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The number of reports that have emerged since the start of the war in late February suggests that rape in Ukraine at the hands of Russian soldiers may be widespread. Those fears were further crystallized earlier this month following the Russian withdrawal from Bucha, a suburb of the capital Kyiv, where some two dozen women and girls were "systematically raped" by Russian forces, according to Ukraine's ombudswoman for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova.
"What we've seen in Bucha is not the random act of a rogue unit," said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. "It's a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities. The reports are more than credible. The evidence is there for the world to see."
History has shown that rape in wartime has been used to horrifying effect. Such crimes can be used to humiliate, intimidate and punish. Victims are primarily women and girls, though men and boys can also suffer sexual violence. Rape has been used as a tactic of genocide — to shape the future of a country through forced impregnation. Gang rape has even been a grotesque way for disparate troops to bond. Rape in war zones can be opportunistic or systematic — and it nearly always goes unpunished.
What's happening in Ukraine
Two months into the war, much remains to be investigated and confirmed about the prevalence of sexual assaults in Ukraine. NPR has been unable to independently verify individual accounts. But in an interview with Morning Edition, Matilda Bogner, the head of a United Nations team documenting possible human rights abuses in Ukraine, says she has received "dozens" of allegations.
"It is difficult to fully confirm sexual violence because it's often the type of case where victims don't want to speak publicly, and they're often not in safe areas where it feels safe for them to speak out, or where they have received the services that they need," she said.
Organizations such as the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and La Strada Ukraine have begun to document sexual violence in Ukraine. So, too, have Ukrainian officials.
"The cases we documented amount to unspeakable, deliberate cruelty and violence against Ukrainian civilians," said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in a report earlier this month. "Rape, murder, and other violent acts against people in the Russian forces' custody should be investigated as war crimes."
Russia has denied allegations of rape and other atrocities by its soldiers in Ukraine. "It is a lie," Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said in response to one Ukrainian woman's account of Russian soldiers shooting her husband dead then raping her repeatedly.
But Dara Kay Cohen, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book Rape During Civil War, says she's watching what's happening in Ukraine with "a great deal of trepidation, worry and horror." From the accounts that are public, she has noticed some disturbing trends.
"One of them is reports of gang rape, which is actually very common in wartime," she tells NPR. "In fact, gang rape in particular is by far the most widely reported form of rape during periods of conflict. And that's in stark contrast to peacetime, where gang rape is relatively rare, even in places where we know rape to be quite common."
Another disturbing trend she has noticed is a lack of any attempt to hide such crimes. In some conflicts, she says, perpetrators will attempt to bury the evidence, perhaps by killing the victims or witnesses. While information remains limited, Cohen says this brazenness by Russian soldiers suggests to her that commanders are, at a minimum, "aware of what's happening."
"It doesn't suggest ... individual soldiers going off to engage in opportunistic sexual violence. It suggests something that is at the very least being tolerated by the command, if not ordered," she says.
One example she points to is the violence that took place in Bucha. Denisova, the Ukrainian ombudswoman for human rights, described the situation to the BBC: "About 25 girls and women aged 14 to 24 were systematically raped during the occupation in the basement of one house in Bucha. Nine of them are pregnant. Russian soldiers told them they would rape them to the point where they wouldn't want sexual contact with any man, to prevent them from having Ukrainian children."
Cohen says this account reminds her of some of the horrors that took place in Bosnia during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, when women were raped and impregnated.
The atrocities in Bucha are "genocide wrapped in gender-based sexual violence," wrote Sharon Block, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. "The soldiers could have killed the women and girls to prevent reproduction. But they chose to inflict sexual harm as a sign of their power."
Russian officials have claimed that the country's military operation in Ukraine is being distorted and that the atrocities in Ukraine have been "staged" by Ukrainian forces to be circulated by Western media.
Rape is not common in all conflicts
Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University and an international security fellow at the think tank New America, says it's important to understand that although rape is a war crime, it is not something that is present in all wars.
And danger can come from different directions. In one case noted by The Guardian, a Ukrainian teacher had been dragged into the school library by a Ukrainian soldier who tried to rape her. She reported him to the police and the man was arrested.
"It's not just a normal part of war. Not all soldiers rape," Bloom tells NPR. Bloom and Cohen are both a part of the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict project, which collects data on the subject.
She says because there is variation between conflicts — some have rampant sexual violence, while others have little — there isn't a consistent theory of when and why rape is used in war.
But scholars have identified different strategic aims. One goal can be to weaken or alter a society by forcibly impregnating women with children fathered by the enemy. She points to the Serbian "rape camps" in Bosnia, where women and girls say they were raped until they were pregnant — and then imprisoned to prevent them from getting abortions.
"That's not accidental," says Bloom. "You're allocating resources. And the way they were thinking is they would undermine the cohesion of the community because that next generation would be giving birth to babies that were half and half — that had the ethnicity of their father, despite the fact that there was no communication with the father."
Rape can also weaken social ties if the victim is then rejected by her own family or community, as has been the plight of many Nigerian girls and women kidnapped and impregnated by Boko Haram fighters. Even when the women escape and make it home, community members have told researchers the children had "bad blood" transmitted from their fathers.
But Bloom believes that an underlying feminism in Ukrainian society could serve to reduce the stigma that has often been the burden of survivors of sexual violence.
"Women have played such an important role in the resistance and in fighting the Russians that the likelihood of the women being ostracized and blamed is very low," Bloom says.
Militaries have used rape as a war weapon
In Ukraine, experts say there are indications that Russian soldiers are using rape in a number of ways — as a form of punishment, as well as with perhaps systematic, genocidal aims.
While the precise motivation remains unknown, Cohen says the reports coming out of Ukraine suggest something other than opportunistic violence.
"These are incredibly violent rapes where there are photos circulating of women's bodies that have been branded, women who have been raped multiple times, women who have been held as sexual slaves, women who have been raped until they're pregnant," Cohen says. "All of these things are beyond just an opportunism argument and are indications of rape being used as some kind of weapon."
It's a view that was shared this month by the British ambassador to Ukraine, Melinda Simmons.
"Rape is a weapon of war," Simmons said. "Though we don't yet know the full extent of its use in Ukraine, it's already clear it was part of Russia's arsenal. Women raped in front of their kids, girls in front of their families, as a deliberate act of subjugation."
Justice for survivors is rare
As the fighting continues, investigations into possible war crimes in Ukraine, including rape, have already begun.
In the first two weeks of April, the Ukrainian ombudsman received 400 reports of rape committed by Russian soldiers, the Kyiv Independent reported. And a U.N. mission has received 75 allegations of rape against Ukrainians.
But the track record of holding anyone accountable for rape during wartime isn't long.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted the mayor of Taba, Rwanda, in 2001. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander, was found guilty by the International Criminal Court in 2017 of genocide and war crimes, including the mass rape of women and girls. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader, faced similar charges but died in jail in 2006 before the end of his trial.
