A web of front people conceals environmental offenders in the Amazon

• A paper trail left by a notorious land grabber reveals how he used relatives and an employee as fronts to evade environmental fines and lawsuits, shedding light on this widespread practice in the Brazilian Amazon.
• Fronts prevent the real criminals from having their assets seized to pay for environmental fines, besides consuming time and resources from the authorities, who spend years trying to prove who the real financier of the deforestation is.
• Experts say it’s best to go after environmental offenders where it hurts the most, by seizing their assets, rather than to chase down their true identity.
• This investigation is part of a partnership between Mongabay and Repórter Brasil.

 

 

By Fernanda Wenzel, via MongaBay

 

“This one is famous!” the attendant at a farm equipment store in the town of Bujari exclaimed when asked about José Carlos Bronca. The name is also familiar to the man working at a small barbecue restaurant and to a farmer with half a dozen head of cattle on his property at the margins of the federal road connecting Bujari to Rio Branco, the capital of Brazil’s Acre state. “This is a big farmer,” he said, mentioning Bronca’s ranch on the outskirts of town.

Read this story in Portuguese at Repórter Brasil’s site. 

Bronca, who was a sponsor of Bujari’s agribusiness fair, Expo Bujari, and has been decorated as a Rio Branco citizen by the City Council, also co-owns the slaughterhouse chain Frigonosso, which has facilities in the states of Acre, Amazonas, Rondônia, São Paulo and Mato Grosso.

The entrepreneur is 71 years old, tall, with black hair diligently combed back. Bronca likes to share photos on Instagram of his holidays in Aruba and his meetings with important politicians, where he’s always dressed with “flair and elegance,” as he puts it. During the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, from 2019 to 2022, Bronca’s visits to Brazil’s capital, Brasília, became especially busy, with meetings with authorities and entities like the then-secretary of land issues, Nabhan Garcia, and the Brazilian National Confederation of Industry. He also took part in a video conference with the then-minister of agriculture, Tereza Cristina.

But such flaunting contrasts with the low-profile way he manages his business in another part of the Amazon, 300 kilometers (nearly 200 miles) from Bujari, in the epicenter of what’s known as the “arc of deforestation.” There, in the municipality of Lábrea, in Amazonas state, Bronca prefers to lease his lands to outsiders and register them in the name of his relatives. And in 2016, when agents from IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, came to fine him for the deforestation of 3,264 hectares (8,066 acres), the 16.3 million reais ($4.7 million at the time) notice was issued to one of his closest associates.

Bronca has been described by Greenpeace as a notorious land grabber who operates in one of the Amazon’s most violent regions. He had his assets blocked by a federal judge in February 2021, after becoming a target of the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) and IBAMA.

Despite Bronca being known as an agribusinessman and deforester, authorities are having a hard time prosecuting him, given that his assets are in the name of fronts. “Yes, it happens,” Geraldo Bruno Souza Morais, the agriculture secretary of Bujari, told Mongabay in a chat in the municipality’s humble City Hall, a wood building with faded paint. “Because possibly the area is going to be embargoed, so they pass it on to a relative or a person they trust to be able to do the work.”

A resident of the Ponta do Abunã region in Rondônia state that abuts onto Lábrea lays out the rationale in plain terms: “Imagine a man who comes from another state, gets here and takes protected areas, embargoed areas … will he want to put this land in his name? He will not!” he told Mongabay during a quick chat in the yard of his house, asking not to be named for security reasons.

This strategy, described as commonplace in the Amazon, has long been a stumbling block for investigators. By hiding behind fronts (known as laranjas, or oranges, in Brazilian slang) — often illiterate or unsophisticated people who aren’t fully aware of the consequences — land grabbers can evade laws on land regulation and shield themselves against lawsuits, jail and environmental fines. These notices are never paid since fronts usually don’t have the money for it. “You go to look for the assets that are in the citizen’s name and you don’t find anything, and that’s all there is to it,” César Guimarães, the Rondônia state superintendent for IBAMA, told Mongabay.

A person typically becomes a front simply by signing a piece of paper on the boss’s orders. “These are people who are often exploited by the big ones, who pay them a pittance, and so they take over everything,” Guimarães said. Most of the time, however, the deal doesn’t even involve any money, according to Rafael Rocha, a prosecutor in Amazonas state. “Often it’s even a relationship of camaraderie between boss and employee, between family members, that can happen without any clear counterpart.”

If it’s proved fronts were aware they were helping to defraud the authorities, they may be liable to the charge of misrepresentation, in this case in the form of document tampering.

Forged contracts to cheat authorities

The first time Bronca sidestepped IBAMA was in August 2016. A team from the environmental agency had come to a property called Nova Liberdade, in Ponta do Abunã, and found several men clearing the forest with chainsaws. They said the area belonged to “Mr. Bronca,” as stated in the monitoring report filed by the agents.

Five days later, however, a Bronca employee, Cheyenne Figueiredo de Souza, came to IBAMA’s office carrying a contract stating he had bought Nova Liberdade from Bronca in 2014. Souza, therefore, was the one liable for any fine for the deforestation. Later, in a public labor lawsuit he filed in 2023 against his former boss, Souza would confess the contract was signed in a notary’s office the day before his visit to IBAMA’s office and “blatantly forged with a retroactive date.”

