Light Shines on State Called Brazil’s Heart of Darkness

She wants to follow in her husband’s footsteps, but not to the end.

As president of the rural workers union in this corner of the Amazon rain forest, Maria Joel da Costa is as dedicated as her husband was when he had the job. But she has no desire to become a martyr for the cause that has made her a widow.

Her husband, Jose Dutra “Dezinho” da Costa, shrugged off the death threats he received for encouraging poor settlers to stand up to ranchers and loggers trying to force them off the land. He was shot point-blank 4 1/2 years ago by an alleged hit man nabbed only because the burly Da Costa collapsed onto him, pinning him to the ground long enough for residents to arrive.

Two years later, a neighbor who witnessed the slaying was snatched from his home and executed, his body dumped in the street. Then, last year, someone gunned down Maria Joel da Costa’s closest aide, the union treasurer.

Da Costa and her four children now live under state protection, guarded round-the-clock as the same sort of chilling warnings once directed at her husband are now aimed at her.

“You can’t get used to it. When you know that someone has an evil design on your life, each threat that arrives puts you in suspense,” she said. “But I can’t stop my work.”

Da Costa, 41, is one of dozens of people who activists say appear on an informal death list drawn up by ranchers and loggers here in rugged Para state, on Brazil’s northern coast. These marked men and women form the vanguard in a bloody, protracted battle for land in a region so lawless and untamed that some call it Brazil’s heart of darkness.

The outcome may help decide not just the fate of rural residents but of the Amazon rain forest, one of the planet’s largest, richest natural wonders. The struggle pits poor agricultural workers and small landholders, who advocate limited use of the forest, against powerful farmers and loggers intent on pushing ever more deeply into the jungle.

The fight over land in Para has claimed more than 900 lives during the last 25 years, or one death every 10 days, according to statistics compiled by the state and by human rights organizations. Almost all the victims have been poor rural settlers or grass-roots activists like Da Costa’s husband.

But few seemed to care, critics say, until one of the dead was a nun from the United States. Dorothy Stang, who spent decades defending the rights of poor settlers in Para, was shot six times Feb. 12 in an ambush that made world headlines and focused uncomfortable scrutiny on the Brazilian government.

Her killing, allegedly by hit men at the behest of an angry local rancher, highlighted the extent to which parts of the Brazilian Amazon -- an area the size of Western Europe -- have become outposts where corruption, fear and guns rule, not the state. Officials speak openly of a Wild West-like situation in which the rich and powerful, backed by crooked local authorities, literally get away with murder.

“The climate of terror, of violence, continues,” said Paulo Sette Camara, Para’s secretary of public security from 1979 to 1983 and again from 1995 to 2002. “We’re living in a frontier region where might makes right.”

Huge swaths of Para are controlled by local oligarchs and absentee landlords who illegally clear forest for timber and pasture to help satisfy the world’s growing demand for wood and beef, officials and activists say.

Some have reportedly formed their own private militias to defend and expand their holdings. Reports are rampant of hired thugs harassing and intimidating settlers, burning down whole villages to drive them out, beating up or killing those who resist. State police often do little to stop the violence, and sometimes even collude in it, officials acknowledge.

“It’s clear [the system] has failed,” Sette Camara said.

The steady development on what is technically federally owned land stems from policies initiated by Brazil’s 1964-85 right-wing military dictatorship, which promoted settlement of the Amazon Basin as a patriotic enterprise.

The promise of free land -- acre upon acre of it -- lured waves of speculators and poor settlers, many from the country’s historically impoverished northeast. These newcomers carved out holdings in areas mainly populated by indigenous tribes, who have been pushed onto reserves.

But the government lacked an efficient, transparent process for granting land titles, which has resulted in a giant mess of unauthorized, competing and falsified claims. Widespread corruption has benefited those with the financial or political clout to get their stakes recognized.

Without strong governmental institutions to stop them, illegal appropriations and strong-arm tactics have become commonplace.

There are only three federal police precincts in all of Para, watching over a state that is more than twice the size of France.

Small settlers trying to make modest claims speak bitterly of being muscled aside by grileiros. The land grabbers are named after the Portuguese word for “cricket” because of their habit of drafting fake land deeds and depositing them in boxes full of the insects, whose droppings yellow the paper, making it look more aged and authentic.

Stang campaigned against the incursions of speculators, cattle ranchers and loggers, and supported small settlers’ efforts to create forest reserves set aside for low-impact, sustainable development. After her slaying sparked an international outcry, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sent in 2,000 army troops to help contain the spiraling violence in Para.

“It’s abominable that people still think that a .38 revolver is the solution to a conflict,” Lula said.