Russia is not a party to the ICC, nor is the United States. Ukraine isn't either, but it has recognized the court's authority, so the court could prosecute atrocity crimes committed in Ukraine.
The ICC's top prosecutor has said he will fast-track an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine. But Ukraine's foreign minister has said he has little confidence in organizations like the ICC to prosecute crimes like rape.
"When Russian soldiers rape women in Ukrainian cities — it's difficult, of course, to speak about the efficiency of international law," the minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said at a forum last month.
Cohen says that holding people to account for rape in wartime is rare. At the highest levels, it's usually difficult to prove that the rape was ordered by someone in command.
"It is very rare to ever have smoking gun evidence that rape was ordered from the top down," she says.
And for the rank-and-file soldiers accused of committing such atrocities, prosecutions can be exceedingly hard to come by.
"There is some degree of accountability, but it is rare," says Cohen. "But I think that that does not imply, however, that we shouldn't be doing our best to collect all of the documentation that we possibly can in order to potentially hold perpetrators accountable."
Speaking with The Atlantic earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said real victory will come only when the perpetrators are tried, convicted and sentenced. But justice likely won't come quickly, he conceded.
"How long do we have to wait? It's a long process, these courts, tribunals, international courts," he said.
Russian soldiers patrol at the Mariupol drama theatre, bombed last March 16, on April 12, 2022 in Mariupol, as Russian troops intensify a campaign to take the strategic port city, part of an anticipated massive onslaught across eastern Ukraine, while Russia's President makes a defiant case for the war on Russia's neighbor. (photo: Getty Images)
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From Mariupol Museums by Russian Forces: City Council
Boychenko didn't mince words Saturday in his claims. Boychenko posted to his Telegram channel.
"In two years, the Nazis killed 10,000 civilians in Mariupol. And the Russian occupiers in two months - more than 20 thousand Mariupol. More than 40,000 people were forcibly deported," Boychenko stated. "This is one of the worst genocides of civilians in modern history. The Russian army is purposefully and ruthlessly destroying our city and its inhabitants."
Boychenko used words like "racists" to describe the worst his city's residents have ever seen, saying the Russians "have already illegally deported as many Mariupol residents as Hitler's troops during the years of occupation."
"Racism is the fascism of the 21st century," Boychenko wrote. "No doubts or illusions. Mankind has paid a high price for the victory over fascism in the last century. If we do not unite today and do not stop this evil, the price this time may be much higher."
There has not been an accurate number of civilians killed in Mariupol since the war began in late February. The city's council first said that 10,000 had been killed, but are now saying at least 20,000 have been killed.
The city has been devastated, and most recently civilians have been bunkered at the Azovstal Steel Plant complex. There have reportedly been cease fires to allow human corridors for evacuation of residents, but there have also been conflicting reports of Russian troops thwarting evacuation attempts.
Mariupol is a strategic seaport along the Azov Sea, and also the scene where a drama theater sheltering children and women was bombed by Russian artillery. Outside the theater, on each end, were the words "Children" painted in Russian.
The deputy mayor of Mariupol, Sergei Orlov, said up to 1,200 people sought refuge in that theater. A bomb landed in the middle of the overcrowded shelter. Some women and children were able to escape, but the amount of deaths in the theater is unknown.
After the bombing, Boychenko called it a "genocide" of Ukrainians.
"The only word to describe what has happened today is genocide, genocide of our nation, our Ukrainian people," Boychenko said.
Illia Ponomarenko, a defense reporter for the Kyiv Independent, tweeted at the time: "It's a miracle—civilians that were hiding in a basement at the Drama Theater in Mariupol survived the air strike." Ponomarenko add, "they are getting evacuated from underneath the ruins."
After forced and voluntary evacuations, about 100,000 people still remained in Mariupol. Russia has occupied almost everything but the steel plant, which endures heavy fighting each day between Russian troops and Ukrainian defenders.
Republican officials continue to see immigration as a campaign issue, and in Arizona state legislators hope to use between fifty and seven hundred million dollars of public funds for additional barrier construction. (photo: John Kurc)
More than a year after the former President left office, Republican governors, federal regulations, and inaction in Congress are allowing construction to continue.
Halfway down a road leading to the border with Mexico, Traphagen stopped his truck. A burly man of fifty-four, with thick brown hair and a scruffy beard, he raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “I think that’s it,” he said. Traphagen was pointing to a winding dark line that, from a distance, looked like a stain on the earth: the border wall. “It’s like you come down here to see it and then you don’t want to see it,” he added. A biologist by training, Traphagen has spent the past four years mapping the four hundred and fifty-eight miles where the Trump Administration erected a wall from Texas to California—a barrier that he warns is having a disastrous impact on the environment. “Animals have been migrating through this route for tens of thousands of years,” he said. “If we cut off this population, we’re essentially altering the evolutionary history of North America.”
Driving behind Traphagen, in a gray S.U.V., was John Kurc, a photographer in his sixties who once travelled with rock stars. Kurc, who wears his hair in a low bun, spends his days tracking the wall’s environmental damage, from waterway pollution to disruptions of migration patterns. “I can see it snaking over the mountains off to the west,” he told Traphagen, via a handheld radio. The two men drove through an expanse of desert dotted with ocotillos and towering saguaro cacti. The Tinajas Altas, one of the area’s granite mountain ranges, appeared in the distance, dwarfing a thirty-foot-tall stretch of barrier that bisected the ridge. “Like we needed to have a wall when there’s already the best natural wall you could ever have,” Traphagen said.
Unlike in Texas, where the vast majority of properties bordering Mexico are privately owned, almost all border areas in Arizona belong to the federal government. This is where the Trump Administration, likely to avoid protracted court battles, focussed its wall construction. During Trump’s four years in office, half of the wall building took place in Arizona, and his Administration completed all but eighteen miles of what it planned in the state. Since most crossings take place in Texas, the wall in Arizona, Traphagen contends, is doing more damage to the environment than to smuggling networks. All told, in the name of building the border wall, the Trump Administration waived more than fifty environmental laws and regulations. “It’s every major environmental act that’s ever been passed,” Traphagen said.
On the day Joe Biden took office, he revoked the emergency declaration that Trump used to justify barrier construction, following through on a campaign promise not to build “another foot” of wall. But, more than a year later, construction continues. Republican governors are in the process of building new sections of barriers in their states with hundreds of millions of dollars in government and private funding. Federal regulations have delayed attempts by the Biden Administration to cancel numerous wall-construction contracts issued by Trump in his final weeks in office. And liberal Democrats, environmentalists, and landowners near the border say that the Biden Administration is not moving aggressively enough to reverse the damage caused by the wall. “They are riding the fence on this,” Traphagen said.
