“The individual whom God has chosen for the government of His creatures and His servants is under obligation to defend His subjects against their eventual enemies, to repel the dangers that may threaten them, and to enforce coercive laws that prevent them from attacking each other. They are owed the protection of their goods; to provide for the safety of travelers, and to direct men to what is most advantageous to them.”
— Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), The Prolegomena.
Only environmental crimes—clandestine deforestation and illegal fires—have dominated national and international headlines about the Amazon.
Yet organized crime in the region has already drawn the attention of the United Nations.
The 2023 World Drug Report highlighted the expansion of drug-trafficking networks that use land grabbing, illegal mining, logging, and deforestation as instruments of territorial control.1
In 2019, Carlos Souza, then Secretary of Justice and Public Security of Amapá and a colonel in the Military Police, revealed that seven criminal factions—national, regional, and local—were operating in the state.2
Amapá has twice the national average rate of violent deaths. Seventy percent of its population depends on government income-transfer programs to survive. Nearly all economic activity is prohibited by environmental legislation, by the demarcation of conservation units and indigenous lands, and by other restrictions that render more than 90% of the state’s territory off-limits to productive use.
To compound the problem, a lawsuit involving a foreign-funded NGO, supported by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and Ibama, blocked even the opening of an experimental offshore oil exploration well.
Crime in the Amazon is rooted in structural causes that must be addressed for any lasting solution. These causes stem from the absence, fragility, and misdirection of the national State in the region, and from its gradual replacement by a parallel “government” of NGOs—often under the complacent, and at times complicit, gaze of official agencies.
The State lacks the capacity to monitor the vast areas under its jurisdiction, whether conservation units or indigenous lands. At the same time, it devotes a disproportionate share of its limited resources to pursuing rural producers and entrepreneurs who are hemmed in by regulations that stifle economic activity.
The lack of land-title regularization leaves rural properties in a legal limbo: possession may be legitimate, but it is not always formally recognized.
NGOs fiercely oppose regularization, as it would consolidate human settlement—an outcome contrary to the neo-Malthusian doctrine of “de-anthropization” they promote.
The creation of new conservation units and indigenous lands over areas already occupied by riverside communities and farmers generates severe social conflict, condemning families either to abandon their homes or to live under the stigma of illegal occupation of public land.
The blanket criminalization of economic activity drives segments of the youth toward organized crime, under the reasoning that if almost everything is “illegal” anyway, there is little difference between informal economic activity and outright criminality.
The result is the growing recruitment of young people into criminal groups operating in the region.
The failure of the “sanctuary” model,3 sustained by a command-and-control environmental policy,4 is evident in the Amazon’s own social indicators—the worst in Brazil—revealing the unacceptable paradox of the country’s greatest poverty coexisting with its richest subsoil.
Reducing violence, crime, and illegality in the Amazon will only be possible when the balance between preservation and development becomes the guiding principle of the State, and when the State itself acts as an inducer of infrastructure investment and private initiative across the development frontier made possible by the region’s immense natural resources.
- O Globo, 28/06/2023. ↩︎
- Diário do Amapá, 07/01/2019. ↩︎
- Sanctuaryism is the conception of the Amazon as a pristine natural sanctuary that must be protected from human presence. ↩︎
- Command-and-control, in environmental policy terminology, refers to the enforcement of standards primarily through fines, embargoes, and punitive measures against rural properties. ↩︎