Finalist: Terrence McCoy of The Washington Post

Story by Terrence McCoy

Photos by Raphael Alves

Terrence McCoy, who covers Brazil for The Washington Post, traversed the length of Highway 319 to report this story.

First the road was cragged and cracked. Then it was a thick slop of mud. Then a swirl of red dust. But now, after we had traveled hundreds of miles through the densest of jungle, the highway was finally good — paved and smooth — and it was here that the driver stopped the truck.

There was an unmarked dirt road branching off from the highway. It cut into the jungle and led out of sight. Lucas Ferrante, the environmental scientist leading this journey, wanted to go down the road and see what — and who — was hidden behind the trees.

“This is illegal deforestation,” he said.

The driver, who lives on the highway, told him it would be too dangerous to proceed. These rough-hewn side roads are often the work of armed criminal groups. The groups, which dominate this stretch of the forest, had unleashed a wave of fire and destruction that was transforming much of southern Amazonas state into smoldering pastureland. The way they solve problems is with violence. People disappear. Their bodies are never found. Our driver feared the trouble that following this road would bring.

Ferrante, who has spent years detailing the region’s lawlessness in academic journals, understood the highway’s dangers and uncertainties better than most. He had been threatened in anonymous calls and messages — then abducted in November 2020 and told to keep quiet.

Another researcher documenting the destruction received this text: “You’re going to burn in the fire. It will be a barbecue. Message delivered.”

But Ferrante, 33, believed traveling here was worth the risk. He had come to see this highway, a reddish gash scarring a quilt of green, as one of the Amazon’s last stands. A photographer and I had now joined him on this journey to its further reaches.

BR-319 begins along the banks of the Amazon River and runs more than 500 miles, slicing through the largely preserved core of the Brazilian Amazon to connect the cities of Manaus and Porto Velho.

Scientists argue that the only thing protecting this reserve — one of the region’s last bastions of contiguous forest — is the profound deterioration of the road itself.

Its decay has for years left much of it impassable, repelling criminal land grabbers and helping to preserve an area scientists say is vital to the survival of the entire forest.

But that protective barrier is now being paved over.

Stretches of the highway have been improved in recent years, making travel easier and unleashing a surge of deforestation. Many in the rainforest want the government to complete the job. President Jair Bolsonaro, who has worked to ease and undermine environmental regulations to promote development, says paving the highway would fulfill “a wish of the Amazonian people.” His vice president, a general in reserve, said he’d eat his own military beret if current officials don’t get it done.

For many in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million cut off from Brazil’s main highway system, the road symbolizes something close to freedom — a lifeline that connects them to the rest of the country and paves the path toward development.

“BR-319: It’s our right,” says the slogan plastered across social media and highway signs. In a region of both vast resources and pervasive poverty, many say the time has come to use what’s there for the taking, to seize the better life long denied by isolation and geography, to push back against federal laws and environmentalists who seem to care far more for trees than people.

The outcome of the emotional political clash, scientists say, has implications not only for the rest of the forest but the world. The Amazon is a crucial bulwark against global warming, helping to slow the inexorable march of climate change. But researchers warn that finishing the highway and subsequent state roads would open up its core to destruction. Scientists at the Federal University of Minas Gerais found in 2020 that paving the highway would quadruple deforestation here over the next three decades.

“That would be the end of the forest,” said Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist who focuses on the Amazon.

The Amazon is already believed to be at the precipice. If much more is lost, scientists warn, the forest could suffer destabilizing ecological changes that convert immense swaths into degraded open savanna. What has historically been a carbon sink could suddenly become a “carbon bomb,” upending the world’s efforts to avert catastrophic warming. Already, some regions of the Amazon are exploding — emitting more carbon gas than they absorb. The shift has been particularly acute in the most deforested sections of the Amazon’s degraded southeast, where in the past 40 years the average temperature during the annual dry season has risen more than 4 degrees.

But the wave is now moving deeper into the forest. The two cities in Brazil that produce the most carbon gases — São Félix do Xingu and Altamira — are far from the most populous. They’re both in the Amazon, near large infrastructure projects that have brought development, but also deforestation and extreme violence.

Along this stretch of BR-319, where the destructive process is well underway, the killings have already begun.

Humaitá, the town closest to our position, recorded 15 homicides in October alone — five times the monthly average. Police said most were connected to rising land-grabbing and deforestation. On one cattle farm built on cleared land, several workers had recently disappeared. First went a farm worker named Jeferson Bungenstab, 37. Then followed one of the last men to see him alive, a housekeeper named Nelson Antônio da Conceição, 33. Police didn’t yet know what had happened to the men, but had begun to suspect the worst.

Ferrante, unaware of the rash of killings and disappearances, peered down the road. He had made up his mind. He told the driver to pull out onto it. The photographer, Raphael Alves, and I looked at each other. I felt a wave of nerves. Alves got his camera ready. The truck started forward.

“We’re entering an area of great risk,” warned the driver, who asked not to be named out of concern for his safety.

Heading down the path and into the forest, we didn’t yet know how much.

‘CATASTROPHIC’ ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES

In the late 1960s, several years into Brazil’s two decades of military rule, a small group of generals started drawing lines on the map. They were strategizing the greatest military excursion in Brazilian history: the conquest of the Amazon. They charted out a blitzkrieg of highway projects to tame and integrate the rainforest into the larger country. The Trans-Amazonian Highway cut across the Amazon’s belly. Another road cleaved massive Pará state. A third highway lassoed Venezuela to the Brazilian Amazon.

The new roads fueled surges in both migration and deforestation. In a region where people have long seized land and tried to establish ownership by occupying it, the highways filled with travelers — poor migrants, land speculators, ranchers — chasing fortune and opportunity. Many ended up along the Amazon’s southern sweep, a bow-shaped area that now concentrates 75 percent of the forest’s losses and has come to be known as the “arc of deforestation.”

Years of analyses illustrate how roads often lead to deforestation. It’s called the fishbone pattern. The highway forms the spine. Then speculators, illegal loggers and local officials build roads radiating outward: the ribs. Studies have shown that the vast majority of deforestation in the Amazon has occurred within 30 miles of a major road.

BR-319 was different. It was constructed in the 1970s, like the others, but attracted far less notice. Merchants in Manaus found cheaper methods to transport goods. Migrants went to other parts of the forest. The highway — built hastily during the rainy season and battered annually since then with an average rainfall of 87 inches — fell into disrepair and became impassable for much of the year. In 1988, it was effectively shut down, sealing off both the core of the Amazon and also Manaus, where a divisive debate over its future has seesawed ever since.

Transportation and environmental authorities in 2007 approved the restoration of portions of the highway, but not its vast middle. Then they authorized the rudimentary “maintenance” of the highway’s decayed midsection — but not paving it. Local politicians promised before the 2018 elections to finish the whole thing. Environmentalists countered that it made no economic sense: Studies showed it was cheaper to transport goods along river routes.

Then, last year, a new coronavirus variant crushed the city, depleting its oxygen supplies. The road’s supporters seethed: If the highway had been passable, oxygen would have arrived in time. Instead, dozens suffocated to death.

The raw nerves surrounding the issue have been exposed at boisterous public hearings.

At one September session in Manaus, an American scientist read a lengthy prepared statement. “The BR-319 highway is economically unviable,” said Philip Fearnside, who contributed to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for climate research. He called Brazil’s decision-making process “deficient.” And the environmental consequences if the highway were paved? “Catastrophic.”

The highway’s supporters in the audience started to boo. Fearnside yelled over them in his heavily accented Portuguese. Then his mic was cut. Video shows the next speaker striding to the front.

“Why would someone from the United States come here for this?” demanded Sérgio Kruke, director of the Conservative Amazonas Movement, pointing at Fearnside. “How could that be?”

The audience clapped and cheered. Kruke shouted into the microphone.

“This house is ours! If we want to knock down all of the trees, we’ll knock them down!”

A HIGHWAY IN THREE ACTS

Ferrante, a researcher affiliated with the National Institute of Amazonian Research, sat in the front row at that hearing, increasingly restive. He is Brazilian, but believes the forest belongs to the world. Terrified by the implications of paving the highway, he had partnered with Fearnside to show how even its simple maintenance had already harmed the rainforest, and also threatened Indigenous communities.

But sitting in the audience, the PhD candidate saw the studies hadn’t been enough. Few were convinced of his view. He needed more proof. He needed to make another trip down the highway. We asked to join him.

We set out at 3 a.m., caught the first ferry out of Manaus and, as the sky reddened over the Amazon River, reached the highway. Ferrante thought about the long road ahead.

BR-319 is a highway in three acts. The first 100-some miles are paved, marked by road signs and split by yellow stripes. Then it begins to devolve into what’s known as the “middle stretch”: 250 miles of dirt and crevices and mud-slicked stretches so formidable that they cause vehicles to spin out and tumble off the road. The final act is smoothed out — and speeds travelers into one of the most dangerous parts of the Amazon, on the edge of the arc of deforestation, where environmental destruction and violence are rampant.

Ferrante secured his N95 mask, less to protect him from Brazil’s rampant coronavirus than to hide his identity.

“We are going against the entire world here,” he said, a world he worried wished him harm. Intense and combative, Ferrante knew his work and demeanor had made him enemies. He’d argued heatedly with highway proponents. He’d accused the government in opinion pieces of intentionally destroying the Amazon. He’d written academic study after academic study: On illegal loggers along the highway. On remote Indigenous groups sidelined during highway discussions. On illegal gold prospecting near the highway.

Now he feared he was a marked man. In November 2020, he’d climbed into a car he’d assumed was his Uber outside his apartment. The driver took him far off course and, according to the statement Ferrante gave state authorities, attacked him with a sharp object, scratching his arms. “You’re messing with things you shouldn’t be,” Ferrante said the man told him. Ever since, Ferrante has perceived threats nearly everywhere.

He saw them again here now, as his driver pulled to a stop before a stagnant body of water. Runoff from road maintenance had turned the water a soupy brown. Ferrante looked back and forth — coast clear — and got out to investigate. “We have to hurry,” he said. “We can’t stay in one place for too long.” He noted the environmental damage — fish killed, water source poisoned — and got back in the truck. The next water source down road was the same. And the one after that: brown and dead.

Now he feared he was a marked man. In November 2020, he’d climbed into a car he’d assumed was his Uber outside his apartment. The driver took him far off course and, according to the statement Ferrante gave state authorities, attacked him with a sharp object, scratching his arms. “You’re messing with things you shouldn’t be,” Ferrante said the man told him. Ever since, Ferrante has perceived threats nearly everywhere.

He saw them again here now, as his driver pulled to a stop before a stagnant body of water. Runoff from road maintenance had turned the water a soupy brown. Ferrante looked back and forth — coast clear — and got out to investigate. “We have to hurry,” he said. “We can’t stay in one place for too long.” He noted the environmental damage — fish killed, water source poisoned — and got back in the truck. The next water source down road was the same. And the one after that: brown and dead.

PLUNGING DEEPER INTO THE FOREST’S GRIP

There were no signs of humanity here. The temperature was lower. The forest was dense and dark. As we pushed deeper into its grasp, the highway became a bog of thick mud. The vehicle struggled forward — past a marooned truck, an abandoned van, a jaguar skirting across the road. Finally, we reached a small collection of dirt-covered homes along a river.

Inside a wooden house on stilts, an old woman had spent 50 years waiting.

Nilda Castro dos Santos, 74, was young when she came here, following her father from a dead-end town elsewhere in Amazonas. The road then was “new and beautiful.” She viewed it as a promise: There would be work, opportunities, a better life for her children. The people built a community with small restaurants, shops, serving residents and visitors. But then their lifeline — the highway — began to atrophy. No one came to fix it. The flow of travelers stopped. Neighbors moved away.

Now the town felt as dead as the highway itself: silent and sun-wilted.

Every day now, Castro sits and waits — for the government to remember this place, for the highway to be paved, for the fulfillment of a promise she feels has been delayed a half-century.

“I’m scared I’ll die without ever seeing it paved,” she said. “We have been able to survive here, but we haven’t been able to live.”

A gnarled man walked down the dirt street. Rosineu Batista, 59, spoke of his brother-in-law. The man had recently fallen ill. But the highway had been impassable, and without proper care, he died. Batista believes a paved highway might change things here. Maybe he’d be able to have more to eat than whatever he can fish out of the river.

“But you’re not worried about criminal land grabbers coming in with a paved highway?” Ferrante asked.

“Yeah,” he said. Then he looked out at the desolate village: “But …”

We continued on. The truck bumped and jostled across a river, over rickety bridges, past signs hailing the coming maintenance. Rains rushed through. Darkness enveloped the forest. Vila Realidade, a gritty highway village settled by squatters, came and went.

Then, as suddenly as it had deteriorated, the road improved. The dirt smoothed out. Shacks appeared in the distance.

Anderson Ferreira, 30, stepped out of one. He’d grown up on the highway. For most of his life, the forest was all there was. But then workers began improving the highway. Outsiders arrived from faraway states.

The forest started to burn.

Now Ferreira tends a small house on recently deforested land, looking after someone else’s cattle. He badly wants the highway paved — it’s all anyone here talks about. But he also thinks of the cost.

“To be human is to want to live in harmony with nature,” he said.

Beyond his house, the smoke was rising. We had made it to the arc of deforestation.

‘THIS IS GOING TO BE A MASSIVE HIDDEN FARM’

Since 2015, deforestation along the highway has grown ninefold. A sweep of forest nearly the size of Washington, D.C., is lost every year. Nowhere is the destruction more evident than here, in the vast city limits of Humaitá, the largest municipality along the highway, where the road finally smooths out. Patch by patch, the forest here is being stripped clear. Illegal roads streak into the receding tree line.

Ferrante’s research team has started mapping the roads, even driving down several. They have found illegal gold prospecting, logging and burned forest. One criminal forest broker tried to sell them land, the team wrote in the academic journal Land Use Policy. He offered two acres of deforested land for $570. The same amount of forested land would go for $3.80, but the buyers would have to deforest and occupy it themselves. During a visit to the site, the “land-grabbing agent” kept a gun in his hand.

The deforestation has been closely accompanied by the threat of violence. In 2017, armed illegal miners in broad daylight burned down the offices in Humaitá of Ibama, the federal environmental law enforcement agency. Inspectors investigating illegal sites now equip themselves for combat: long rifles, camouflaged fatigues, bulletproof vests. Rural landowners have been targeted. Criminals “come and execute the people on the land so they can lay claim to it,” Amazonas state police detective Mário Melo said.

