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09 March 22
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From Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir the Barrel Bomber, Mother Russia has mourned a lot of her children. And it is only one patch on a world map bloodstained over millennia by senseless wars. When elephants fight, an African proverb says, the grass gets trampled.
Now we are at the limit. Lost amid war news, the latest U.N. climate report warns that without drastic global action over the next seven years, Homo sapiens are headed toward massive die-offs. That is moot if war in Europe escalates to nuclear showdown.
After four years of ignoble lunacy, America now has leaders to help get the world back on track. But it is dangerously short of followers. If the United States can’t live up to basic standards of democracy and decency, inhuman humans set the tone.
Putin’s onslaught is unambiguous naked aggression. A brave nation of 40 million can be overrun only at horrendous cost and “occupied” only by harsh repression. But all major conflicts result from hubris: misjudged “power” that leads to failed diplomacy.
Prine’s lyrics, from 2005, make the point: “…you're feeling your freedom and the world's off your back, (then) some cowboy from Texas starts his own war in Iraq.”
When Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait in 1989, coalition forces took it back. George Bush the elder stopped them short of Baghdad, knowing what would happen if he pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall with no plan in place to clean up the mess.
In 2003, Bush junior aimed his war on terror at Saddam, who had dismantled his arsenal of mass destruction and had no role in 9/11. Dick Cheney and neocon ideologues predicted a “cakewalk” would democratize the Mideast, with rich oilfields as the spoils of holy war.
That resulted in perhaps a million needless deaths and millions more refugees. Brutality and outlawed torture by U.S. forces impelled minority Sunnis to create an Islamic State. Now ISIS and other terrorist groups, still growing, infest much of Africa and South Asia.
Today, Cheney’s conservative daughter is an unlikely Joan of Arc, defending America from corrupted Republicans who control what is no longer a grand old party — not neocons, just cons.
My guess is that Americans are more human than not. By November, when the stakes are clearer, even many now enraptured by a treacherous, narcissistic draft dodger will cleanse Congress of Trumplicans who snuffle at his feet for their own selfish purposes.
But that may be wishful thinking.
Far from the Russian borders Putin is determined to expand by force, Ukraine reflections are just outside my door in Arizona. Take, for example, Wendy Rogers, a Christian fundamentalist state senator who reduces complexity to simple black and white.
The Arizona Senate just passed a token censure of Rogers, who said unspecified “traitors” — presumably Democrats of her choosing — should be publicly hanged. She called Volodymyr Zelensky “a globalist puppet” of George Soros and bankers “who are shoving godlessness and degeneracy in our face.”
Gov. Doug Ducey called her Ukraine remarks “wrong and dangerous,” but he still supports her. His political action committee spent $500,000 on her 2020 campaign.
After the censure, an unapologetic Rogers said she would destroy the career of any Republican who opposed her “simply because of the color of my skin or opinion about a war I don’t want to send our kids to die in."
We all know the Fox-stitutes — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and the others who twist truth for pay. Sean Hannity seems to live in Trump’s golf bag. Worse may be hate mongers who reach many millions more by round-the-clock radio, on the internet and at large gatherings.
Rogers’ public-hanging remarks were at a Feb. 25 rally in Florida of the America First Political Action Conference run by Nick Fuentes, a heil-Hitler Nazi with a weird toothy grin. “Our secret sauce here,” he said, “it’s these young white men.” The crowd roared. Then he added, “Can we give a round of applause for Russia?” That sparked a drumbeat chant: “Putin, Putin.”
Fuentes was flanked by two House members. One was Paul Gosar from here in Arizona, a leader of the Jan. 6 insurgency who is so poisonous that his own family urges voters to shun him. I was more interested in the other one, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She declared afterward: “I do not know Nick Fuentes. I’ve never heard him speak. I’ve never seen a video. I don’t know what his views are, so I’m not aligned with anything that may be controversial.” Really? Just roll the tape.
Greene snuggled up to Fuentes, beaming at the self-proclaimed Übermensch. She is the one who compared the Capitol police who thwarted Trump’s coup attempt to Hitler’s “Gazpacho.” She said Nancy Pelosi used them to spy on Republicans.
That might be comic relief, but it’s not. World War II killed perhaps 80 million people, including 6 million exterminated Jews, and left survivors in misery among the ruins of glorious cities lost to future generations.
History matters. Hitler took an early bite of neighboring Czechoslovakia, then told Neville Chamberlain in Munich it was his last. The prime minister, back in London, triumphantly declared “peace in our time." It took two atomic bombs to end the war seven years later.
Americans refused to weigh in until Pearl Harbor. But after 1945, U.S. administrations helped rebuild shattered nations, set up a United Nations and forged military alliances that averted war (except for Korea, still unresolved, and conflicts America started on its own).
Trump nearly destroyed NATO. He brought troops home from Europe and toadied to Putin while insulting allies. He fired top military aides, then plotted a wag-the-dog war with Iran. Angela Merkel, born in Soviet-bloc East Germany, stepped up as interim free-world leader.
Joe Biden restored the alliance. He spurred Germany to double its military budget and, after its post-war pacifism, to export heavy weapons to Ukraine, the besieged country that Trump tried to extort by withholding arms unless its new president helped him slur Biden.
In a masterful State of the Union address, Biden explained the hard truths of high-wire diplomacy without a net. His generals know from hard experience the risks behind simple-sounding strategies, such as “no-fly zones,” which amount to a declaration of war.
Putin cannot be allowed to occupy Ukraine. Yet he has 2,000 active nuclear warheads, each with far more destructive power than those blasts that killed at least 200,000 Japanese under mushroom-shaped clouds or from long-lingering radiation.
Sanctions take time to inflict pain. Putin has muzzled all dissent. Anyone guilty of what he considers “fake news” — reporters for global news organizations or individuals on social media — faces 15 years in prison. Protesters can be conscripted and sent to Ukraine.
But three times more Americans watched the Super Bowl, an annual gladiator classic with no world impact, than heard Biden’s hourlong speech. Even many Democrats complained bitterly that he short-changed their own narrow domestic priorities.
Idiotic online posts and letters to editors blame Biden for Covid-19 despite all he did to reverse the mass death of Trump’s depraved indifference and Republicans’ refusal to protect others. They fault him for the resulting inflation, corporate gouging and supply disruptions. In fact, his first year produced some of the best economic numbers in generations.
Widespread criticism of his Afghanistan “debacle” pushes me to despair. Skewed reality about distant conflicts, repeated widely in news media, favors politicians who offer glib simplicities that lead to more needless war. Trump is a perfect example.
A Facebook “friend” replied to a post of mine, attributing to Biden everything Trump saddled him with at the close of a war he opposed from the outset, tried to stop in 2008 and promised voters he would end. “Such ‘seasoned statecraft,’” he wrote, “has me searching diligently for a ‘horselaugh’ emoji.”
I’ve covered conflict before, during and since the Vietnam War. When an attacking force suddenly surrounds a capital and a leader flees, panic is inevitable. The test is what comes next.
I started to explain why military experts call the airlift a spectacular success under the circumstances but cut it short: “Oh, fuck it,” I wrote, “Life is too short. Democracies get the leaders they deserve. If so many people can carp at a guy who is actually doing a damned good job with the worst load any president has taken on since WWII, ours is no longer worth saving.”
Yet even in the face of Putin’s onslaught, the crazies in Congress, sworn to protect all Americans from foreign and domestic threat, play clown-car politics.
(My sidekick editor covered conflicts for decades before working in senior U.N. positions. After a final read, she just messaged: “When will I hear your fist slamming on the desk?” She’s right. Now.)
What is WRONG with us? Adam McKay’s film, “Don’t Look Up,” was long and a bit subtle for Hollywood. But so much tepid, cynical response, niggling at details, scares the crap out of me. For its message, it is probably the most important movie ever made. We are hurtling toward climatic endgame. And now two nuclear powers face High Noon. We need to look up.
