Occupying a plot of land is the first, and perhaps easiest, step in the process of creating a legally constituted private property. In all eight Amazonian nations, a title or a certification of a title must be issued by an agency of the central government, which in most cases is a lineal descendant of the colonisation agencies of the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, these agencies issued provisional titles because full tenure was contingent upon establishing a successful homestead. This negative legacy grew over decades as the rural economy expanded and the number of landholdings multiplied. One key responsibility of these agencies was the compilation of a land registry, known as a ‘cadaster’, which functions as a documentary reference point for all legal transactions involving rural property. The decision to delegate the task of title certification to a national rather than a local agency was a logical consequence of the distribution of public lands by the central government. A national solution probably appealed to central planners who doubted the capacity of local (frontier) governments to manage a large and technically complex undertaking. Individual landholdings are incorporated into the national rural cadaster, but only after their spatial attributes and legal providence have been validated by public servants. The failure to complete this process and consolidate national cadasters is a major driver of the lawlessness that defines frontier society. These agencies, whether by design or happenstance, oversee a chaotic system where fraud and graft facilitate the misappropriation of public lands. As…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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