In Congress, divisions among Democrats have slowed Biden’s efforts to permanently end his predecessor’s project. After taking office, Biden tried to reallocate several billion dollars in funds that Congress had appropriated during the Trump-era to build additional wall. By law, the President is required to spend that money on a “barrier system” at the border, and Congress has not rescinded or repurposed the money. As a result, Customs and Border Protection is taking steps toward the construction of eighty-six miles of wall in the Rio Grande Valley using funds appropriated under Trump. Environmentalists in Texas have said that they hope Democrats in Congress will repurpose the money before the new wall is actually built. But a former senior White House official predicted that conservative Democrats in the Senate would likely oppose such a move. “You have enough moderates who are going to argue, ‘We need some border barrier,’ ” the official said. “An idea of something being better than nothing.”
The Biden Administration also decided to minimize the hazard caused by unfinished construction by filling gaps in the wall left by Trump in Arizona, Texas, and California. The former official said, “It ended up being a legal conclusion that some of the construction was going to have to be finished, or else it would create a legal risk.” The former official regretted that the Administration hasn’t appointed a political liaison to oversee initiatives related to the wall—an oversight that left many border residents unclear about the White House’s intentions. “There was a question about who owned it. That was a problem across immigration issues,” the official said. “And it speaks to a lack of political awareness about the border region. It’s a lack of political respect for border communities.”
Asked for comment, a White House official said, “On his first day in office, President Biden paused construction of a wall along the Southern border, and every day since we have been working to clean up the mess the prior Administration left behind, including by returning, where possible, the land it seized, returning the money it took from our military, and working closely with border communities, stakeholders, and Tribal communities to address urgent life, safety, and environmental issues.”
Republicans, meanwhile, are extending Trump’s barrier. Last summer, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who is running for reëlection this November, said that he would use state and private funding to resume border-wall construction. The Texas governor has obtained seventeen hundred unused wall panels from a federal agency that distributes surplus material. Following Trump’s playbook, he has declared a state of disaster on the border, and reallocated state funds for barrier construction which the legislature had originally designated for other uses. So far, Abbott has secured more than a billion dollars in state funds and fifty-four million dollars in private donations.
In Arizona, Governor Doug Ducey and state legislators hope to use somewhere between fifty and seven hundred million dollars of public funds for additional barrier construction there. Across the Southwest, Republican officials continue to see the potency of immigration as a campaign issue. “Fear,” Kurc said, “is very profitable in the United States.”
Kurc’s first visit to the area, in 2019, had little to do with the wall: he was there to photograph the Rolling Stones. Curious to see for himself the “invasion” that Trump kept talking about, he visited the border town of Douglas, Arizona. “I took a dirt road and drove right up to the wall,” he recalled. “There was no Border Patrol, no Mexican Army, no drug smugglers, no migrants coming over. I started videotaping, and I was, like, ‘Look, this is not what we’re being told.’ ” Kurc, who has adult children and was newly single, returned to his home, in Charleston, South Carolina, put a mattress in the trunk of his car, and drove back to the border with two cameras and no return date in mind. “I was so intrigued by the non-invasion that I came back the next month,” he said.
Soon afterward, Kurc and Traphagen met for the first time, at Guadalupe Canyon, some four hundred miles east of Cabeza Prieta. Traphagen had been working along the border for decades. A California native, he started his conservation career in southeastern Arizona, in the nineteen-nineties. He met his wife, Martha Gomez Sapiens, an ecologist, there, and the two had a son. When Trump’s border-wall construction reached Arizona, Traphagen began advising a coalition of local ranchers and scientists about its impact. Around that time, Kurc was in Guadalupe Canyon taking pictures of the landscape with a drone, when he heard an explosion. For the next several days, he watched workers and engineers drill holes in the rock, place explosives there, and set off three or four blasts a day.
On a visit to the canyon, Kurc recalled what the area looked like during that time. Hundreds of R.V.s. filled the site. Using backhoes and bulldozers, workers carved out roads leading to multiple wall-construction sites. “This was like a huge city,” he said. The new barrier blocked large portions of a critical habitat for various species in the southern Peloncillo Mountains—the only link between the Rockies and the Sierra Madre Occidental.
An estimated three hundred and fifty miles of barriers were completed in the final year of the Administration. Multimillion-dollar contracts were awarded up until the last days of Trump’s term. Many observers believed that Trump was trying to make it difficult for his successor to unravel his project. The new President would face hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts to contractors. “This was a mad rush,” Kurc recalled, referring to the pace of construction under Trump. “There were even crews working at night.” While Biden was being inaugurated, Kurc observed the last dynamite blast on the border.
Landowners, tribes, and environmentalists impacted by the construction argue that the Biden Administration’s response has not been forceful enough. Many among them would like to see entire sections of wall torn down, but the Administration has so far ruled out that idea. Others, like Traphagen, have asked that at least some gaps be left in place so that large animals can roam their natural habitat freely. Currently, only cottontail rabbits can make it through the barrier’s four-inch-wide bollards.
For years, Traphagen, using trail cameras, had captured images of javelinas, bobcats, mountain lions, Coues white-tailed deer, and Sonoran mule deer traversing the border. Since the construction of the wall, he’s lucky if he spots a skunk. “The southeastern corner of the state is where the jaguar and the black bear share the same trails,” Traphagen said. Scores of streams were also dammed, irreplaceable fossil groundwater was depleted, and the removal of vegetation created a risk of erosion. During last year’s rainy season, flash floods ripped several of the wall’s floodgates off their hinges near the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge. “It’ll choke off streams, watercourses, and springs,” Traphagen said, of the construction debris. “And the effects are going to be felt on both sides of the border.”
In the Mexican city of Agua Prieta, which sits across the border from Douglas, environmentalists told me that rivers that flowed south from Arizona into Mexico had been contaminated by rust from Trump’s wall. José Manuel Pérez Cantú, the conservation director of Cuenca los Ojos, a binational group that oversees dozens of miles of protected lands, said that three of Cuenca’s properties had been walled off by Trump’s barrier, including one across the border from Guadalupe Canyon. A rangy fifty-five-year-old, Pérez wore a creaseless white shirt with Wranglers and a straw sombrero. “We haven’t learned to read nature,” he said. “It’s been yelling at us for years.”
When we visited the San Bernardino River, which flows south from Arizona through one of Cuenca’s properties, the water had an orange tinge, and native fish were nowhere to be seen. During the rainy season, Pérez said, floodgates and sections of wall have been toppled by surging waters. Using Kurc’s footage, Pérez had brought a complaint to Mexican authorities, but officials told him that there was nothing to be done. The damage, they insisted, was only on the American side.
As a protective barrier, the wall had proved ineffective, Pérez said. U.S. Border Patrol agents have already recorded thousands of breaches by smugglers, who use basic hardware like grinders and acetylene torches. Crossings through Cuenca’s properties, Pérez added, have only increased. Roads created by wall contractors on the U.S. side now serve as routes for human and drug smugglers. “Whereas we previously saw one group a month,” Pérez said, “we now see people crossing every day through the roads carved by the workers.”
What is now referred to as el muro, the wall, was once known in the borderlands as la malla—the mesh—the scholar Norma Iglesias-Prieto wrote in a collection of essays. In 1849, in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, the two countries placed hundreds of markers, including obelisks of stone and marble, along the newly negotiated border. Nearly two centuries later, barbed-wire fences and walls, some of which were built with steel helicopter landing pads from the Vietnam War, have dwarfed the nineteenth-century markers.
