garimpeiros, to allow work on their land — ‘‘There
is always an attempt. But there is also resistance.’’
It is well known, for instance, that logging
trucks regularly emerge from the Kayapó-Xikrin
reserve hauling illegally harvested trees to the
sawmills in Anapu. To combat these incursions,
some in the same Kayapó group disseminate
videos of its members defending their territory
with armed patrols that confront gold miners
and settlers, tear down their structures and
frighten them away. The Kayapó’s historic rep-
utation as warriors is now mostly obsolete, but
it may help them in their defense. Da Cunha’s
hope is that the constitution has provided a
structure that allows for such eff orts sometimes
to succeed.
The rate of deforestation in the Amazon has
varied with the ebbs and fl ows of the Brazilian
economy, hitting a low point about a decade
ago. Luciano Pohl told me that in 2012 he found
only one homestead inside Ituna-Itatá and in
2013 only a few but that greed for land there was
so intense that by 2016 the property maps of the
reserve were smothered in fraudulent claims,
many of them overlapping and rampantly
illegal. The claimants tended to be local oppor-
tunists of limited means but raw ambition. Their
claims were less absurd than they were cynical.
They followed a tested Brazilian principle that
illegality often leads to law.
Pohl was disgusted. He told me that in late 2016
after the left-wing president Dilma Rousseff was
removed from offi ce (nominally for her proxim-
ity to corruption; Pohl calls it a coup d’état) and
Bolsonaro’s establishment predecessor Michel
Temer temporarily assumed her place, the illegal
assertion of titles in Ituna-Itatá escalated. Accord-
ing to Pohl, a new crowd shoved aside the fi rst
generation of claimants, beginning the systematic
invasion of the land and building Mocotó into a
logistics base primarily for the maintenance of
heavy equipment and the distribution of diesel
fuel. I asked Pohl to consider that these were mere-
ly the actions of the poor, squatting on land as
they have for generations elsewhere in Brazil in
desperation to survive. He emphatically contra-
dicted that, saying the invasion of Ituna-Itatá was
the story of profound political corruption, fi nan-
cial corruption, moral corruption and calculation.
Pohl received his fi rst death threats not long
after a municipal environmental offi cial namedLuiz Alberto Araújo was assassinated on Oct. 13,
2016, while sitting in his car at home in Altamira,
in the presence of his family — shot seven times,
then for good measure twice more, supposedly
for having tried to block development schemes.
The killers arrived and left on a motorcycle and
were never found.
Surveying Ituna-Itatá became increasingly
dangerous. Pohl told me that a riverbank logis-
tics depot was guarded by men armed with
rifl es, themselves fearful of calling down the
wrath of Amazonian warriors if they angered
Indigenous guides. According to him, if IBAMA
approached the depot at all, it was only by
overfl ight. When Bolsonaro won the election
in 2018, the land-grabbers went rushing by the
thousands into the old-growth forests, where
they encountered no Indigenous opposition,
either because the native residents had fl ed or
because they had never existed in the fi rst place.
Ituna-Itatá became a free-for-all, the most heav-
ily invaded reserve in Brazil; from August 2018
to July 2019, it accounted for 30 percent of the
deforestation within Indigenous lands. Across
the Amazon, land-grabbers cleared so much ter-
ritory so fast that during the accompanying dryTwo boys sell ice cream on the main road of MocotóPhotograph by João Castellano for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 45
as smoke rises from a burn at a settler’s clearing.