‘Invisible’ traditional communities threatened by the advance of agribusiness are placed on the map

In front of the house where she lives in the Cacimbinha community, in western Bahia, community leader Lusineide Gomes, 26, presents a serious expression at the beginning of a conversation about living conditions in the region.

The expression, however, soon changes when he hears the question: “What does being a geraizeira mean to you?”. Smiling, she answers without having to think too hard. “Geraizeiro is everything, right? It’s a place where we live peacefully, live our lives.”

More than an explanation about the name given to residents of communities in the region —for occupying Gerais, one of the ways the cerrado is called—, the answer reflects a desire: that this tranquility be maintained.

Since the early 2000s, the accelerated process of deforestation in the cerrado, which threatens the supply of water and energy generation in the country, also puts the existence of these small traditional communities at risk, which, in most cases, have not even been recognized as such.

It is the opposite of what would be a peaceful life for Lusineide and her neighbors.

“[Vida tranquila] it’s living only from the cerrado, from what we plant and harvest, but it’s a planting that we have ways of planting and harvesting that don’t harm nature, and that’s it. The cerrado is a form of resistance, because we make our living from here”, she says, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “we are all cerrativists”.

Faced with the advance of agribusiness in the region known as Matopiba (a polygon that covers part of the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia), many of these communities have suddenly found themselves in the midst of land conflicts and have been losing their territories —through expulsion or abandonment—and your own identity.

Matopiba accounted for 56% of all native vegetation loss observed in the Cerrado over the past 20 years. And for 72.5% of what was lost in the biome in 2021 alone, according to a survey by MapBiomas.

The champion city for deforestation in the cerrado is precisely Formosa do Rio Preto (BA), where Cacimbinha is located. The intense advance of the chainsaw has counted, at least since 2013, with the connivance of magistrates of the Court of Justice of Bahia, lawyers and land grabbers to speed up fraud.

The land-grabbing scheme covered an area of ​​more than 360,000 hectares in the municipality and was only dismantled in 2019 by the Federal Public Ministry in the Faroeste Operation. In the “Atlas of Climate and Corruption”, released in November by Transparency International – Brazil, the case was described among 15 corrupt practices that have harmed the way Brazil faces climate change.

The “purchase of judicial decisions led to the legitimization of fraud in real estate registrations and land grabbing associated with deforestation”, points out Transparency.

“The land-grabbing scheme exposed by the Faroeste Operation is not an isolated case in the region. In western Bahia, several other cases of land-grabbing involving deforestation, land conflicts and violation of the rights of traditional communities were recorded. This land chaos has also led to impacts dramatic socio-environmental problems”, continues the document.

For Lusineide, the most felt impact was on water quality. According to her, research already attests that the river is contaminated by pesticides and erosion. In the process of deforestation, some buritis also fell to the ground, altering the paths from which residents extracted golden grass, raw material for handicrafts, such as bags and jewelry.

Descendants of Canudos

In Cacimbinha and neighboring communities, the oldest geraizeiros say that the first to arrive in the region were survivors from the village of Canudos, decimated in a military siege in the war that became known with the same name at the end of the 19th century.

Geraizeiros are one of the 28 types of traditional peoples and communities recognized in Brazil —a category that includes indigenous peoples, quilombolas, riverside dwellers—, according to the National Council of Traditional Peoples and Communities. But, with the exception of indigenous peoples and quilombolas, for whom there are land demarcation policies in Brazil (although they have been abandoned in the last four years), most of these peoples are on their own.

Since 2007, the country has had a National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Traditional Peoples and Communities, but it does not necessarily mean that they have recognized land rights.

In an attempt to give visibility to the communities, two initiatives —one by the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and the other by a group of NGOs— have sought to register existing groups, record their ways of life and the territory they occupy in order to literally put them on the map.

At the end of August, the Sheet followed the work of one of them, Tô no Mapa, developed by Ipam (Amazon Environmental Research Institute), ISPN (Society, Population and Nature Institute), Cerrado Network and Cerrados Institute, in an expedition through western Bahia.

The group has been visiting communities in the cerrado, inviting them to register on a platform. They are encouraged to fill in, in a cell phone application that can be used even without an internet connection, their information, boundaries of the territory they consider theirs, what are the uses they make of the place, where there is conflict and how they relate to the environment.

Each meeting begins with an explanation of the importance of registration. “The idea is to help strengthen communities so that you can fight for your rights,” said Isabel Castro, researcher at Tô no Mapa and project coordinator at Ipam, in one of the communities visited.