For Reynaldo Anzaldua, a seventy-seven-year-old who lives in the Rio Grande Valley, that history is deeply personal. More than two hundred years ago, Anzaldua’s ancestors settled on the Texas side of the river, on a Spanish land grant of more than half a million acres. Anzaldua estimates that they came to own about a third of the Valley’s land. In the following century, thousands of acres were lost to taxes and land grabs. Along with other local residents, Anzaldua saw the border become a militarized zone. He also witnessed his family’s land be confiscated; by his count, they have lost about two hundred acres in recent decades, primarily to U.S. federal and state land seizures. “Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents—we’ve all had to fight the same battle,” he said.
One morning, Anzaldua picked up his cousin Jose Alfredo Cavazos from his home. The two men, both retired, spend hours on the dock of their property in Mission, Texas, which stretches for more than a mile along the Rio Grande. On their way to the river, they recounted the U.S. government’s efforts to seize their land dating back to the George W. Bush Administration, which passed a law in 2005 that allowed the Department of Homeland Security to waive dozens of laws to expedite construction. They got a brief reprieve under Barack Obama, who erected more than a hundred miles of fencing, but nowhere near their land.
After Trump took office, Anzaldua received a letter from U.S. Customs and Border Protection that read, “We hope that you and other landowners in the Rio Grande Valley will assist us in our strategic efforts to secure the Nation’s borders.” Hundreds of Texas families who owned property along the Rio Grande received the same notice. After the family refused to allow any workers to enter, they had to fight the Administration in court. Eventually, the Administration filed a lawsuit to seize part of the property under eminent domain.
At the same time, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House strategist, and three of his associates launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to build a private border wall on a neighboring property. Bannon, who was later accused of defrauding donors but was pardoned by Trump, constructed less than five miles of wall. Anzaldua could see the construction, shoddily done, from his dock. “It’s foolish,” he said. “The river will end up washing it away.”
Last April, a federal judge ruled that the government could seize a portion of the family’s land through eminent domain. But the Biden Administration decided that their properties were no longer needed by the federal government—a reversal that has benefited forty families to date. The announcement brought temporary comfort to the Cavazoses. But many families in the Valley fear Governor Abbott’s construction plans. Shortly after Biden took office, Abbott sent a letter to the President demanding that the federal government return to Texans any land “not used for building a border wall.” The former senior White House official expressed dismay about the continued violation of private property rights. “So many of our democratic values go out the window at the border,” the official said. “But even libertarian and conservative values go out the window, too.”
Some forty miles to the west, I met Nayra Alvarez, a teacher in her fifties who lives in the community of La Rosita. Together with her father and her grandfather, Alvarez owns about eight acres along the Rio Grande. In 2018, the Trump Administration tried to condemn and seize their land, but the family spent years in court battling the government. At one point, surveyors told Alvarez and her neighbors that, if they didn’t take the hundred dollars the government was offering in exchange for permission to enter and study the property, it would inevitably seize the land, anyway. She believes that the Administration targeted her county because it is one of the poorest in the state. “I think that when they picked Starr County to start building the wall, that informed it,” Alvarez said. “They didn’t realize there were a lot of educated people, and that they were willing to fight.”
In September, a federal judge dismissed the former Administration’s attempt to seize her property, but Alvarez doesn’t trust the Biden Administration, either. Recently, contractors began building a thirteen-mile concrete barrier topped with guard rails that the new Administration calls a levee. Alvarez, along with other local residents and conservationists, sees it as a ruse by Biden to keep the wall in place. “You can’t plan for tomorrow, because you don’t know what is going to happen,” Alvarez said. “It’s a waiting game.”
Forty miles to the northwest, business owners and construction workers in the ranching county of Zapata, Texas, told me that they welcomed renewed wall construction by Biden or Abbott. A construction manager, who asked not to be named, said that people in Zapata, a border community of more than five thousand, need the high-paying jobs that the construction creates. In 2019, the company that the manager worked for was awarded a six-hundred-million-dollar contract to build forty-two miles of barrier in the county. “That just doesn’t happen here,” he said. “It was an opportunity to make history.”
The wall’s construction proceeded far more slowly than expected. By the time Trump left office, “we got under two miles done,” the manager said. When Biden halted wall construction, workers blamed him for eliminating jobs. “They stopped us too soon,” the manager said.
At a taqueria along U.S. Highway 83, I met two of the workers the man had hired: a father and son who also lamented the end of construction. The father, fifty-nine years old, said that he was originally from Tamaulipas, Mexico, and had migrated north with his parents as a child. His son, who had just graduated from high school, wore braces, a silver cross pendant, and a pair of Oakleys on top of a cap. The minimum wage in the area, they explained, was a little more than seven dollars an hour; wall contractors paid more than twenty. “We were thrilled,” the father recalled. When his children were young, he had worked in the pipeline industry, in various roles. The work kept him away from his family for a week or more. When he was building the wall, he could return to his family every night, for the first time in years.
The father and son acknowledged that the wall was poorly managed by construction companies, at least one of which donated to Trump’s campaign. “They didn’t have the slightest clue,” the father said. He didn’t understand how the Biden Administration could simply rescind the contracts, when pretty much all the material was already on-site. “If they want to tear it down, have them call me,” he said.
Last winter, the father and son went back to working on the wall. Abbott had awarded a hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar contract to build eight miles of his wall. The father felt lucky, he said, and hoped to work on it for at least a year. He remembered Abbott visiting the construction site twice. “He signed some papers and left with a smile,” the father said. Last week, after the workers had completed only a mile-and-a-half-long stretch of Abbott’s wall, state officials announced that work on that part of the barrier was nearly finished.
The father, who is now unemployed, said that he had found dignity in the work—not in the project itself but in the life style that came with the pay. He relished seeing his wife, children, and grandchild each night. But there was something about the job that troubled him. This year, several migrants have fallen while trying to climb the wall, and lost their lives. In April, sheriff’s deputies near Douglas, Arizona, found a thirty-two-year-old woman from Sinaloa, Mexico, hanging upside down from the barrier. After apparently climbing up the barrier with a ladder, her foot and leg became ensnared in a gap between the steel bollards, leaving her “trapped upside down for a significant amount of time.” A local coroner said she died of traumatic asphyxia, a medical condition in which excessive blood accumulation in the head and neck causes a person to choke to death.
The father said that from a distance, while building the wall, he could see the town in Mexico where he was born. He still has relatives there. “On the other side of the river is Tamaulipas,” he said. “I often think to myself, Look what you’re doing to your own people.”
Vice President Kamala Harris (center) marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with civil rights activists to commemorate the 57th anniversary of 'Bloody Sunday' in Selma, Alabama on March 6, 2022. (photo: Yahoo! News)
Democrats and activists are increasingly disappointed with the lack of progress on passing sweeping voter protection legislation. And with high-stakes midterms elections looming, there's also growing concern about ballot access for voters of color — historically a key voting bloc for Democrats.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, , an Ohio Democrat and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said the Biden administration should "do whatever is necessary, whether that's an executive order, whether that is us figuring out a legislative approach that we can get through."
