The financing from Banco do Nordeste and Itaú — including subsidized rural credit — went to a São Paulo-based investor who has also secured favorable court rulings, deforestation permits, and approval from a land agency to evict traditional communities from land they have long occupied

“They would come in before dawn. By the time you noticed, the damage was already done. When we got there, they’d stop. We’d call the police, and when they [the officers] came, they’d still side with them [the tractor operators], who had the paperwork,” says Edvaldo Dutra, a resident of the Veredão settlement, recalling the episodes of forest destruction that tore through bacuri groves — a native Cerrado fruit — in rural Chapadinha, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão.

Before the first episodes of correntão — when an enormous steel chain linked between two bulldozers destroys all the fauna and flora in its path — residents of Veredão and the neighboring settlement, Vila dos Borges/Sangue, would camp temporarily in the higher areas to gather bacuri. The Cerrado fruit fills the bacuri groves from December to March.

Since 2022, however, men, women, and children drop everything at the first sound of tractors, at any time of year, and rush up to the chapada — the higher, flatter plateaus targeted for agribusiness cropland — to protect the bacuri groves. These flat areas are common across Matopiba, an administrative region created in 2015 in the Brazilian Cerrado, whose name is an acronym for the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia.

The São Paulo soybean grower behind the destruction is Gustavo Maretto de Barros. GMB Investimentos Holding, named after his initials, acquired land lying between the two settlements. In doing so, it interrupted an ongoing process to formally convert what may be vacant public land in Maranhão — land never officially designated by the Brazilian state — into settlement land now traditionally occupied by these families.

Barros is managing partner of at least 11 active companies, whose combined share capital totals R$58.8 million. Spread across the states of Tocantins, Pará, Goiás, and São Paulo, the businesses range from renting agricultural machinery and equipment, growing and trading coffee and cattle, to buying, selling, and developing real estate.

In Maranhão, the businessman has secured environmental permits, notarial registrations, and financing to carry out his plan: replacing thousands of hectares of native Cerrado forest with soybean plantations. More than that, he has obtained financing through subsidized funds and support lines ostensibly earmarked for sustainability.

“He came in and destroyed everything,” says Mr. Anastácio*, a bacuri gatherer from Vila dos Borges. “We cried. We were worried, because that was our food and our source of income.”

The reporting team contacted Gustavo Maretto de Barros, who responded in a statement that the extractivists’ claim of traditional use “does not hold up.” His justification is that the peasants lack the capacity to carry out economic activity on the land.

“Veredão and Sangue together have more than 5,500 hectares — and there’s still interest in more land?” Barros asks. The roughly 200 families from the two communities officially occupy a collectively held area of 5,856 hectares, which would work out to 29 hectares per family unit. The soybean grower, by himself, tied 5,363 hectares to rural credit operations with Itaú bank and the Banco do Nordeste do Brasil (BNB).

Subsidized Interest Rates to Deforest

Since the start of the land conflict with extractivists in Veredão and Vila dos Borges, Gustavo Barros has reportedly received R$44.3 million through public rural credit policy to grow soybeans in Chapadinha, according to data from Instituto DADOS, a technical-legal organization that works to strengthen socio-environmental and climate justice in Brazil.

In total, six loans were signed starting in April 2022 through Banco do Nordeste do Brasil (BNB), a public financial institution, and the private bank Itaú, with repayment terms extending to 2037.

The year of the first financing operation, 2022, coincides with the period when the extractivists reported the first disturbances in the territory. At the time, the BNB deposited R$11.6 million into the businessman’s account to purchase machinery, tractors, trailers, wagons, and cargo-handling equipment.

By the time the loan was granted, in December of that year, the area tied to the operation had already lost a thousand hectares of native vegetation, according to data cross-referenced by O Joio e O Trigo with rural credit information and data from the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform. Deforestation continued in the years that followed.

The source of funds for all of the BNB’s operations tied to Gustavo Barros’s land is the Northeast Constitutional Financing Fund (FNE), a resource managed within the rural credit system. Since January of this year, the Rural Credit Manual has prohibited financing in areas where native vegetation clearing is planned.

Banco do Nordeste do Brasil confirmed that it is financing three ongoing operations for Barros. According to the BNB, the active loans were reviewed and approved “in compliance with the rural credit rules in force at the time the contracts were signed, including requirements related to environmental compliance.” The public bank’s response makes no mention of two operations that matured in 2023 and 2024.

An additional R$5 million was taken out by Barros through Itaú bank, using funds from BNDES/Finame — the National Bank for Economic and Social Development’s equipment-financing line — tied to the ABC+ program (the Program for Adaptation to Climate Change and Low Carbon Emissions).

According to GFW data, the destruction of native vegetation in the area tied to the loans released 789,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent into the atmosphere. That is the equivalent of the annual emissions of 167,000 gasoline-powered cars, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Itaú stated that it “grants rural credit in compliance with the law and in accordance with internal governance criteria and socio-environmental risk management” and that it takes appropriate action when irregularities are found. The bank did not clarify, however, whether it would take any action against GMB in this specific case.

