May 16 2025| Nº. 165

Editorial

This week, from Monday, May 11 to Wednesday May 13, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited China seeking to deepen ties with Brazil’s largest trading partner. He signed twenty bilateral agreements and seventeen cooperation documents with Chinese President Xi Jinping, aiming to strengthen Brazil-China relations for the next several decades. The deals span infrastructure, renewable energy, health, and technology, including a US$1 billion investment in sustainable aviation fuel and a new R&D center for clean energy in Brazil. Lula highlighted the importance of balanced trade, noting the growth of Brazil-China commerce from US$6.6 billion in 2003 to US$160 billion in 2025, and stressed the need to move beyond commodities toward high-tech exports. The visit also included discussions on artificial intelligence, climate change, and preparations for the July BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro. However, controversy erupted back home after First Lady Janja criticized TikTok during a meeting with Xi, prompting Lula to request a Chinese envoy to discuss digital issues—sparking backlash from opposition lawmakers, who called it a diplomatic overstep and vowed to summon the foreign minister for questioning. Despite the tension, Lula celebrated growing Chinese investment in Brazil’s ports, energy, and tech sectors, reaffirming China’s role as a key partner in Brazil’s development and Global South leadership.

According to new data from MapBiomas released this Thursday, May 15, deforestation across all of Brazil’s biomes dropped for the first time last year, falling 32.4%. The Cerrado remained the region most affected by human degradation, accounting for over half of all native vegetation lost—mainly due to expanding agriculture in the Matopiba region. The Amazon also saw a sharp decline, with deforestation down nearly 70% from its 2022 peak. While the drop is a hopeful sign, experts warn the pressure from agribusiness remains high, especially in areas rich in biodiversity. Extreme weather also played a role, especially in the Atlantic Forest, where storms caused major vegetation loss. This is a positive outcome the Lula administration will be eager to showcase given that the explosion of deforestation under former president Jair Bolsonaro was a topic of considerable international concern.

Looking ahead to the 2026 election, Lula signaled this week his intention of shoring up his leftwing base by appointing Congressman Guilherme Boulos of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) to the General Secretariat of the Presidency of Brazil, a cabinet position designed as a liaison to various social movements. As the most prominent leader of the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST), Boulos has a long history of engagement with militant left-wing politics. Some interpreted his new role in the administration as yet another step away from the type of coalition politics Lula embraced in 2022. Rather than mollifying the center in next year’s campaign, Lula seems intent on rallying his traditional base. Surely he will attempt to do both things, but it remains to be seen whether doing so is feasible once again.

Highlights

• Pepe Mujica. Former Uruguayan President José “Pepe” Mujica died on Tuesday, May 13, aged 89, due to cancer. Mujica was a political prisoner during the country’s dictatorship, fought for the return of democracy in Uruguay, and became one of the most influential figures on the Latin American left in recent decades. Lula attended the funeral in Montevideo after returning from a trip to Moscow and Beijing. The Brazilian president referred to Mujica as an exceptional and incomparable figure.

• Conflict of Powers. This week, the Supreme Court and the Chamber of Deputies were the protagonists of another chapter in the series of clashes that have strained relations between the branches of the Brazilian government. The Chamber of Deputies intervened to prevent the trial of one of its members, Alexandre Ramagem, the former director-general of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN), who was involved in the coup plot together with former president Jair Bolsonaro. Ramagem was elected to Congress in 2022. The Supreme Court opened proceedings against him soon thereafter, for acts committed before and after his election. The Chamber of Deputies claims the prerogative to prevent its current members from being tried for acts committed prior to the beginning of their current terms, but the judges reaffirmed their decision. The case may go to the plenary of the Chamber, with an uncertain outcome.

• American pressure. Luís Roberto Barroso, the president of the Supreme Court said this week at an event in New York that the United States played a “decisive” role in preventing Bolsonaro from carrying out a coup d'état in 2002/2023. The minister referred to the various demonstrations in favor of democracy and respect for the election result, made by members of the government of then-president Joe Biden. The WBO was at the center of the discussions in defense of respecting the election results, by sending a delegation of civil society leaders to Washington. Read more here.

• Hunted and arrested. Federal congresswoman Carla Zambelli, one of the most strident voices of the far-right Bolsonaro supporters, was sentenced this week to the loss of her congressional seat and ten years in prison for having hacked into the National Council of Justice's computer system. In 2023, she hired and paid a hacker to hack into the Judiciary's systems and forge arrest warrants against Alexandre de Moraes, a judge at the court responsible for the most important ongoing cases against the coup plotters. The now former congressional representative can still appeal the sentencing, but the conviction cannot be reversed.

News from ABO and social organizations and movements:

Authoritarianism. The Brazil Office joined forces with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) to hold a virtual panel on Thursday, May 15 entitled “How Brazil Defeated Authoritarianism.” The event included two WBO-related personalities: associate researcher Jana Silverman and Stanley Gacek, who is a member of the organization’s board of directors. Learn more.

Agrarian reform. The Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) held the 5th National Agrarian Reform Fair in São Paulo on May 8, where more than 500 tons of food and 1,800 different types of other pesticide-free and non-GMO products were offered to the population, with no intermediaries between family farmers and end consumers. In total, producers from camps and settlements in 23 Brazilian states under the supervision of the MST managed to participate.

Black movement. People and organizations linked to the Black movement participated this Monday, May 12 in the 29th Night March for Racial Democracy, organized by the Instituto do Negro Padre Batista. The participants demanded compliance with racial equality laws in Brazil, especially Law 10.639/2003, which makes the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture mandatory in schools.
 