Ferrante had thought extensively about the perils of his work. Brazil is one of the world’s most dangerous countries in which to investigate environmental crime. Twenty environmentalists were killed in 2020 alone. But he told himself — and his family — that it wouldn’t happen to him. He was too methodical, too careful. Still, some risk was unavoidable: “We can only discover certain things by going inside.”

Now he was inside again, going down another illegal path, looking out into the dark forest.

“This is new,” he said. “We don’t know what we’re about to find.”

Then it was upon him: A mile down the road, there was a large wooden sign. It said the land here — which was public and protected — was private and for sale. It listed a phone number and the name “Martelos.” Ferrante shook his head and took a picture. The road forked to the right and opened on a vast clearing.

A wash of blackened earth. A string of shacks. Electrical wiring. A fence to hold in the cattle.

“This is going to be huge,” Ferrante said. “This is going to be a massive hidden farm.”

If someone found him here, he worried, there would be trouble. Difficult questions would be asked. Someone might recognize him. He could easily be disappeared. He was hours out of cellphone range. No one would ever know. Working quickly, Ferrante marked the property’s coordinates, took some pictures and, planning to alert the authorities, got back into the truck. He was furious.

“This is land that belongs to the country!” he fumed. “They have just invaded it and ripped out all of the trees!”

He then heard the squawking of birds. It was getting louder. The truck approached a fence post. Vultures were sitting on it.

Alves, the photographer, went out to document the scene. Ferrante and I followed. We were looking down at the dirt path when we heard the screaming. It was coming from Alves.

Alves was running toward the truck. He yelled that he’d found a body. It had been a man. His hands were tied. Ferrante told the driver to start the truck and keep it running. He then went to see for himself. And there, at the base of a ditch beside the fence, he came upon the motionless form.

The man’s face was disfigured. His wrists were bound. He appeared to have been executed.

The body of Nelson Antônio da Conceição, the farm housekeeper who had disappeared, had lain in this ditch for days. Police say he vanished shortly after telling them what he knew about the disappearance of the farm worker Jeferson Bungenstab. Both men, police say, worked for the same cattle rancher, Celso Deola, 59. Conceição, police told me, had accused him of ordering the disappearances of Bungenstab and others. Police said Deola, an alleged land grabber and illegal deforester, would cheat his workers on payday and then resolve the resulting pay disputes with his “pistoleiro” — a reputed hit man named Edmilson de Jesus Chagas, 35, who carried a Glock 9mm.

Deola did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A relative said: “Unfortunately, he’s my uncle. I hope this time he pays for what he’s done.”

Ferrante took one last look at one of the alleged victims. Then he raced back to the truck. The driver pulled out as his door closed. Ferrante looked up, then felt a swell of panic: In front of the truck, two men on a motorcycle were coming toward us. “Don’t stop,” Ferrante told the driver. “Whatever you do, keep going.”

The truck passed the motorcycle.

“Go, go, go.”

The men kept going in the other direction. The truck broke the tree line and made it back onto the highway. No one was following.

“That’s not going to happen to me,” Ferrante said. “I’m not going to end up dead.”

The truck sped to the nearest town. We heatedly discussed what to do. In a region where many local officials are connected to environmental crime, the police would be difficult to trust. It would be easier and safer to wait until after we’d left the region to report the body. But then we thought of this man’s family, waiting, never knowing what had happened to him. We had to tell someone now. So that evening, Ferrante reported the body, then took the police back to it.

In the weeks to come, police would accuse Chagas and Deola of killing his two employees and announce warrants for their arrest. Officers would mortally wound the alleged hit man in a firefight at his house, police said. Next they would try to visit the rancher, police said, but Deola had already fled. Police say that he is now considered a fugitive. Authorities would release pictures of what they say was discovered at his ranch: heavy-caliber rifles, silencers, scopes, rounds and rounds of ammunition. Ferrante would feel sickened by how close he’d come to meeting that violence.

But for now, on this highway, Ferrante felt as if it was receding behind him. The road took us further south — back into cell range, out of the lawless frontier, and, finally, into a placid expanse. The highway was now fully paved and marked. On either side were pastures stretching to the horizon. The wave of deforestation had already passed through.

The highway had been traversed, and this was how it ended: not in pitched lawlessness, but in a stream of pleasant farmhouses, in cattle meandering through well-maintained fields — in another chunk of the forest cleared away and the Amazon brought yet closer to its death. The guns were gone. There were no more bodies. The criminals had been replaced by legitimate business people. It was as if the forest had never existed at all, and the future was already here.

“The transformation is complete,” Ferrante said.

Gabriela Sá Pessoa contributed to this report.

About this story

Editing by Matthew Hay Brown. Copy editing by Vanessa Larson. Graphics by Laris Karklis. Graphics editing by Lauren Tierney. Photography by Raphael Alves. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video by Raphael Alves, Avener Prado and Terrence McCoy. Video editing by Alexa Juliana Ard. Design and development by Allison Mann. Design editing by Matt Callahan. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya.

Map sources: July 2021 satellite image mosaic compiled by Planet Labs PBC. Hydrography, transportation, conservation and Indigenous data via TerraBrasilis.

By Terrence McCoy and Júlia Ledur 

The pattern is clear: First, the forest is razed.

Then the cattle are moved in.

If the Amazon is to die, it will be beef that kills it.

And America will be an accomplice.

Cattle ranching, responsible for the great majority of deforestation in the Amazon, is pushing the forest to the edge of what scientists warn could be a vast and irreversible dieback that claims much of the biome. Despite agreement that change is necessary to avert disaster, despite attempts at reform, despite the resources of Brazil’s federal government and powerful beef companies, the destruction continues.

But the ongoing failure to protect the world’s largest rainforest from rapacious cattle ranching is no longer Brazil’s alone, a Washington Post investigation shows. It is now shared by the United States — and the American consumer.

In the two years since Washington lifted a moratorium that was imposed on raw Brazilian beef over food safety concerns, the United States has grown to become its second-biggest buyer. The country bought more than 320 million pounds of Brazilian beef last year — and is on pace to purchase nearly twice as much this year. The biggest supplier is the beef behemoth JBS, whose fleet of brands stock some of America’s major retail chains and businesses: Kroger, Goya Foods, Albertsons (the parent company of Safeway, Jewel-Osco and Vons).

JBS, the world’s largest beef producer, has repeatedly been accused by environmentalists of buying cattle raised on illegally deforested land. Greenpeace first alleged such ties in a 2009 report. In 2017, Brazil’s environmental law enforcement agency, Ibama, fined the company what was then more than $7.5 million, alleging that two of its Amazon meatpacking plants had purchased nearly 50,000 such animals. In October, federal prosecutors focusing on deforestation alleged widespread “irregularities” in the company’s direct supply chain from January 2018 to June 2019 in Pará state.

But in a forest where some beef producers still don’t track cattle origins, and in a country where no law specifically prohibits the purchase of cattle from illegally deforested land, JBS considers itself one of the good guys. It says it has prioritized the environment and blocked more than 14,000 cattle ranches that didn’t comply with company standards. It has signed agreements with environmentalists and federal prosecutors promising not to purchase cattle from ranches that were illegally deforested. It publishes the names of the ranches from which it purchases cattle.

None of it has been enough.

By reviewing thousands of shipment and purchase logs, and analyzing satellite imagery of Amazon cattle ranches, The Post found that JBS has yet to disentangle itself from ties to illegal deforestation. The destruction is hidden at the base of a long and multistep supply chain that directly connects illegally deforested ranches — and ranchers accused of environmental infractions — to factories authorized by the U.S. government to export beef to the United States.

Between January 2018 and October 2020, records show, JBS factories with that authorization made at least 1,673 cattle purchases from 114 ranchers who at the time owned at least one property cited for illegal deforestation. Several ranchers from whom JBS bought cattle were notorious — alleged by authorities to be among the Amazon’s most destructive actors. The supply chain, the examination found, was infected with dozens of ranches where land had been deforested illegally. Satellite imagery showed that several of the operations had cattle on land where grazing was prohibited at the time — in what environmental regulators called a violation of Brazilian law.

“Environmental control in the beef supply chain needs to be much more rigorous,” said Suely Araújo, who directed Ibama from 2016 to 2018. “Meatpackers need to stop complaining and actually control their supply networks. We’ve talked about cattle tracking for three decades but have never done it in a real way.”

President Biden has been outspoken about the need to conserve the Amazon, a vital carbon sink that scientists say must be preserved to avert catastrophic warming. But the U.S. agency that authorizes Brazil’s meatpacking plants to export to the United States says it doesn’t try to determine whether the operations cause environmental damage. Seven plants greenlighted by the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service are in the Amazon.

Brazil’s Environment Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The Agriculture Ministry blamed “historic land-use problems,” not the beef industry, for deforestation.

Senior officials at JBS say Brazil’s cattle supply chain is one of the world’s most complex, involving thousands of ranches spread over expansive territories, and is extremely difficult to monitor. Marcio Nappo, director of corporate sustainability at the beef giant, told The Post that the company has gone beyond what other companies have done to root out deforestation.

“JBS has been in the top five, top 10 companies in eliminating deforestation in its supply chain,” Nappo said. “…We can say with great confidence that we have already advanced enormously.”

The company has moved aggressively to stop purchases from operations that graze cattle on illegally deforested land, he said, using a “pioneering” monitoring system. He said the company plans to expose and eliminate all deforestation in its supply chain by 2025 and has already succeeded in stopping purchases from ranches that have carried out illegal deforestation.

But the biggest problem in Brazil’s cattle industry today, and a key reason deforestation in the Amazon has reached a 15-year high, isn’t the direct supplier. That hasn’t been the case in years. The biggest problem is the indirect suppliers — ranchers who know how to work the system, shuffling cattle from ranch to ranch to conceal their illegal origins and sell them off.

The game is called “cattle laundering.” The forest is full of players, swaggering ranchers who built their businesses from the embers of the forest. Today, one Amazon cowboy, Zaercio Fagundes Gouveia, says cattlemen like him have a new focus:

“The United States.”

A CYCLE OF FIRE AND BEEF

The life of an Amazonian steer typically amounts to climbing a ladder. At the bottom rung, where the system is least regulated and where most illegal deforestation occurs, are operations focused on breeding. Then the young animals are moved to properties that nurture them through adolescence. Next up are the fattening farms.

With each rung climbed, the system is more closely monitored and regulated, until the animal reaches the top of the ladder, the processing plant, where it is slaughtered and its meat butchered.

There was a time when nearly every stage of the process involved burning down forest, a cycle of fire and beef that transformed much of the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso — Portuguese for “thick forest” — into a checkerboard of cattle ranches. But a decade ago, leading beef producers signed a pair of agreements to clean up the industry.

One was a 2009 accord with Greenpeace that committed signatories to eliminating deforestation in their entire supply chains. The other was an agreement with federal prosecutors, in Brazil’s last real attempt to take on the powerful sector. Its most important signatory was JBS.

In the agreement, the producers promised to stop sourcing cattle from ranches that continued illegal deforestation. The effort would include stopping all cattle purchases from operations with environmental embargoes — citations that prohibit ranchers from grazing cattle on land that in most cases was illegally deforested.

But rather than cull deforestation from the industry, investigators say, the reforms pushed it further out of sight. Cattle are not tracked individually in Brazil, as they are in neighboring Argentina and in Europe. All that ranchers with embargoed land have to do is ship their cattle to properties with clean environmental records. Once the animals reach a ranch that doesn’t have a history of deforestation, they are effectively born again — cleansed and ready to be sold to producers such as JBS for slaughter and shipment.

“This is cattle laundering,” said Raoni Rajão, an environmental scientist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “The scheme has become institutionalized.”

The Post, in a collaboration with the Dutch environmental research organization Aidenvironment, analyzed thousands of cattle purchase and shipment logs that provide a glimpse into this world. The analysis, which focused on three U.S.-authorized JBS plants located in areas of large-scale deforestation in the Amazon, did not seek to capture all ties to deforestation. It was based on Ibama embargoes, which, according to a 2015 study, cover less than one-fifth of deforested areas.

The documents nonetheless expose loopholes and failings that investigators say bedevil the wider industry. They reveal what’s on the surface: JBS does direct business with ranchers who have extensive histories of deforestation; 3 percent of the plants’ cattle purchases between January 2018 and October 2020 were from ranchers who had been cited for deforestation by Ibama. They also reveal what’s beneath the surface, leading into the labyrinth of the indirect supply chain, where illegally deforested farms are hidden.

The documents draw a direct line. It begins at cattle ranches accused of illegal deforestation. It leads to ranches with no environmental infractions. It then travels to JBS slaughterhouses certified to export meat to the United States.

At the first step in the process, in the supply chains of two of the three JBS plants, The Post and Aidenvironment identified 71 ranches where Ibama had embargoed a section because of deforestation. (The Post was unable to obtain cattle shipment records for the third plant.)

The analysis found that those properties had shipped at least 7,912 head of cattle to clean ranches that directly supply JBS.

Finally, the examination revealed that those clean ranches made at least 263 sales of an unspecified number of cattle to JBS factories authorized to export to the United States.

Shuffling cattle from dirty ranches to clean ones isn’t against the law: It’s a workaround. What is against the law is using embargoed land to raise cattle — which Ibama inspectors say happens frequently. “The cattle produced there is commercialized normally,” said one Ibama agent in Mato Grosso, who like other government regulators spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely. “The state has lost its function. Society is acting however it wants, regardless of the law.”

At The Post’s request, the geospatial company Maxar Technologies produced satellite imagery of five indirect JBS suppliers with embargoed land. The images showed that three of the ranches had cattle on land that was embargoed at the time.

One of them is Nova ranch, located in rural Santa Cruz do Xingu in the state of Mato Grosso. The town is home to about 2,700 people and 127,000 head of cattle.

One of the many ranches in the area cited for environmental infractions, Nova had nearly 3,000 acres of its land embargoed in 2016, prohibiting ranchers from grazing cattle there. But the ban didn’t stop them.

Using close-up satellite images, The Post discovered cattle in multiple places on land embargoed at the time.

In this image from May 2021, five years after the embargo was imposed, cattle are seen grazing near a pond in an area that had been deforested.

Another image shows more cattle on the other side of an area embargoed at the time.

Livestock activity is also spotted close to a ranch in the middle of the restricted area.

Luiz Alfredo Abreu, attorney for Nova ranch owner Ricardo Eugênio Palmeira, said state authorities had given the rancher permission to use those areas. “He can sell cattle even to the president of the United States,” Abreu said. “This embargo is nothing.”

Ibama and state officials called that assertion inaccurate. “The embargo remains valid — so much so that the farmer was recently fined for disobeying it,” Ibama said in a statement. Local authorization does not override Ibama embargoes, state and federal officials said.

