TERRA NOSSA, Brazil — In 2024, Mongabay investigative reporter Fernanda Wenzel traveled to one of the most dangerous spots in the Brazilian Amazon — a region where a silent land war is destroying the forest and costing lives. Her goal: to understand why three groups are locked in conflict here — land grabbers, settlers, and landless families — and how this battle pushes deforestation ever deeper into the rainforest. Fernanda met a group of landless people camping in an area already designated as a land reform settlement — land that, on paper, belongs to settlers who were legally allocated those plots. So why weren’t the settlers living there? Because a third group, land grabbers, had taken it over. They illegally fenced off huge portions of the settlement, blocked the rightful settlers from entering, and even hired armed security to patrol the area and intimidate the landless families now occupying the plot. “It’s a region where land is controlled by violence,” says land conflict expert Maurício Torres, who was also in the region accompanying Fernanda. “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 is the root of Brazil’s land dispute crisis: a tiny elite controls large territories, while the majority of small farmers have little or no land. To escape the conflict, those small farmers push deeper into the forest, clearing new areas and driving deforestation. In 2024, Brazil…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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