Barred from Entering

Gustavo Barros is pursuing two lawsuits against residents of the Veredão and Vila dos Borges/Sangue communities in Chapadinha’s 1st Civil Court, seeking to retain possession of properties he purchased from the former owner of part of the land. In court, the businessman requested that residents be prohibited from entering the areas he has registered as farms.

The cases were transferred to the Agrarian Court of the Maranhão State Court of Justice, in the state capital of São Luís, which has jurisdiction over disputes involving collectively held territories.

Barros has also filed for extrajudicial adverse possession at Chapadinha’s real estate registry office, seeking title to the Vereda and Monte Alegre farms — land traditionally occupied and claimed for years by the extractivists through the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra) and the Land Institute of Maranhão (Iterma). The two agencies are responsible for regularizing settlement land and vacant public land, respectively.

Rodolfo*, a Veredão resident, says that in 2022 GMB arrived in the region “buying this land. In doing that, they got all the paperwork done and had the area georeferenced. The settlement doesn’t have georeferencing, just the croqui — a rough survey drawn on a map. Incra never did it; we even demanded they do it before, but Incra said it didn’t have the funds.”

According to Incra, in response to a request under Brazil’s Access to Information Law, “there was disagreement over the property’s boundaries, which is why the regularization/finalization process for the project has not yet been completed.” Thirteen years have now passed since the settlement project was created.

Every December, Mr. Raimundo Francisco, a resident of Vila dos Borges, sets up camp with his children, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren right in the heart of the land conflict.

“I’m 65 years old. I’ve lived here for a long time, and then someone from São Paulo comes along and changes our lives here. He shows up saying the land is his — I don’t know how he got it,” Mr. Raimundo wonders, with his hands and clothes stained by the distinctive mark of bacuri peel.

For two months and 19 days, starting in December 2023, Mr. Raimundo and other extractivists from Vila dos Borges were barred from accessing a traditionally occupied area of 1,068 hectares that overlaps with the boundaries of the Monte Alegre farm, registered under Gustavo Barros’s name.

According to Diogo Cabral, the grassroots lawyer representing the community, the extractivists’ possession of the land is immemorial, collective, and traditional, which gives them “the strongest claim to possession of the area.”

“If Incra or Iterma had gone ahead with the land regularization back around 2009, perhaps there would be no conflict today,” Cabral states.

Incra responded that “all statements issued in this case followed strictly technical and administrative criteria, based on applicable legislation and the agency’s official land records.”

Regarding Veredão, the institute confirmed it has not finished the georeferencing, citing “budget availability” and “institutional priorities.” Regarding Vila dos Borges, it stated that responsibility for regularizing the “possible vacant state land” falls to Iterma.

Iterma, meanwhile, did not respond to our requests for comment.

Revolving Door

To launch his soybean business in Chapadinha, Gustavo Barros filed requests for legal deforestation permits with the Maranhão State Department of the Environment (Sema-MA). Based on data from the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), O Joio e O Trigo calculates that GMB obtained approval to clear at least 3,834 hectares in the area affecting the Veredão and Vila dos Borges communities. Barros’s representative, geographer Oquerlina Costa Silva, filed the company’s environmental licensing requests for the conflict areas in 2021.

In April 2022, Costa Silva stepped down as a partner in the environmental consulting firm hired by Barros and took over as deputy secretary of Sema-MA. One month into her public-sector post, she signed documents authorizing GMB to begin deforestation in the area. She signed another permit, authorizing the use of fire, in the company’s favor in 2023.

For the extrajudicial adverse possession filings at the registry office, Barros also needed the signatures of the confrontantes — the neighboring property owners — of the Vereda and Monte Alegre farms. Since the neighboring properties are agrarian reform settlements, it falls to Incra’s sitting regional superintendent to agree or disagree with the boundaries claimed by whoever is filing for adverse possession.

Levi Pinho Alves, a career Incra civil servant, took over as acting superintendent in January 2022. Two months later, he was signing a series of documents that favored the interests of Gustavo Maretto de Barros, the owner of GMB.

Pinho Alves signed notarial declarations stating that “there is no dispute or disagreement,” that “Incra has no interest in this area,” and that Incra “has no objection to this transaction,” referring to the Vereda farm and contributing to the extrajudicial adverse possession proceeding filed by Gustavo Barros.

The communities, meanwhile, say Incra acted unilaterally, favoring the soybean grower without consulting them. In Vila dos Borges, there are requests made in 2015 and 2018 by Incra itself to Iterma, asking that alleged vacant state lands be converted into settlement areas.

Luis Antonio Pedrosa, legal advisor to the Maranhão Agroecology Network (RAMA), who follows cases like this one, says Incra’s lack of interest in the land constitutes an irregularity.

“Technically, that’s not possible. If it was leftover land, or vacant public land, Incra and Iterma would have had an immediate interest in it, given the presence of these communities,” Pedrosa states. “It wasn’t a land vacuum that the company could just claim for itself.”

Oquerlina Costa e Silva told the reporting team that her professional work in the private sector bears no relation to the duties she carried out in public office. Levi Pinho Alves, for his part, responded that his statements “should not be confused with acts of land regularization, expropriation,” or other land-regularization procedures, and that they merely reflect the status of the cases at the time of signing. Full responses can be read here. Sema-MA did not respond to the reporting team’s request for information.

*Names have been changed to protect the interviewees’ identities.