Palmeira is also a direct supplier to JBS. But his deforestation record is paltry compared with those of some ranchers with whom JBS has done direct business, The Post found.

One was José de Castro Aguiar Filho, who has been assessed more than $11 million in environmental fines. He has been described by the Intercept Brasil as one of the “25 biggest destroyers of the Amazon.” (In audio messages to The Post, the rancher called authorities who fined him “not very correct” and said he barely sells cattle now.)

Another supplier, Mário Quirino da Silveira, was described by the federal government in 2008 as one of the Amazon’s biggest deforesters. (Repeated attempts to contact Quirino da Silveira were unsuccessful.) Another was Vitor Elisio Poltronieri, accused by environmental authorities in 2009 of being one of Mato Grosso’s biggest deforesters. (Poltronieri didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Two more direct suppliers, Aldo Pedreschi and his son Aldo Pedreschi Filho, both named two of Mato Grosso’s biggest deforesters, have been cumulatively assessed more than $3.6 million in environmental fines. (Pedreschi died in 2020. Efforts to contact his son were not successful. A former family lawyer denied wrongdoing: “The family never committed any environmental crime!”)

Presented with The Post’s findings on its supply chain, including the names of the particularly notorious suppliers, JBS said it had severed ties with the men. The company acknowledged that its deforestation monitoring system targets ranches, not their owners, though many operate multiple properties — some sanctioned and some not — and can shuffle cattle between them.

Once the animals arrive at the JBS plants, the process leading to export to the United States can begin. Shipment records provided by Panjiva, the trade research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, show that JBS exports almost all of its U.S.-bound beef to its own American facilities.

But neither the U.S. government nor the American consumer knows where it goes from there. Once imported beef passes inspection, it can be stripped of all labels that identify it as foreign-sourced and be sold as if it were produced domestically. No federal agency tracks the domestic sale of imported beef. And retailers aren’t obligated to inform consumers of the raw beef’s country of origin. That labeling requirement was repealed with the passage of the 2016 omnibus spending bill.

To try to locate the beef, The Post asked 16 national grocery and restaurant chains whether they sell JBS beef from Brazil. Only Kroger and Albertsons said they did — but a very small amount. Goya Foods has imported nearly 2 million pounds of canned Brazilian beef since March 2020, trade records show. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Kroger said it has a “no-deforestation commitment” and has “engaged the JBS team to further review the situation.”

JBS, citing “commercial restrictions,” declined to divulge its list of U.S. buyers. It did not respond to questions about whether it informs American retailers of the meat’s country of origin.

The beef of the Amazonian steer has finally reached the top rung of the ladder: the American consumer. But many of those buyers will have little idea it is Brazilian.

‘A LAND WITHOUT MEN FOR MEN WITHOUT LAND’

How cattle, the most common of animals, became central to the decimation of the world’s most valuable forest is a story of intention, not coincidence. It begins in the mid-1960s, when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship. Worried that vast stretches of uncontrolled territory in the Amazon would invite foreign invasions, generals set out to conquer what had until then been unconquerable.

The mission: “Operation Amazon.” The rallying call: “A land without men for men without land.”

The tool of conquest: cattle.

The bovine was seen as a crucial ally in taming — and then claiming — the wildest of terrain. A relatively small number of the animals can range across large expanses of land. Their grazing keeps the jungle from regenerating. And their meat provides both sustenance and income.

“The idea was conquest, to conquer and integrate the interior into the rest of the country,” said Antoine Acker, a historian of the Amazon at the University of Zurich. “The cow was a powerful animal for that. It occupies a lot of land and is really cheap.”

With investment benefits, tax breaks and a new web of highways, Brazil persuaded local and foreign investors alike to bet on the seemingly paradoxical endeavor of cattle ranching in the rainforest. The goal of the dictatorship was to have at least 20 million head of cattle in the Amazon within a few decades. Brazil transitioned to democracy in 1985, but exceeded that benchmark for raising cattle by 1990 and has since more than quadrupled it.

People rich and poor rushed into the Amazon, burned chunks of forest, put down cattle and claimed the land by means both legal and illegal. In a vast region largely beyond government control, slave labor was pervasive, violent land disputes erupted and Indigenous communities were massacred. By the early 2000s, farmers were burning enough forest each year to cover New Jersey.

Lawmakers tried to curtail the destruction. Under the forest code, farmers and companies were limited to burning only 20 percent of their properties. Knocking down more — or razing public and Indigenous lands — would make the deforestation illegal. But what was said in faraway Brasília was one thing. What happened in the Amazon was another.

Ranchers continued to burn forest to widen their pastures. Land grabbers and squatters invaded and burned land to steal it. Environmental authorities struggled to patrol the vast territory: One of their primary law enforcement tools was the embargo. But the comparatively few citations that were issued had little effect. Few environmental fines are paid. Others are contested in the byzantine Brazilian appellate system in cases that drag on for years. The slaughterhouses had little incentive to stop buying cattle that came from illegally deforested land. And the ranchers had little incentive to stop selling it.

Incentive was exactly what federal prosecutor Daniel Azeredo hoped to provide. A native of southeastern Brazil — a wealthier, largely urban region where the Amazon feels as distant as a foreign country — he arrived in Pará state in 2007 and quickly realized conditions were unsustainable. Pressuring ranchers to stop burning forest wasn’t working. His office was inundated with cases against them — all dead ends. He needed to exert pressure another way.

He assembled a list of ranches with embargoes to determine which meatpackers bought their cattle. Then he followed which grocery stores bought that meat. Then he started suing. He threatened Brazil’s largest grocery stores, alleging that they hadn’t ensured their meat was free of ties to deforestation. The fallout was immediate: Several grocery stores started to boycott the slaughterhouses linked to the destruction.

“It was decisive,” said Beto Veríssimo, co-founder of the Amazon Institute of People and Environment. “It had impact.”

In 2009, the largest slaughterhouses signed an agreement with Azeredo’s office declaring that they would no longer source cattle from ranches that were being deforested illegally or had been cited with an embargo. The reforms contributed to one of the century’s great environmental success stories. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon plummeted.

But even then, Azeredo couldn’t shake the feeling that the gains wouldn’t last. There were gaps in the reforms. It wouldn’t be long before ranchers found them.

FOLLOWING THE BEEF RUSH

The São Judas Tadeu ranch sits at the cusp of the Amazon rainforest like a giant anchor, more than half the size of Manhattan. It has smoldered and burned for years. Thirty-six fires raged through the property in 2005 alone. An additional 13 in 2008. And seven more in 2013. In all, according to a fire analysis by University of Maryland geographer Louis Giglio, more than 100 fires have scorched the ranch since 2004.

Only one-fourth of the ranch still has remnants of native vegetation, property records show. Its history of fires suggests “forest clearing,” said Giglio, who studies global fire emissions. Embargoes have been issued for sections of the ranch, but satellite imagery produced by Maxar showed cattle on a swath where they were prohibited at the time.

The ranch is also an indirect supplier to a JBS plant authorized to export beef to the United States.

From January 2018 to January 2019, government cattle shipment records show, the São Judas Tadeu ranch transferred at least 3,173 head of cattle to the nearby, embargo-free São Sebastian ranch. In the months after the transfers, the clean ranch made at least 24 cattle sales to a JBS plant in northeastern Mato Grosso. The records show that both properties are owned by a single rancher.

Zaercio Fagundes Gouveia — short-cropped hair, gold bracelet, big aviators — is from the southeastern city of Ituiutaba. He arrived in Mato Grosso three decades ago, when his father joined the beef rush to become an Amazonian rancher. They knocked down a section of the forest — “permitted and cleanly legal at that time,” the son said — put down some cattle and built a ranch. Gouveia, then 19, never moved back home.

The region was forest and little else then — a blanket of green that would have been an environmentalist’s Eden. But to Gouveia, “it was awful, just terrible.” The closest telephone was more than 150 miles away on a dirt highway. There were few paved roads. Schools were out of the question. His daughter was home-schooled. To build what he has — an agribusiness with six ranches and 200 employees — and to help bring an economy to a region largely without one took sacrifice. More, he said, than most ranchers could handle.

And now: “It’s wonderful.”

Much of the forest is gone. The terrain is latticed with a network of roads and dotted with cattle ranches, churches, towns — all powered by beef. The region developed and prospered, he said, by the grace of settlers like him and a market poised to continue its growth.

Global beef consumption, a traditional marker of development, is projected to continue to rise over the next decade. The United States is the largest market: It is home to 4 percent of the world’s population but eats about 20 percent of its beef.

Gouveia said he’s here to provide it. There’s just one obstacle in his way.

“The environmentalists,” he said. “I have so many environmental problems. So many. It’s not easy.”

Authorities have cited Gouveia eight times since 2008 for environmental infractions. At the time of his sales to JBS, he stood accused of knocking down at least 5.4 square miles of forest and had been assessed nearly $3 million, a sum researchers say puts him among the most-fined ranchers in the Amazon.

Gouveia blames the infractions on fires started by others and on environmental regulators who were incompetent and inexperienced. He denies wrongdoing. One large embargo was recently dismissed, and he is appealing at least one fine. The accusations, he said, once wouldn’t have impacted his supply chain much. Ranchers could continue sending cattle directly to the meat plants. But with this “extremely serious and unjust environmental pressure on top of us,” he said, ranchers had to find a workaround.

“A different system,” he called it.

Gouveia continued to raise cattle at São Judas Tadeu — but not, he said, within prohibited areas, which had accounted for more than one-third of the ranch. From São Judas Tadeu, he said, he would ship the cattle to another of his operations to fatten them. Then they’d be sold off to slaughter.

When told The Post had obtained satellite imagery that showed cattle on land embargoed as of May 2021, he shrugged.

“Well, generally, I tell them not to put cows there,” Gouveia said.

JBS cut ties with Gouveia’s Amazonian ranches after it was informed of The Post’s findings — a decision Gouveia bitterly mourned. “You hurt me with this report,” he said. “I talked to you with an open heart.”

He still had reason to be optimistic. The agricultural industry, which managed to grow during the coronavirus pandemic, now accounts for 8 percent of Brazil’s gross domestic product. The lifting of the U.S. moratorium on raw Brazilian beef two years ago has opened up a massive new market. And President Jair Bolsonaro is in power.

“We’re now the most important industry in Brazil, aren’t we?” Gouveia said.

A SOLUTION IGNORED

The problem is not without a solution. The maze of the cattle supply-chain system has a key. But Brazil has failed to seize it.

Every time cattle are moved in the country, a shipment log called a “Guide of Animal Transport” is created. The purpose of the document is sanitary: to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases and ensure proper cattle vaccinations. But those records, current and former government officials say, can be used to create a cattle-tracking tool and illuminate even the murkiest sections of the supply chain.

Researchers have done it. But not the federal government.

“Does Brazil have the capacity to do this? It does,” said Izabella Mônica Vieira Teixeira, Brazil’s environment minister from 

2010 to 2016. “What it lacks is the political will.”

In late 2018, environmental regulators, supermarket chains and beef producers gathered in Brasília to develop a system that would incorporate the cattle shipment logs into a tracking tool. Then Bolsonaro, who’d spent the presidential campaign criticizing environmental regulations, was sworn in. Participants in the discussions say the effort soon fizzled.

“We had the money,” said a senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. “But people believed there was no way to continue. Things had changed politically.”

The government has since made tracking cattle more difficult. In mid-2019, months into Bolsonaro’s tenure, federal and some state governments sharply restricted access to the records. Documents that were once available to download on Agriculture Ministry websites — albeit painstakingly, one by one — are now even harder to obtain. Even meat producers complain, not without reason, that they’re criticized for not tracking cattle when the government has deprived them of the tools to do it.

“The federal government doesn’t make this data available to third parties,” Brazil’s Agriculture Ministry told The Post in a statement, because it includes confidential information. “It’s essential for the maintenance of the animal health system. Therefore, there is no reason for it to be released for demands that don’t involve the health of animals.”

In that restriction, environmentalists see the contours of what has become a political Rubik’s Cube. Bolsonaro, under international pressure to save the Amazon, has committed to ending illegal deforestation by 2030 and making Brazil carbon-neutral by 2050. But few think those goals can be reached without curbing rapacious cattle ranching. And even fewer think Bolsonaro, who sees those who practice it as a crucial base of support, will do it.

“Brazil is a green power,” Bolsonaro declared during November’s international climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. “We are part of the solution. Not the problem.”

Days later, the federal agency charged with monitoring deforestation released its annual report. Deforestation had reached a 15-year high. The Amazon’s losses for the year could nearly cover the state of Connecticut.

A few weeks after that, one more report was released, this one by the national association of Brazilian meat producers. The year 2021 was another banner one for beef. Brazil, which shipped out over 2 million tons, was once again dominant in the global export market: the reigning king of beef.

Heloísa Traiano, Gabriela Sá Pessoa and Reinaldo Chaves contributed to this report.

About this story

Editing by Matthew Hay Brown. Copy editing by Vanessa Larson and Martha Murdock. Graphics by Júlia Ledur. Graphics editing by Kate Rabinowitz. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video editing by Alexa Juliana Ard. Design and development by Allison Mann. Design editing by Matt Callahan. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya and Jay Wang.

Sources: Data on deforestation (from 1988 through 2020), forests and water bodies, Indigenous territories and official Amazon borders are from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Pasture areas and levels of damage, as well as the location of meatpacking plants, are from the Atlas das Pastagens, a digital atlas of Brazilian pastures. Pasture areas are as of 2019. Biomass data is from NASA’s ORNL DAAC at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Data on the number of cattle in the Amazon is from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, Municipal Livestock Survey. Satellite images are from Maxar Technologies and Landsat/Copernicus via Google Earth.

Methodology

Cattle purchase and shipment logs

The Post identified three JBS slaughterhouses located in what Brazil defines as the Legal Amazon — a region of nine states that fall within the Amazon basin — that are authorized to export to the United States. The Post obtained the purchase logs of the processing plants through the beef producer’s traceability database, which included identifying information for ranchers who sold to the company. The Post then referenced the names against an Ibama database of federal embargoes. In collaboration with Aidenvironment, an analysis of the indirect supply chain of two of the slaughterhouses was carried out using Guide of Animal Transport (GTA) cattle shipment records in Mato Grosso state. Those records were also referenced against an Ibama database of federal embargoes.

Pasture-quality data

Developed by the Image Processing and Geoprocessing Laboratory of the Federal University of Goiás (Lapig/UFG), the Atlas das Pastagens maps pasture areas in Brazil and their quality. Researchers developed a machine-learning model to analyze nearly 300,000 satellite images from Landsat 5 and Landsat 8. They detected, quantified and classified damage in pasture areas in Brazil from 2010 to 2018. They also conducted field research on pasture areas to create an archive of samples that helped refine the data collected by the two satellites.

