ALTAMIRA, Brazil — Bartolomeu Moraes, better known as Brasília, was a peasant leader and trade unionist in Brazil involved in a long, bloody land war. In 2002, he was killed after years of opposing powerful local ranchers along the BR-163 highway area, located in the Brazilian state of Pará. “He saw a lot of land with few people and wanted people to be able to use the land for family farming,” Raimunda Rodrigues, better known as Mariana, told Mongabay while walking along the dirt road that leads to her house. After his death, the Brazilian state finally caved in and created a sustainable settlement (known as PDS in Portuguese) in 2005, honoring Brasília. Mariana got a piece of land inside the 19,800 hectares (49,000 acres) of PDS Brasília, an area bigger than Brooklyn in New York, which by then had belonged to a single rancher. The federal land reform agency, INCRA, designed the settlement for 500 families that would practice family farming on their plots while collectively using a large area of standing forest to extract forest fruits and nuts. However, 19 years later, the scenario is quite different. Without support from public administration, only 200 families remain on their plots. Many of them were forced to sell the land to large ranchers (which is illegal), who gradually regained territorial supremacy. According to the civil society network MapBiomas, more than two-thirds (75%) of the settlement has already been converted into pasture for cattle ranching, which is forbidden inside a PDS.…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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