This chapter examines the national-scale origins and political linkages of land mafias and rural militias in Brazil. These linkages, especially to political power, explain how, over just a few decades, an RDPE of active and open land-grabbing mafias has spread from southern Brazil to the Amazon. These cases illustrate the dynamics by which federal-level changes can expand an RDPE system to the national scale and to other parts of the same jurisdiction, polity, and political system. The land-grabbing process is linked to illegalities and violence, which are mutually self-reinforcing through the logics operating in these systems. This chapter examines the rapid post-2019 transformation of pastures into monoculture soybean or corn plantations, especially in southeastern Acre and along the paved BR-163 highway. Part of the problem is the institutionalization of illegal land grabbing and its mafia-like tactics, whose continuation is ensured through legal loopholes and ambiguities. The situation worsened, especially during the reign of Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023), as land mafia dynamics penetrated deeper into the sociopolitical fabric of Brazil.

This chapter explores the ongoing and novel merging of gold mining with organized crime, highlighting the relation of drug trafficking, land grabbing, and other related sectors to deforestation. The recent gold-mining expansion and boom in the Amazon is linked to gold markets and the global political economy. The chapter scrutinizes the rise of narco-gold mining, linking drug trade, organized criminal groups, and money laundering with rainforest gold and the surge of authoritarian and mafia-like power. During the Bolsonaro era there was a significant deepening of the link between gold-mining activities and organized drug traffickers and criminal networks. In southwestern Pará, gold mining is the leading cause of deforestation inside areas like the upper Tapajós Munduruku Indigenous lands near Jacareacanga. This chapter utilizes field research experiences, interviews, and ethnographic observations to illustrate the complex dilemmas faced by communities currently being pressured and divided by increasing gold extraction in their territories. In the end of the chapter the discussion turns to solutions for how to address these and other root causes of deforestation in political economy.

As gold prices have soared, the Amazon and its inhabitants have had to bear the brunt of a rampant, environmentally destructive gold-mining rush. Small and medium-sized illegal, informal, and other irregular forms of so-called artisanal gold mining, as well as large-scale corporate gold mines, cause major and multifaceted socioenvironmental–health–human rights crises. The dynamics of the gold-mining boom are important to understand the key political economic sectors behind forest degradation and deforestation and to highlight how RDPEs work. The overall situation in the Amazon is presented, analyzing the causes of gold mining and the violence, especially in Peru, Brazil, and other key regions. The triple frontier between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil is also analyzed as the irregular gold-mining RDPE is one of the most important drivers of deforestation. In this region, gold-mining operations are led by ex-guerilla groups in Venezuela, paramilitaries and other armed groups in Colombia, and, increasingly, by the First Capital Command and other drug factions from southeastern Brazil in Roraima’s Yanomami Indigenous lands.

This chapter is a novel intersectorial analysis of deforesting industries in Brazil linked to illegal land grabbing/land value speculation, including ranching, monoculture plantation expansion, logging, and infrastructure development. The driving and pulling causes of deforestation in the Amazon are explored through a deeper analysis of the ranching-grabbing regionally dominant political economy (RDPE). Ranching speculating is by far the most prominent key driver and dominant political-economic sector in explaining deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Counterintuitively, politically enabled illegal land grabbing/speculation have become more lucrative in many places than the actual ranching activities on the deforested land. Drawing on field research and expert interviews in the Brazilian Amazon, this chapter explains how ranching opens lands for other forms of extractivism, especially the expansion of monoculture plantations. The relations and distinct yet interlinked business logics within ranching and soybean plantation sectors yield an analysis of “modern” and “primitive” forms of agribusiness. The particularities of Amazonian cattle capitalisms are explored via regional comparisons.

This chapter explores how the ranching-grabbing RDPE is supported by moral economic changes, which in this context is veneration for the cowboy lifestyle and scorn of traditional/Indigenous livelihoods. The cowboy lifestyle is often seen in a positive light, despite the violence that accompanies forest removal. These changes in the moral economy help to explain how locals increasingly welcome ranching-land speculation, even inside multiple-use conservation areas. Another key factor in deforestation processes are the policies and infrastructure investment decisions made at the federal and state level, which render large areas available for appropriation. These problems are also international, as groups expanding deforestation are still often funded by international banks, creating investment lock-in, as investors are more interested in preserving returns on investments than curbing illegalities. Simultaneously, there is a wide variety of activists in local communities who are resisting these extractivist pushes. The chapter examines where and how Indigenous peoples/forest-dwellers successfully resist land grabbing and clearcutting on their lands.