Degradation is quantified using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, in which a value of 1.0 correlates with dense, live, green vegetation. Values between 0.4 and 0.6 correlate with moderate damage; values of 0.4 below correlate with severe damage. The accuracy rate of the model is 92 percent.

He’s been called a deforester and killer. Now he’s called mayor.

Story by Terrence McCoy and Cecília do Lago

Photos and videos by Rafael Vilela

Terrence McCoy, who covers Brazil for The Washington Post, visited a remote, illegally built town within Indigenous territory for this story.

SÃO FÉLIX DO XINGU, Brazil — Word was spreading across the Indigenous territory: The land invaders were preparing to attack. Remote villagers said they were surrounded by armed horsemen. Authorities warned of violence. A neighboring tribe said that “blood could be spilled at any moment.” And in one bitterly disputed stretch, a slight man stood before a wooden house, fearing that such a moment had arrived.

Kawore Parakanã, a leader of the Parakanã people, had ventured miles into the jungle in May with three warriors to track the invasions that have made this Indigenous land in Pará state one of the Amazon’s most deforested. Up ahead lay an illegal clearing. Beyond it was a wooden shack. Outside the dwelling, a chain saw coughed awake.

“Kawore,” one of the warriors said, “someone is home.”

They considered their options. One was to fight, to take back the land. But they had traveled unarmed, and Kawore believed they’d be killed. Another was to seek help — but from whom? He couldn’t go to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who says restrictions within Indigenous territory have impeded the country’s economic development. He couldn’t go to the surrounding communities, populated by newcomers who eye his territory with avarice.

But most of all, he couldn’t go to the mayor, one of the most powerful and feared men in the Amazon, known by some as “the god of São Félix.”

It’s not just that Mayor João Cleber Torres had aligned himself with the land grabbers. It’s that he has been described — by federal attorneys, police, news reporters, government-funded researchers and a federal judge — as one himself.

Torres moved to São Félix do Xingu in 1981, when it was little more than dense forest. He is then alleged to have built what federal attorneys described in an internal memo as a large criminal organization that butchered the jungle — first extracting its precious wood, then stealing the land and selling it to be cleared for pasture. Torres, attorneys wrote in the memo, orchestrated “dozens of homicides,” assembled a network of 100 gunslingers, and violently seized territory from the weak and the isolated, including in this very Indigenous territory.

Police reports show that he was investigated for homicide in 2002. His criminal file links him to two cases of attempted homicide in 2003 and 2005. Records indicate that he has been charged with illegal deforestation, fined more than $2.4 million for deforestation and accused by federal attorneys, in 2016, of subjecting farmworkers to slavery-like conditions.

The catchphrase that one Brazilian journalist and residents attribute to him: “Either you sell the land to me, or I’ll buy it from your widow.”

Torres, 61, has never been convicted of any crime. He said he opposes illegal deforestation and has always followed environmental laws. He dismissed all allegations of wrongdoing as unproven and said publishing them would potentially be a “criminal act against my honor.”

“In our country, we have a well-structured, well-designed justice system, based on fundamental juridical principles and guided by international human rights,” Torres said in a statement. “No one else is authorized to act as the judiciary, issuing moral convictions against my name, as is happening here, gravely wounding our justice system and my fundamental rights.”

In a region where people amass wealth and power through deforestation, and where the local leaders charged with enforcing environmental laws are often the very people alleged to have broken them, Torres is just one of many Amazon officeholders accused of environmental misdeeds. But few command a city as vast or ecologically threatened as São Félix, which routinely posts some of Brazil’s highest deforestation and carbon emission rates.

One of its most endangered forests belongs to the Parakanã in the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, where Kawore stood watching the wooden house.

The only thing he could do, he decided, was flee. It was too dangerous to confront the invader. He also worried about antagonizing Torres. In January, three environmentalists had been killed along a forested patch of the Xingu River that property records show had been claimed by the mayor’s brother. The crime remains unsolved. The Torres brothers have denied involvement, but that hadn’t quieted the suspicions in the community.

Kawore turned to leave. He wouldn’t go to the wooden house. He wouldn’t meet the man who lived there, Erasmino Ferreira do Santos, 71. He wouldn’t hear Ferreira say how he’d come to this land, hacked down the forest to graze cattle and felt no remorse. The settler knew the mayor was on his side.

“The best person,” Ferreira said. “He helps us so much.”

‘WHY DO PEOPLE VOTE FOR THEM?’

In the Amazon, there is little political cost to destroying the forest. Here, a vice mayor in Mato Grosso is cited three times for deforestation and is reelected the next year. A mayor in Amazonas is arrested and accused by federal police of participating in a protest that destroyed an environmental law enforcement base — and stays in office. The “King of Gold Mining,” as he was dubbed by a national magazine, is sentenced to nearly five years for illegal deforestation — but coasts to reelection as a mayor in Pará.

Such cases are not rare.

A Washington Post analysis of thousands of federal infractions and candidate data in the Amazon has found that accusations of environmental wrongdoing against members of the region’s political class are not an anomaly but a defining characteristic. In recent decades, as deforestation has pushed the biome toward what scientists warn could be its collapse, the very people accused of playing a role in that destruction have come to wield significant political power over it.

The Post found that those accused of wrongdoing by federal environmental law enforcement have pumped tens of millions of dollars into political campaigns in the past two decades and won public office more than 1,900 times. Taken together, the electoral victories and campaign financing have formed a parallel political system, law enforcement officials say, that has undermined attempts to safeguard a natural resource that scientists warn must be preserved to avert catastrophic climate change.

“This is the rule, not the exception,” said Alexandre Saraiva, who was chief of the federal police in Amazonas state until last year. “Those who deforest the Amazon completely dominate local politics, both through economic power and through violence. The representatives of the people are, in fact, the representatives of those who deforest.

“It has reached such an absurd point that once, during an active investigation in Rorainópolis, in the south of Roraima, the mayor came to the police station with the people we were investigating and asked me to dismiss the case,” he said.

The Post analysis identified 1,189 officeholders over the past 20 years in the Amazon who have been cited for federal environmental infractions. Many won more than one election, and more than 3 in 4 were accused of deforestation or a deforestation-related offense. The examination, which analyzed all environmental infractions in federal databases and anyone who had held municipal, state or gubernatorial office, found that at least one-third of the politicians were cited for environmental abuse while they held office.

Because of data limitations, the findings are almost certainly an undercount.

Many infractions were for minor offenses and resulted in fines of a few thousand dollars. But dozens of elected officials had been fined more than $1 million each — sums assessed for more-serious wrongdoing. The Post found that nearly half of them had also been issued at least one federal embargo, a land-use restriction on illegally deforested or degraded areas. An additional 236 officeholders, The Post discovered, had not been individually accused of environmental wrongdoing but were owners of companies that had been.

The amount of money donated to Amazon political campaigns by people and companies that have been cited for environmental infractions is far more than previously known. More than 1,590 people and 717 companies cited for environmental wrongdoing made at least 5,546 contributions over the past two decades, amounting to nearly $37 million. (In 2015, Brazil prohibited campaign donations by companies.)

The names of the politicians and the cities they have governed provide a road map through the most deforested swaths of the Amazon. Many are within what’s known as the “arc of deforestation,” a section of more-intense deforestation along the forest’s southern sweep. Many cities in this arc — Novo Progresso, Feliz Natal, Cotriguaçu — have repeatedly elected officials accused of environmental wrongdoing.

Most municipalities in the region have sprung into existence in recent years, forged in the fires that razed the forest and populated by those who lit them. The architect of this development plan was Brazil’s military dictatorship, which, worried that the sparsely inhabited region would invite foreign invasions, conceived initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s to stitch the forest to the rest of the country. The national slogan: “Integrate to not surrender.”

Highways punctured the forest. Businesses received tax benefits to relocate. Between 1980 and 1996, the number of cities in Pará state grew from 83 to 143, clustered mostly in the arc of deforestation, where the government put in just enough resources to open up the impenetrable region but not enough to bring order to it. People accrued wealth and power from illicit resource extraction. Public and private lands were invaded and stolen. Slavery-like conditions were imposed on the poor. People disappeared and rural murders were almost never solved.

A new way of life took hold. It was rooted in the belief that the Amazon was to be claimed, not preserved, and embodied by an ascendant political class.

“Why do people vote for them?” asked longtime Amazon journalist Evandro Corrêa. “Why do they vote for people they know are criminals, that they know are deforesters? It’s a question of culture. This is the same story, over and over again. All that changes is the characters.”

One is Antônio Marcos Maciel Fernandes, former mayor of Apuí in Amazonas, who has been cited at least 20 times for environmental wrongdoing and been fined more than $11 million. (In audio messages, he denied any wrongdoing.) Another is Valdinei José Ferreira, the mayor of Trairão in Pará, convicted in July 2020 of running an illegal sawmill, but reelected months later. (He declined to comment.)

Then there is Valmir Climaco de Aguiar, the “King of Gold Mining,” who owns a farm where authorities say they found more than 1,000 pounds of cocaine in 2019, but who was reelected mayor of Itaituba in 2020 with 77 percent of the vote. (He told police the cocaine wasn’t his and wasn’t charged with any crime for lack of evidence.)

But even in such a region, Torres is notorious. So is the fear his name elicits.

FEAR AND DEATH IN THE FOREST

Few in São Félix do Xingu want to talk about the mayor’s alleged past. When people hear his name, voices lower, conversations halt, the phone disconnects. “I want to keep living and die of natural causes,” one man said before ending an interview. “Stop asking questions,” another person said. “You live far away from here, and I live here, and who’s going to wind up dead is me.” A local farmer pleaded: “You can’t use my name. These are dangerous people.”

When federal attorney Mário Lúcio Avelar arrived here in 2003, he said, he’d never seen such terror. He’d been sent to investigate the killings of seven rural workers and allegations of slavery in the region. Raised in the wealthy southeastern city of Belo Horizonte, Avelar, still a federal attorney, told The Post he arrived to find “a Brazil completely different than I had known before.”

Avelar and his team traveled to remote farms and settlements to interview workers and residents, asking about life and violence. Some people would meet him only in the middle of the night, he said, in out-of-sight locations and practically hooded, out of fear “they’d be recognized and executed afterward.” He quickly realized that crime in São Félix do Xingu — a vast municipality larger than South Carolina — went far beyond the cases he’d been sent to investigate. He launched a parallel probe into how organized crime had come to dominate the region.

The frontier was in the throes of a “tormented and violent process” that was destroying the Amazon forest to “almost no social or economic benefit,” Avelar wrote in one of several dispatches to superiors in Brasília, obtained by The Post. First had come the miners in the mid-1980s, who built the early roads. Then followed the loggers seeking mahogany. And finally, the land grabbers. For them, São Félix was a jackpot. More than three-fourths of the region was unclaimed public land. “Terra sem dono,” people call it — land without an owner. Easy to occupy, deforest and sell with fraudulent documents.

The region was lawless, but society was structured. On one rung were the “pistoleiros,” Avelar wrote, hired guns who drove poor settlers from land and killed anyone who refused. On another, the paper-pushers, who “legitimized” illegal land seizures through forgery and government corruption. Overseeing it all were the bosses. The most powerful, Avelar and his team found, was João Cleber Torres.

The short and stocky Torres was a son of humble migrants from faraway Rio Grande do Norte, Avelar wrote. One of the first to settle the region, he started early in the wood trade. But as the mahogany dried up, he swiveled to land acquisition — “an enterprise no less lucrative,” Avelar wrote — and came to lead a criminal organization that built a network of 100 pistoleiros. His partner was his brother, Francisco Torres, known as “Torrinho.” The men were seizing land throughout the region but were particularly active in the Indigenous region of Apyterewa, where, Avelar said, they owned several farms.

Avelar wrote that he’d looked into Torres’s criminal history, finding two homicide cases that named Torres “as the one who gave the order.” The details and dispositions are not clear. Neither is whether they relate to the homicide and attempted homicide cases found in Torres’s criminal file.

But a 2002 police report obtained by The Post, which recommended homicide charges against Torres, said two men on a motorcycle had fatally shot Herógenes Adilson Lemos outside his house. One man accused in the killing, Leonilson Pereira Gonçalves, told police Torres had ordered the hit. (Efforts to locate Gonçalves were not successful.) A separate police investigation named Torres the following year. Two men, Deusdete Rodrigues dos Santos and Claudio de Deus Freitas, told police that Torres had ordered someone named “Amarair” shot. (Attempts to locate the men were unsuccessful.)

Torres said he’d never heard of any of the men: “I’m stupefied by the attempt to link my name to murder or attempted murders of these people.”

The more Avelar learned, the more he grew afraid of Torres, whose name appeared in other investigative accounts. A 2006 study commissioned by the Brazilian Environment Ministry called him an “entrepreneur of land-grabbing.” The Pastoral Land Commission, an organization that studies rural conflicts, named him “the famous land grabber of São Félix do Xingu.” One of the study’s contributors, Steve Schwartzman, who reported on Torres’s activity within Apyterewa, remembers him well: “Isolated communities were being overrun by people like João Cleber.”

But no one came to understand the region and its criminal players better than Avelar. He knew their euphemism for deforestation: “to clean.” He discovered their preferred method of killing: gunmen on motorcycles. He saw the reach of their power in the city: “The military and civil police are controlled by the loggers.” And he extensively documented the principal figures: Torres and his brother.

“Leaders of an organization that carries out and promotes the invasion, occupation and illegal seizure of public lands,” Avelar wrote in his final report on regional crime. “By the danger they represent, they are extremely feared in the region. … They are responsible for dozens of homicides, many of which were committed [after] they refused to pay their rural workers.”

Torrinho, the mayor’s brother, contested the assertions: “Nothing was proven against me or my brother.”

Avelar signed the reports and, together with another federal attorney, sent them to law enforcement leadership in Brasília. He urged support. “Violence is pervasive,” he wrote. “This demands the assembly of a permanent task force.”

Charges by federal police involving the rural killings soon followed. Avelar, who’d quickly departed São Félix do Xingu, feared for his life. One of the men accused in the homicides was later charged with making death threats against him. Avelar vowed never to return to the city. He spent years waiting — for the task force to be assembled, for the state to dismantle the criminal structure, for someone to hold Torres to account for all that the federal attorneys alleged he’d done.

None of it happened. His reports have gone missing at the federal attorney’s office, officials said. The homicide and attempted homicide cases naming Torres, state justice officials said, have disappeared from the São Félix court.

No larger investigation ever followed. And in São Félix, Torres set his sights on political office. But the man who would become mayor never lost his interest in the Indigenous territory of Apyterewa.

