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.
This article was written for issue 166 of the WBO newsletter, dated May 16, 2025. To subscribe and receive free weekly news and analysis like this, simply enter your email in the field provided.
