching. From 1985 to 2023, the Amacro region lost approximately 7 million hectares of native vegetation, which was converted to agricultural use, according to data from the Amazon Institute for Man and the Environment (Imazon).
It is also a region with high rates of deforestation and a concentration of agrarian conflict cases, such as those that killed Jacozinho and Cafu.
In Boca do Acre alone, the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT, in Portuguese), which monitors this type of violence, recorded 27 conflicts over land in 2023 involving river dweller communities, extractivists, squatters, and rubber tappers. Considering the entire region, these figures are alarming.
“In 2023, Amacro concentrated 10% [179] of all land conflicts registered in Brazil, and 26% of all assassinations that took place in the context of conflicts in the countryside,” highlights the pastoral's 2023 Report on Conflicts in the Countryside.
Of all the 31 murders related to conflicts in the countryside that year, eight happened in Amacro, five of which were caused by land grabbers, according to the CPT. In 2021, of the 60 registered conflicts in the countryside in the state of Acre, 51 were within the Amacro region.
Professor Julia Adão Bernardes explains that violence against residents of the area is part of the process of expanding agribusiness frontiers. “The Brazilian agribusiness frontier is born from the conflict over land with the populations in the areas that will be affected by commodity plantations [raw materials produced on a large scale for export, such as soya],” says Bernardes, a researcher in social geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, in Portuguese). “Initially, they sanitize populations, pushing them to imminent risk, murdering their leaders and threatening their way of life,” she says.
On January 4, 2023, Patrick Gasparini Cardoso, a resident of the Tiago Campin dos Santos encampment located in Porto Velho, capital of Rondonia (a municipality that makes up Amacro), was murdered by gunmen. The area where he used to live was being reclaimed by the company Leme Empreendimentos Ltda, whose owner is a well-known land grabber in the region. Days after the murder, two other residents of the area were also assassinated by military police in a repossession action.
In 2022, six squatters – known in Brazil as “posseiros” – were victims of an assassination attempt in the same region where Cafu was killed, the 37 Branch, on the Recreio do Santo Antônio undesignated public land. In 2020, lawyer Fernando Ferreira da Rocha was shot dead inside his house in Boca do Acre. According to a publication on the CPT's website, he worked to defend peasant families in the region.
Over a decade of threats
CPT regional coordinator, Cosme Capistrano, a resident of Boca do Acre, knows the region's problems well. Threatened several times, he had to change his address and joined the Ministry of Human Rights' Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, Communicators and Environmentalists (PPDDH, in Portuguese).
“The conflict intensified in 2017, 2018, when it was announced that the Recreio do Santo Antônio undesignated public land was untitled federal land that the government was collecting to register and legalize the land for landless families,” he explains. While the demarcation doesn't take place, the land remains legally insecure and is targeted by land grabbers.
According to the most up-to-date database of the National Register of Public Forests (CNFP, in Portuguese), released in 2022, around 15% of Amacro's territory is made up of undesignated public land. This corresponds to an area of more than 6.5 million hectares, larger than the state of Paraíba. These are lands that belong to the state or federal government, but have not yet been transformed into settlements, Conservation Units or other protected territories, such as Indigenous Lands and the Quilombola Territories.
This is the case of the Recreio do Santo Antônio gleba, inhabited by extractivists and squatters who are waiting for their land to be regularized. According to the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), this is a federal area.
Although the conflicts have intensified since 2017, Capistrano has been receiving threats for over a decade. In 2012, through an anonymous phone call, a man warned that Capistrano and one of his colleagues would die that year. After that, he received notes and messages threatening him among other kinds of intimidation.
“We are threatened because we denounce land grabbing, violence in rural areas, crimes against rural workers,” says Capistrano, who has been threatened for more than a decade. “When you denounce this absurdity – these factors that directly affect communities, particularly poor families, as happened with Cafu – we are targeted,” he laments.
A landowner installed a gate on the road
According to farmer Paulo do Vale, who used to work with Cafu, the landowner suspected of killing Cafu announced he would kill the rural worker. The suspect used to threaten and intimidate landless workers. “Valdir killed Cafu on the branch that leads to the colony," he says.
The branch – a small dirt road – is an access route between the area occupied by landless workers and the city of Boca do Acre. Valdir Silva has properties on the side of the road and, according to Vale, is trying to expand his area, which is what led to the disagreements. The landowner installed a gate on the road and padlocked it, preventing squatters from passing through.
The farmer accused of being Cafu's killer put a gate to prevent people from crossing the road linking the area he claims and the town of Boca do Acre / Courtesy of Paulo do Vale
“They wanted to take land from residents. And then, when they couldn't, Valdir would close the gate, saying that the area was his and that of other ranchers,” says Capistrano.
Boca do Acre has just over 35,000 inhabitants and is on the list of Brazil's 100 largest municipalities in terms of land area, according to a dossier published by the De Olho nos Ruralistas Observatory, with a territory equivalent to that of the state of Sergipe.
In 2023, the municipality had almost 305,000 hectares occupied by pasture, which represents around 13% of its territory. Ten years earlier, in 2013, the pasture area was 169,000 hectares.
The municipality is on the list of priority areas for action to curb deforestation in the Amazon, monitored by the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm, in Portuguese). The list includes 70 municipalities which together are responsible for almost 80% of deforestation in the biome.
In Labrea, violence increases
The pastures of Boca do Acre are concentrated on the border with Labrea, a town also monitored by the PPCDAm due to its high rates of deforestation. There, one of the points of conflict is the Novo Natal Gleba, partially occupied by the Palotina farm, a 40,000-hectare property where cattle are raised and which claims the area where Jacozinho's body was found.
On the edge of the farm is the Marielle Franco encampment, where Jacozinho lived, occupied by around 200 families who are waiting for the land to be regulated. While the area is not demarcated, residents denounce attacks by big landowners. There have been reports of houses being set on fire and threats.
The people responsible for the farm claim ownership of the land, which they acquired in 1985. The case is before the courts. According to INCRA, “the process of collecting the area was sent to INCRA's Specialized Federal Attorney for legal analysis on December 30, 2024."
Like Boca do Acre, Labrea is on the list of the 100 largest municipalities in Brazil, being the 10th place on the list, with a territory of almost 7 million hectares. In 2022, farmer couple Sebastião David Pereira and Maria Aristides da Silva were murdered in an ambush. They lived in the Monte Settlement Project, Pará state, created in 1994 to house 940 families. In 2023, the CPT recorded four conflicts in PA Monte.
“Land grabbing is quite common in this region and this has become a very dangerous scheme because those who have money call the shots and those who don't obey,” Capistrano laments.
Edited by: Dayze Rocha