AN ILLEGAL VILLAGE NAMED ‘REBIRTH’

If there’s a shield against deforestation in the Amazon, it’s Indigenous land. Safeguarded by its peoples and under more governmental surveillance than other reserves, the territories are often ecological and humanitarian refuges. They make up more than 13 percent of Brazil, but less than 2 percent of the country’s deforestation is on Indigenous land. This hasn’t been the case for Apyterewa.

Since the beginning, its territorial limits, established by the Justice Ministry in 2001, have been disputed. Farmers and loggers — the first to make official contact with the isolated Parakanã in 1983 — say they have just as much, if not more, claim to the land. A few hundred Indigenous people, they argue, don’t need, deserve or even want so much territory.

It’s a political position that has since been used to justify large-scale invasions, rampant deforestation and, in more recent years, the construction of what officials call Brazil’s largest illegal community in an Indigenous territory, an enclave of non-Indigenous people who have claimed the land as their own.

They call it Vila Renascer: “Rebirth Village.” Its dozens of homes climb a gentle slope along the southeastern lip of Apyterewa, where much of the forest has been destroyed. And its champion is Torres. “I have special affection for its people,” he said in a 2020 political advertisement. “One of the newest communities in the city. It has grown so much.”

His involvement began in 2016. The federal government had just ordered the removal of people who were occupying the Indigenous territory, a decision Torres bitterly opposed. He held urgent meetings with the territory’s farmers, oversaw city efforts to contest the decision and made a trip to visit an encampment. Dozens of families, squatting outside a military base, waited to greet him. Many said they had nowhere else to go.

Torres, accompanied by his brother and a rural farmer later named a suspect in a murder case, looked out at the scene, video shows. He shook his head. “The federal government wants to remove 2,000 families to benefit 300” Indigenous people, he said. “I will fight until the end to reverse this.”

Nalva Santos, 42, was listening. The wife of a preacher, she had just moved here with her family to establish an evangelical church. They were the first inhabitants of what would become Vila Renascer. Hearing Torres, Santos said, she felt relief. She’d been worried they were wrong — living inside an Indigenous territory — but felt absolved by his words.

“We believed in him because he was an authority, the mayor,” she said. “And since then, the village has grown so, so much.”

Dozens of blazes burned through the immediate vicinity in the years that followed, according to a University of Maryland fire analysis. Now when Santos walks down the street, she finds not a barren path but a village rising upon the hill. She passes clothing shops, grocers, a butcher’s, restaurants, hotels, a school, and a medical center periodically staffed by city workers. She meets newcomers and sees a future filled with promise — one she believes both neighbors and the mayor will fight to protect.

She witnessed that spirit in November 2020 when, two days after Torres was elected mayor for a second time, dozens of people surrounded and threatened to attack the nearby law enforcement base used to fight deforestation. Then again months later when Torres announced that the city would “come in with construction equipment” and refurbish roads cutting through the territory, over the protests of federal attorneys and without Indigenous consent. And again last August, when federal law enforcement agents stormed Vila Renascer — the “principal support center of land-grabbing and deforestation,” one environmental agent said at the time — and shut down its gas stations and internet connection.

The community didn’t just survive, Santos noticed. It expanded. People of greater ambition were now arriving.

One stood at the edge of the community, surveying a construction project, wearing a cowboy hat and boots and draped in gold. Bulky gold watch. Gold earrings. Gold initials, dangling from her neck. Her name was Monica Silva. She didn’t want her picture taken. “It will go bad for you,” she warned a reporter.

Silva was building a commercial complex. It was all sketched out: a bar over here, a hotel over there, a shop to sell whatever. People were coming from all over, she said. They wanted to buy land inside the Indigenous territory, and she wanted in on the action. There was money to be made.

“If they want their land deforested, my people will do it for them,” she said. She wasn’t troubled by the law. “You have to knock down trees to be able to raise cattle, because agriculture needs cattle, and the country needs agriculture.” Neither was she bothered by doing it on Indigenous land, whose inhabitants she said didn’t have the “courage” to work — they wanted only government handouts.

“The Indians don’t want this land,” she said. “But if they came and asked for it, I would say, ‘It doesn’t work that way.’ ” She was prepared for violence: “I’d take up my machete, and from there, it’d be worked out.”

Far away, in another part of the reserve, Kawore, leader of the Parakanã, considered the potential of such violence. He was standing at the radio transmitter in the Indigenous village of Paredão, telling leaders what he’d witnessed on the reconnaissance mission: More deforestation. More invaders. More people like Monica Silva. No one said anything. They accepted the news with resignation. No one wanted this fight, and neither did Kawore.

He didn’t want to die like Zé do Lago.

AN ENVIRONMENTALIST’S FINAL DAYS

Everyone along the river knew Zé. Workers from nearby farms lunched at his home, built on an isolated stretch of the Xingu River. Neighbors hunted and fished with him. Government workers traveling to the nearby Kayapó Indigenous Territory stopped to visit. He led a volunteer initiative to repopulate the Xingu with threatened turtle species. His plan was to open an ecolodge and leave it to his children.

“An environmentalist to the core,” said his daughter, Sara Tyele, 28.

But José Gomes — who went by Zé do Lago — had a problem. He talked about it to friends and family, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety. His land had been claimed by another person. His rustic, dirt-floor house was nestled within the property lines of a cattle ranch owned by the mayor’s brother — Torrinho.

To the Torres family, the land had become increasingly important. The mayor owned an adjacent farm on which he has been accused of large-scale deforestation. (In an interview, he blamed the fires on Indigenous people.) And he was embroiled in a legal struggle to annex territory in dozens of nearby properties, which would vastly expand his regional holdings.

The Torres brothers were “always” trying to buy do Lago out, one close family member said. But do Lago didn’t want to sell. “The only way I’m leaving is dead,” friends recalled him saying.

Late last year, two friends remembered, he described a confrontation. He explained that a person not affiliated with the Torres brothers — a prominent pastor — had offered to buy his property. Do Lago said he’d been considering the offer when Torrinho found out. A disagreement followed, the friends recalled do Lago saying.

“Zé told me Torrinho said, ‘That area is mine. It’s within my land title. You know that this area is mine,’ ” one of the men said. “Zé told me, ‘Man, this guy is crazy to get my land.’ ”

“That was the last time I saw Zé.”

The man, who often spent weekends with do Lago at his house, eating fish and sipping the sugar cane liquor cachaça, next heard his friend’s name on the news. Do Lago, 61, had been shot to death at home. Also killed were his wife, Márcia Nunes, 39, and her daughter, Joane, 17.

A video was going viral. It showed do Lago’s son arriving to retrieve the bodies as a hard rain fell. The camera focuses first on a lifeless form, bobbing in the river’s shallows. “Márcia,” the son says quietly. Then it swivels to the ground, past empty bullet cases, before settling on a motionless girl lying in mud: “Joane,” he says. The son’s voice catches. His father lies supine on the sodden ground ahead, dead and bloated in the downpour. “My father!” he cries. “My God, my father!”

Nothing was missing from the house. The crime scene didn’t look like a robbery gone wrong.

“It was an execution,” one neighbor said.

More than six months have passed since the killings. No suspects have been named. No charges have been filed. All case files, including autopsy reports, are under seal. Investigating officers did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Torres and his brother dismissed suspicions that their family was tied to the killings. “Unfounded accusations,” Torrinho said. “I never argued with Zé do Lago about his land; he had my permission to stay there.”

“We want the killers and masterminds to be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” the mayor said.

No one in the community interviewed for this report — the victims’ family, neighbors, researchers, police and community leaders — said they believed the case would be thoroughly investigated. Not in São Félix do Xingu, where not one of 62 reported homicides in territorial disputes has ever been solved, according to the Pastoral Land Commission. And not when it involved men as important as Torres and his brother, close political allies of Pará’s governor, Helder Barbalho.

“Torrinho is suspect number one, without doubt,” said a state detective who was not assigned to the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the investigation. “I’ve read the reports. What is happening would almost be a joke if it wasn’t so serious.”

So the family waits. Not for justice. But for more violence.

“I’m under threat,” one close family member said. “I’ve had to flee town.”

THE FUTURE, CARVED FROM A HARD LAND

The mayor was relaxed, sitting across from the friendly radio host in late May and talking about his closeness to the governor. “He always gives me support,” Torres told his interviewer. “Even when I’m out of government, he gives me support.” But what he now needed as mayor, he said, was a state representative interested in helping the community. He looked to the man at his side. It was his brother.

“So that’s why always I’m saying that, today, Torrinho is running for state office,” the mayor said. “I very much believe in this, to strengthen our region, and strengthen our city.”

Torrinho, the president of the local rural farmers association, called his pre-candidacy a “project.” But he was still waiting on some electoral polls before officially announcing. If he decides to run, political analysts say, he’ll have a strong chance at victory.

Torres and his brother ended the segment and exited the radio booth. The mayor was all smiles and handshakes. Surrounded by handlers and boosters, he felt the success of his life. He said all of it — a declared wealth of $3 million, multiple properties, 11,800 head of cattle — had come to pass only because his family had been committed to building the region, not just a business.

“This was a frontier town,” he said in a brief interview. “We suffered here. I caught malaria multiple times. I know the difficulties that people have gone through here.” When he worked as a logger, he said, “it was always with a license.” And when he had to deforest, “it was all within the forest code.” The city, he said, is committed to fighting environmental crime: “I’m against illegal deforestation.” No one in the city fears him, he said. Anyone who says otherwise is a political opponent “wanting to denigrate the image of the mayor.”

Then he was leaving the building. He entered one of the two waiting gray Volkswagen pickup trucks. His caravan departed, to take him to the next political event.

They pulled out into a city where the forest felt far away and most voters didn’t seem to be troubled by the allegations in the mayor’s past. They’d heard the stories, but shrugged when reminded: That was then. This was now. And now feels good. The local economy is growing. The city has national chains. Asphalt roads. More than 2.4 million head of cattle, the largest bovine population in a Brazilian municipality. A forest is gone. Indigenous people are fearful of violence. People have been killed and forgotten. But an easier life has finally arrived in this part of the Amazon, carved from an inhospitable terrain and sculpted by men such as Torres.

“It’s a good thing, him being mayor,” said Oscar do Santos, 65. “I would vote for him again.”

“I’ve never doubted my vote,” offered Josemar Pereira da Silva, 41. “It wasn’t he who ordered the killings; it was his brother.”

“I didn’t worry about that history,” said João Caetano, 61. “I want good government.”

The mayor continued down the road, toward a large billboard. It showed him smiling beside the governor. Then beyond was another. This one was of his brother, grinning and standing beside a herd of cattle, heralding the town’s 60-year anniversary and all that had been accomplished.

“Congratulations, São Félix do Xingu,” the billboard said.

Gabriela Sá Pessoa contributed to this report.

Story by Terrence McCoy

Photos by Rafael Vilela for The Washington Post

BRASILÉIA, Brazil — Daniel Valle sped down Highway 317, closing in on the first targets of the day. He was in a hurry. Deforestation alerts had tripled in recent weeks. Police were warning that armed criminal groups had invaded new territory. Another season of destroying the Amazon rainforest was here, and in this corner, the only check on the looming ecological disaster was this: Valle’s small team of inspectors in a dirt-splattered pickup truck.

“This is it,” said Valle, 39, pulling off the highway. A roving state environmental inspector, he traveled throughout this remote land that was increasingly under threat from a wave of destruction that had leveled the forests to the east. His job was to slow its advance. The challenge felt futile most days. But especially today.

His crew was in southern Acre, where the federal government under President Jair Bolsonaro — a longtime critic of environmental regulation — no longer staffed a single inspector. That meant his state agency, the Acre Environmental Institute, now bore the burden of enforcing environmental law in this area of more than 3,600 square miles along the border with Bolivia.

Valle pulled out his target list. The map showed 16 points of illegal devastation — pinpricks of red piercing an expanse of green and brown.

He sighed. This was enough work for two weeks. Not the two days they’d been given.

“We don’t have enough people,” Valle said.

This mismatch — too few inspectors for too much deforestation — is one in a cascading series of shortfalls and failures that are enabling criminals to raze the world’s largest rainforest with impunity. Law enforcement misses the majority of deforestation in the Amazon. The fines that the few state and federal inspectors here write are seldom paid. The occasional cases that spill into the criminal justice system languish for years. And in the rare instance of a criminal conviction, it almost never draws a prison sentence, The Washington Post found in a review of a year’s worth of cases.

The violent and lawless erasure of the Amazon is perhaps the world’s greatest environmental crime story. Scientists warn that the forest, seen as vital to averting catastrophic global warming, is at a tipping point. But in Brazil, home to about 60 percent of the Amazon, nearly one-fifth has already been destroyed. And virtually no one, law enforcement officials say, has been held accountable.

“No one goes to jail,” said Luciano Evaristo, former chief inspection officer of Ibama, the federal environmental law enforcement agency. “For example, in 2016, we took apart a large deforestation ring in the south of Pará state. They deforested 50 square miles. There were 23 arrests. In the end, no one’s in jail. And this was the biggest deforestation ring in Brazil.”

Environmental agencies have similarly struggled to punish even those accused of only minor deforestation — such as the man the inspection team was driving to visit. At the end of the path, they found rancher Francisco Nonato de Souza coming out of his house. They accused him of illegally deforesting 45 acres and handed him a $17,000 fine.

Nonato glowered. He looked at the crew’s heavily armed police escort.

“You come out here for this bit of deforestation but do nothing about the guys who deforest 120 or 150 acres?” he said. “Those guys over there” — his chin jutting into the distance — “they knocked it all down. Burned it. Planted grass. Nothing happened to them.”

Valle defended their work. Nonato was the first on their list in southern Acre. But they still had 15 cases to investigate.

The rancher was unmoved.

“They knock it all down,” he said. “And nothing happens.”

Valle didn’t reply; he knew environmental authorities were about to fall even further behind. His was the only inspection team that traveled throughout the state. The year was shaping up to be perfect for deforestation: hot and dry. And the last agent to perform inspections from the south Acre field office, disillusioned by the mission and tired of the risks it entailed, had just announced he was quitting. So when tomorrow came, and Valle’s crew departed for another part of the state, they’d be leaving the forest here defenseless.

More than 3,600 square miles. And no one to enforce the environmental law.

THE FOREST BURNS. FEW PAY.

Brazil had once promised something different. Rising from the yoke of a military dictatorship that had promoted rapacious development of the Amazon, the country vowed a radical new approach to the environment. The 1988 constitution described it as “essential” and called upon the government and civil society to safeguard the country’s natural resources. Soon came official plans to crack down on deforesters, and the law enforcement agencies to do it.

