After decades of violent displacement and land theft, the country’s quilombola communities are fighting back
For most of his 39 years, Josias Dias dos Santos, known as Jota, has endured degrading cycles of displacement as a quilombola, a descendant of Black people once enslaved on Brazil’s sugar cane and coffee plantations. He says his and other quilombola families subsisting in the rainforests in Pará, northern Brazil, were first forced out of their settlements by violent loggers, then by ranchers and miners.
Yet, they say the worst came with the arrival of the palm oil industry in what is now the country’s most deforested state. Palm oil companies producing biofuels and supplying global customers, subsidised by the federal government, have laid claim to ever larger tracts of traditional quilombola territory over the past two decades.