This book analyzes the role of different political economic sectors that drive deforestation and clearcutting, including mining, ranching, export-oriented plantation agriculture, and forestry. The book examines the key actors, systems, and technologies behind the worsening climate/biodiversity crises that are aggravated by deforestation. The book is theoretically innovative, uniting political economic, sociological, political ecologic, and transdisciplinary theories on the politics of extraction. The research relies on the author’s multi-sited political ethnography, including field research, interviews, and other approaches, across multiple frontiers of deforestation, focusing on Brazil, Peru, and Finland. Why do key global extractivist sectors continue to expand via deforestation and what are the differences between sectors and regions? The hypothesis is that regionally and sometimes nationally dominant politically powerful economic sectors are major explanatory factors for if, how, and where deforestation occurs. To address the deepening global crises, it is essential to understand these power relations within different types of deforesting extractivisms.

In 2011, the Brazilian Government began dismantling the country’s robust framework for Indigenous land rights by enacting measures to deny Indigenous Peoples’ access to their ancestral lands. From 2019 to 2022, the government did not recognize or title a single hectare of Indigenous lands, despite more than 700 pending requests for demarcation (or formal designation and titling). A change in government and six land demarcations in 2023, however, show signs of a new era for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and relationship with the state. This chapter analyzes evolving Indigenous land rights pre- and post-constitutionalization in 1988, the result of intense political mobilization and shifting colonialist perceptions of Indigenous Peoples. This chapter also discusses the main obstacles faced by Indigenous Peoples in enforcing Brazil’s protective land rights framework, accounting for the structures of settler colonial states – structures that permit institutional and physical violence against Indigenous Peoples by state and non-state actors alike. Finally, this chapter examines the opportunities created since the change in government in 2023, proposing new avenues to advance Indigenous Peoples’ constitutional land rights in Brazil.

Does decarbonization depend on policy stability that makes climate policies and institutional development irreversible, or does it depend on mastering a messy political conflict with uneven progress that might be inherent in large political economy transitions? This chapter draws on case studies of two large emerging powers, Brazil and South Africa, to argue that politicization of climate action seems inevitable in decarbonizing energy transitions. Fossil fuel coalitions are too powerful and the threat to them too existential to avoid politicization as they defend their interests. At the same time, Brazil shows that policy stability was a critical step in a large expansion of wind power there – not a full energy transition itself but providing an important alternative to fossil fuels. Both countries show that allies in the struggle against fossil fuels can be won and lost in non-climate political economies of energy transition. The potential for new industry and job creation, enhanced energy security, and impacts on communities that host infrastructure are all important to energy transition, with each following a political economy logic that may or may not focus on climate change.

Chapter 7 explores the reasons why Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela experienced relatively stable authoritarianism during the early twentieth century. All three countries professionalized their militaries during this period, which helped bring an end to the frequent revolts that had undermined their prospects for democracy in the nineteenth century. None of the three countries developed strong parties, however. The absence of strong parties impeded democratization in several ways. First, party weakness allowed presidents to concentrate authority and extend their hold on power in some cases. Second, and even more importantly, the weakness of opposition parties meant that the opposition had little chance of winning elections or enacting democratic reforms, particularly in the face of widespread government electoral manipulation. As a result, the opposition frequently abstained from elections, which only deepened authoritarian rule in these countries. In some instances, the opposition also encouraged the military to intervene to overthrow the president, which undermined otherwise mostly stable authoritarian regimes.

Since the early 1900s in Brazil, futebol has been an instrument of nation building, used to articulate a proud, masculine national identity. During the culture wars of the 1930s and today, the sport has served as a tool for fascists insisting on gender differentiation and masculine displays of strength. Conversely, gender dissidents have formed futebol teams as part of their antifascist struggles for rights and recognition. This chapter explores the creation and visibility campaigns of one such group: the Meninos Bons de Bola, Brazil’s first trans soccer team. I examine the team’s strategic use of nude images (2016–18), amidst the rise of ultra-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro. Drawing on two semi-naked photoshoots with the MBB, and on an oral history with team’s founder, Raphael H. Martins, this essay asserts that the Meninos’ defiant disrobing during this period of governmental change reveals their resistance to the machinations of Brazilian fascism.

In 2021, the Brazilian Supreme Court issued a landmark decision which declared that a portion of Section 40 of the Brazilian Patent and Trademark law violated the constitutionally enshrined right to health. The challenged provision automatically extended the terms of certain patents for up to ten years, a much longer period than permitted under any other patent regime in the world. It was adopted following lobbying from foreign pharmaceutical companies over the objections of local elites. The impugned provision qualified as an example of ultra-orthodoxy, defined here as the adoption of radically neo-liberal legal institutions in developing countries as a result of the lobbying efforts of industries with substantial economic power. The ruling by the Brazilian Supreme Court merely brought Brazilian law into line with the TRIPS agreement, the benchmark for legal orthodoxy. At the same time, the ruling was heterodox in several respects, including the interpretation of the right to health as a collective human right, the value given to independent academic opinions, and the attention paid to comparative law, particularly involving other countries from the Global South. It remains to be seen whether backlash against the decision will mute its potentially beneficial distributive effects.