The tools: Fines that could soar into the millions. Land-use embargoes that prohibited the commercial use of illegally deforested or degraded land. Criminal charges that could put deforesters in prison.

“A revolution” is how former environment minister Marina Silva described it in an interview.

But in the decades since, law enforcement officials say, nearly every tool has been dulled to the point of ineffectiveness, snagged by bureaucracy, case overloads and a grinding appellate system that has long stymied the country’s criminal justice system. The atrophy has deprived Brazil of what should be its most potent weapon against deforestation: credible regulations and the threat of consequences for those who violate them.

“It’s the economic theory of crime,” said Jair Schmidt, a government environmental analyst who studies law enforcement failings. “Will you make more money from deforestation than you stand to lose if you are cited for an infraction?”

In the beginning, the answer was unclear. Ibama, the country’s chief environmental enforcement agency, was founded in 1989 and professionalized with a civil service exam in 2002. It would be years before it was writing more than 10,000 citations a year. Then years more before deforesters knew how seriously to take them. Between 2004 and 2012, according to government data, deforestation fell 83 percent.

But there was a hidden flaw: As the number of citations rose, the number of people charged with adjudicating them didn’t. The backlog swelled. Thousands of cases languished, some for as long as 15 years. At least 28,100 fines issued since 2000 have expired, government records show, because of the statute of limitations. Between 10 and 15 percent of fines are paid. But they are the smallest ones, law enforcement officials say, for the pettiest abuses. Less than 1 percent of the money owed for environmental abuse is generally paid, according to government audits.

“Infractions aren’t generating the dissuasive effect that they should have,” Ibama officials reported this year in an internal technical note obtained by The Post. “Offenders think it’s worth it to continue with their undue use of natural resources and that the risk of timely punishment is low.”

Ibama didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the federal criminal justice system, which adjudicates more-serious allegations of environmental abuse, the risk of punishment is just as slight.

The Post examined all 764 criminal cases filed in 2016 by federal attorneys in the Amazon.

Only 125 cases — 16 percent of the total — had resulted in a conviction. Some of those convictions were subsequently dismissed for exceeding the statute of limitations; others drew sentences of community service or a fine. The Post was not able to find one prison sentence.

“What you saw in your analysis is what we see every day,” said Daniel Azeredo, a federal attorney who has led some of the government’s largest prosecutions of accused deforesters. “We don’t have people in prison for environmental crimes. What we do have is a trade. We are trading massive areas of the Amazon for very small punitive penalties.”

Offenders enjoy several advantages in the court system. Crimes of deforestation are limited to maximum sentences of four years. The appellate system effectively freezes cases. And the legal resources at the command of deforesters are enormous — many hire expensive defense attorneys now specialized in environmental law.

Prosecutors named grocery store owner Ezequiel Antônio Castanha the “Amazon’s biggest deforester” in 2014 and won a conviction in 2019. But Castanha was not sent to prison. (Prosecutors are appealing. Castanha declined to comment.) Federal attorneys called São Paulo businessman A.J. Vilela the same thing in 2016. But his case is still pending. (Vilela didn’t respond to requests for comment. He has denied any wrongdoing.) José Lopes, one of the Amazon’s biggest farmers, was accused by federal attorneys in 2019 of forming a militia to invade public lands and conduct “large-scale deforestation,” but never convicted. (Lopes contested the charges. Citing a lack of evidence, prosecutors have requested a dismissal.)

In the Amazon, nearly 95,000 people were incarcerated as of December. But only one-tenth of 1 percent of them were being held for an environmental crime, according to the National Prison Department. There isn’t a state in the Brazilian Amazon that doesn’t face illegal deforestation, but in some, not one person was incarcerated for environmental abuse.

One such state was Acre, where a state environmental agent named Marcel Pedralino had decided to call it quits.

‘I’M NO MARTYR’

At the field office of the Acre Environmental Institute, the requests had been piling up for weeks. One was from a local judge, asking for verification that a ranch was respecting a land embargo. Another came from a judicial official wanting a deforestation investigation on 45 remote acres. And in the back of the sleepy office, one more request now sat on Pedralino’s desk.

Pedralino, the last person in the office who investigated such infractions, squinted at the page. “Damage to the forest,” a colleague had written. “Uncontrolled fire.”

He looked around. Shuffled some files.

“Where is that stack of papers?” Pedralino asked.

He opened the cupboard behind him and pulled out a beige envelope. It was stuffed with all the complaints of deforestation that had never been investigated. There were dozens: “They burned all of the vegetation protecting the creek,” one reported. “Seventy acres already destroyed by fire,” another said. “Illegal extraction of wood,” added a third.

Pedralino put the additional report on the top. He closed the folder and placed it back in the filing cabinet.

He was done. His paperwork was signed, delivered and approved. He no longer worked here. He now was employed by the state sanitation service, a prospect he found far more enticing than defending the Amazon. No one gets killed tinkering with sewer systems.

“I’m no martyr,” he said. He wasn’t even an environmentalist. He of all people, he believed, didn’t deserve to go down like the cop ambushed and killed in 2016 after an environmental bust in Pará state. Or the government worker shot dead in 2019 while investigating illegal fishing in Amazonas. He didn’t want to be attacked like the Ibama agents who came under fire in 2020 in Roraima state and to not have a way to respond. The agency didn’t give him a gun. It didn’t provide a bulletproof vest. He didn’t even have a car. The office truck had been in the shop for weeks. No one knew when they were getting it back.

Pedralino glanced to his right. Elaine da Silva was typing at her computer. She was also authorized to perform inspections, but had never done one in the region and had no plans to. Not without an armed escort, which police almost never provided to the field office, unlike for Valle’s team of inspectors. No environmental offender, she believed, would listen to her, a Black woman, anyway.

So here they sat, gunless, carless, with 3,600 square miles to patrol and limited resources to do it.

“Give me a hand with this property registry,” da Silva told Pedralino, dropping a form on his desk. With no other work to do, he gave it a look.

It hadn’t always been like this. When Pedralino joined the agency in 2012, the government had seemed on the cusp of eliminating illegal deforestation. Each federal and state environmental agency staffed an inspection force. Pedralino would travel down distant roads, hand out the tickets and be on his way, free of concern for his safety.

But that was before the election of Bolsonaro. Before Bolsonaro’s environmental minister met with gold miners, loggers and land grabbers. Before the number of Ibama inspectors plummeted. Before Acre’s conservative new governor told accused environmental offenders not to pay fines issued by state inspectors. Before the rise of a politics of grievance that presented deforesters not as criminals, but as honest workers oppressed by authoritarian environmentalists. And before Pedralino realized that this job, a job for which he felt no personal affinity, was putting his life at risk.

He had always considered himself willing to do whatever was necessary to perform his work. But now, when asked to investigate deforestation, all he could see was the violence that might happen. He remembered when dozens of angry ranchers, some of them armed, surrounded his truck in 2013. He thought about the illegal logger who went to get something from his house, and Pedralino was sure it was a gun. He heard his own pleas, begging visiting environmental agents in 2019 not to destroy the logging equipment they’d confiscated — because that could trigger retaliation, and he was the one who lived here and would have to suffer the consequences.

The stress got to be too much. So late last year, Pedralino complained to his bosses that it was nearly impossible to investigate environmental wrongdoing without security. Then in early July, with nothing having changed, he told them he was quitting. And now it was a week later, and he was standing up from his desk, not feeling a bit of regret.

There was only one matter that caused him remorse: the thought that other inspectors were out there now, patrolling territory he refused to go into, taking on risks he could no longer stomach.

“That’s the hardest thing to face,” he said, “But, maybe it will prolong my life.”

FIGHTING THE FUTURE

Sixteen points of deforestation on the map. One now done. Fifteen to go.

Daniel Valle pulled out his target map, feeling a swell of annoyance. The phone he held was his own. The mapping app he used to locate the deforestation was a free promo. The Acre Environmental Institute hadn’t even provided the targets. They came from the state police.

Every shortfall cost time. Not having a mobile printer meant losing 30 minutes writing fines by hand. Having no access to property records meant personally pinpointing on which ranch the deforestation had occurred. Too few inspectors meant they had to drive hours just to reach their targets.

Sometimes during those long drives, they got to thinking that their challenges had been imposed intentionally, that they weren’t employed to fight deforestation but to provide political cover. So that Acre could say it was combating deforestation when really it wasn’t.

“We’re pushing with our bellies,” fellow inspector Josmario Santos Guimarães said during one such conversation, using a Brazilian expression that means not doing much of anything.

“The agencies have been shrunk so much,” lead inspector Ivan de Jesus Pereira de Araújo e Silva said during another.

Valle looked up from his map. He grabbed the wheel.

“We’ll take advantage of our current location,” he said. “This next point is close to our last inspection.”

It was easy to get frustrated, but Valle couldn’t picture himself doing any other work. Raised on a rural commune, he’d always felt connected to the forest. He remembered the cool Amazon mornings of his childhood — “cold enough to kill a monkey,” his grandmother would say — and his fear when he learned that not only was the biome in danger but that its demise could threaten the world.

He decided there could be no better way to spend his life than defending something so important. But over the years, as more of the forest disappeared, and temperatures rose, and mornings cold enough to kill monkeys grew rarer, the idealism with which he’d entered the profession was infected by cynicism. Most days, he didn’t feel like he was fighting deforestation. He was fighting the future.

They passed dirt roads branching off the highway. Each of these, he believed, was opening more territory to illegal deforestation. Some days, he’d find illegal loggers mowing away with their chain saws. Other days, blackened embers smoking from a recent blaze, or trucks laboring under the weight of giant logs. But every day, he’d hear the same story. Deforesters saying they’d done it to survive, to feed their families.

Was it the truth? Maybe for some. Not for others.

And he was about to hear it again.

The inspectors were arriving at a 500-acre cattle ranch. An unshaven Màrcio Silva de Melo, 41, had been accused of hacking down 20 acres of forest. The cattleman looked down at his muddy boots. He said he’d done it to widen his pasture. He wanted more money to support his two daughters, ages 14 and 3.

He felt embittered. First the government had left him without support out here, he said. Now it wanted to fine him $8,000 for doing what was necessary to survive. That money, he said, would “come out of the mouths of my daughters.”

Valle listened, relieved there was no violence in the man’s voice. No one knew whether accused deforesters were armed, or how they would react. The inspectors took what precautions they could — never work alone, take security escorts, treat everyone with respect — but still, the job had become more dangerous. Just the other week, his crew had inspected a farm occupied by a man convicted of organizing the murder of a female American missionary in 2005. They now relied on police to tell them where it was safe to go — and where their presence would bring trouble.

Hoping that the next stop wouldn’t, they plunged deeper into the forest. The path led toward a huge ranching complex ringed by illegal deforestation.

A dozen men emerged from the shadows of a building. No one said anything for a long moment.

“Let the police get out first,” Valle said.

Property owner Luiz Ricardo Fernandez Leon, 56, came out to greet the inspectors, uncertain and unsmiling. Valle walked with him to the shaded porch of a farmhouse, where he said they’d discovered more than 200 acres of illegal deforestation on his property. As the rancher’s men watched, Fernandez Leon was handed several documents: a fine of $80,000 and an embargo prohibiting him from using the deforested land to grow crops, graze cattle or any other moneymaking activity.

The rancher shook his head and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t deny the destruction, but said he would fight the enforcement. Not with force — with lawyers. He planned to appeal the case. It would almost certainly be years before the matter was settled. If it ever was.

“I was not expecting this,” Fernandez Leon said. “Five years we’ve been out here, and I’ve never seen one government inspector.”

Valle knew it was unlikely he’d ever see another. He got back into the truck. A long drive loomed, and the crew had to get moving. Their next destination was along the far eastern tip of the state. Their work here was done.

Sixteen points of deforestation. They’d worked two days, and hadn’t even visited half.

A DREAM OF CONSERVATION UNDONE

Back in the office, a phone on Pedralino’s desk was vibrating.

He grimaced and picked it up. “It’s me.”

The woman on the other end sounded frantic. Headquarters needed someone to drive into the field and lift an environmental embargo. Could Pedralino go on Monday? He was already shaking his head.

“We don’t even have a car,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“Why don’t you send an email?” he said. “I don’t work here anymore. I now work in sanitation.”

“You work in sanitation?”

He suggested a solution, hung up and went back to his computer. He pulled up Google Earth. He zoomed in to show his house, a property surrounded by forest on all sides. “How I like it,” he said. Then he zoomed back out again.

The screen showed the states of Acre and neighboring Rondônia, side by side, each showing a different side of the debate over the future of the Amazon. Two of the last Brazilian states to be incorporated, they once mirrored one another: remote, forested jurisdictions of similar size and economic power.

Then their paths diverged. Acre, reeling from the 1988 assassination of conservationist Chico Mendes, chose to preserve the environment. It built a sustainable economy around ecological reserves, rubber-tapping and the harvesting of nuts. Rondônia, meanwhile, opened itself up to the cattle industry. Land grabbers stole territories. Armed disputes erupted. In a matter of decades, the state lost nearly 40 percent of its forest.

Today, Rondônia has twice as many people as Acre, three times the economic output and nearly four times as many cars. And its neighbors in Acre, increasingly critical of the conservation efforts their state once championed, want to catch up. In 2018, Acre awarded Bolsonaro 77 percent of its vote — more than any other state. Voters that year also elected a conservative new governor, Gladson Cameli, who has worked to realize Bolsonaro’s vision, growing the cattle industry and deprioritizing conservation.

Critics have lamented what they call the “Rondonization of Acre.” But few doubt that Bolsonaro will win again here in the October elections.

Pedralino zoomed in on Rondônia. The screen showed vast stretches of deforestation. He wanted to believe his 3-year-old daughter would know the Amazon as he had — gargantuan and pristine. But he started to doubt himself. All of this destruction had happened in just his lifetime. “A forest lost in a generation,” he said.

He returned the view to Acre. An expanse of uninterrupted green.

“Could it be possible,” he wondered aloud, “that what happened in Rondônia will now happen here?”

The screen swept toward the eastern tip of the state, where armed land invaders were increasingly aggressive, and where, on the ground, it looked to Valle as if the question was already being answered. He was standing in the forest, looking at a scattering of colossal logs. The inspectors had been sent to try to remove them, but had no idea how. “We’re not going to be able to solve anything here,” one of the inspectors vented, before they left for the next point of deforestation, and the next.

Pedralino closed Google Earth.

He stood up from his desk. He gathered his things and headed to the door. Whether Acre became the next Rondônia or not was no longer his problem. The Amazon would have to find itself a different martyr.

He walked outside, into the bright afternoon sun, put on his motorcycle helmet and rode off.