Bronca told Mongabay he has never used fronts for “any purpose, much less to defraud the land regularisation process.”

“If someone comes in with a sales contract and has a notary’s office notarizing it, I have to base my actions on the document,” IBAMA official Guimarães told Mongabay when presented with the case.

In June 2018, two years after that first fine, Souza would once again pick up a deforestation fine for the clearing of 691 hectares (1,708 acres) in the same plot. In both cases, the fines were never paid; Souza appealed to IBAMA and the case is still ongoing.

Under this system of fronts, the real deforester gets away with clearing forests, but the designated front is effectively blackballed, including being cut off from funding. Souza’s lawsuit contained an email from Banco do Brasil, a state-owned lender, saying it can’t grant rural credit “to the area where the environmental violation or embargo actually took place.”

In his lawsuit, Souza sought moral and financial compensation for being used as a front, in addition to labor charges, totaling 22 million reais ($4.5 million). Bronca, in his response, argued that Souza “was never obliged” to sign the land sale contract. Oddly, Bronca also stated in his response that he is the actual owner of the farm, therefore confirming the contract had no value. A first ruling from December 2023 awarded Souza compensation for unpaid labor rights, but didn’t mention reparations related to the charge of having been used as a front.

In an email to Mongabay, Souza said he wouldn’t comment on the story.

A land grabber in the Amazon ‘Wild West’

Ponta do Abunã sits on a slice of land around BR-364, the road that connects the Rondônia state capital, Porto Velho, to Acre’s Rio Branco. The road has become a conduit through which land grabbers seek to invade the vast tracts of pristine rainforest in the south of Amazonas state. “It is a real Wild West,” Humberto de Aguiar Júnior, a prosecutor in Acre, told Mongabay, referring to the frequent land disputes, many of which culminate with shootings. “Sometimes six people are claiming to be the owners of the same area.”

João Bento’s plot, an old rubber plantation nearly double the size of the city of São Paulo, is one of these invaders’ havens. It was incorporated by Brazil’s federal government in 2011 as nondesignated land, meaning it doesn’t have any of the protections afforded to conservation units or Indigenous territories. The last barrier before a vast block of protected areas, reportedly home to Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, João Bento has already lost almost half of its forest cover to land grabbers profiting from cattle ranching, logging or land speculation.

Among them is José Carlos Bronca, according to a 2021 Greenpeace report. Under the permissive Bolsonaro administration, which championed the occupation of the Amazon by agribusiness, Bronca used his political influence to try to resolve his legal issues in the area. Documents obtained by Mongabay via the Brazilian freedom-of-information mechanism show that he had four meetings with the federal land reform agency, INCRA, from 2021 to 2022. Two of them were with the agency’s president, one in the Specialized Federal Prosecutor’s Office, and the fourth in the directorate responsible for land regularization policy.

In the meetings, Bronca and the authorities discussed “georeferencing in João Bento’s plot” and “land regularization in João Bento’s plot,” according to the papers. The meetings were arranged by Márcio Bittar, an Acre senator and Bolsonaro’s supporter, described by Bronca as a “friend.”

Bittar told Mongabay he would not comment on this story.

Far from Brasília’s corridors, at the end of a dirt road where timber and cattle trucks pass all the time, the swath of deforestation continued to spread across Bronca’s land. In Nova Liberdade, the 5,600-hectare (13,800-acre) ranch located 40 km (25 mi) from the main road, IBAMA issued at least three deforestation fines between 2016 and 2019, amounting to 28.7 million reais ($7.3 million at the 2019 exchange rate).

The total damage caused by the land grabber, however, is unknown since it’s hard to tell exactly how many hectares he cleared in the João Bento plot. A clue comes from a case in his name in SIGEF, the Brazilian land management system, about the cancellation of the registration for 11 properties, totaling nearly 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres) at the request of INCRA, the land reform agency.

The method used by Bronca in the south of Amazonas was very similar to that of Bruno Heller, a notorious land grabber from Pará state dubbed by authorities one of Amazon’s largest deforesters. Heller was targeted by a Federal Police raid in August 2023. Like Bronca, he allegedly forged land registries under the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), a system created to increase environmental control over rural properties but which has since been subverted into a land-grabbing tool.

Bronca divided Nova Liberdade into several smaller CARs and registered them in the names of relatives, such as his sister, his nephew and his niece, according to research by Mongabay with the support of the Center for Climate Crime Analyses (CCCA). Besides keeping his own name high and dry, this strategy is used to get around the land regularization law, which allows titling areas of up to 2,500 hectares (6,200 acres) — larger properties are subjected to heavier scrutiny — and only to people who don’t own other properties.

Bronca also doesn’t raise cattle in the area, which he instead leases to ranchers from other parts of the country, according to Mongabay and Repórter Brasil sources who asked to remain anonymous for security concerns, and an IBAMA report. “The lease adds an extra layer of difficulty to the investigation,” said Aguiar Júnior, the Acre prosecutor. “Most lease agreements are verbal, and you’ll only find out by asking people, who often won’t say.”