As Biden spoke solemnly about sacrifices volunteer troops make, including his own decorated son, Beau, Rep. Lauren Boebert from Colorado and Greene from Georgia screeched like magpies to interrupt him. When he mentioned coffins of servicemen killed by a terrorist bomber, Boebert yelled: “You put them there. Thirteen of them!”
Yet other Republicans defend them. In a deadlocked Senate, a coal baron from West Virginia, one tiny state, votes against his own party to block a voting rights bill. At Biden’s address, he sat with Republicans. Arizona’s Democratic senator, funded heavily with Republican money, also helps undermine American democracy.
We are all now playing for keeps. It is hard to imagine Putin can survive if what John McCain called “a gas station with nukes” is reduced to an impoverished pariah, with pissed-off ex-oligarchs and suffering millions. But he controls the message: Russia is a victim.
Putin is a stone-cold butcher with a pit viper’s focus. The Chechnyan capital, Grozny, leveled to rubble, showed what he is capable of doing to workaday families just living their lives. In Russia, casts of characters and plots change, but long-term turmoil is a recurring theme.
John Reed titled his book on Russia’s revolution: “Ten Days That Shook the World.” Putin’s rape of Ukraine has already surpassed that, with much of his armor bogged down, harassed by nationalist defenders. His impossible dream of historic glory likely won’t end any time soon.
Putin commands the biggest chunk of geography on Earth, one eighth of its habitable land mass, across two continents and 11 time zones, with borders on 16 sovereign states. His hidden wealth likely makes him richer than Elon Musk. He has more nukes than the United States.
But Russia’s population is 145 million, less than half of America’s, and its economy, which now ranks close to Texas, is already hurting badly. His obsessive concern for his health suggests that for all his bluster, he is not likely to risk nuclear chicken with the United States.
Russia is what Barack Obama should probably not have called it: a regional power. That infuriated Putin, pushing him to restore lost grandeur.
The real global threat is not a bear but rather a dragon. Dealing with Xi Jinping is no job for amateurs. American voters need more guidance than what now emerges from the “media” cacophony. Some is excellent; some is ridiculous.
On MSNBC, for instance, Andrea Mitchell has watched the world since forever. Richard Engel reports at close hand with empathy. But one anchor just remarked that China, which hovers over Taiwan and skirmishes with India, is opposed to invading neighbors. Ask Tibetans about that.
Until 2017, China and the United States coexisted peaceably. They share common interests despite opposing philosophies. Each badly needs the other, and neither wants economic disruption.
Trump alternated between effusive praise and crude bullying, depending on goals of the moment. He lauded Xi’s effective, “transparent” actions to curb Covid-19 until he let the virus run wild in America and needed a scapegoat. By 2021, China was plainly hostile, expanding military bases abroad and extending its reach from the ocean floor to the dark side of the moon.
Biden understands XI after dozens of private meetings and crisscrossing China’s airspace with him. China wants to project a better image than what it is: a race-based tyranny that uses genocidal ethnic cleansing, strict censorship and harsh repression to blot out dissent. It can be swayed by hard-edged criticism but only in private. Public shaming provokes backlash.
Xi and Putin made a grand show of friendship and new cooperation at the Olympics. But Xi, plainly in charge, is not motivated to follow his junior partner into quixotic folly.
Common wisdom says the Chinese characters for crisis and opportunity are the same. Although linguistic scholars disagree, they are close. An unstable oil market could push China toward greater commitment to mitigating climate collapse with alternative energy.
The rub is in America. Oil and coal producers motivated by profit, not principles, bankroll a distressing number of politicians. And for a lot of self-focused Americans, someone else’s war in a place they can’t find on a map is far down their list of priorities.
In the end, it all comes down to John Prine’s lyrics, which raise the fundamental question to be answered in November: In today’s dis-United States, how many humans ain’t human?
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. (photo: Manaure Quintero/Reuters)
One of the freed prisoners was Gustavo Cardenas, among six Citgo oil executives arrested in 2017 and convicted on charges the U.S. government says were fabricated. The other was a Cuban American, identified as Jorge Alberto Fernandez, detained on unrelated charges.
"Tonight, two Americans who were wrongfully detained in Venezuela will be able to hug their families once more," President Joe Biden said in a statement.
"We are bringing Gustavo Cardenas and Jorge Fernandez home," he said. He gave no more details about their release.
The weekend visit by the U.S. delegation focused not only on the fate of detained Americans but on the possibility of easing U.S. oil sanctions on the OPEC member to fill a supply gap if Biden banned Russian oil imports in response to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine - something he did on Tuesday. Venezuela is Russia's closest ally in South America.
Washington has sought the release of at least nine men, including those known as the "Citgo 6," two former Green Berets and a former U.S. Marine.
The freeing of the two could set a more positive tone for talks between the United States and Venezuela, which have had hostile relations through successive American administrations.
The U.S. delegation, the highest-ranking to travel to Venezuela in recent years, met the detainees on Sunday in a Venezuelan prison. U.S. hostage envoy Roger Carstens was part of the group, and he was believed to have stayed behind to finalize the release.
Tuesday’s release followed talks with socialist President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday as the Biden administration sought ways to stave off the impact of soaring U.S. gasoline prices spurred by efforts by the West to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
Biden ramped up the pressure campaign on Moscow on Tuesday with his announcement of a U.S. ban on Russian oil and other energy imports. The ban could further increase prices at the pump for American consumers, adding to inflationary pressure.
Engagement with Maduro, a longtime U.S. foe, was also aimed at gauging whether Venezuela is prepared to distance itself from Russia.
But the Biden administration faced strong criticism on Capitol Hill for its contact with Maduro, who is under U.S. sanctions for human rights abuses and political repression.
Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urged the White House not to pursue a deal with Venezuela.
Maduro, he said in a statement, “is a cancer to our hemisphere and we should not breathe new life into his reign of torture and murder.”
The United States in 2019 recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's legitimate president following Maduro’s 2018 re-election, which Western governments dismissed as a sham.
STICKING POINT
Cardenas was one of six executives of U.S.-based Citgo Petroleum, owned by Venezuela's state-own oil company PDVSA, arrested during a business trip to Caracas in 2017. A Venezuelan court in November 2020 sentenced the men, who were accused of crimes including embezzlement, money laundering and conspiracy, to prison terms ranging from eight to 13 years.
The executives - five naturalized U.S. citizens and one permanent U.S. resident - have been in and out of prison and house arrest in recent years, their circumstances often appearing to depend on the state of U.S.-Venezuela relations.
Their detention has been a major sticking point between Caracas and Washington, which has repeatedly demanded their release and called their detention unlawful.
Among the Americans still held in Venezuela is Matthew Heath, a Marine veteran charged with terrorism and arms trafficking. Heath denied the charges. U.S. officials said Heath was not sent by Washington and accused Venezuelan authorities of holding him illegally.
Two other Americans still detained are former U.S. special forces members, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, who were arrested in 2020 in connection with a botched raid aimed at ousting Maduro.
A woman gets assistance fleeing from a civilian apartment complex that was bombed in Chuhuiv, near Kharkiv, Ukraine. (photo: Alex Lourie/Redux Pictures)
Blinken told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" that there are also "very credible reports about the use of certain weapons." The secretary appeared to be referring to Russia’s suspected use of cluster munitions in areas of Ukraine, killing and wounding civilians.
On Feb. 28, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, accused Russia of also using vacuum bombs, controversial thermobaric weapons, in its invasion. A CNN team reported seeing a Russian thermobaric rocket launcher — which is capable of launching vacuum bombs — south of Belgorod, Russia, near the Ukrainian border, on Feb. 26, but so far there is no evidence that the actual thermobaric weapons have been used by Russia. The Kremlin denied the use of cluster munitions or vacuum bombs.