“With that, if a large enterprise wants to set up shop, they will be able to know that you are here, that these communities have existed for a long time. As well as indigenous territories, which are demarcated and recognized for the role they play in protection.”

The work, which began in 2019, was paralyzed during the pandemic and resumed in 2022. 137 communities have already been registered and validated in the program, occupying approximately 631,000 hectares, inhabited by more than 13,000 families and representing 13 segments of people. and traditional communities, as well as family farmers.

The states with the most mapped communities are Minas Gerais, with 46 registrations (34% of the total), Mato Grosso do Sul, with 22 (16%), Bahia, with 21 (15%), and Goiás, with 14 (10%). .

In each community, researchers identified three conflicts faced. Smaller and less populated territories account for 70% of reported conflicts, which are generally over land and water.

In western Bahia, the main conflict is with the Cachoeira do Estrondo Condominium, a set of farms growing mainly soy that is pointed out by Incra (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) as the largest illegal area in Bahia and one of the largest in Brazil. .

The undertaking was installed in an area of ​​more than 440 thousand hectares, affecting the territories of seven traditional communities, such as Cacimbinha and Cachoeira, also visited by the Tô no Mapa team.

After deforestation and the start of planting, which took over a large part of the communities’ territory, watchtowers were installed, with armed security guards, restricting the movement of residents and the animals they raise.

The objective, according to the communities and technicians from Agência 10senvolvimento —a local partner organization of Tô no Mapa—, was to register the area of ​​the communities as a Legal Reserve for the farms.

According to the Forestry Code —the law that governs the protection of native vegetation by private properties—, 20% of the area of ​​farms in the Cerrado must be preserved. As the farms were opened by cutting down the entire cerrado, the idea was to transform the land that remained for the communities into a Legal Reserve.

In 2019, signs were placed by Estrondo precisely in the area occupied by traditional communities, delimiting the territory as a Legal Reserve of the megafarm.

As the geraizeiros are used to raising free-range cattle, beyond the living area, the problems soon began. In January 2019, farmer Jossone Lopes was shot in the leg by security guards when some of his animals were trapped on the other side of the guardhouse.

“They reduced our space, squeezed us. The cerrado is life for us, it’s everything. We depend on it to raise our animals. But they took away our land and, with deforestation, the water in our swamp dropped”, says Adão Batista Gomes, 60 , resident of Cachoeira.

“I was born here, my parents were born here, my grandparents… The first ones who arrived here, they say, came from the fight in Canudos. There are more than 300 of us from the same family, always here. Being a geraizeiro is everything. For a while, many didn’t they recognized that, they thought they could be something else. But that’s right, that’s good”, he adds.

The situation between Estrondo and residents calmed down after an agreement was signed to deactivate the guardhouses and residents were allowed access to certain areas of the farm.

An agreement is also in progress with the state and federal public prosecutors for the transfer of titles to an area of ​​43,000 hectares to the Geraizeiras communities. The request, however, was for 82,000 hectares —according to the communities, this is the total area traditionally used by them.

Contacted by the report, the company Agronegócio Estrondo, which represents the condominium of farms, recalled the attempted agreement and said that it “covers a Conduct Adjustment Term (TAC) and the implementation, on its property, in the Legal Reserve areas, of an extractive reserve for sustainable use by the communities, which could generate income in bioeconomy, through the collection of golden grass, medicinal herbs, fruits of the cerrado etc.”

According to the company, “while the process progresses, the area is in possession of the communities that filed the lawsuit, being fully respected by the enterprise”.

Estrondo also said that “it has already been the victim of criminal acts, with the destruction of its properties and the intimidation of employees and their families” and that it “vehemently disapproves of the use of any type of violence and, at the slightest sign of conflict, triggers local authorities immediately”.

For Wilson Rocha, Public Prosecutor, the origin of these conflicts is the fact that “from the point of view of Brazilian law, there is no public policy for the recognition of the territorial rights of these communities”.

“We have a real deficit in the territorial guarantee of these peoples. We started to think about a way to guarantee these rights, to give visibility to these peoples. It is necessary to advance in the demarcation with clarity and justice, but it is not the only way”, says Rocha, who is a member of the management council of the Traditional Territories Platform, a MPF initiative to map communities, linked to Tô no Mapa.

The primary function of these mappings, he points out, is to bring these people out of invisibility. “So that their existence is considered, so that they are taken into account in the various public policies, in the licensing process for undertakings, in land regularization projects.”

_{The reporter traveled at the invitation of the Tô no Mapa initiative}