According to Souza’s lawsuit, Bronca’s efforts to skirt environmental fines were so intensive that no assets, including his companies, could be kept in his name, and no money could be moved by him. To achieve that, he used credit cards from his relatives. “Not even a lunch was bought from the bank account of Mr. José Carlos Bronca,” Souza’s lawyer said.

The rancher strategy worked until October 2019, when IBAMA agents went once again to Nova Liberdade and spotted new deforestation of 1,343 hectares (3,319 acres). The ranch manager identified Bronca as the owner of the area, and this time there was no way out: he was fined 10 million reais ($2.6 million at the time) and had his assets blocked by a judge. The following year, authorities began tracing the ties from the fronts back to Bronca, in an investigation that is still ongoing.

“From the beginning of the investigations, prosecutors signaled the possibility that José Carlos Bronca was using third parties, fronts, to hide the ownership of rural properties in the municipality of Lábrea,” Ana Carolina Haliuc Bragança, a federal prosecutor from Amazonas, wrote in August 2022.

In April 2023, Bronca would be fined again. The tab this time was 25.7 million reais ($5.2 million) for environmental crimes — with no front to take the fall for him this time.

Chasing fronts

A great example of how fronts get in the way of authorities is Amazônia Protege, an initiative launched in 2017 by the federal prosecutors’ office with a very simple proposal: to overlay deforestation maps from INPE, Brazil’s space agency, onto maps of CAR registries. Prosecutors could file lawsuits against those who had registered their CAR over the deforested areas. Bronca himself was prosecuted twice by Amazônia Protege for illegal deforestation in Apuí, another municipality in the south of Amazonas.

“We flooded courts with these files,” prosecutor Aguiar Júnior said. “But when the bailiffs went to find these people, they didn’t show up, or if they did, they said, ‘Look, I have nothing to do with this area, I’m so-and-so’s employee.’ So these lawsuits end up coming to nothing.” Nearly 700 lawsuits were filed in the states of Amazonas, Rondônia and Pará by the end of 2022, but only 81 (11.7%) had a final judgment.

Proving who is the real deforester behind the fronts is no easy task. In 2021, for example, the Federal Police asked the military police in Lábrea to visit Bronca’s ranch to verify if he was the actual owner of the land. The military police denied the request because it called for a 1,400-km (870-mi) journey, equivalent to the distance from New York to Atlanta, through “stretches with possible bogs, muddy and smooth, due to the precariousness of the dirt roads.” To make matters worse, the military police said they had no vehicles, fuel, or money to pay the team’s per diems.

In another episode, a bailiff had to track down one of Bronca’s relatives as he was trying to help move a truck that had bogged down on a dirt road in the Acre’s countryside, to notify him of a judicial order. The violence in many parts of the Amazon makes it even more challenging, said Guimarães, the IBAMA superintendent: “These are extremely hostile places. I need two police officers for every agent. Because if the agent gets there alone, he’ll be chased away and lynched.”

There are less risky ways of proving someone is a front, especially by showing that the income of the person who claims to be the owner of the land is incompatible with the size of the asset and the environmental damage. “Deforestation is not cheap. The cost of felling one hectare of forest with chainsaws is 4,000 reais [$800],” Guimarães said. “And it goes up to 6,000 reais [$1,200] if you are going to use tractors.”

“Sometimes we come across someone who has received emergency aid from the government and at the same time is fined for deforesting 500,000 hectares [1.2 million acres]. Obviously, something is wrong,” said Rafael Rocha, the prosecutor in Amazonas.

In Bronca’s case, the fact that the relatives claiming to be the landowners worked with cattle ranching also rang alarm bells for the authorities.

Getting bank and phone records through a court order may also be effective. “In one operation, we found a spreadsheet in an exchange of messages listing all the plots that were in possession of that large landowner but which had been registered in the names of fronts,” Rocha said. But it’s a resource to be used sparingly, since neither the justice system, which can authorize this snooping, nor the Federal Police, responsible for collecting and analyzing the intercepted information, have enough agents to process it.

“It is all about time,” Aguiar Júnior said, summing up the stalling effect that fronts pose to an investigation. “Something that should be resolved quickly ends up dragging on for two, three years, in this back and forth to find out who’s actually exploiting the area.”

That is why experts agree that the most effective way to dissuade deforesters is to go directly to their pockets. “Do you have cattle on top of the deforested area? Get them. Do you have soybeans on it? Get it. Because then the damage is great,” Guimarães said. For him, the 50% plunge in deforestation in Lula’s first year in office in 2023 was due mainly to IBAMA’s Recovery Operation (Operação Retomada), in which cattle from embargoed areas (which should be set aside to allow the forest to regenerate) were seized.

“Seizures are more important than knowing who is there to punish,” Aguiar Júnior said. “If you seize a farmer’s cattle, the news spreads and this creates a fear that acts as a deterrent.”

 

Banner image: A cattle ranch in a deforested area. Image by Fernando Martinho.