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March 10, 2025
Exclusive: Banks and Public Money Are Financing the Amazon's Collapse
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An investigation looks into the Amacro region in the Amazon.
From January 2018 to August 2024, nearly $1.9 billion was lent to 24,000 rural areas in the region known as Amacro, an agricultural frontier opened under Bolsonaro. Some of this money ended up in the hands of people involved in deforestation and suspected funders of the attempted coup in Brasilia
Since March 2024, SUMAÚMA has been conducting a deep investigation in the region of the Brazilian Amazon known as Amacro, where it has discovered a cycle of depredation: political and economic forces are accelerating the death of the planet’s largest tropical rainforest, with public money. In this groundbreaking report, we analyze political agendas, government and academic documents, deforestation figures, and data on Central Bank financing and fines levied for environmental violations. We traveled more than 2,000 kilometers by road, following the money that flows from rural credit in the form of low-interest loans, which are one of the driving forces behind the obliteration of a rainforest that is essential for climate stability. With access to data on 65,315 loans, we cross-referenced information to sketch a profile of beneficiaries, financial institutions, and, above all, the destination of money now underwriting interests that are killing the Amazon and jeopardizing the future for coming generations. The conclusions are alarming.
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A routine scene on a farm located near kilometer 120 of federal highway BR-319, which links Manaus to Porto Velho, shows tractors and crop sprayers sharing space with bags of fertilizers in a 60-meter-long shed. On this particular Sunday, more of this machinery can be glimpsed through two open doors. Owned in part by Juares Monteiro, Fazenda Arco-Íris—Rainbow Farm—saw a portion of its area embargoed by Brazil’s environmental watchdog IBAMA in October 2019 because of a “flora violation”: he clear cut 217 hectares of forest without the authorization of Brazil’s environmental agencies. An IBAMA embargo is an administrative measure that blocks economic activities on a given piece of land to prevent further progression of detected environmental damage. Juares Monteiro was fined a little over $250,000, a sum that remains open on IBAMA’s books five years later.
Nonetheless, on six occasions—three each in 2020 and 2021—Juares received around $190,000 in low-interest loans from public banks, with rates ranging from 5.75% to 7.5% per year. For the ordinary citizen in Brazil, interest rates average 8% per month. On the gate to Juares’s land, which had been cleared irregularly, a sign announced: “Banco da Amazônia finances Fazenda Arco-Íris.” A few meters before that, a refrigerated trunk, used to transport Cattle carcasses, proudly displayed the Brazilian flag.
Juares’s land lies in the region of Amacro, a new frontline of destruction where killing proceeds in the same old way. The name Amacro—an acronym standing for Amazonas, Acre, and Rondônia—refers to a project local ruralists began drafting in 2015 and that former president Jair Bolsonaro ended up embracing as a political banner. Under the right-wing extremist’s administration, Amacro gained strength as a new agricultural frontier and political and economic project for the Amazon. The region encompasses 32 municipalities and an area of 454,220 square kilometers—bigger than Paraguay. The project was announced in early 2021 and officially inaugurated in December of that year, although the devastation had begun years earlier, driven by the buzz about the plan’s eventual implementation. While the systems used by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research—like other methods for measuring deforestation—do not distinguish between the legal and illegal felling of trees, data show that in just three years, from 2020 to 2022, a forest area nearly seven times the size of London was cut down in the Amacro region. A total of 1,026,830 hectares of trees were razed, with devastation peaking in Bolsonaro’s final year in power.
Some of those who received funds through loans for work done in embargoed areas during this period had direct access to the presidency, as well as to governors, senators, mayors, and state and federal deputies. These individuals are aligned with the interests of the far-right former president, and some are suspected of financing the 2023 coup attacks. They include people who have been issued infraction notices for engaging in labor practices “analogous to slavery” or accused by civil society organizations of threatening members of the region’s traditional populations. Other companies have received subsidized funds and been the subject of parliamentary inquiries into the alleged theft of public lands.
Along highway BR-319, the forest has given way to soybean fields, or land intended for soybeans, and to pastureland where cattle share space with a scattering of Brazil nut trees, a species whose felling is prohibited in Brazil and which, without its ecosystem, is condemned to a slow death amid the stench of pesticides and manure. This is a landscape reshaped by subsidized bank loans—and indirectly reshaped by Brazilian taxpayers through their taxes, bank deposits, savings accounts, and financial investments directed to agribusiness.