White House officials said they haven’t ruled out any avenues.
"Everything's on the table,’’ Cedric Richmond, senior advisor to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement told USA TODAY.
He added: “Where there's constitutional things we can do you can look for us to do them.”
Executive authority has limits
Biden signed an executive order last March marking the commemoration of “Bloody Sunday,’’ when peaceful voting rights activists were beaten by state troopers in 1965 as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
The order directs federal agencies to expand access to voter registration and election information. Among other things, it urges federal agencies to allow workers to volunteer as poll workers and sets up a steering group to look into ways to improve voter access for Native Americans.
Voters of color have long faced barriers to casting ballots, including poll taxes and intimidation. Advocates contend election laws adopted by GOP-controlled legislatures aim to suppress turnout.
Republicans have said the bills protect against voter fraud.
By mid January, lawmakers in at least 27 states had introduced, pre-filed or carried over 250 bills with restrictive provisions, including imposing stricter ID requirements, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
From early on, Biden backed Democratic measures to expand federal voting rights protections. He also urged Congress to pass the bills in his State of the Union address last month.
Vice President Harris, who has been tasked with leading the White House fight for voting rights, joined civil rights activists in Selma last month for the annual commemoration of the march.
Later that month, Harris unveiled recommendations to improve access for Native Americans and voters with disabilities. “We are fighting, all of us, together every day to safeguard and to strengthen the freedom to vote,’’ she said.
Cashier scanning products at a grocery store during the COVID-19 pandemic. (photo: Hispanolistic/Getty Images)
In 2020, corporate America made a big show of supporting frontline workers with pay increases. But as soon as nobody was looking, it went right back to paying less than a living wage — and funneling the massive gains to shareholders and executives.
We once hailed these workers as heroes for doing the hard, often drudgerous work that, it turned out, actually kept the world spinning while the rest of us sat at home — all while a deadly and debilitating virus floated through their workplaces. We promised that once it was all over, we wouldn’t just forget their sacrifice, and would make sure they were at least decently compensated.
That promise was squarely broken, we’re told by a new report from the Brookings Institution, which examines where the enormous profits accrued over the course of the pandemic actually went. According to the report, despite pledging even before the pandemic to pay their workers fairly, none of the twenty-two leading companies Brookings looked at pay their employees a living wage, they overwhelmingly funneled excess profits into stock buybacks and executive pay, and they let their workers bear the brunt of whatever financial difficulties they experienced.
These companies, from Amazon and Chipotle to McDonald’s and Target, were well-placed to live up to a 2019 Business Roundtable pledge they signed vowing fair pay and “important benefits” to the more than 7 million frontline workers they employ. Their profits rose 18 percent over the first seven quarters of the pandemic to a total of $213 billion, with the twelve best-performing companies seeing a jump of 45 percent after posting their best years on record. Meanwhile, a skyrocketing stock market saw a $1.5 trillion gain in the wealth of shareholders.
Yet little of this trickled down to the average worker. At least two-thirds of the firms don’t pay so much as half their workforce a living wage — the bare minimum needed to cover basic life costs, or around $17.70 per hour as of October 2021 — while only one, Costco, had a minimum wage ($17 an hour) that was anywhere close to it.
While most companies did offer higher wages through a temporary, pandemic-specific policy of bonuses and hazard pay, these gains were modest, and were ultimately slashed to between just 2-5 percent by October 2021 as a result of inflation — and likely almost entirely erased by further inflation in the months since then.
“When we calculated companies’ 2020 expenditures on Covid pay, we found that most companies had the resources to raise pay more than they did,” states the report.
While these companies’ workers saw their wages increase by a total of $27 billion over the pandemic, the twelve best performing companies alone spent $100 billion on dividends and stock buybacks over the same period. Overall, this period saw a five-to-one ratio of spending on the latter versus added pay for workers, with the report’s authors estimating that sixteen companies that bought $50 billion of their own shares could’ve raised their median worker pay by 40 percent instead.
With stock buybacks pushing these companies’ share prices up, the report concludes that the 6 million richest households saw a gain of $140,000 per family over the pandemic, compared to the extra $3,700 the average worker got. Just five companies saw a rise in real profits of 41 percent, while real wages went up by only 5 percent. And CEOs across all twenty-two firms benefited from an average pay of $22 million, compared to $25,000 for their median worker — a stunning 904-to-1 ratio that’s extra galling considering it was the workers who risked sickness and death to produce this wealth, while the CEOs lounged on yachts and spaceships far from any health risk.
Even so, these twenty-two companies were quick to let workers shoulder the burden when times got tough. “All of the companies in this analysis generated additional wealth for their shareholders during the twenty-two months we studied — even companies that experienced major financial losses and furloughed tens of thousands of workers,” states the report. Disney, for instance, decided to give an extra four thousand workers the axe just a day before its share price recovered to its pre-pandemic number. Best Buy’s share price was salvaged just a few months into the pandemic, at which point twenty-five thousand workers were furloughed.
The report’s findings constitute an enormous betrayal of the frontline workers who not just ensured these massive profits, overwhelmingly siphoned off by the richest, but who toiled at the behest of all those who had the luxury of working remotely while riding out the pandemic.
It also helps explain the continuing, simmering disgruntlement that has permeated public opinion under a Democratic government, with inflation having eroded the bulk of workers’ gains, and those at the top hoarding an ever larger share of the wealth for themselves. Unless something changes, this ongoing gross inequality will undercut any message about a recovered economy, just as it did once upon a time under a previous Democratic administration.
Sunday Song: Julian Lennon performs Imagine at the Global Citizen's social media rally, Stand Up For Ukraine. (photo: Julian Lennon)
Lyrics Julian Lennon, Imagine.
From the 1971 album, Imagine.
Written by, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world, you
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Illegal fires burn during the dry season on farmlands at the border of a rainforest reserve in Mato Grosso state in central Brazil in August 2020. (photo: AFPTV)
Then the cattle are moved in.
If the Amazon is to die, it will be beef that kills it.
And America will be an accomplice.
Cattle ranching, responsible for the great majority of deforestation in the Amazon, is pushing the forest to the edge of what scientists warn could be a vast and irreversible dieback that claims much of the biome. Despite agreement that change is necessary to avert disaster, despite attempts at reform, despite the resources of Brazil’s federal government and powerful beef companies, the destruction continues.
But the ongoing failure to protect the world’s largest rainforest from rapacious cattle ranching is no longer Brazil’s alone, a Washington Post investigation shows. It is now shared by the United States — and the American consumer.
In the two years since Washington lifted a moratorium that was imposed on raw Brazilian beef over food safety concerns, the United States has grown to become its second-biggest buyer. The country bought more than 320 million pounds of Brazilian beef last year — and is on pace to purchase nearly twice as much this year. The biggest supplier is the beef behemoth JBS, whose fleet of brands stock some of America’s major retail chains and businesses: Kroger, Goya Foods, Albertsons (the parent company of Safeway, Jewel-Osco and Vons).