These are the types of weapons that could be part of the International Criminal Court’s investigation that was launched last week into allegations of war crimes by Russia.
To understand what cluster munitions and vacuum bombs are, the kind of destruction they cause and why they’re controversial, Yahoo News spoke to David Johnson, a principal researcher at the RAND Corporation, an American global policy think tank. The interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.
Yahoo News: What are vacuum bombs, and how do they work?
David Johnson: The conventional system is explosives and steel, and the fragments kill you, and perhaps the blast. Thermobarics rely on an aerosol that ignites and flame and overpressure to kill.
"Vacuum bomb" is not a particularly good description. It's a thermobaric weapon. And nobody ever hears the word "thermobaric" very much, so it's confusing. I think the difference between thermobaric systems that are either single-warhead or cluster munitions is that the way a thermobaric warhead works is, there is a two-stage system.
One is an aerosol. When it first hits, it flows the aerosol and essentially completely blankets the range of the system in this vapor. The second stage ignites it. And so it's like you're standing in a room and [it] also fills the room full of natural gas or gasoline that's been vaporized, and throwing a match into it. And it's horrendous.
So there are multiple delivery systems on these things, but the one that I think the Russians use the most, in fact, is the TOS-1. It's the one that's on an armored chassis with all the tubes.
It has [24] 220-mm rockets, and the only purpose of those is to shoot thermobaric rounds. One launcher with these [24] things can launch in 15 to 30 seconds, all the rockets in it. And it will essentially blanket an area that's 200 by 400 meters. So you think about something longer than two football fields and wider than four. And it vaporizes what's in there. So it's devastating. It's also very effective. The Russians used them extensively in Grozny [the capital of Chechnya] to take down buildings. The range of them is, initially they were 2.5 kilometers, now they're about 6.
How dangerous are vacuum bombs?
I'll read from a 1993 Defense Intelligence Agency report on this [“Fuel-Air and Enhanced-Blast Explosive Technology—Foreign"]: "The blast kill mechanism against living targets is unique and unpleasant. What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction vacuum, which ruptures the lungs. If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, it lights up but doesn't explode, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale burning fuel. Since the most common fuels are toxic, breathing those things before they've dissipated will also be problematic."
There's a [separate] Central Intelligence Agency report that notes, "The effective fuel-air explosive explosion within confined space is a mess. Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe will likely suffer many internal and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums, crushed inner-ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness."
So it is devastating; it's horrendous. And I think it's unconscionable to use these against civilians. Against enemy forces, it's no more problematic than dropping a dozen 500-pound bombs on them. You're dead, you're dead. But against civilians, this is particularly pernicious because it's useful inside of buildings in particular. And so you don't know what's inside the building when you use the thermobaric against it. So there's nowhere to hide, essentially, because the aerosol just permeates everywhere.
Are vacuum bombs banned?
What is banned is using them against civilian populations. The weapons themselves are not banned against other military formations.
What are cluster munitions, and how do they work?
So the way to think about a cluster munition, it is a container that has things inside of it. Those things are individual munitions. In the case of an artillery shell, the back pops out and it starts dropping these things out, essentially. And they spread in a certain pattern, and they each are independent explosions. They can be either anti-personnel or anti-vehicle. They also have cluster munitions that are scatterable mines, where a projectile delivers so many mines. But the cluster munition itself describes a category of dispensing, not the weapon itself. The submunition is what's deadly.
Are cluster munitions banned, and why are they controversial?
The problem with cluster munitions is that they leave unexploded ordnance because they don't always all go off. The ban on them is, as I understand the convention, they can have only a certain number of warheads in a dispenser, and there has to be less than a certain percentage of dud rate. But that's a convention, not a law. [In 2008, more than 100 countries agreed to a global treaty banning the use of cluster munitions, but neither Russia nor Ukraine signed on.]
There's no prohibition against using cluster munitions against enemy formations. And again, it's not a war crime by the Geneva Convention. The weapon — using it against civilians is, like every weapon.
It's an absolute in military planning that you are seriously careful about avoiding civilian casualties. And that's when war crimes happen.
Deforestation near Humaita, in Amazonas state, Brazil. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Brazil’s rainforest is being stolen and cleared at an accelerating pace, and the Bolsonaro government is fanning the flames.
They needed to pass a bill that would slash the size of a state rainforest reserve known as Jaci-Paraná and another park farther south. Once a vast expanse of sinuous streams and soaring stands of mahogany and castanha trees, Jaci-Paraná Extractive Reserve has been largely transformed into pasture for cattle. Roads cut into the bright red mud crisscross the reserve, connecting hundreds of ranches where 120,000 cattle graze. The ranches are illegal. The new law would change that. The owners would no longer have to hide the origin of their livestock to sell to big beef producers. More important, the land grabbers would have a path to legal title. Almost half the state legislators are ranchers or got elected with agribusiness money. They’d long wanted to wipe the slate clean for their rural base, and now they had support all the way up to the presidential palace in Brasilia.
In a few days, President Jair Bolsonaro would appear at a U.S.-sponsored climate summit to defend Brazil’s record on the Amazon. For two years, Donald Trump had been a friend as Bolsonaro dismantled protections for the rainforest. President Joe Biden most certainly would not be. The lawmakers’ plan could fall apart if Biden ratcheted up the pressure. “Listen well,” Ezequiel Neiva, a rancher and lawmaker, told his colleagues. “This is one of our last chances to vote.” The bill passed unanimously. Coronel Marcos Rocha, Rondônia’s governor and one of Bolsonaro’s staunchest allies, signed it into law on May 20. (It’s being challenged in court.) Jaci-Paraná, formerly large enough to swallow Mexico City, was slashed in size by 89%, leaving only a sliver of terrain along its western edge. The other state reserve mentioned in the bill, Guajará-Mirim, lost 50,000 hectares, or 124,000 acres.
Two days after the Rondônia law passed, Bolsonaro didn’t let down the ranchers. He was defiant when he spoke via video link to Biden and other heads of state at the Leaders Summit on Climate. Bolsonaro praised Brazil’s work in protecting the Amazon, while pointing a finger at the developed world’s addiction to fossil fuels as the key culprit in climate change. Above all he lamented the “Amazonian paradox.” The rainforest is one of the globe’s greatest natural resources—in both the commodities it holds and its role in producing oxygen and cleaning the world’s air—and yet most of the 24 million people living in and around it are poor.
“The value of the standing forest” must be acknowledged Bolsonaro said. “There must be fair payment for environmental services provided by our biomes to the planet at large.” The message to the world was clear: Pay us to leave the Amazon alone, or Brazil will find its own way to extract that value.
There’s ample evidence that the government is already doing that. A review of thousands of public documents and dozens of interviews with prosecutors, forest rangers, and members of Bolsonaro’s inner circle show that Brazil’s government is engaged in an active campaign to open up the Amazon to privatization and development—first by turning a blind eye as public and protected lands are raided and cleared, and then by systematically pardoning the people responsible and granting them legal title to the stolen lands.
Bolsonaro’s government didn’t invent the practice. It’s rooted in the nation’s 1988 constitution, and two presidents before Bolsonaro rammed through changes that essentially amnestied about 25,000 people who’d been squatting on public properties, a review of Brazilian land records shows. But Bolsonaro and his team want to accelerate the process like never before by making it easier for big ranchers to get in on the game. “All that land that’s been cleared in the Amazon, the law allowed it,” says Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, Bolsonaro’s land-policy czar. “That’s how it happened in the United States. It happened in Australia. When colonizers first went out and took that virgin land, all of it came from the state.”