Looking at the Amacro region from January 2018 to August 2024, the data show that rural credit was granted to around 24,000 CARs, that is, land mandatorily registered with Brazil’s rural property records system. Together, these loans amounted to nearly $1.9 billion. Most of the loans went to land in Rondônia that encroaches on the edges of nine Indigenous territories, as well as undesignated public forests (forestland protected by law but without belonging to a specific tenure category), settlement projects, and conservation units.
Banco do Brasil and Banco da Amazônia, both state-owned, were the top providers of this type of loan in the period analyzed, followed by several cooperatives. Brazil’s Central Bank has been making loan records available since 2013, but it was only in 2018, as determined under the new Brazilian Forest Code and the Rural Credit Manual, that it became compulsory to link credit to CAR property registrations. In other words, only since 2018 has it been possible to track the exact piece of land tied to a loan, which is why the period of our analysis begins in 2018.
Rural credit is a type of loan to agribusiness for operations in the field, ranging from planting to marketing. The funds are largely public, but they also come from ordinary people who entrust their savings to banks. Rural credit further includes subsidies, where the federal government makes a loan more affordable by bearing part of the costs, for example, through reduced interest rates. Here is how it works: under Brazil’s agricultural stimulus program known as Plano Safra, a bank offers rural credit to an individual or company at below-market interest rates and, to keep the bank from taking a loss on these reduced rates, the government covers the difference. In short, this is a public policy benefit. In 2023 and 2024 alone, the stimulus program provided Brazilian agribusiness with over $85 billion in credit.
To apply for rural credit, banks require the landowner to present his CAR registration, certificate of title registration, size classification (whether they are a small, medium, or large producer), and proof that they are not on the blacklist for labor practices analogous to slavery. Lastly, the landowner must prove they are free of any active embargoes for illegal deforestation.
An analysis of data from the last six and a half years, however, reveals that areas embargoed earlier by the environmental agency IBAMA received $1 million in loans, in violation of the rules defined by Brazil’s National Monetary Council and Central Bank. In short, a total of $1 million was placed in the hands of people who had cut down the forest.
Graphic: Money that went to embargoed landowners
Juares, part-owner of Fazenda Arco-Íris, held title to embargoed lands that received the largest number of irregular loans, exceeding $190,000. In August 2018, speaking at a press conference in Porto Velho, capital of Rondônia, while still on the presidential campaign trail, Bolsonaro said: “Here in Rondônia there are 53 conservation units and 25 Indigenous territories. What’s done in Brazil in the name of the environment is absurd. This has restricted the progress of people who want to invest in agribusiness and even family farming. Let’s find a turning point in this.” They did. Rondônia became the capital of Amacro and grabbed 72% of the loans for the region, in value, most of them subsidized.
The website of the Arco Íris Group, of which Juares is managing partner, states the company was founded on October 18, 2018. The group owns four farms in Porto Velho, with roughly 700 hectares dedicated to soybeans and corn; it also has a herd of 500 Nelore cattle.
What the website doesn’t say is that Juares Monteiro had 217 hectares of land embargoed on October 13, 2019. He was also fined more than $250,000 under the embargo. Even so, he managed to obtain financing from Banco da Amazônia and Banco do Brasil in 2020 and 2021 for cattle investments in the Amazon. Satellite images taken of Juares’s land suggest, that in recent years, deforestation has advanced into other areas embargoed by IBAMA. Satellite images from the Earth Genome team identified hundreds of head of cattle in Juares’s embargoed areas in September 2021.
Click here to see activity in Juares Monteiro’s embargoed areas when the embargo took place in October 2019 and again in October 2024.
On the banks of the Madeira River, 125 kilometers from the land of which Juares is part-owner, boats and ferries are docked at Cargill’s Cargo Transshipment Station. Built in Porto Velho, Roraima, by the multinational, the port helps stimulate the soy monoculture in the region. Cargill is now building another cargo terminal, to the tune of $55.66 million. On the horizon, large silos emblazoned with the name of the André Maggi Group, a Brazilian soybean leader, form a sharp contrast with a few resilient trees. In 2022 and 2023, 20.8 million metric tons of cargo were shipped along the Madeira River, half of it soy. From January through November 2024, the total was 9 million metric tons, with soybeans, corn, fuel, and fertilizers accounting for nearly all of it. Brazil’s National Waterway Transportation Agency predicts the amount of cargo will reach 28 million metric tons by 2044.