JBS, the world’s largest beef producer, has repeatedly been accused by environmentalists of buying cattle raised on illegally deforested land. Greenpeace first alleged such ties in a 2009 report. In 2017, Brazil’s environmental law enforcement agency, Ibama, fined the company what was then more than $7.5 million, alleging that two of its Amazon meatpacking plants had purchased nearly 50,000 such animals. In October, federal prosecutors focusing on deforestation alleged widespread “irregularities” in the company’s direct supply chain from January 2018 to June 2019 in Pará state.
But in a forest where some beef producers still don’t track cattle origins, and in a country where no law specifically prohibits the purchase of cattle from illegally deforested land, JBS considers itself one of the good guys. It says it has prioritized the environment and blocked more than 14,000 cattle ranches that didn’t comply with company standards. It has signed agreements with environmentalists and federal prosecutors promising not to purchase cattle from ranches that were illegally deforested. It publishes the names of the ranches from which it purchases cattle.
None of it has been enough.
By reviewing thousands of shipment and purchase logs, and analyzing satellite imagery of Amazon cattle ranches, The Post found that JBS has yet to disentangle itself from ties to illegal deforestation. The destruction is hidden at the base of a long and multistep supply chain that directly connects illegally deforested ranches — and ranchers accused of environmental infractions — to factories authorized by the U.S. government to export beef to the United States.
Between January 2018 and October 2020, records show, JBS factories with that authorization made at least 1,673 cattle purchases from 114 ranchers who at the time owned at least one property cited for illegal deforestation. Several ranchers from whom JBS bought cattle were notorious — alleged by authorities to be among the Amazon’s most destructive actors. The supply chain, the examination found, was infected with dozens of ranches where land had been deforested illegally. Satellite imagery showed that several of the operations had cattle on land where grazing was prohibited at the time — in what environmental regulators called a violation of Brazilian law.
“Environmental control in the beef supply chain needs to be much more rigorous,” said Suely Araújo, who directed Ibama from 2016 to 2018. “Meatpackers need to stop complaining and actually control their supply networks. We’ve talked about cattle tracking for three decades but have never done it in a real way.”
President Biden has been outspoken about the need to conserve the Amazon, a vital carbon sink that scientists say must be preserved to avert catastrophic warming. But the U.S. agency that authorizes Brazil’s meatpacking plants to export to the United States says it doesn’t try to determine whether the operations cause environmental damage. Seven plants greenlighted by the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service are in the Amazon.
Brazil’s Environment Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The Agriculture Ministry blamed “historic land-use problems,” not the beef industry, for deforestation.
Senior officials at JBS say Brazil’s cattle supply chain is one of the world’s most complex, involving thousands of ranches spread over expansive territories, and is extremely difficult to monitor. Marcio Nappo, director of corporate sustainability at the beef giant, told The Post that the company has gone beyond what other companies have done to root out deforestation.
“JBS has been in the top five, top 10 companies in eliminating deforestation in its supply chain,” Nappo said. “…We can say with great confidence that we have already advanced enormously.”
The company has moved aggressively to stop purchases from operations that graze cattle on illegally deforested land, he said, using a “pioneering” monitoring system. He said the company plans to root out all deforestation in its supply chain by 2025 and has already succeeded in stopping purchases from ranches that have carried out illegal deforestation.
But the biggest problem in Brazil’s cattle industry today, and a key reason deforestation in the Amazon has reached a 15-year high, isn’t the direct supplier. That hasn’t been the case in years. The biggest problem is the indirect suppliers — ranchers who know how to work the system, shuffling cattle from ranch to ranch to conceal their illegal origins and sell them off.
The game is called “cattle laundering.” The forest is full of players, swaggering ranchers who built their businesses from the embers of the forest. Today, one Amazon cowboy, Zaercio Fagundes Gouveia, says cattlemen like him have a new focus:
“The United States.”
The life of an Amazonian steer typically amounts to climbing a ladder. At the bottom rung, where the system is least regulated and where most illegal deforestation occurs, are operations focused on breeding. Then the young animals are moved to properties that nurture them through adolescence. Next up are the fattening farms.
With each rung climbed, the system is more closely monitored and regulated, until the animal reaches the top of the ladder, the processing plant, where it is slaughtered and its meat butchered.
There was a time when nearly every stage of the process involved burning down forest, a cycle of fire and beef that transformed much of the Amazonian state of Mato Grosso — Portuguese for “thick forest” — into a checkerboard of cattle ranches. But a decade ago, leading beef producers signed a pair of agreements to clean up the industry.
One was a 2009 accord with Greenpeace that committed signatories to eliminating deforestation in their entire supply chains. The other was an agreement with federal prosecutors, in Brazil’s last real attempt to take on the powerful sector. Its most important signatory was JBS.
In the agreement, the producers promised to stop sourcing cattle from ranches that continued illegal deforestation. The effort would include stopping all cattle purchases from operations with environmental embargoes — citations that prohibit ranchers from grazing cattle on land that in most cases was illegally deforested.
But rather than cull deforestation from the industry, investigators say, the reforms pushed it further out of sight. Cattle are not tracked individually in Brazil, as they are in neighboring Argentina and in Europe. All that ranchers with embargoed land have to do is ship their cattle to properties with clean environmental records. Once the animals reach a ranch that doesn’t have a history of deforestation, they are effectively born again — cleansed and ready to be sold to producers such as JBS for slaughter and shipment.
“This is cattle laundering,” said Raoni Rajão, an environmental scientist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “The scheme has become institutionalized.”
The Post, in a collaboration with the Dutch environmental research organization Aidenvironment, analyzed thousands of cattle purchase and shipment logs that provide a glimpse into this world. The analysis, which focused on three U.S.-authorized JBS plants located in areas of large-scale deforestation in the Amazon, did not seek to capture all ties to deforestation. It was based on Ibama embargoes, which, according to a 2015 study, cover less than one-fifth of deforested areas.
The documents nonetheless expose loopholes and failings that investigators say bedevil the wider industry. They reveal what’s on the surface: JBS does direct business with ranchers who have extensive histories of deforestation; 3 percent of the plants’ cattle purchases between January 2018 and October 2020 were from ranchers who had been cited for deforestation by Ibama. They also reveal what’s beneath the surface, leading into the labyrinth of the indirect supply chain, where illegally deforested farms are hidden.
The documents draw a direct line. It begins at cattle ranches accused of illegal deforestation. It leads to ranches with no environmental infractions. It then travels to JBS slaughterhouses certified to export meat to the United States.
At the first step in the process, in the supply chains of two of the three JBS plants, The Post and Aidenvironment identified 71 ranches where Ibama had embargoed a section because of deforestation. (The Post was unable to obtain cattle shipment records for the third plant.)
The analysis found that those properties had shipped at least 7,912 head of cattle to clean ranches that directly supply JBS.