Nabhan Garcia, 63, is himself a rancher. He and his boss came of age during the 1970s, when the military government in Brazil viewed turning the wild expanses of the Amazon into cities, farms, and mines as an imperative of national security. The dictatorship, which endured until 1985, built military bases, power plants, and a network of roadways throughout the thick jungle. Those infrastructure projects fueled what’s known as the “Brazilian Miracle,” a period of 10% annual economic growth that still stands out in many minds as the nation’s golden era. But these were some of the darkest days for the rainforest itself. Millions of people migrated inland from coastal cities, carving homesteads and huge industrial hubs out of the jungle. In 40 years, the Amazon has lost an area as big as California to deforestation. Some scientists suggest the Amazon is now close to a tipping point, at which it will become a savanna rather than a rainforest. It will pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere instead of pulling them down, and so-called flying rivers—bands of moisture in the air that bring rainfall to the continent—will dry up. As many as 10,000 species may be at risk of dying off.
Since taking office in January 2019, Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has revived the 50-year-old worldview that Amazon development and Brazilian prosperity go hand in hand. And he’s stacked key land management and environment agencies with farmers and ranchers who share his vision. Jaci-Paraná is the latest example of that vision’s realization, but it’s far from the only one.
União Bandeirantes, located east of Jaci-Paraná, is a dusty blip of a farming community, a crosshatch of dirt roads and a few dozen structures surrounded by coffee plantations and cattle pastures. A little more than two decades ago, it didn’t exist. No roads. No ranchers. Just rainforest. Today, it’s something of a model for would-be land-grabbers across Rondônia.
Edmo Ferreira Pinto, 49, is proud to take credit for the transformation. Wearing trim jeans and a fitted button-down shirt, he’s intense and energetic as he sits in a trendy wine bar on a recent evening in Porto Velho recounting how he and his friends hacked their way through the jungle and divvied up land that wasn’t theirs. He fancies himself a modern-day Robin Hood who stole from the state to give to the poor. “I still look back and can’t believe we pulled it off,” Ferreira Pinto says.
Known as Dim-Dim (pronounced jeen-jeen), Ferreira Pinto was only 12 when he, his parents, four siblings, and two other families piled into the back of an open-air fruit truck and traveled the 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) from coastal Bahia state to Rondônia. It was the mid-1980s, and the truck’s owner made a living charging a few bucks per head to ferry migrants such as them to the Amazon. For years government ads on TV and radio and in newspapers had promised plots and prosperity for anyone willing to make the journey. The Amazon was “a land without men for men without land,” the ads declared. Millions answered the call to conquer the “green hell,” and the population of Rondônia swelled from about 115,000 people in 1970 to more than 1.1 million in 1990. Behind the boom was the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or Incra, a government agency the military regime created to speed Brazil’s industrial revolution.
The trip took a week. They sat on wooden benches, a tarp offering shade from the scorching sun. Like the millions of others making their way to Brazil’s Wild West, they followed a highway built as part of a World Bank-backed push to thread roads through the jungle. Once in Rondônia the family moved in with an uncle who’d made the same trek a decade earlier. He’d been rewarded with land, but by the time Ferreira Pinto arrived, everything had changed.
After the military dictatorship gave way to a democracy, Incra was given a new mission. Instead of colonizing the Amazon with industrial farms and factories, the agency was told to reclaim whatever hadn’t yet been developed, dice it up into tiny lots, and hand those out to Brazil’s poor for subsistence farming. It was one of the largest social welfare giveaways of all time. But the execution was bungled. No longer backed by the power of the military, Incra couldn’t enforce its rules when conflicts over land broke out. People rushed to claim whatever plots appeared to be free. Wealthy owners stripped of their properties fought in court to save their stakes, tying the land up for decades. Documents were easily forged or altered to make bogus titles look legitimate. A resale black market for the dubious claims proliferated. Some falsified documents have now changed hands so many times that it’s impossible to determine the real owners of some parcels.
A decade after they arrived, Ferreira Pinto’s parents found their way to an Incra settlement on a massive farm that had been granted to a conglomerate during the dictatorship, then confiscated after the company failed to develop the land. Ferreira Pinto looked around at people who’d been there for years. They were still living in tarp-covered shacks without water or electricity while waiting for Incra to tell them which plot was theirs. “You see that, and it hurts,” Ferreira Pinto says. “I don’t think my father ever really let it get to him, or at least he didn’t show it. But me, it hurt.” By then he and his friends, who’d also come with their parents in search of land, had been waiting for most of their lives. When they heard about a strip of terrain standing free to the east of Jaci-Paraná, they hatched a plan.
On Dec. 3, 1999, which locals still remember as an independence day of sorts, Ferreira Pinto and three busloads of people drove to the edge of the rainforest and set up camp. They built small huts, then started cutting out roads, knocking down trees everywhere they went. It took a year to hack through the rainforest to the spot that is now the heart of União Bandeirantes, which translates as Pioneers Union. Along the way they recruited topographers, lawyers, builders, and administrators, all of them eager to fill the vacuum left by the government—and grab a slice of public land for themselves. Ferreira Pinto was arrested twice for conflicts and invasions but was never convicted of a crime. In the end, he estimates, his group settled some 1,800 families. Current law allows anyone who developed land as recently as 2008 to apply for amnesty. The people of União Bandeirantes made a bet, and it paid off.
Everaldo Pandolfi is sitting on a brown horse at the intersection of two dirt roads, watching his son tend to cattle in a fenced-in lot. “That’s all his now,” Pandolfi says as he points to a sweeping field in front of him where the jagged teeth of torched tree stumps still poke out from the tall grass. Behind him is a plot he transferred to his daughter; to his left is a field owned by his other son. Combined, they add up to more than 200 hectares. “It used to be pure rainforest,” he says. “I tore it all down.”
An original settler of União Bandeirantes, Pandolfi, who’s 51, paid 250 reais (about $80 back then) to a surveyor working with Dim-Dim to mark his future farm. From there he followed a familiar playbook: First he went for the majestic hardwoods, hundreds of years old and as much as 11 feet in diameter. They brought in fast cash from exporters. Then he torched the land to clear the scrub, before planting a weedy grass that is a staple in cattle diets. Eventually he built a small house, with two fish ponds and a pen for pigs out back. In a few more years, the burned tree stumps may break down enough to make way for the payday: coffee or soybeans. “That’s the dream,” a neighboring farmer explains. In the south of the state, where big farmers reign, the shift to soybeans is already under way. But for that you need investment: irrigation, machinery, and fertilizer. The little guys rarely get there.
The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, the federal regulator known as Ibama, knows all about the deforestation, but doesn’t do much to stop it. A study by the independent news site InfoAmazonia found that between 1980 and 2019, Ibama issued 75 billion reais ($14 billion) of fines, adjusted for inflation, but collected only 3.3% of the total. Pandolfi has himself been fined three times, adding up to 600,000 reais. He doesn’t plan on ever paying it. “How can I?” he asks, sitting barefoot on his porch late in the afternoon, with a straight-shot view of rainforest territory set aside for indigenous people. Blond and tan, Pandolfi is unassuming and a little bit goofy, curling his legs beneath him as he breaks down how he gets around the fines in order to sell his cattle to big beef producers, whose policies prohibit them from buying from deforesters. “I took everything out of my name,” he says. “My car, my house, the land.” He sells cattle to one of the biggest slaughterhouses in the area by registering the transactions in another rancher’s name. It’s a well-known practice. Laundered beef has been found in the supply chains of meatpackers JBS and Marfrig Global Foods, and the supermarket chain Carrefour. These companies say they vet direct suppliers extensively, and that such cases represent a very small portion of their beef purchases.
