JALAPÃO, Brazil — The buritis, or moriche palms, are fighting for their lives in the streambed now lined with scorched earth. For two years now, drought has advanced a barrier of dead vegetation through this once-humid oasis, called a vereda by the people who live in the Jalapão region of central Brazil. A crested caracara (Caracara plancus) emits a solitary caw. Luzia Passos Ribeiro looks away. “I feel like I’m suffocating,” she says, giving voice to what a buriti palm trapped in the dry earth might say. But if today is a tough day for the buriti palms, on another day they will show their splendor and spread their ripe seeds that will later spring up across the surrounding ground. At 35 years of age, Passos Ribeiro has seven children and a future to look out for. So much so that one day she reached the point where she declared in a voice so firm that it would have made any crested caracara jealous, “Only those we want inside our quilombola territory will be allowed to stay!” That was how they got rid of the tractor, backhoe, flatbed and pickup truck belonging to a farm that had been operating on land belonging to the Quilombo do Prata community. The quilombo, a rural community founded by formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians, was officially recognized in 2006 in the municipality of São Félix do Tocantins, in Tocantins state, but has not yet been granted title to its land. Deforestation is slowly making the water…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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