His election in late 2002 as Brazil’s first working-class, left-leaning president brought hope that land reform was finally within reach, as he had repeatedly promised during his campaign. In anticipation, more poor and landless migrants have flocked to the Amazon in the past 2 1/2 years searching for a better life on a patch to call their own.

But no wide-ranging agrarian reform has been enacted, a source of bitterness for settlers and their supporters. The government’s emphasis on maintaining strong economic growth through agricultural exports has tended to favor big farming interests, not small landholders.

With the increased population -- and therefore added tension -- in the region, the number of land-related deaths has risen during Lula’s administration, not fallen as activists had hoped. From 2002 through 2004, the Roman Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission recorded 68 such killings in Para, more than triple the number during the previous three years. (The deadliest period was in the mid-1980s, just after Brazil’s dictatorship ended, a time of heightened tumult in the state.)

In the Stang case, four men have been arrested, including two alleged gunmen and the rancher accused of taking out the contract on her life. But police say that evidence points to a wider conspiracy of ranchers who wanted the 74-year-old nun out of the way, and promise more arrests.

Such quick work by law enforcement is an anomaly in Para, where the overwhelming majority of land-related homicides go unsolved, and in some cases uninvestigated.

The church land commission has tracked the killings of 772 rural workers and activists over the last 30 years. Out of these hundreds of cases, only seven people have ever been convicted.

Four were pistoleiros, or hit men. The other three were the farmers who hired them, but none is behind bars. Two are free pending an appeal of their convictions, while the third, who spent years as a fugitive in Mexico, is under house arrest for “medical reasons” -- an eye ailment, said Jose Batista Goncalves Afonso, the commission’s coordinator in Maraba, not far from here in eastern Para.

“Impunity is the rule in these cases, and this is the fuel that feeds the violence,” Afonso said. Investigations into killings “go nowhere because there’s no interest in their getting anywhere.”

The reason, activists and officials agree, is that many ranchers and loggers have become the de facto bosses of their communities, shielded from investigation or punishment by the judges, politicians and state police they help bankroll.

“Some of these big farmers, big loggers, they pay for the police’s gasoline and food. They buy them cars, they pay their rent, they buy them guns. It’s a system of favors,” said state prosecutor Mauro J. Mendes Almeida.

The ranchers and loggers complain of being made scapegoats by meddlesome activists bent on destroying Brazil’s economic competitiveness.

“They want to tarnish the image of the farmers,” declared Luciano Guedes of the National Confederation of Agriculture. “We’re concerned about production.... We are not much involved in these partisan political issues. The farmers are caught in the crossfire.”

Here in Rondon do Para, a struggling town of about 40,000 inhabitants on the eastern edge of the state, Maria Joel da Costa waits for some semblance of justice for her husband, a beloved figure among the settlers and squatters whom he organized to challenge the farmers and loggers eager to get rid of them.

The pistoleiro who allegedly shot Dezinho da Costa in November 2000 has been in custody since the slaying, but procedural delays and a judge activists believe to be favorable to ranchers have prevented a trial from being scheduled, said Mendes Almeida, the prosecutor.

Any trial in the case will almost certainly be conducted in Belem, the state capital, about 240 miles to the north, because “you can’t get an impartial jury here,” Mendes Almeida said. “People are afraid to testify, especially after they see folks get killed [for doing so]. They think, ‘Why should I be the next one?’ ”

Legal maneuvering has also kept out of jail the rancher suspected of hiring Da Costa’s killer.

“His life goes on as normal,” Maria Joel da Costa said bitterly. “I’m the one who’s had to take precautions, who’s had to change my life.”

She now keeps her travel schedule and organizing activities as secret as possible, her visits to settlements unannounced. She moved from a rickety old wooden house to a sturdier one, to make arson more difficult.

Two bodyguards protect her in shifts, which seems to have scared off the car that would circle her house in warning. But the anonymous phone calls still come, the notes telling her she’s next, and the word-of-mouth threats.

The violence gripping Para has receded somewhat since the army arrived. But the scale of the conflict, downplayed or ignored for years, is still emerging. The Rio de Janeiro daily Jornal do Brasil reported this week that soldiers have begun unearthing hidden graves containing the remains of bodies, some badly charred, that probably are those of slain workers.

A departure date for the troops has not been set, but activists are bracing for a major backlash once they leave.

“I sometimes think of getting out, but on the other hand, I think it would be cowardly,” said Eugenio Soares Fernandes, 42, a colleague of Maria Joel da Costa who has also been threatened. “It’s God who decides. If something happens, it happens. I can’t just give up.”