It would be easy to think of Pandolfi as a villain, a callous land-grabber who blithely destroyed a patch of precious rainforest. But he and his neighbors paint a picture in which policy, poverty, and the world’s insatiable demand for commodities all pushed them toward the choices they’ve made. The only way to get credit from lenders is to use cattle or land—even untitled land—as collateral. Global markets don’t buy enough sustainably produced foods such as Brazil nuts or acai to keep people afloat, whereas the appetite for beef, grains, and timber seems bottomless. (In 2020, Brazil exported $35.2 billion of soybeans, soybean meal, and soybean oil, and only $128.3 million of nuts.) Meanwhile, politicians, from local council members all the way up to the president, encourage the destruction. A cross-check of political databases and Ibama fines shows almost 1,000 elected officials and political appointees are on government blacklists for environmental crimes.
It’s poverty that truly drives the calls to develop the rainforest, from both the left and the right. Thirty percent of Brazilians live in poverty, including 13% who survive on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank. In the country’s north, where the rainforest is, poverty is especially dire: Clean water, sanitation, and electricity are luxuries. Almost one-third of the population is functionally illiterate, unable to meet day-to-day reading or writing needs. The Covid pandemic became just one more item on a long list of scourges that includes malaria, dengue, and Zika.
The commodities boom in the mid-2000s brought a wave of prosperity that few Brazilians had experienced. The crash a few years later dragged down everyone. Today, prices are again surging, and with them, schemes to grab even more land. Only now the schemes are more daring, more organized, and a lot more violent.
Carlos Rangel da Silva hikes into the Pacaás Novos National Park in central Rondônia, leaving behind the waist-high grass and searing tropical heat of a cattle pasture for the cool shade of the rainforest canopy. Suddenly he stops, pointing his machete at something ahead. The eight armed police officers and three park rangers in his entourage freeze, waiting for his cue. He motions to a lightly trampled patch of grass and, farther out, a faint track across the red dirt. “A motorcycle,” he says. “Could be someone going after timber or scouting the area.” The lead ranger breaks off to check it out, trailed by two police officers, their assault rifles ready.
It turns out to be nothing, but there’s a reason Rangel is on high alert. Informants had been warning that land-grabbers were massing for another assault on Pacaás Novos, a vast national park that’s home to a stunning half-moon-shaped canyon, towering cliffs, and plunging waterfalls. The preserve overlaps the territory of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, an elusive indigenous tribe that didn’t make contact with the outside world until the 1980s and still keeps its distance. On paper, being both a park and a reserve for indigenous people gives the preserve two layers of protection under Brazilian law. “But that doesn’t mean much, especially these days,” Rangel says.
At 72, Rangel may be the oldest park superintendent in Brazil. His team consists of nine firefighters who double as rangers, patrolling a park twice the size of Rhode Island. He’s been in the job for 20 years and fantasizes about retiring and writing the next big Brazilian bestseller. But the names his bosses in Brasilia put up to replace him, he says, are a joke; they want to bring in a bureaucrat. The work is physically demanding, requiring Rangel and his rangers to hack their way through the jungle and sleep in tents, among the poisonous snakes and the mosquitoes. “You need someone who will fight,” he says.
A few years back, Rangel discovered an especially well-organized push to claim 60,000 hectares of park. It was led by a local rancher named Stable Queiroz, his two brothers, and a 92-year-old grandmother named Victoria Pando de Souza, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court. Pando’s family had been granted permits to tap rubber in the park in 1917, and the crew argued that those documents gave them the right to buy and sell the land. According to the complaint, they tried to divide the park land into small plots to sell to anyone who wanted a farm. They hired a lawyer to create an association and sent people into the park to build a sales office. Hundreds of potential buyers—mainly impoverished farmworkers in the area—jumped at the offer. Queiroz dreamed of creating a new farming town to be named Rio Bonito, or Beautiful River; he would be its de facto mayor.
Federal officials monitoring satellite images in Brasilia tipped off Rangel. A skilled logger with a chainsaw can cut through more than two hectares a day, and Queiroz had a whole team. The destruction was spreading quickly. For months, Rangel plotted raids from his office in Campo Novo, a remote town of about 14,000 people where rangers and deforesters live side by side.
Rangel mustered a few police patrols, made up of junior officers who volunteered in order to make an extra 180 reais a day. Any time they ventured out, they were met with threats and intimidation. “From now on, it’s going to be fire and steel,” Queiroz warned in a voice message that was cited in court papers. “From now on, you will respect us, or you will suffer the consequences.” It took 12 hours to drive 20 kilometers over rutted and roadblocked trails to where the illegal loggers operated, and once they got there, it was all too easy for the gang to flee into the thick jungle. Once, after Rangel and his team managed to arrest someone, Queiroz and about 30 others ambushed them on the road back to Campo Novo. They carried Molotov cocktails and surrounded the police vehicles, threatening to set them on fire if they didn’t get their man back, according to sworn statements by Rangel. The standoff lasted an hour before Rangel and his lead ranger talked Queiroz down. But they did give up the prisoner.
The complaint against Queiroz and his associates was filed in October 2019. They denied any wrongdoing. They were let out of jail in the spring, before their trial, when the government emptied cells because of the pandemic. They’ve been ordered to stay far from the park. But if there’s one thing the past 20 years have taught Rangel, it’s that there’s always someone in the wings, waiting for the guards to look away.
Under the glaring sun, several watchmen with walkie-talkies take cover in two shacks. A rope dangling between the shacks forms a makeshift gate to the Jacundá National Forest, a 220,000-hectare preserve that’s become a flashpoint in the war for land. Past the rope, a dirt trail dips into a narrow valley, where a river meanders under a sturdy bridge built with slabs cut from giant logs. Children jump from the bridge into the water, while two women fish with a green plastic net. A half-dozen more wash clothes a few meters downstream. The trail climbs back up into a camp called Terra Prometida, or Promised Land, where 200 families have settled inside the protected jungle.
At the entrance to the camp, Fernanda Santana, 20 years old and 8 months pregnant, lounges in a white plastic chair inside a two-room hut with palm leaves covering the roof and walls. She has straight brown hair that passes her shoulders, acrylic nails, and a calm conviction. In the room next door, a mint-green dentist’s chair and equipment stand idle. Outside, men are constructing a clinic to house it all.
The camp sprouted up fast. In the five months since the land-seekers arrived, they’ve built a church with a loudspeaker and a couple of hundred huts, identical in design and arranged in an orderly grid. There’s an internet tower, a generator, a schoolroom, a vegetable garden, and showers for the women. (The men bathe in the river.) In a cantina, a half-dozen cooks prepare a lunch of rice, beans, beef, and vegetables in dented steel pots over wood fires; their work schedule is posted on a tree trunk supporting the roof. The pantry is packed with food bought in bulk. Asked how they pay for all this, Santana says everyone pitches in with whatever they have. When the meal is ready, one of the women steps outside and hollers. Dozens of residents hurry over carrying plastic bowls and plates.
Santana has known many of these people her whole life. She’s from a small village outside the park, now drained of its people. “Everyone came here,” she says. To the villagers, Jacundá and its vast, untouched jungle felt like an affront. For nights they’d camped out in the fields at the edge of the park, debating strategies while waiting for enough families to join them before going in and staking a claim. They figured the more people at the outset, the easier it would be to resist eviction. And they were right: A few months after they settled in, police rolled up and ordered everyone to leave. The residents assembled on the narrow road, crossed the log bridge, and met the officers head-on at the checkpoint. While the group chanted, “Land, land, land,” the outnumbered officers climbed back into their vehicles and drove off.