Finally, the examination revealed that those clean ranches made at least 263 sales of an unspecified number of cattle to JBS factories authorized to export to the United States.
Shuffling cattle from dirty ranches to clean ones isn’t against the law: It’s a workaround. What is against the law is using embargoed land to raise cattle — which Ibama inspectors say happens frequently. “The cattle produced there is commercialized normally,” said one Ibama agent in Mato Grosso, who like other government regulators spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely. “The state has lost its function. Society is acting however it wants, regardless of the law.”
At The Post’s request, the geospatial company Maxar Technologies produced satellite imagery of five indirect JBS suppliers with embargoed land. The images showed that three of the ranches had cattle on land that was embargoed at the time.
Luiz Alfredo Abreu, attorney for Nova ranch owner Ricardo Eugênio Palmeira, said state authorities had given the rancher permission to use those areas. “He can sell cattle even to the president of the United States,” Abreu said. “This embargo is nothing.”
Ibama and state officials called that assertion inaccurate. “The embargo remains valid — so much so that the farmer was recently fined for disobeying it,” Ibama said in a statement. Local authorization does not override Ibama embargoes, state and federal officials said.
Palmeira is also a direct supplier to JBS. But his deforestation record is paltry compared with those of some ranchers with whom JBS has done direct business, The Post found.
One was José de Castro Aguiar Filho, who has been assessed more than $11 million in environmental fines. He has been described by the Intercept Brasil as one of the “25 biggest destroyers of the Amazon.” (In audio messages to The Post, the rancher called authorities who fined him “not very correct” and said he barely sells cattle now.)
Another supplier, Mário Quirino da Silveira, was described by the federal government in 2008 as one of the Amazon’s biggest deforesters. (Repeated attempts to contact Quirino da Silveira were unsuccessful.) Another was Vitor Elisio Poltronieri, accused by environmental authorities in 2009 of being one of Mato Grosso’s biggest deforesters. (Poltronieri didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
Two more direct suppliers, Aldo Pedreschi and his son Aldo Pedreschi Filho, both named two of Mato Grosso’s biggest deforesters, have been cumulatively assessed more than $3.6 million in environmental fines. (Pedreschi died in 2020. Efforts to contact his son were not successful. A former family lawyer denied wrongdoing: “The family never committed any environmental crime!”)
Presented with The Post’s findings on its supply chain, including the names of the particularly notorious suppliers, JBS said it had severed ties with the men. The company acknowledged that its deforestation monitoring system targets ranches, not their owners, though many operate multiple properties — some sanctioned and some not — and can shuffle cattle between them.
Once the animals arrive at the JBS plants, the process leading to export to the United States can begin. Shipment records provided by Panjiva, the trade research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, show that JBS exports almost all of its U.S.-bound beef to its own American facilities.
But neither the U.S. government nor the American consumer knows where it goes from there. Once imported beef passes inspection, it can be stripped of all labels that identify it as foreign-sourced and be sold as if it were produced domestically. No federal agency tracks the domestic sale of imported beef. And retailers aren’t obligated to inform consumers of the raw beef’s country of origin. That labeling requirement was repealed with the passage of the 2016 omnibus spending bill.
To try to locate the beef, The Post asked 16 national grocery and restaurant chains whether they sell JBS beef from Brazil. Only Kroger and Albertsons said they did — but a very small amount. Goya Foods has imported nearly 2 million pounds of canned Brazilian beef since March 2020, trade records show. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Kroger said it has a “no-deforestation commitment” and has “engaged the JBS team to further review the situation.”
JBS, citing “commercial restrictions,” declined to divulge its list of U.S. buyers. It did not respond to questions about whether it informs American retailers of the meat’s country of origin.
The beef of the Amazonian steer has finally reached the top rung of the ladder: the American consumer. But many of those buyers will have little idea it is Brazilian.
How cattle, the most common of animals, became central to the decimation of the world’s most valuable forest is a story of intention, not coincidence. It begins in the mid-1960s, when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship. Worried that vast stretches of uncontrolled territory in the Amazon would invite foreign invasions, generals set out to conquer what had until then been unconquerable.
The mission: “Operation Amazon.” The rallying call: “A land without men for men without land.”
The tool of conquest: cattle.
The bovine was seen as a crucial ally in taming — and then claiming — the wildest of terrain. A relatively small number of the animals can range across large expanses of land. Their grazing keeps the jungle from regenerating. And their meat provides both sustenance and income.
“The idea was conquest, to conquer and integrate the interior into the rest of the country,” said Antoine Acker, a historian of the Amazon at the University of Zurich. “The cow was a powerful animal for that. It occupies a lot of land and is really cheap.”
With investment benefits, tax breaks and a new web of highways, Brazil persuaded local and foreign investors alike to bet on the seemingly paradoxical endeavor of cattle ranching in the rainforest. The goal of the dictatorship was to have at least 20 million head of cattle in the Amazon within a few decades. Brazil transitioned to democracy in 1985, but exceeded that benchmark for raising cattle by 1990 and has since more than quadrupled it.
People rich and poor rushed into the Amazon, burned chunks of forest, put down cattle and claimed the land by means both legal and illegal. In a vast region largely beyond government control, slave labor was pervasive, violent land disputes erupted and Indigenous communities were massacred. By the early 2000s, farmers were burning enough forest each year to cover New Jersey.
Lawmakers tried to curtail the destruction. Under the forest code, farmers and companies were limited to burning only 20 percent of their properties. Knocking down more — or razing public and Indigenous lands — would make the deforestation illegal. But what was said in faraway Brasília was one thing. What happened in the Amazon was another.
Ranchers continued to burn forest to widen their pastures. Land grabbers and squatters invaded and burned land to steal it. Environmental authorities struggled to patrol the vast territory: One of their primary law enforcement tools was the embargo. But the comparatively few citations that were issued had little effect. Few environmental fines are paid. Others are contested in the byzantine Brazilian appellate system in cases that drag on for years. The slaughterhouses had little incentive to stop buying cattle that came from illegally deforested land. And the ranchers had little incentive to stop selling it.
Incentive was exactly what federal prosecutor Daniel Azeredo hoped to provide. A native of southeastern Brazil — a wealthier, largely urban region where the Amazon feels as distant as a foreign country — he arrived in Pará state in 2007 and quickly realized conditions were unsustainable. Pressuring ranchers to stop burning forest wasn’t working. His office was inundated with cases against them — all dead ends. He needed to exert pressure another way.
He assembled a list of ranches with embargoes to determine which meatpackers bought their cattle. Then he followed which grocery stores bought that meat. Then he started suing. He threatened Brazil’s largest grocery stores, alleging that they hadn’t ensured their meat was free of ties to deforestation. The fallout was immediate: Several grocery stores started to boycott the slaughterhouses linked to the destruction.
“It was decisive,” said Beto Veríssimo, co-founder of the Amazon Institute of People and Environment. “It had impact.”