Fellows. Among the various publications, lectures, and interviews given by WBO research fellows, we highlight two articles this week: one written by David Nemer in The Conversation called “Geração dividida: gamificação do ódio e o abismo cada vez maior de gênero entre os jovens”; and another, written by Rafael R. Ioris, in the IEB Magazine Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros magazine, called “Development as Overcoming the Colonial Condition: The Long-term Influence of ISEB Formulations.”

Feature Article

Brazil’s Laws of Land Grabbing

By Gabriel Suchodolski*

Brazil is a global leader in agriculture and land investments but also in the assassination of environmental defenders and in tropical deforestation that drives massive droughts, floods, and extinctions. Of Brazil’s vast 8.5 million km² territory, half lies within overlapping tenure categories, one-sixth is absent from officially registered maps, 6.4% lacks an official land-use designation, and nearly 10% was under active land conflict in 2022. What explains this disorderly and violent frontier expansion that threatens Indigenous people, ecosystems, and even agricultural viability itself?

At the root lies a long history of state-sanctioned and extralegal frontier expansion over forested lands interpreted as “empty” or “underutilized.” These agrarian frontiers have expanded through both formal mechanisms, such as state grants and regional plans, and informal ones, including land usurpation. Brazil’s land governance has repeatedly bent under pressure from powerful landed elites, and weak bureaucratic capacity has left land information systems, Indigenous lands, and forests vulnerable to predatory land grabbing.
 For over five centuries, Brazilians have exploited legal ambiguity to seize land. Time and again, elite-backed legislation has reliably granted amnesty for prior land usurpation, fostering expectations that today’s illegal occupation can be tomorrow’s legal title. Every major land law has acknowledged both official property documentation and usufructuary occupancy rights, from colonial sesmarias (land grants) to current legislative proposals. Public land has been defined in negative terms: whatever has not yet been privatized. With limited state capacity to enforce land surveys or registration and many landholders actively resisting registration (to avoid taxation, expropriation, or in hopes of expanding their claims), vast areas of public lands remain unregistered well into the twenty-first century. This legal ambiguity and limited state capacity typically benefit the well-resourced—those capable of producing documents, withstanding litigation, coercing rival claimants, and swaying governments—while Indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, and forests bear the costs.

During the colonial era (1500-1822), Brazilian elites leveraged complications in land policy to maintain autonomy from Portuguese rule and dominate landless nonelites, creating vast landed estates (latifúndios). Squatter peasants—poor migrants and those fleeing slavery or latifúndios—expanded frontiers slowly and informally. After independence, Brazil’s 1824 Constitution established private property rights, but the absence of a land law until 1850 led to widespread informal land appropriation. The 1850 Land Law recognized land property rights through official transfers and sales (although it also acknowledged possessory rights, which poor squatters eventually demanded). However, weak state bureaucracies resulted in land records being handled by private registries and notaries, who often accepted self-declared claims and simple sales contracts.  Thus emerged the land-swindling industry known as grilagem (land grabbing). Swindlers, or grileiros, have forged documents to register land, legalize usurpation, and sell seized lands for profit. Grilagem has exacerbated land conflicts, often to the net benefit of elites. Brazil’s system of formal land property, built decades before the abolition of slavery in 1888, helped consolidate land inequality.

Mid-twentieth-century efforts to occupy Brazil’s hinterland involved ambitious colonization schemes and modern land bureaucracies. Starting in 1943 and expanding during the military dictatorship after 1964, the state planned land settlement along new roads into the Amazon. The outpouring of capitalist ranchers and spontaneous settlers, however, overwhelmed state plans and bureaucracies—and triggered massive expulsions, ethnocide, and deforestation. Civil society responded with demands for agrarian reform, Indigenous land rights, and environmental protections. These movements culminated in the establishment of plural land rights under Brazil’s 1988 democratic Constitution. However, plural land rights mean little without enforcement, and most of these territories remain “public lands,” dependent on weak land bureaucracies for implementation and protection.

In the twenty-first century, agribusiness elites have advocated for “private property security” and the privatization of public land. A series of legislative reforms—dubbed laws of grilagem—again legalized private claims over public land. Between 2005 and 2017, five laws progressively expanded the size of eligible plots, loosened the criteria for beneficiaries, extended the occupancy cutoff dates, included new types of public land, and provided waivers for on-site verification. As a result, private companies (not only homesteaders or family farmers) can legalize private claims of up to 2,500 hectares in areas occupied by 2008. These claims can be self-reported via georeferenced digital cadasters (like CAR and SIGEF), with on-site verification waived for parcels up to 400 hectares. When the digital maps do not flag overlaps, private claims are generally approved.

Current legislative proposals would go further. Bill PL 2,633/2020, approved by the House and awaiting Senate consideration, would waive on-site verification for plots up to 600 hectares. Bill PL 510/2021, proposed in the Senate, raises that threshold to 2,500-hectare plots and resets the occupation cutoff date to 2012.

Meanwhile, Congress approved the marco temporal (time frame) rule (Law 14,701/2023) restricting Indigenous land claims to areas occupied and documented in 1988, when the Constitution was approved. The Supreme Court has ruled this unconstitutional, and President Lula has vetoed the law, but political pressure to limit Indigenous land rights remains strong.

In sum, Brazil has expedited pathways for the privatization of public lands, while the constitutional rights of Indigenous peoples and environmental conservation have relied on weak bureaucracies for implementation and enforcement. In addition to legal strategies, international cooperation should help strengthen Brazilian land bureaucracies—with career staff hiring, equipment, budget, and political autonomy to fulfill their mandates—to protect Indigenous and environmental conservation lands from ongoing attacks by a land-grabbing minority with powerful connections in government.

*Gabriel Suchodolski is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Earth Commons Institute, Georgetown University. PhD in Sociology, UCLA. His research focuses on land policy and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.