Brazil’s deforestation machine is complex, and it’s impossible to know exactly who’s directing its movements. A large part is certainly driven by the everyday Brazilian who longs for land, but that alone can’t explain the sheer scale of the destruction or the recent sophistication in the attacks. A few decades ago, when undesignated government land was bountiful, it was easy for a lone farmer to drive some stakes in the ground and claim it as his own. But those plots are gone; what’s left in Rondônia are protected parks and territories. Environmental-crime prosecutors now describe a fraud that turns poor Brazilians into foot soldiers for criminal gangs, logging companies, and industrial farming operations. It’s the stuff of novels, the type of book Carlos Rangel dreams of writing if only he could retire. “The people on the ground don’t have the financial wherewithal to pay for the kind of operations you see,” says former state prosecutor Aidee Maria Moser Torquato Luiz, who tried for two decades to stop the land grabs in Jaci-Paraná before finally giving up and moving away from the Amazon. “Someone is bankrolling them.”
At the core of the scams is the byzantine land-management system Incra left standing in the chaotic transition from dictatorship to democracy. “There’s a huge discrepancy between reality of fact and the reality in our documentation,” says Tatiana de Noronha Versiani Ribeiro, the lead federal prosecutor on the Queiroz case. “Criminal gangs figured out how to mine the documentation and exploit the confusion.” First, the gangs comb through public records, looking for loopholes such as Queiroz’s 100-year-old rubber-tapping permits. Then, with phony paperwork in hand, they recruit desperate families and convince them the land is up for grabs. They bus them out to remote reserves, promising to pay for supplies and food. The claims are always challenged in court, but they sit in legal limbo for years. By that time, the camps have grown into villages, and it gets more politically complicated to evict hundreds of families with children. All the while, the masterminds are raiding the forest of its hardwood. When they’re done, they move on to their next target. Many of the families can’t make it on their own and end up abandoning the land they fought so hard for, or selling it cheap to big farmers amassing soybean and ranching empires.
At Terra Prometida, Santana says the camp has no leaders. “These people just want what others have.” People arrive daily to join them, from all over. One of the guards, a man in his early 50s with wire-rimmed glasses, journeyed with his family from Venezuela, a country in complete collapse. The head cook at the cantina, a woman from Porto Velho named Elisangela (she didn’t want to give her last name), says she’d been waiting her whole life for this opportunity. “As soon as I heard about it, I left everything behind,” she says. Many learned about Terra Prometida from WhatsApp groups. A few made the trip after watching the camp’s YouTube channel.
They plan to carve up the jungle into 20-hectare plots for family farms and say they have every right to be there. As proof, Santana is eager to show off a crumpled steel marker, drilled into the earth in the backyard of one of the huts and stamped by Incra: Tract 4, Mark 7. It may have been part of a settlement once or a marker when the land was surveyed, but it likely lost any validity when the park was created. Across the camp, there are signs of cut logs and patches of scorched earth. Satellite images compiled by Global Forest Watch show hot spots of tree cover loss all around. Santana acknowledges the jungle is being stripped of its hardwoods but says the settlers aren’t the ones doing it. “There’s a big sawmill nearby,” she says. “They’re using us as an excuse.”
Nabhan Garcia, Bolsonaro’s land-policy czar at the Ministry of Agriculture, is a stout fast-talker with a bushy mustache and a penchant for khaki hunting vests. On a June day, he walks into a barbecue for ranchers at the Ji-Paraná fairgrounds in Rondônia, and the crowd gathered under a long ramada whoops and cheers. The dirt parking lot is brimming with four-wheel-drive Toyota Hiluxes and Ford Rangers and, next to it, a row of 10 forequarters of beef slowly roast over a bed of coal. In the crowd are politicians, mining executives, and ranchers who’ve expanded into solar power and construction. In one of the world’s most unequal societies, these are the guys who’ve made it big, who’ve built empires—who, as Nabhan Garcia tells them, “carry Brazil on your backs and sustain it with your sweat.” Some boast of properties in the tens of thousands of hectares, which is possible only if they were granted during the dictatorship or pieced together from failed smaller farms, or are untitled land grabs. These are the guys Bolsonaro wants to boost.
Under legislation the president introduced in 2019 that’s now making its way through Congress, industrial-scale farmers may for the first time be able to get in on the legal land laundering and win clean titles to public tracts that were originally intended for settlements or reserves. The proposal opens the door to more farmers sitting on properties between about 300 hectares and 2,500 hectares. All combined, that’s an extra 16 million hectares of Amazon land that could soon be titled, including properties that were deforested as recently as 2012. The most dangerous change, however, according to Raoni Rajão, a land-management and environmental policy expert at the Federal University in Minas Gerais, is that the government wants to make it a no-check process, meaning Incra officials will no longer be required to go out into the field and inspect the properties before issuing titles. They’ll rely only on satellite images. “It works for the land-grabbers to not have Incra doing its job,” Rajão says. “It becomes an incentive to keep stealing land.”
As special secretary of land affairs, Nabhan Garcia is leading the charge to rally support for the bill. With no previous political experience other than a failed congressional run in 2006, he’s managed to amass an almost cultlike following among his fellow ranchers and an impressive level of influence with the president. The two bonded during Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign over a shared love of guns and disdain for foreign governments they say are threatened by Brazil’s agricultural prowess. “Behind it all—all the lies about the Amazon—is a dirty war fueled by geopolitics and hypocrisy,” Nabhan Garcia says. “No other country in the world has the potential to boost production the way Brazil does, and that scares people.” Arguments such as this one are a common thread at the luncheon in Ji-Paraná. One rancher talks of a powerful milk and cheese industry in southern Brazil that doesn’t want competition from the north; another says American soybean farmers, unhappy that their Brazilian counterparts picked up the slack and undermined the U.S.’s trade war with China, are slandering the country. They say the situation in the Amazon isn’t portrayed fairly abroad, that the burns aren’t as bad as the media makes them out to be, that the best way to preserve the forest is to put private property owners with resources in charge of it. “When you have a title and you can say ‘this property is mine,’ that alone can put an end to illegal fires,” Rocha, Rondônia’s governor, says in an interview at the barbecue.
Among the sponsors of the event was the Association of Rural Landowners of Rondônia, whose president is Adelio Barofaldi, a beef tycoon who owns about 40,000 hectares across several farms. A few days earlier, on a trip to a 9,000-hectare property that was once federal public land, he explained how he acquired it eight years ago from smaller farmers who’d abandoned their holdings. Now he’s building a 3 million-real feedlot able to hold 15,000 head of cattle.
Central to the private-property argument is that owners will have the incentive to enforce Brazil’s forest code. The law requires property owners to preserve 80% of their land, while allowing for the rest to be deforested. In Barofaldi’s case, that’s more than 30,000 hectares of jungle he says he pays to maintain, employing guards to protect it from bands of invaders trying to tear it down. “I pay for security and the taxes on that land, which doesn’t earn me a cent of profit,” he says.
There had been an uptick in violent conflicts on private property, and a few days before the barbecue, the national guard had descended on Rondônia for a 90-day mission. Nabhan Garcia and his ranching backers draw distinctions when talking about who’s doing the land-grabbing. There’s a big difference, they say, between farmers and ranchers moving in on public land and leftist radicals targeting private property, whether titled or not. Nabhan Garcia was cited in a 2005 congressional investigation for alleged ties to militias that hunted down squatters on farms in his state, São Paulo. He denies the accusations and was never charged with a crime, but he vehemently defends the use of force when asked. “A person’s land is his life. It’s his family’s life,” he says. “If someone invades your property, you have the right to react and stop that invasion, even finish him off.”
About 167,000 claims for titles are awaiting an Incra decision. As many as 12% of them involve farms not currently allowed by law, making up 60% of the area being claimed. Almost 30% of the land shows no signs of use before 2018, meaning the law change isn’t about giving security to families who’ve been on the properties for decades, Rajão says. It’s about amnestying more recent and bigger invasions. Once Incra approves the title, the owner essentially buys it from the federal government. In a municipality in Para state, for example, a hectare from Incra costs as little as 46 reais. It’s worth more than 100 times that in the open market.
