A Mongabay investigation that revealed an illegal cattle boom amid a record-high number of killings of Indigenous Guajajara has been cited by Brazilian authorities to remove thousands of head of cattle from the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in the Amazon Rainforest. “Your report is very similar to what we’re actually finding in the field. It showed an accurate reality and this helped us a lot in practical terms,” Marcos Kaingang, national secretary for Indigenous territorial rights at the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, told Mongabay in a video interview. In June 2024, Mongabay published a yearlong investigation, with funding and editorial support from the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, revealing that large portions of the Arariboia territory, in northeastern Maranhão state, had been taken over by commercial cattle ranching, in violation of the Constitution. “There was a large presence of cattle that shouldn’t be on the Indigenous land, thousands of head of cattle,” Kaingang said. The investigation also revealed details that authorities said they hadn’t been aware of, including the physical alteration of Arariboia’s boundaries by moving border markers. “It was a topic that I would say had gone a bit unnoticed,” Kaingang said, adding he only found out about this through the investigation. “I remember you mentioned it in one of our conversations and this also came up in the publication of your report,” he told this reporter. “We brought it up as an important point in our discussions and we verified that the milestones had in fact been changed.” Launched…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Mongabay investigation spurs Brazil crackdown on illegal cattle in Amazon’s Arariboia territory
