Amazon land wars: how violence and illegal land grabs are fueling brazil’s deforestation crisis

Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, a devastating “silent war” is raging over land ownership—one that’s costing lives and accelerating the destruction of the world’s largest rainforest. In 2024, Mongabay investigative reporter Fernanda Wenzel ventured into Terra Nossa, one of the Amazon’s most dangerous regions, to document how competing claims over territory are pushing deforestation ever deeper into pristine forest areas.

The conflict involves three distinct groups locked in a complex struggle: illegal land grabbers, legitimate settlers, and landless families desperate for a place to farm. What Wenzel discovered reveals the twisted reality of Brazil’s land crisis. Even in areas officially designated as legal settlements—where the government has allocated plots to settlers—the rightful owners often cannot access their own land. Instead, powerful land grabbers have illegally seized control, erecting fences around vast territories and hiring armed guards to intimidate anyone who challenges their authority.

“It’s a region where land is controlled by violence,” explains land conflict expert Maurício Torres, who accompanied Wenzel during her investigation. “Whoever gets a piece of land is not the one who has it registered at the land registry office; it’s whoever is strongest and manages to expel the weakest.”

This violent cycle creates a domino effect that devastates the environment. As small farmers are displaced from settled areas, they’re forced to venture deeper into untouched rainforest, clearing new patches of land for survival. The result is a system where Brazil’s extreme land inequality—with a tiny elite controlling enormous territories while millions lack access to farmland—directly fuels the Amazon’s ongoing deforestation crisis.