For 39 years, Josias Dias dos Santos - known to friends as Jota - has been playing a grim game of musical chairs with his homeland. As a quilombola, a descendant of Black people once enslaved on Brazil's sugar cane and coffee plantations, he's been displaced first by violent loggers, then by ranchers and miners in the rainforests of Pará, northern Brazil. But the worst, he says, came with the palm oil industry in what is now the country's most deforested state.
Palm oil companies producing biofuels and supplying global customers - subsidized by the federal government, because of course they are - have spent the past two decades laying claim to ever larger tracts of traditional quilombola territory. The companies have erected mazes of fencing, guard towers, and security checkpoints, sometimes cutting communities off from their own family cemeteries. Leaders who spoke out for land rights and against toxic industrial waste were jailed or gunned down in ambushes that went unprosecuted. Nothing says "sustainable biofuel" like a guard tower blocking access to grandma's grave.
Now quilombolas fear the second round of Brazil's presidential elections will heighten the threat to the forest and its people. Many say a victory for Flavio Bolsonaro - son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro - would make securing formal recognition of their land rights "impossible." Because nothing complements a deforestation crisis quite like a Bolsonaro family reunion in power.
Dias dos Santos was barely seven years old when loggers forced his and other quilombola families to flee their homes near an abandoned sugar mill where their enslaved ancestors once worked. After the loggers came the palm oil industry. With government encouragement, the industry set out to acquire large tracts of land in northern Pará. Today, about 202,000 hectares (500,000 acres), much of it near the Acará River, are used to produce palm oil for biofuels and a wide range of foods.
For years, quilombola communities complained the companies were squeezing them off their traditional lands. They also claimed their families were affected by a toxic chemical byproduct of palm oil production, which plagued the Acará River with bloated, dead fish. Quilombola activists who led protests and failed attempts to reclaim land met violent ends: one leader, Artemio Gusmão, was decapitated and dismembered; another was shot 16 times in the back. "We were frightened," Dias dos Santos says, in what may be the understatement of the decade.
Tensions increased in 2020 after Brasil BioFuels (BBF) took over a large operation in the region. It built a complex of fences, gates, and watchtowers guarded by private security and began systematically filing more than 1,000 police reports accusing quilombolas of making threats, damaging property, and stealing equipment. Because if you can't beat them in court, bury them in paperwork.
But the Acará quilombolas were different. Rather than accepting displacement, the community acted to reclaim what they said was their land - first with a human blockade, then by establishing borders that made it impossible for the palm oil company to enter. Behind their own security gates, they began reforesting and restoring biodiversity to lands once degraded by palm oil monoculture. They built schools, community centres, and hundreds of homes, despite a campaign to evict them. Take that, monoculture.
In one incident in late 2021, BBF's security chief, Walter Romero Ferrari, led scores of armed men to break up a demonstration against the company. Court records say the armed men tied protesters' hands behind their backs and used pepper spray on them. Ferrari and another BBF executive were eventually charged with torture - the case is still pending, because justice moves at its own leisurely pace.
That event convinced community members to pursue more radical resistance: they planned to block BBF's main entrance. On 24 February 2022, Dias dos Santos and others arrived at BBF, padlocked the gate, and refused to move, despite their lack of weapons against armed guards. BBF later accused them of threats, which they deny. The quilombolas declared they would no longer allow the company to harvest palm fruits and insisted they owned the land behind the gate.
Over months, accusations of violence and theft flew, but the blockade endured. The community expanded checkpoints and built infrastructure using income from selling palm fruit. The courts have not only refused to enforce most of BBF's land claims, but one key government body has ruled the quilombolas have a valid right to much of the land they reclaimed. They've also rejected eight of nine requests by BBF to lay criminal charges against Dias dos Santos. The exception - a charge of theft for allegedly disarming a BBF security guard and turning the guard's gun over to local police for safekeeping - is being contested. Because returning a gun to the police is apparently the real crime here.
In a 2024 interview, Milton Steagall, BBF's chief executive, portrayed himself as a job creator and environmentalist combating deforestation by planting palm trees. He rejected the idea BBF stole land, saying it acquired another palm oil company that had operated in the area for more than a decade. Steagall also presented the company as the victim of fraudsters falsely claiming Indigenous identity as a ruse to justify land theft. "Imagine that I'm being accused of something that was planted 10, 12 years earlier and I'm responsible for having planted it in an Indigenous or quilombola area? Does that make sense?" he asked, presumably while gesturing at a palm tree.
By 2024, BBF was struggling to pay employees, and a court in Pará declared it bankrupt and put it into corporate rescue procedure last year. New palm oil companies are leasing BBF's former plantations next to the Acará community's land. In a statement, BBF's lawyers said Steagall maintained his 2024 position that "the company entered into a palm cultivation activity that had already existed in the region for years," and that this did "not mean that there are no territorial claims or controversies over areas in the region." The statement added: "The location, boundaries and legal status of each property require individual examination of the documents and the procedures conducted by the competent authorities," and that "BBF respects the rights of communities and maintains that no accusation regarding a specific area should be treated as an established fact without such verification." In other words: we're bankrupt, but our commitment to vague legal language remains solvent.
The campaign marked the quilombolas' first victory against biofuel companies in the region. About 2,300 community members have gained control over nearly 32,400 hectares formerly cultivated by BBF. Yet conflict is not limited to the quilombola communities or Acará municipality. The Tembé and Turiwara Indigenous communities in Tomé-Açu, Moju, and Tailândia also face another large producer operating on 22,972 hectares - 18,203 of which the quilombolas claim. In a provisional ruling, the local court has already ruled partly in favour of the communities, finding that 72% of the disputed land overlaps with areas belonging to quilombola and riverside communities. The ruling has also led to the cancellation of 24 land registrations.
Independent reports by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic advocacy organization, indicate at least four deaths, attempted murders, and 14 death threats have been recorded in the region. For all these reasons, the Acará community says victory is far from assured. Dias dos Santos fears for his life and says they continue to repel violent attempts to evict them and are still awaiting formal property titles.
"I know that the risk of being killed is very high," says Dias dos Santos, who travels in three-vehicle convoys for protection and relays his movements to other community members, who track him using a GPS app for security reasons. The future may be uncertain, but for now, Dias dos Santos and his people are confident. "Our grandparents decided not to fight because they would die. Now, if we fight back, we run the risk of dying, too. But we have a mobile phone, where we can learn about our rights and report things," he says. "So we have a chance of staying alive." A mobile phone and a padlock: the revolutionary toolkit of the 21st century.