Gabriela Sá Pessoa and Luiz Fernando Toledo contributed to this report.

My friend Dom Phillips and activist Bruno Pereira were shot dead in the Amazon. I traveled deep into the forest to find out why.

ATALAIA DO NORTE, Brazil — There’s nowhere to hide on the water. Looking out from stilt houses high atop the bluffs, the river dwellers have a clear view of everything that putters down the Itaquaí. Nothing goes by unnoticed, not even the small aluminum motorboat that rounded the bend here early one Sunday in June.

The boat carried two men. One was Bruno Pereira, an activist investigating poachers in the nearby Indigenous territory. The other was Dom Phillips, a British journalist documenting his work. The men had left their Amazon rainforest encampment at dawn — early enough, they believed, to sneak past the river community where some of the poachers lived and make it back to town.

But a poacher known as Pelado was already awake. The wiry and hardened fisherman was standing outside his wood-plank house above the water filling a canister with gasoline, according to a confession he gave to police, when he spotted the boat.

He didn’t know Dom. But he recognized the bearish man piloting the vessel. It was his nemesis, the man he’d allegedly told others he wanted to shoot: Bruno.

Pelado put down the canister. He went to fetch his gun.

“There he goes,” he called to another fisherman, he later told police. “Let’s go kill him.”

Pelado and the other man headed down to the river, each carrying a 16-gauge shotgun. They climbed into Pelado’s boat and took off after the two men, vanishing around the river bend and setting in motion a series of events that would shock the country, draw worldwide attention to the criminal dismantling of the Amazon, and grow grimmer by the day. First, the disappearances of Dom and Bruno. Then the frantic searches. Then days of taut uncertainty. And finally the arrests, confessions and morbid revelations: Dom and Bruno had been shot dead, burned, dismembered and buried deep in the forest.

Prosecutors have filed murder charges against Pelado, who led investigators to the remains; his brother Oseney da Costa de Oliveira; and Jefferson da Silva Lima, the fisherman who accompanied Pelado. Five more inhabitants of the river community were accused by police of helping to hide the bodies. This was not an act committed by one solitary individual, police say. It was a community affair.

The details haunted me then, just as they haunt me now. I knew both of the men who were killed. Bruno, 41, had been a senior official at Funai, Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency. He had once overseen its operations in the remote Javari Valley region where he was killed. And Dom, 57, was a friend. I remember his warmth and kindness the first time I spoke to him in 2014, when he was a Brazil-based contract writer for The Washington Post and I’d just started as a reporter for the paper. He was one of the first people I contacted when I came here as The Post’s new Rio de Janeiro bureau chief, and he immediately invited my wife, Emily, and me out to meet the other foreign journalists. I spoke with Dom just two weeks before his death.

For months, I couldn’t stop thinking about their killings. Not only because I’d known the two men, and had frequently taken the same risks that led to Dom’s death, but also because I couldn’t make sense of what had happened.

What had fed Pelado’s hatred? What had driven a fisherman deep in the rainforest to kill two people out in the open — and believe he could get away with it?

President Jair Bolsonaro, a longtime critic of Indigenous protections, sought to blame the men for their own deaths — what happens when an “adventure” goes wrong in a “completely wild” region. The country’s vice president pinned the attack on alcohol, saying the killers had probably been drinking.

But a review of official records, interviews with dozens of people and a journey down the Itaquaí show that such explanations serve only to obscure the government negligence that enabled the killings. In recent years, the government has reduced its presence in the region, leaving the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory and its 6,000 inhabitants more vulnerable to outsiders. It then did little to address what followed: a surge in invasions by armed poachers, threats against the depleted security forces left behind, and the 2019 killing of a federal official investigating illegal fishing.

And then, when an Indigenous group moved to fill the void, enlisting Bruno to lead an Indigenous patrol team, authorities neither responded to threats made against the surveillance scouts nor dismantled the poaching network they exposed.

At its most basic interpretation, what led to the killings was the simple human motivations of hatred and greed. But the story of the deaths of Dom and Bruno also betrays the broader forces fueling the destruction of the Amazon.

Those elements — nearsighted government policies, weakened law enforcement institutions, criminal impunity — also propelled this story forward, until the end came and the lives of three very different men converged, out there along an isolated stretch of the Itaquaí, where the river bends and no witnesses could be left living.

CHAPTER 2

The man known as Pelado was born Amarildo da Costa Oliveira and raised in a time of conflict along the northern crest of the vast Javari Valley, home to the world’s largest concentration of uncontacted peoples. His community was at war with an isolated tribe just beyond the confluence of the Ituí and Itaquaí rivers.

The river dwellers, lured by a government promise of jobs and wealth, had come to settle this distant part of the Amazon along the borders of Peru and Colombia. But much of it was already occupied. The isolated Korubo, a warrior people who carried long wooden clubs, were waging a failing resistance.

The years of Pelado’s childhood were filled with reports of killings, attacks and counterattacks, men skinned and Indigenous people massacred — constant violence that molded his community’s perception of the world. “We are civilized; we are not Indians,” said Alzenira do Nascimento Gomes, Pelado’s aunt, who helped raise him. “The Korubo are killers.”

In 1989, when Pelado was 9, a relative named Sebastião Costa heard that four Korubo had been near his house. The community was “terrified,” federal investigators wrote in a report on the incident. That night, Costa organized a group of 15 armed men to drive the Korubo off. They killed three, the investigators reported. One was shot in the chest. Two in the back. Fearful of reprisal, the river dwellers hid the evidence, throwing the bodies in a common grave. (Costa denied involvement in the killings. He has since died.)

The killings disturbed authorities. Funai had named the Javari Valley a protected reserve for its Indigenous population in 1985, drawing its first territorial lines. But the agency wasn’t enforcing the boundaries. Settlers were still plundering the valley’s resources freely, inciting more violence. A base for Funai agents was built at the confluence of the Ituí and Itaquaí, closing off the main entry point into the valley in 1996. Federal forces then swept the territory. They removed any settlers living inside. Many had been there for years and ended up along the riverbanks just outside the reserve. Many were related to Pelado.

“Our fields, homes — we lost everything,” said Pelado’s brother-in-law, Manuel Vladimir Oliveira da Costa. “Whatever we had was inside.”

Grievance over the valley’s closure led about 300 settlers to go to the confluence and surround the Funai base in February 2000. Calling themselves “the riverless,” they demanded the removal of the Funai forces and the authority to take what they wanted from the Indigenous territory, police reported at the time. Some held molotov cocktails. Others charged the base to retrieve confiscated fishing equipment.

It was a standoff, but some federal officials were sympathetic to the settlers. “We can’t deny their poverty,” Mauro Sposito, a detective with the federal police, wrote to his superiors. Prohibiting entry had left “innumerable families … with no alternatives for survival.” If nothing was done, he warned, “there will not be peace.”

But little help arrived. The territorial lines of the Javari Valley were made permanent in 2001. And a hatred began to grow in the river communities. Toward not just the Indigenous people with whom they had warred, but also their protectors in Funai.

CHAPTER 3

The uneasy new order was soon put to a test. In the summer of 2002, Funai needed the help of the river communities. The agency was plotting an expedition into the valley’s wilds to find an uncontacted people named the “flecheiros” — people of the arrow — and draw their territorial lines. It needed to recruit several master woodsmen to act as guides.

One was Pelado.

Paulo Welker, an expedition captain, looked along the Itaquaí for men who could withstand the mental and physical strain of three months in the jungle. He remembered Pelado — 21 years old, athletic, always smiling — as the perfect candidate. He could build canoes. Pilot tough river passages. Hunt and deftly wield an ax. Welker quickly hired him.

“Extremely agile and dedicated,” he said. “Anything you needed help with, he’d do.”

He paused.

“At the time,” he said, “I had no idea I had just arrested his uncle for illegal hunting inside the territory.”

It was a potentially volatile mix. Indigenous people and government experts would be working with river dwellers — a group normally hostile to them — and journeying hundreds of miles into the jungle. “The river communities view the Indigenous experts with hostility,” author Leonencio Nossa wrote in a book about the mission. And few of the woodsmen, he wrote, would “refuse an invitation to hunt Indians.”

Pelado and the other river dwellers rarely spoke to the Indigenous people. At dusk, each group clustered in its own camp. One night, in the dense forest, Pelado started to scream. He was dreaming that flecheiro warriors had infiltrated the camp, carrying axes and machetes. He yelled at them to drop their weapons.

“He woke up everyone,” Nossa recalled. “There was a fear there.”

Pelado kept that fear mostly hidden beneath smiles and an apparent desire to please. But one night around the fire, journalist Scott Wallace witnessed a different Pelado. The young man was talking about a frightful incident. Shortly before the journey, he’d been held up by bandits. Afterward, he’d wanted revenge, to “break” the men. Wallace asked what he meant. “ ‘Kill them,’ ” he said.

“That was when I began to think maybe Pelado isn’t the happy-go-lucky guy that I first thought,” said Wallace, now a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut.

As years went by, as Pelado married and had five children, the challenges of the river exacted their toll and the easy smiles of his youth largely disappeared, friends and family said. Many river dwellers were embittered by the territory’s closure. But Pelado particularly was. He started sneaking past the Funai base to fish in prohibited waters. There was money to be made.

In the past two decades, an illegal fishing industry had taken off. Restaurants and markets in Brazil, Peru and Colombia were selling protected fish and turtles. Fishermen believed the best catch was in the Javari Valley. Law enforcement officials say a local crime boss started buying equipment for river people to increase their haul and then sell to him. Pelado got a speedy fishing boat with a 60-horsepower motor, and soon built himself another house, in the nearby river town of Benjamin Constant.

One relative, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety, said Pelado’s ambitions were larger. The law enforcement presence was waning. The environmental agency Ibama had closed its regional base in 2018. Funai was cutting its patrol missions. In a territory nearly the size of Portugal, financial records show, the agency spent less than $250,000 in 2020 on law enforcement. The government, which never had a large presence in the region, seemed vulnerable.

Pelado got his gun. At night, people who know him said, he started shooting at the Funai base. He cursed the agency. “He was very aggressive,” the relative said. “Very.”

One night, the relative watched him drink in a bar. Pelado said there was one last thing holding him back. A local Indigenous association, the Javari Valley Indigenous Peoples Union, had started patrolling the rivers. The effort was led by a man Pelado already knew: Bruno, the former regional director of Funai.

“He said, ‘If we kill Bruno, we’ll be the bosses of everything here.’ ”

Then:

“ ‘I’m going to kill him.’ ”

CHAPTER 4

When I heard Dom and Bruno were missing, I called everyone I knew in the region. The announcement by the Indigenous union had been troubling. The patrol team that the two men were visiting had received threats shortly before Dom and Bruno failed to show up as expected in the city of Atalaia do Norte. But I tried to hope for the best. There’s little cellphone service in the Amazon. It’s not unusual for hours, even days, to pass without hearing from someone.

Then night fell. I messaged Eliesio Marubo, the attorney for the Indigenous union and a member of the Marubo people. I told him I was nervous. Dom was an experienced journalist who’d lived in Brazil for 15 years. He’d been all over the Amazon. But the region was swarming with drug traffickers and environmental criminals. Marubo himself rarely went anywhere without an armed guard. What did he think happened?

“They definitely suffered an attack,” Marubo wrote back.

The next morning, I received a string of audio messages. They were from Orlando Possuelo, another activist who led the Indigenous patrol team with Bruno. The normally jovial Possuelo sounded exhausted, defeated. Bruno and Dom’s disappearance had become a global news story. Possuelo said security forces were arriving from all over. But he wasn’t optimistic. The first to report the men missing, he’d already scoured the Itaquaí. One river dweller had told him he’d seen a large boat following Dom and Bruno — Pelado’s boat.

“I just stood there, without hope,” Possuelo said. It was Pelado who had threatened the surveillance team days before. Dom and Bruno, he said, were very likely dead.

None of this information was yet public. I planned to write a story. But first, I called Dom’s wife, Alessandra Sampaio. I didn’t know what to say, but knew she had to hear this from me rather than read it in the newspaper. As the phone rang, I thought about the last time I’d seen her. Dom loved soccer, and we’d gone to a hilltop bar in Rio to watch the Brazilian club Flamengo play Liverpool. Flamengo lost, 1-0, and other patrons were furious, but Alessandra didn’t seem to care. She’d been vibrant that night, joking and laughing the entire time.

Now her voice was catching.

She was sitting in her apartment, waiting for news. I told her what I’d learned. People didn’t think Dom and Bruno were coming home. She absorbed the information. But she wasn’t ready to accept it, at least not yet. There was still this image in her head. It was Dom, and he was injured in the woods. Night was descending. And she couldn’t get to him. She started to weep.

“This is anguishing,” she said. “The river is full of traffickers and loggers. Life doesn’t have any value to them. They kill for nothing.

“They need help. I need help.”

CHAPTER 5

Few people knew the dangers and difficulties of the region better than Bruno. He had come to the valley in 2010 to work at the Funai regional office. It’s not an easy posting. The remote city of Atalaia do Norte has limited medical facilities and school options. The internet rarely works. But Bruno requested the slot. He wanted to protect isolated Indigenous communities, and the Javari Valley was where they were particularly vulnerable.

“He kept saying we need to protect the isolated Indians,” said Danielle Moreira, a friend. “He was such an Indigenista that he could have only been born that way.”

Named Funai’s regional coordinator for the Javari Valley in April 2012, Bruno obsessed over territorial security. The vastness of the reserve belied its vulnerability. Many of the rivers that veined the land were unpatrolled. Invaders were exploiting the Curuçá River, so Bruno opened a base there. Then he increased law enforcement. Between 2012 and 2015, according to Funai records, his team stopped at least 45 boats and seized thousands of pounds of wildlife.

Threats followed, but Bruno didn’t stop. He instead bought a gun. From then on, he carried a chrome .380 Taurus.

If they come shooting, he told friends, at least I’ll be able to defend myself.

But in truth, few worried. At that time, the Funai office had security. The support of the armed forces. And a fiery leader in Bruno, who was uncowed, stringing together successes that would make him one of Brazil’s most renowned Indigenistas. He led daring expeditions to make contact with isolated groups. He helped negotiate a truce between the warring Korubo and Matis in 2014. And he learned to speak four Indigenous languages. Then came a promotion and a transfer to Brasília, where he became national director of the department for the isolated Indigenous.

“That was when more of the problems started,” said Beatriz Matos, his wife.

National politics were shifting. With the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, the leftists who had governed Brazil for 14 years were replaced by leaders who were more likely to see the rainforest as a resource to be tapped, not preserved.