In 2009, the largest slaughterhouses signed an agreement with Azeredo’s office declaring that they would no longer source cattle from ranches that were being deforested illegally or had been cited with an embargo. The reforms contributed to one of the century’s great environmental success stories. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon plummeted.
But even then, Azeredo couldn’t shake the feeling that the gains wouldn’t last. There were gaps in the reforms. It wouldn’t be long before ranchers found them.
The São Judas Tadeu ranch sits at the cusp of the Amazon rainforest like a giant anchor, more than half the size of Manhattan. It has smoldered and burned for years. Thirty-six fires raged through the property in 2005 alone. An additional 13 in 2008. And seven more in 2013. In all, according to a fire analysis by University of Maryland geographer Louis Giglio, more than 100 fires have scorched the ranch since 2004.
Only one-fourth of the ranch still has remnants of native vegetation, property records show. Its history of fires suggests “forest clearing,” said Giglio, who studies global fire emissions. Embargoes have been issued for sections of the ranch, but satellite imagery produced by Maxar showed cattle on a swath where they were prohibited at the time.
The ranch is also an indirect supplier to a JBS plant authorized to export beef to the United States.
From January 2018 to January 2019, government cattle shipment records show, the São Judas Tadeu ranch transferred at least 3,173 head of cattle to the nearby, embargo-free São Sebastian ranch. In the months after the transfers, the clean ranch made at least 24 cattle sales to a JBS plant in northeastern Mato Grosso. The records show that both properties are owned by a single rancher.
Zaercio Fagundes Gouveia — short-cropped hair, gold bracelet, big aviators — is from the southeastern city of Ituiutaba. He arrived in Mato Grosso three decades ago, when his father joined the beef rush to become an Amazonian rancher. They knocked down a section of the forest — “permitted and cleanly legal at that time,” the son said — put down some cattle and built a ranch. Gouveia, then 19, never moved back home.
The region was forest and little else then — a blanket of green that would have been an environmentalist’s Eden. But to Gouveia, “it was awful, just terrible.” The closest telephone was more than 150 miles away on a dirt highway. There were few paved roads. Schools were out of the question. His daughter was home-schooled. To build what he has — an agribusiness with six ranches and 200 employees — and to help bring an economy to a region largely without one took sacrifice. More, he said, than most ranchers could handle.
And now: “It’s wonderful.”
Much of the forest is gone. The terrain is latticed with a network of roads and dotted with cattle ranches, churches, towns — all powered by beef. The region developed and prospered, he said, by the grace of settlers like him and a market poised to continue its growth.
Global beef consumption, a traditional marker of development, is projected to continue to rise over the next decade. The United States is the largest market: It is home to 4 percent of the world’s population but eats about 20 percent of its beef.
Gouveia said he’s here to provide it. There’s just one obstacle in his way.
“The environmentalists,” he said. “I have so many environmental problems. So many. It’s not easy.”
Authorities have cited Gouveia eight times since 2008 for environmental infractions. At the time of his sales to JBS, he stood accused of knocking down at least 5.4 square miles of forest and had been assessed nearly $3 million, a sum researchers say puts him among the most-fined ranchers in the Amazon.
Gouveia blames the infractions on fires started by others and on environmental regulators who were incompetent and inexperienced. He denies wrongdoing. One large embargo was recently dismissed, and he is appealing at least one fine. The accusations, he said, once wouldn’t have impacted his supply chain much. Ranchers could continue sending cattle directly to the meat plants. But with this “extremely serious and unjust environmental pressure on top of us,” he said, ranchers had to find a workaround.
“A different system,” he called it.
Gouveia continued to raise cattle at São Judas Tadeu — but not, he said, within prohibited areas, which had accounted for more than one-third of the ranch. From São Judas Tadeu, he said, he would ship the cattle to another of his operations to fatten them. Then they’d be sold off to slaughter.
When told The Post had obtained satellite imagery that showed cattle on land embargoed as of May 2021, he shrugged.
“Well, generally, I tell them not to put cows there,” Gouveia said.
JBS cut ties with Gouveia’s Amazonian ranches after it was informed of The Post’s findings — a decision Gouveia bitterly mourned. “You hurt me with this report,” he said. “I talked to you with an open heart.”
He still had reason to be optimistic. The agricultural industry, which managed to grow during the coronavirus pandemic, now accounts for 8 percent of Brazil’s gross domestic product. The lifting of the U.S. moratorium on raw Brazilian beef two years ago has opened up a massive new market. And President Jair Bolsonaro is in power.
“We’re now the most important industry in Brazil, aren’t we?” Gouveia said.
The problem is not without a solution. The maze of the cattle supply-chain system has a key. But Brazil has failed to seize it.
Every time cattle are moved in the country, a shipment log called a “Guide of Animal Transport” is created. The purpose of the document is sanitary: to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases and ensure proper cattle vaccinations. But those records, current and former government officials say, can be used to create a cattle-tracking tool and illuminate even the murkiest sections of the supply chain.
Researchers have done it. But not the federal government.
“Does Brazil have the capacity to do this? It does,” said Izabella Mônica Vieira Teixeira, Brazil’s environment minister from 2010 to 2016. “What it lacks is the political will.”
In late 2018, environmental regulators, supermarket chains and beef producers gathered in Brasília to develop a system that would incorporate the cattle shipment logs into a tracking tool. Then Bolsonaro, who’d spent the presidential campaign criticizing environmental regulations, was sworn in. Participants in the discussions say the effort soon fizzled.
“We had the money,” said a senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. “But people believed there was no way to continue. Things had changed politically.”
The government has since made tracking cattle more difficult. In mid-2019, months into Bolsonaro’s tenure, federal and some state governments sharply restricted access to the records. Documents that were once available to download on Agriculture Ministry websites — albeit painstakingly, one by one — are now even harder to obtain. Even meat producers complain, not without reason, that they’re criticized for not tracking cattle when the government has deprived them of the tools to do it.
“The federal government doesn’t make this data available to third parties,” Brazil’s Agriculture Ministry told The Post in a statement, because it includes confidential information. “It’s essential for the maintenance of the animal health system. Therefore, there is no reason for it to be released for demands that don’t involve the health of animals.”
In that restriction, environmentalists see the contours of what has become a political Rubik’s Cube. Bolsonaro, under international pressure to save the Amazon, has committed to ending illegal deforestation by 2030 and making Brazil carbon-neutral by 2050. But few think those goals can be reached without curbing rapacious cattle ranching. And even fewer think Bolsonaro, who sees those who practice it as a crucial base of support, will do it.
“Brazil is a green power,” Bolsonaro declared during November’s international climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. “We are part of the solution. Not the problem.”
Days later, the federal agency charged with monitoring deforestation released its annual report. Deforestation had reached a 15-year high. The Amazon’s losses for the year could nearly cover the state of Connecticut.
A few weeks after that, one more report was released, this one by the national association of Brazilian meat producers. The year 2021 was another banner one for beef. Brazil, which shipped out over 2 million tons, was once again dominant in the global export market: the reigning king of beef.
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