Barofaldi is requesting title to 470 acres of government land west of Porto Velho, an Incra database shows. Some 200 politicians in the Amazon have also filed paperwork for titles to public land, including a Rondônia state assembly member who voted for the Jaci-Parana bill. At least two of the outstanding claims are for properties inside national parks. One member of Brazil’s National Congress even listed an unregulated property in his electoral declaration.
The analysis of title claims is far from complete, mainly because data on properties is so hard to come by. Bolsonaro’s government has used the pandemic as cover to clamp down on access to public information related to land grabs, and Rondônia state has been among the most aggressive in locking away its documents.
What is sure is that the destruction is accelerating. In recent years, Bolsonaro put the Ministry of Agriculture in charge of the environmental regulator, cut firefighting and management budgets, reversed plans to protect large swaths of indigenous lands, and proposed opening up indigenous lands to mining. Roughly 10,500 square kilometers of rainforest were destroyed in the first six months of 2021, on course to eclipse 2020’s 11-year high. A study released in July by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research shows that parts of the Amazon where the burns are the worst have flipped into net carbon emitters, contributing to climate change rather than helping to limit it. Many of the land grabs go far beyond what even Bolsonaro’s administration has proposed pardoning. The thinking is that even though greenwashed titles for, say, a national park may not be in the pipeline now, it’s only a matter of time before they are. With no real consequence or enforcement, why not stake the claims now? “What’s astonishing is that these are self-confessed crimes,” Rajão says. “People go in and say, ‘I’m seizing this land,’ and they’re rewarded for it, because the lawmakers keep moving the line forward.”
Itamar Lopes Manoel walks a half-kilometer from the rutted dirt road along a rare patch of forest still standing in Jaci-Paraná. Manoel, who is 54, bought the 100-hectare terrain in 2005 for 1,200 reais from a man who had no right to own it in the first place. It was a deal sealed with a handshake and no documentation. He says he had no idea it was a state reserve when he arrived. But then again, no one ever told him to leave.
He’s cleared a small pasture, where his neighbor grazes cows for 25 reais a head per month, but his focus is on the forested part of his land. “This is where my dreams begin, right here,” Manoel says. There’s space for a grove of 3,000 cacao trees to earn him a good living, he figures, plus chickens, pigs, and milk cows for his family. He doesn’t want to do it in the typical way, by illegally clearing and burning it all (not least because he’d like to avoid getting fined by Ibama). But his dreams have been elusive. “They don’t give loans for cacao, only cattle,” he says. “And cattle can’t be produced in the jungle. Cacao, yes, but not cattle.”
Lawmakers pushing to develop the Amazon often say they’re trying to help people such as Manoel. But they’ve been saying that for decades, while inequality has grown worse. Without government programs to help people work the land sustainably, chances are Manoel will eventually clear-cut it all or abandon it. Already, in the eastern half of Jaci-Paraná, farms are being consolidated into industrial-size ranches. “Most small farmers end up selling to the big ones,” Manoel says. “We can’t survive. They can.”
Pro-choice protesters march outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin. (photo: Sergio Flores/Getty Images)
An average of 1,400 Texas women traveled each month between September and December 2021 for abortion services
Since the passing of the law, known as Senate Bill 8 (SB8) last year banning almost all abortions in the state, an average of 1,400 Texas women traveled each month between September and December 2021 and sought abortion services at 34 facilities in nearby states.
The average is approximately the same as the total number of Texans who traveled out of state each year to those clinics for all reasons between 2017 and 2019.
In August 2021, only 235 Texans went for abortions in the 34 facilities, the month before SB8 took effect.
The states that many Texas residents sought abortions from include Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Nearly three out of four Texans, or 45%, who traveled out of state during those months seeking the procedure obtained abortion care in Oklahoma, which just has four facilities that offer abortion services.
According to the research, the number of Texans seen each month at these clinics since the law took effect is more than double the monthly average of all abortion patients seen in Oklahoma in 2020.
Around one in four Texans seeking an abortion, or 27%, traveled to New Mexico to obtain such a service. The state has seven facilities. New Mexico does not require state-mandated counseling, waiting periods or parental consent for minors.
From October 2021 to February 2022, researchers interviewed 65 Texas women who sought abortion services across state lines.
The participants ranged from 18 to 42 years old. Nearly half, or 46%, identified as Hispanic/Latinx, 23% as Black, 21% as white, 6% as Asian and 2% as more than one race. Participants reported a median gestational duration at abortion of nine weeks. Texas bans abortion after about six weeks.
The participants described their frequent experiences with delays, often as a result of state law that include mandatory ultrasounds and counseling visits.
Some participants said they visited “pregnancy resource centers” – organizations that frequently offer ultrasounds free of charge but may seek to discourage pregnant people from seeking abortion.
Participants who had medical conditions that posed health risks for continuing their pregnancy said their healthcare providers were reluctant to offer information on out-of-state options for abortion services.
The law, which disproportionately affects communities of color, adds a burden in the need to travel, as not all may have the necessary resources to travel beyond state lines.
Due to long wait times at nearby abortion services in neighboring states, many participants said they were unable to get an appointment at those facilities and had to travel even farther to obtain abortion care.
From Fort Worth, Texas, for example, the nearest Oklahoma facility is nearly 200 miles, or over three hours’ drive away.
From Houston, the facility is 450 miles, or seven and a half hours away. To obtain an abortion in Oklahoma, people first must receive state-mandated counseling and then wait at least 72 hours, imposing a further cost and time burden that is beyond many would-be patients.
Additionally, unlike in New Mexico, minors are also required to notify a parent and obtain parental consent before receiving abortion care.
In June, the conservative-majority supreme court is expected to deliver a decision on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most significant abortion rights case since the landmark 1973 supreme court ruling in Roe v Wade, which effectively legalized abortion in the US.
The case pits Mississippi’s last abortion clinic against the state’s leadership, as the latter seeks to ban abortion after 15 weeks gestation and asks the highest court to overturn Roe.
“I’ve never felt more like the government doesn’t give a shit about me than I do right now, to be honest with you. I’ve never felt it so deep inside of me that I am so disposable, that I don’t matter, that I don’t get any bodily autonomy in such a horrible [life-threatening] situation … I just wish that I could have [had] done it here, at home,” said one Texas woman to the researchers of her experience in obtaining an out-of-state abortion.
“I really feel like this whole Texas law – I don’t agree with it. It’s not right, and it’s so hard. I can just imagine the women who don’t have the support system that I have, how hard it is for them to get an abortion if they’re able to … If I didn’t have my support system, it would have been so hard, if not impossible, to get this done,” another said.
Marta Montero stands outside her home in Mar del Plata, Argentina. (photo: Natalie Alcoba/Al Jazeera)
Lucia Perez’s 2016 killing sent shockwaves across Argentina. Her family is still pushing for justice.
Lucia’s life was snuffed out five and a half years ago in one of the most emblematic cases of femicide in Argentina — not just for the violence that was exacted on the 16-year-old, but for the way in which a court judged her.
“The first year is just terrible. The first birthday. The first Christmas,” said Montero, sitting at the kitchen table of the modest house where she lives with her family in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, about 400km (248 miles) from the capital Buenos Aires.
“That absence makes your skin hurt. Your soul hurts. You feel it in your body. Your body hurts. It is just terrible. I remember coming home from work on the bus, and seeing Lucia. And getting off the bus crying and thinking, ‘I must be going crazy.'”
It has been a devastating and maddening time for Lucia’s family and their allies since the teenage girl’s lifeless body was dropped off at a health clinic in her hometown in October 2016 by two men, Matias Farias, 23, and Juan Pablo Offidani, 41. They were accused of drugging, raping and killing her – and Farias also faced a charge of femicide – but acquitted by a trio of judges who found them only guilty of administering drugs to a minor. The judges also absolved a third man who is now deceased of helping them cover up the crime.
