BBF security chief and another executive face pending torture charges
Quilombola communities in Brazil’s Amazon basin have reclaimed nearly 32,400 hectares of land from palm oil producer Brasil BioFuels (BBF) following years of blockades, court rulings, and violent confrontations, according to an investigation published Thursday by The Guardian. About 2,300 community members in the Acará valley of Pará state now control territory that was once cultivated for palm oil — the result of a campaign that combined physical blockades, legal challenges, and direct-action resistance. The Guardian characterized the region’s history as decades of violent displacement and “land theft,” described the country’s quilombola communities as fighting back, and called the campaign the first victory for those communities against biofuel companies in the region.
For Josias Dias dos Santos, known as Jota, the reclamation is the latest chapter in a decades-long cycle of displacement. The 39-year-old quilombola leader, whose ancestors were enslaved on Brazil’s sugar cane and coffee plantations, told The Guardian that he and other quilombola families subsisting in the rainforests of Pará in northern Brazil were first forced out of their settlements by violent loggers, then by ranchers and miners. Dias dos Santos was barely seven years old when loggers forced his and other families to flee their homes near an abandoned sugar mill, where their enslaved ancestors once worked. Palm oil companies producing biofuels and supplying global customers, subsidized by the federal government, later brought what he described as the most severe dispossession.
With government encouragement, the palm oil industry set out to acquire large tracts of land in northern Pará, in what is now the country’s most deforested state. Over the past two decades, companies have laid claim to ever larger tracts of traditional quilombola territory, and 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, according to The Guardian. For years, quilombola communities complained that the companies were squeezing them off their traditional lands, and said their families were being affected by a toxic chemical byproduct of palm oil production, which also plagued the Acará River with bloated, dead fish. Dias dos Santos said the companies had put up mazes of fencing, guard towers and security checkpoints, sometimes cutting communities off from family cemeteries. The Guardian reported that leaders who attempted to speak out for their land rights and against toxic industrial waste were often either jailed or gunned down in ambushes that went unprosecuted.
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 representatives later accused them of making 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 arose, but the blockade endured, with the community expanding checkpoints and building infrastructure using income from selling palm fruit. While many displacement cases in the Amazon end with companies forcing traditional communities off their land, the Acará quilombolas responded by reclaiming what they said was their land through a human blockade and then establishing borders that made it impossible for the palm oil company operating there to enter.
Courts have refused to enforce most of BBF’s land claims, and one key government body has ruled that the quilombolas have a valid right to much of the land they have reclaimed. Courts have 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, according to The Guardian.
Behind their own security gates, the quilombolas began reforesting and restoring biodiversity to lands once degraded by palm oil monoculture, The Guardian reported. They built schools, community centres and hundreds of homes despite a campaign to evict them. About 2,300 community members now control nearly 32,400 hectares formerly cultivated by BBF.
Tensions escalated after BBF took over a large operation in the region in 2020. The company 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 its equipment, according to The Guardian. 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, the records said. Ferrari and another BBF executive were eventually charged with torture; the case remains pending. The confrontation led the quilombola community to plan to block BBF’s main entrance, and many community members feared the plan would lead to arrests.
In a 2024 interview, BBF’s chief executive, Milton Steagall, portrayed himself as a job creator and an environmentalist, combating deforestation by planting palm trees. He rejected the idea that BBF had stolen land, saying it had 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 who were 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 The Guardian.
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 location, boundaries and legal status of each property require individual examination of the documents and the procedures conducted by the competent authorities,” the statement said, adding: “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.”
By 2024, BBF was struggling to pay its employees, and a court in Pará declared the company bankrupt and placed it into a corporate rescue procedure last year. New palm oil companies are now leasing BBF’s former plantations next to the Acará community’s land.
The conflict between local communities and the palm oil industry extends beyond the quilombola communities and the Acará municipality. The Tembé and Turiwara Indigenous communities in Tomé-Açu, Moju and Tailândia face another large producer operating on 22,972 hectares — 18,203 of which the quilombolas claim, according to The Guardian. In a provisional ruling in that separate dispute, a local court found partly in favor of the communities, determining 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. Community leader Miriam Tembé said she feels like a prisoner in I’Ixing village, where the Indigenous people built a wall for protection.
Independent reports by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic advocacy organization, indicate that at least four deaths, attempted murders and 14 death threats have been recorded in the region. The Guardian reported that 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 said.
Quilombola communities now fear the second round of Brazil’s presidential election will heighten the threat to the forest and its people. Many community members say a victory for Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, would make securing the formal recognition of their land rights “impossible.” The Acará community said victory was far from assured. Dias dos Santos said formal property titles were still outstanding, the community continued to repel violent attempts to evict them, and he feared for his life.
“I know that the risk of being killed is very high,” Dias dos Santos said. He 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 said. “So we have a chance of staying alive.”
The Guardian’s investigation was reported by Gisela Pérez de Acha, Sasha Schell and Cícero Pedrosa in Acará, Pará, with Luiz Monticelli and Kathleen Quinn. It was produced in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center and the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and its Investigative Reporting Program. The Guardian credited Sasha Schell’s photographs and video to “The Palm Oil War.”