In addition to barring loans linked to land that has been embargoed because of illegal deforestation, the Rural Credit Manual prohibits banks from passing money on to areas that overlap with Indigenous territories, conservation units, Quilombola territories, settlement projects, or undesignated public forests. Not only did Juares Monteiro receive credit for land that had been embargoed; he also holds title to land that, according to satellite images, may overlap with Gleba Rio Preto, an undesignated public forest. By definition, such forestlands belong to the federal government, states, or municipalities, meaning no private individual or business entity may own or hold private title to them. Yet Juares Monteiro has records from Brazil’s land reform agency INCRA that certify his land, and he has an active registration with the National Rural Environmental Registration System. He denies any irregularities.
Data analysis also leads to the conclusion that rural credit has financed areas where 2,364 cases of environmental embargoes have been registered, albeit not all of them for illegal deforestation, which is the only case in which the Rural Credit Manual proscribes subsequent financing. There are areas where the loans may be considered irregular, as in the case of Juares. Other areas received funds prior to an embargo, but the loans remain active, which is also irregular. Still others were charged with environmental violations for deforestation after the loan was fully paid off, which in no way represents an irregularity but may suggest that public funds were also used to expand the irregular destruction of the forest.
Credit granted prior to IBAMA embargoes runs to over $14 million. This is money that was lent to landowners who then went on to commit environmental violations yet continued to enjoy the benefits of rural credit. But the Rural Credit Manual states the credit agreement “must stipulate that if non-compliance with any environmental regulations on the rural property is verified during the financing term, the operation may be disqualified”—which wasn’t the case with these landowners. Financial institutions disqualified only seven loans in Amacro, corresponding to 0.54% of the value of the loans, or a total of $77,300.
When serving as vice president in Bolsonaro’s far-right government and chair of the National Council of the Legal Amazon, General Hamilton Mourão announced the creation of Amacro at the 2021 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He took the opportunity to defend private sector investments in the preservation and development of the bioeconomy in the Amazon region. The reality, however, is demonstrably quite different.
In Amacro, private bank investments are still modest compared to investments by the public banks that offer rural credit. At present, De Lage Landen Brasil—part of the Rabobank group, one of the world’s largest credit cooperatives, based in the Netherlands—has supplied the largest volume of credit, approximately $2.5 million. According to a report compiled at the request of Greenpeace, Rabobank is reaping profits while contributing to deforestation and environmental degradation. An investigation by the newspaper FD and Repórter Brasil identified 365 rural producers in Brazil who had been issued infraction notices by Brazil’s environmental agency and yet had obtained bank credit, despite the environmental violations.
Other international banks that provide credit in Amacro are John Deere Bank, a financial institution linked to John Deere, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of agricultural, construction, and forestry equipment, along with Santander. Among private Brazilian lending banks are Itaú Unibanco and Bradesco.
The king of soy and credit
At the top of the list of people who received the most rural credit designated for Amacro is the Soy King. Everyone in Rio Branco, Acre, has a story to tell about Jorge José de Moura, the man who holds that unofficial title and also owes $60,000 in fines for environmental violations. He received approximately $28.5 million in subsidized credit between January 2018 and August 2024, 47% more than the next highest. At least 90% of this money was from the Constitutional Financing Fund for the North, a federal fund—that is, public money—and part of Amacro’s development policy; the fund is managed by Banco da Amazônia. Between 2019 and 2022, during the administration of right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro, Moura received approximately $15.5 million.
The second largest source of credit for the Soy King, after the Constitutional Financing Fund for the North, was rural savings accounts, which are much like general savings accounts but only for rural producers. In this type of savings account, the financial institution must apply 65% of the money deposited (essentially a loan from the depositor to the bank) towards rural credit. The Soy King’s final source of funds is the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). The money is mainly distributed by Banco da Amazônia and Banco do Brasil but also by cooperatives like Sicredi, which alone provided approximately $887,000 in financing for two of Jorge Moura’s properties.
The Soy King’s farming complex takes up 12,059 hectares, an area greater than the city of Paris, France. The complex is 93 kilometers from Rio Branco, the capital of Acre state, between the cities of Plácido de Castro and Capixaba.
The loans borrowed by the Soy King—who is also the King of Credit—are legal but they might be an indication that finance policy falls short in protecting the environment. On April 29, 2020, Moura received loans totaling approximately $91,000. Four years later, the property associated with the loan was embargoed. The embargo’s description cited “flora violation.” The National Rural Environmental Registration System marks the CAR rural property record for this area as pending.