The ruling was quashed in 2020 by a higher court, and the family is still awaiting a new trial date to be set. They also are waiting for a hearing that could strip the original trial judges of their posts for relying on gender stereotypes and prejudices in their ruling. That would be a milestone in the battle waged by women’s rights activists to dismantle the patriarchal underpinnings of Argentine society, including in the judiciary.
“The movement of women has not only conquered the streets, but we are also conquering these spaces and we will use all tools that are available to us,” Maite Guerrero, a lawyer with the Equipo Latinoamericano de Justicia y Genero, told Al Jazeera. “This case could set an important precedent for us.”
Seminal case
In Argentina, one woman is killed roughly every 30 hours, a statistic that has not shifted much since a new wave of the feminist movement exploded onto the streets in 2015 under the banner Ni Una Menos — Not One Less.
Lucia’s death prompted the first women’s strike, which saw hundreds of thousands of people demonstrate in the streets in 2016 demanding more action from legislators. They were driven there at least in part by the horrific revelations by a prosecutor, who told the press in the days after the crime that the teenager had been impaled during the brutal attack, and that her body was cleaned.
Those allegations were deemed unfounded in court, and the three judges — Facundo Gomez Urso, Pablo Vinas and now retired Aldo Carnevale — sided with the defence, which had argued that Lucia had consented to sex with Farias, who sold her cannabis the day before, and that her death was likely the result of drug intoxication.
The judges said they believed text message conversations made it “clear Lucia had sexual relations with whom and when she wanted”; her “personality” and experience with older men meant she couldn’t have been subordinated in the encounter with Farias, they argued.
They also said they did not think that giving her drugs would have “enhanced a situation of vulnerability and prevented her from freely consenting to the action”. Though there was evidence of lesions and rough penetration on Lucia’s body, one of the judges maintained that there was “no physical or psychological violence, subordination, humiliation, much less objectification”.
“I am aware of the existence of so-called gender violence,” Carnevale said, but that did not mean that “under that label, we should frame an act that, once analysed, is diametrically opposed to that”. The court in 2018 sentenced Farias and Offidani to eight years in prison for drug possession with the purpose of selling to a minor and fined them 135,000 pesos (about $3,500 at the time).
‘What happened here?’
The decision sent shockwaves through the courtroom that rippled onto the street.
Human rights, legal, and feminist groups denounced the verdict, saying it judged the character of the victim, rather than the accused. The Organization of American States said the judges sent a “message of tolerance of violence towards women”, and that the use of gender stereotypes by the judiciary represented a “clear violation of the human rights of women” as defined by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
“Imagine what it was like when they gave that sentence,” said Montero. “My husband and I looked at each other and we thought: ‘What happened here, what did we miss?'”
The verdict sent a message, Montero said: “You are disposable. You are a thing. You don’t exist. So, I can f**k you until you’re dead. I can drug you until you’re dead. And I’ll do what I want with your life.”
It has also put Argentina’s legal system under the microscope, as women denounce the patriarchal views of the judiciary. In 2020, a court in the province of Buenos Aires quashed the acquittal. It criticised harshly the judges’ “inexplicable” focus on the conduct of the victim prior to her murder, their probe of her personal life, and the use of “intolerable prejudices, and suppositions based on gender stereotypes”.
In November 2021, the legal body that investigates the conduct of judges, the Magistrates Prosecution Jury, went one step further, announcing that a hearing into their conduct would take place. A date has not yet been set. It suspended them immediately and docked their pay 40 percent.
The family initiated the complaint into their conduct. It was also taken up by the attorney general of the province of Buenos Aires, a commission of the provincial legislature, and the provincial ombudsman’s office.
The judges have stood by their ruling and called the proceedings against them “political”. They maintain that the desire to “make an example” of this case was flawed from the start. The aspects that have to do with Lucia’s personality or relationships are there because they were presented in court, they said in a rebuttal documented by local media.
The College of Magistrates and Civil Servants in the Judiciary of the province of Buenos Aires and of Mar del Plata, which registers lawyers to practice, also rejected the hearing, saying that it threatens the independence of the judiciary and could generate a chill effect for future rulings. They said that the suspension of judges “can’t be based on the content of their decision”.
But Montero said their complaint is not over a dislike of the sentence, but that the decision itself was “so arbitrary”.
Search for answers
Now, Lucia’s family waits – and continues its painstaking work.
“After five and a half years, I’ve already kicked and screamed over the loss of my daughter. I have lived through all the horrible things that someone could live through. But I want things to change,” said Guillermo Perez, Lucia’s father, who with his wife has started an NGO that tracks femicides and advocates for the victims.
“Look at everything we have to do to bring this case forward. We have to pay lawyers, we have to raise money, we have to invest time, and we’re the ones who have lost a loved one,” he told Al Jazeera.
In February of this year, dozens of people rallied around the family as local bands performed at an event in Mar del Plata to mark Lucia’s birthday. One of Lucia’s favourite songs, Jugetes Perdidos (Lost Toys), played on the loudspeaker during intermissions.
“I am here because I am a woman and we don’t want any more femicides and we want justice for Lucia,” said Mariana Solina, a mother, who was part of a Candombe ensemble that performed. “It affected me deeply, honestly. It was terrible. We want to draw attention to everything that is happening. Because this happens all the time,” she said.
Perez said his daughter would have loved the event. Lucia had an entrepreneurial spirit and was always ready to help others. He recalled the concerts the two of them attended together, the way she would remind him to take his medicine, and the mates – the typical Argentine infused drink – they shared before he took her to school every morning.
“We have had incredible support, not just in Mar del Plata but across the country. And we never stopped fighting,” said Montero. “That’s very important. Not just that the family doesn’t stop fighting but that they believe in what they’re fighting for. It’s very important to believe in that daughter that you had.”
Lead can erode brain cells and attack the central nervous system. (photo: John Walker/The Fresno Bee)
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimated that about 170 million adults in the U.S. have been exposed to over 5 micrograms per deciliter, which is over the CDC’s blood lead reference level of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter.
Americans born before 1996 could be at risk of lead-related health problems in the future, including faster brain aging. Leaded gasoline, used to improve car engine maintenance, was introduced in 1923, and it wasn’t banned until 1996. It reached peak use in the 1960s and 1970s, and researchers warn that children during that time had alarmingly high levels of lead exposure.
“Lead is able to reach the bloodstream once it’s inhaled as dust, or ingested, or consumed in water,” said Aaron Reuben, co-author of the study and Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at Duke University. “In the bloodstream, it’s able to pass into the brain through the blood-brain barrier, which is quite good at keeping a lot of toxicants and pathogens out of the brain, but not all of them.”
Lead can erode brain cells and attack the central nervous system, the World Health Organization noted. Exposure is especially toxic to children, and the study authors found that the lead exposure in their analysis may have contributed to an estimated decline of 824 million IQ points, collectively, for an average of nearly 3 IQ points per person.
“I frankly was shocked,” Michael McFarland, study co-author and a professor of sociology at Florida State University, said. “And when I look at the numbers, I’m still shocked even though I’m prepared for it.”
Other heightened health risks for the population in the study include reduced brain size, cardiovascular disease, and mental illnesses.
“Millions of us are walking around with a history of lead exposure,” Reuben said. “It’s not like you got into a car accident and had a rotator cuff tear that heals and then you’re fine. It appears to be an insult carried in the body in different ways that we’re still trying to understand but that can have implications for life.”
McFarland’s next move is to study lead exposure and racial disparities, highlighting the differences in lead exposure and health problems for Black children compared to white children.
“We know lead exposure causes immense suffering in our communities, especially for children and people of color,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) told The Hill in response to the study findings. “But we haven’t done nearly enough to rid our communities of this poison. From Flint to Benton Harbor, Michigan knows the cost of inaction far too well. We need to remove lead from all sources and rid it from our communities immediately.”
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