Funai’s budget was slashed. The number of agents dropped to a 25-year low. And the country was soon in the thrall of Bolsonaro, who was promising to “take a scythe to Funai.” The bellicose rhetoric seemed to encourage invasions of the Indigenous territories, which surged all over the country, including in the Javari Valley. The prospect of violence against Funai workers, once remote, suddenly seemed likely.

“The reality has changed,” Funai officials in the valley wrote in a 2019 technical report.

Weeks after Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, poachers attacked the river base on the Ituí and Itaquaí. The first assault came in the middle of the night, when the base was riddled with at least 17 shots. Then it happened again and again. Within a year, poachers had opened fire on the base at least eight times, instilling a “collective feeling of insecurity,” wrote 11 Funai agents, including Bruno. They said that they’d been forced to abandon many law enforcement duties out of fear of being killed and that they needed help.

“There have never been reports of such intense pressure against Funai,” the agents wrote. “But nothing has been even minimally altered, and no word has come as to additional support.”

One agent who never stopped working was Maxciel Pereira. Set to take regional command over the river bases, Pereira continued to seize illegally caught fish on the Itaquaí. Shortly after one apprehension, in September 2019, he returned home. That evening, he was sitting on his motorcycle when he was approached from behind and, in front of his wife and stepdaughter, shot twice in the back of the head.

“Killed like an animal,” said his mother, Noemia Pereira dos Santos. “Like he wasn’t even a person.”

Weeks after that killing, Bruno was removed from his leadership position and soon replaced by a former missionary who had proselytized in Indigenous communities. Bruno requested leave from the agency. Citing the death of his friend Pereira, the “climate of tension” and the “fragility of the entire Indigenista agency,” he wrote that he needed a break.

He was done with Funai. But not the mission.

CHAPTER 6

Paulo Marubo watched the rising violence, increasingly worried. In Atalaia do Norte, he was hearing that Funai was finished, and everything the director of the Javari Valley Indigenous union saw seemed to confirm the contention. Funai had failed to stop the attacks on its base, arresting not one person. Its new Bolsonaro-appointed director was installing inexperienced loyalists throughout the agency. And it seemed powerless to stop the poaching incursions.

“So I thought, ‘Let’s do it ourselves,’ ” Marubo said.

Marubo toured other Indigenous territories to see how they defended themselves. From those visits rose the idea of a patrol team. It seemed simple: Perform the work that Funai wasn’t doing. Equip Indigenous scouts with cameras, drones and satellite trackers. Send them out to monitor the poachers, mark their locations and obtain identifying details. Then give the findings to authorities so they could make arrests.

One of Marubo’s first calls was to Bruno — “the only White person I’ve ever met who was really worried about the people of the Javari.” For Bruno, it was an opportunity to return to the field. His wife encouraged him to take the job.

“He was really unhappy in Brasília,” she said. “This was a chance to do what he most enjoyed: go into the forest with the Indigenous.”

With funding from the U.S.-based Indigenous advocacy organization Nia Tero, they prepared for months. The first mission came in August 2021. Directed by Bruno and Possuelo, a patrol team of 18 headed up the Ituí and Itaquaí in three aluminum boats and took pictures. In the months that followed, the surveillance squad returned repeatedly to the rivers. They discovered the streams poachers navigated to breach the Indigenous territory, where they fished and hunted, which animals they caught — and how easy it all was.

“Evident impunity,” the team reported to authorities.

It was one of 10 letters team members sent to Funai, the local federal attorney’s office, the national security forces and the federal police between February and May — a detailed account of their work. They shared a list of alleged poachers, described the hierarchy of the illegal fishing trade and warned of the rivers’ mounting lawlessness. Federal attorneys met several times with the surveillance team and requested a police investigation. But few arrests were made, and no security was provided.

The team repeatedly cited Pelado in the correspondence. They said he led a team of six fishermen armed with 16-gauge shotguns. They alleged he entered the prohibited territory at night and poached for days. He was seen as capable of violence. Once, when Bruno was passing his stilt house on the Itaquaí, he fired a single shot over his head.

The threats intensified. Fishermen opened fire on the surveillance team in early April, the Indigenous scouts reported. Weeks later, on April 19, two poachers approached the squad’s leadership as they relaxed in Atalaia do Norte’s central plaza. According to a police report, a poacher tried to punch one of the men, and warned that he knew where he lived and would put a bullet “in his face.” Another fisherman told Possuelo that what had happened to Pereira — executed atop his motorcycle — would happen to them, too.

Possuelo was shaken. He messaged Bruno.

“It was expected that the tension would rise,” Bruno replied. “We have to be careful because the danger will escalate.”

Three days later, an anonymous letter was found under the door of Eliesio Marubo, the Indigenous union’s attorney. Its writer accused the union of persecuting “workers who fish to survive,” and pitting “the Indian against family workers.”

The letter cited Bruno by name.

“We know who you are, and we’ll find you and settle the score,” it said. “I’m only going to let you know this once, that if you continue in this way, it will be worse for you.”

Again, Bruno didn’t stop. He put in the paperwork to buy a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

CHAPTER 7

Early last year, Dom messaged me with news: “We’re leaving town.” After more than 10 years in Rio, he was moving to northern Brazil. He’d won a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which supports ambitious journalism, and was planning on writing a book on the Amazon.

Dom had spent years covering the crises besetting the forest, reporting for both The Post and the Guardian. But he was tired of writing about the problems. He wanted to understand the solutions. The book title he chose: “How to Save the Amazon.”

Months of reporting and many trips — to witness the cultivation of sustainable foods, to study how illegal goods could be tracked — culminated in another excited message from Dom. “I’m due to deliver the book at the end of the year,” he wrote me in late May. “After what will be 2 years of work.”

He needed to make just one last trip. He would soon depart for the Javari Valley. His old friend Bruno, whom Dom had once shadowed for an article, was helping to lead a team of Indigenous scouts trying to repel the poachers. He told Alessandra it would be a short trip. He’d follow Bruno down the Itaquaí, meet the surveillance team, interview some fishermen and return home by the next week to finish his book.

When he reached Atalaia do Norte, he learned of troubling developments. Pelado, he heard, had sent the warning shot over Bruno’s head. Other fishermen had fired on the scouts. Bruno, apparently inured to the threats, seemed to brush them off. But before boarding the boat late that week, Dom brought up the warning shot again.

“He was worried about that,” said Possuelo, who saw the men off. “He was definitely worried.”

There wasn’t much time for second thoughts. The aluminum boat had only a 40-horsepower motor, slower than others on the Itaquaí. It would be nearly four hours before they reached the distant surveillance team, patrolling the waters near the Funai base. They’d have to hurry to make it before nightfall.

“I probably won’t have signal again until Sunday,” Dom wrote Alessandra in Portuguese. “I love and miss you.”

The forest they entered was like something out of a history book, vast and impenetrable. This was not the Amazon of the devastated southeast — an unrecognizable wash of cattle pastures and smoky horizons — but an Amazon of wild sounds and vibrant greens. As they serpentined down the murky Itaquaí, signs of civilization receded. The only markings of humanity were three small enclaves of stilted homes: Cachoeira, São Rafael and São Gabriel, where Pelado lived. Up ahead they found the Funai base, the last vestige of state power before the Javari Valley, and the shack beside which the surveillance team had set up camp.

Soon after, just after dawn on Saturday, Dom spotted from the shore the man he’d heard so much about.

Pelado was going upriver toward the territory in his big boat, dragging three canoes. The surveillance scouts Dom had been shadowing set out to follow him and warn the Funai base. Pelado turned to face his pursuers. He lifted his shotgun above his head, the scouts said, in warning. Then he took a canoe to the stilted river house where Dom and Bruno were staying. Bruno was standing on the patio, watching him arrive.

Pelado was wearing a belt studded with shotgun cartridges.

“Take his photo,” Bruno called out.

Dom, witnesses said, hid behind a tree and snapped a picture.

That night, Bruno said he was concerned. To return home, they’d have to pass Pelado’s house again. He wanted several scouts to accompany them. But the next morning, he said he’d changed his mind. He was worried the Indigenous escorts would “go hungry” without a place to stay in the city, said one witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. Besides, Bruno said, Pelado would never expect them so early.

As the sun broke over the river, Bruno gathered the intelligence the team had collected, the photos and coordinates. Then he and Dom climbed back into the aluminum boat and embarked. The only protection they had was Bruno’s .380 Taurus. His shotgun hadn’t yet arrived.

CHAPTER 8

According to the confessions:

It didn’t take long for Pelado to catch up to Dom and Bruno. His boat, equipped with a 60-horsepower motor, gained rapidly: 300 feet, 200 feet, 100 feet. Bruno never turned around. When they were within 60 feet, Pelado and Jefferson opened fire. Bruno was hit in the back. The large man spun around and pulled his Taurus. He returned fire, letting off five or six rounds. None found their target. Bruno was struck again in the back. He started to faint, and to lose control of the boat. Then Dom was shot, in the ribs, on the right side. The boat collided into thick vegetation on the riverbank. Jefferson approached the boat. Dom was dead. Jefferson shot Bruno once more in the face, Pelado told police, “to be sure.”

The boat was towed into the forest, down a nearby stream. The bodies were thrown into the water. Two of Pelado’s family members soon arrived.

“What are you doing?” one asked, Pelado recalled in his confession.

“We killed them,” Pelado said.

“This is crazy,” the family member responded. “Why have you done this?”

They killed Bruno, Pelado told police, because the activist had called him an “invader” and had wanted Bruno’s picture to be taken. They killed Dom, according to a confidential witness interviewed by police, because they couldn’t leave any witnesses.

More river dwellers arrived to help conceal the killings. They submerged Dom’s backpack underwater and tied it to some branches. They loaded Bruno’s boat with six sacks of clay and sank it to a depth of 65 feet. The bodies were set on fire. When the flames failed to destroy them, either Jefferson or Pelado — they each accused the other — dismembered the bodies with a machete. They dug a grave in the middle of the woods. Six people heaved the remains inside and closed the grave.

The burial took four hours.

CHAPTER 9

After Pelado led police to the remains, after the charges and confessions, I sat with the police reports. It took me three attempts to read them. One passage lodged in my mind: “Dismembered, segmented, burned and buried in the clay soil.” Such precise savagery in the words.

Walking up the wood-plank path from the Itaquaí to São Gabriel, Pelado’s community, I again felt disbelief. It was completely silent. Nearly every house was deserted. No one wanted to live in São Gabriel anymore. The community school, its walls still papered with children’s drawings, was shuttered.

But Pelado’s door was open. Led into the house by a relative, I saw the shack was virtually empty, more noticeable for what was not there than what was. There was almost no furniture. Not a single family photo or decoration. Nothing that didn’t attend to a bare need. Just a sheetless mattress, a bunched fishing net, a pile of dirty clothing, a solitary spoon on a banister. It was as if no one had ever really lived there at all, and never would again.

Pelado’s other house was in a working-class neighborhood in Benjamin Constant. I knocked on the door. A shirtless young man appeared. It was Pelado’s 18-year-old son, Amarilson de Freitas Oliveira. He was watching an American action movie dubbed into Portuguese. No one else seemed to be home. As he spoke, he couldn’t make eye contact.

Amarilson said a lot of people thought Bruno got what was coming to him. He’d been “persecuting” fishermen and gold miners, and particularly his father, for too long. Bruno’s killing was just what happens, he said, “when someone is being persecuted for a long time” and they react with a “hot head.” If it hadn’t been Pelado, he said, “another person would have done it.” He said he hadn’t lost any affection for his father. He went to visit him shortly after his arrest. He said Pelado hugged him and started to weep. “He said, ‘I couldn’t take it anymore, son. He was persecuting me.’ ”

Amarilson kept his eyes on the television screen.

“It seems all of this backlash happened only because of that journalist,” he said. “Wrong place at the wrong time.”

His indifference disturbed me. I thought of the men killed, men I had known.

Dismembered, segmented, burned and buried in the clay soil.

I had one more question. Did he have any sympathy for Dom’s family and all they had lost?

There was a long pause.

“Yes,” he said, but added no more.

CHAPTER 10

There’s a day I think of often. It was a Sunday in November 2020. The weather was dreary and chilly. Rain was coming. I messaged Dom to see if he wanted to get an afternoon beer. But he had other, bolder plans: hitting the water. Did I want to go to the beach?

I went down to Copacabana to wait for him. Within a few minutes Dom arrived on his bike, smiling and relaxed. This part of Copacabana beach — where the waves are calm and the horizon full of mountains — was Dom’s favorite place on the water. He said everyone in Rio needs a sport. His was stand-up paddle boarding. “Nice, light exercise,” he called it. He was already dragging his board into the water.

I’d never done it before and was a little nervous. But Dom gave me instructions that made me feel good, confident in myself. He had a way of doing that.

“Coach Dom,” a friend who’d come along called him.

Dom eased out into the waves and started paddling, heading into deep waters.

Once, a few months after the coronavirus infiltrated Brazil, when it felt as if the world was going mad and anything was possible, I messaged Dom. The Rio hospital system was on the brink of collapse. There weren’t enough hospital beds for everyone. Bolsonaro was dismissing the severity of the disease, and Brazil was on its way to registering one of the world’s highest death tolls. Some foreigners I knew had already fled the country. I had asked him if he had considered going back to Britain.

He answered without hesitation: No, he said. “This is my home.”

Dom loved every bit of Brazil, from the northeastern city of Salvador, where he would move with Alessandra, to the Amazon rainforest where he would be killed, to this view now extending out before him. He was sitting on his board, facing the beach. No sight better captured for him life in Rio — the water, the mountains, the city and favelas beyond.

He stood up and turned.

He paddled some more — out past the tip of the Copacabana military fort, farther than I had the courage to go. I remember him out there: skies darkening behind, rains coming, and Dom paddling farther and farther out, turning back to smile, blue eyes alight.

Gabriela Sá Pessoa in São Paulo contributed to this report.

About this story

Editing by Matthew Hay Brown. Copy editing by Vanessa Larson and Martha Murdock. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video editing by Alexa Juliana Ard. Translation support by Gabriela Sá Pessoa. Design and development by Allison Mann. Design editing by Joe Moore. Project management by Jay Wang.

To report this story

Terrence McCoy, The Washington Post’s Rio de Janeiro bureau chief, interviewed 51 people with knowledge of the killings and region and traveled down the Amazon River to the remote location where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were shot to death. Defense attorney Aldo Raphael Mota de Oliveira declined to make the men charged in the killings available for comment. He said that Amarildo da Costa Oliveira and Jefferson da Silva Lima have confessed to the killings but that Oseney da Costa de Oliveira denies the allegations. Neither Funai, the Brazilian Indigenous affairs agency, nor the national security forces responded to requests for comment.