“Murder, logging and land theft: inside a crime factory in the Amazon”, 30th April 2020

One of the Amazon’s most deforested regions, Lábrea is remote, poorly policed and suffering from a land tenure crisis. As a result, land grabbing, illegal logging and murder are routine. A criminal nexus of landholders laying claim to protected forests they intend to turn into cattle pasture competes over the former São Domingos rubber plantation, where reporters found settlers had left en masse following a spate of killings last year. Several of the high-profile landholders and local officials investigated and convicted by federal prosecutors since 2013 were found to have cloned or forged legal documents, and engaged in conspiracy, fraud, environmental crimes and invasion of public land… There is no official data on violence in the tri-state border region where Amazonas, Acre and Rondônia meet, since few authorities venture here, either to monitor environmental crimes or to investigate the frequent killings of rural Brazilians. Satellites are the only effective tool to accurately monitor environmental destruction in this remote region. What they reveal is alarming. Lábrea is among the top five worst-affected areas in the Amazon biome in terms of forest destruction. Last year, it saw the fifth-largest increase in deforestation in the Legal Amazon, a region spanning all nine states in the Amazon basin...