In the report “Bankrolling Extinction: Banks and Investors as Partners in Deforestation,” Greenpeace makes a series of demands regarding loopholes in the Rural Credit Manual as well as the weak regulation and supervision of loans by these financial institutions.
Greenpeace argues changes are imperative: either cancel or immediately suspend loans when a deforestation embargo is put in place; make the criteria stricter for granting rural loans; deny credit to anyone who has been issued an embargo or infraction notice for any rural property, regardless of whether the request for the loan involves an embargoed area; and apply stricter scrutiny to those who have already appeared on the “blacklist” for labor analogous to slavery, or been accused of violating fundamental rights or involvement in land conflicts. When it comes to regulators—the Central Bank, National Monetary Council, Securities and Exchange Commission, Superintendence of Private Insurance, and the National Superintendence of Complementary Pensions—Greenpeace recommends mandatory monitoring of financed property before and during credit operations, with verification of compliance with socioenvironmental standards, and better, stronger measures to effectively hold institutions accountable when they fail to comply with current regulations.
Among landowners who were granted the most rural credit in Amacro, three had direct access to the presidential palace during Bolsonaro’s administration. In addition to Soy King Jorge Moura, José Marcos Leite Júnior and Antônio Aparecido Custódio attended an event called Meeting with the “Friends of Livestock Volunteer Action” Movement on March 7, 2022. This controversial meeting was not added to the official agenda for right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro until after it had ended and appeared as “Matters relating to Brazilian livestock farming.” But reports at the time suggest it may have been a meeting to finance Bolsonaro’s re-election campaign, due to the presence, for example, of Luciano Hang, owner of the Havan department store chain and one of the former president’s biggest supporters. Hang, it should be stressed, works in the retail sector, not agriculture.
The Friends of Livestock Volunteer Action Movement could not be more aptly named. Among products financed in Amacro, cattle and soybeans rank first and second. Credit also goes toward infrastructure works, machinery and equipment, pastureland, and corn, usually rotated with soy.
Soybeans are not Jorge Moura’s only source of wealth. The first company he founded, in April 1985, was a motel in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso. In August of the same year, he opened Helatex Hevea, a rubber manufacturer. Two years later, in September 1987, he founded Helatex Pneus, which was in operation for 29 years. Although the word “pneus” suggested tire production, the economic activity code associated with the company indicated a retailer of optical goods. The rubber companies closed down in 2016; the motel is still in business. Today Jorge Moura has ties to at least 11 companies as an administrator, managing partner, or legal representative. The businesses include gas stations, property management companies, road transport companies, and agricultural organizations and distributors.
One of the properties Jorge Moura received financing for had environmental embargoes in the names of five other people, meaning some of the land he said was his when applying for credit is claimed by historical residents of the region. These disputes are recorded in the database of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) for 2022 and 2023. One of the disputes in 2022 occurred in Capixaba, Acre, and involved around 15 families; another that same year involved six families in Plácido de Castro. In 2023, the commission recorded conflicts concerning Moura and a total of 87 families in three cases over an area formerly called Seringal Capatará, now Fazenda Capatará, owned by Moura.
It is an unequal battle. “This land was my father’s, and one day they said it belonged to Moura, but the truth is, this has always been ours,” said a resident of one of the disputed areas. SUMAÚMA spoke to some of those involved, whose identities will not be revealed for security reasons. They tell stories of a king and his descendants, children and grandchildren, who are trying to kick them off the land they have inhabited for 62 years. There are reports of alleged threats made against residents to get them to abandon the land. “But if we leave, where will we live? Where are we going to plant?” one asked. Jorge José de Moura is named in at least 61 court cases, in some as plaintiff and in others as defendant accused of alleged threats, illegal possession of weapons, and land disputes.
The benefactors
In the run-up to the presidential election of 2022, two of the three farmers who went to the meeting in Brasilia donated to Bolsonaro’s reelection campaign: Jorge Moura made a direct transfer of approximately $5,600 to the right-wing extremist, while Antônio Aparecido Custódio donated roughly $50,000. Custódio is also vice-president of the board of directors of the rural credit cooperative CrediSIS CrediAri. In short, as well as receiving funds from banks for his properties, he lends money to other rural producers. He was granted approximately $5.6 million in public policy benefits between January 2018 and August 2024 and has more than 400 hectares of land embargoed by IBAMA.
Custódio still has three fines for environmental infractions in his name, totaling roughly $354,000. The oldest is from 2007 and is still marked as “awaiting payment.” The other landowner, José Marcos Leite Júnior, didn’t donate to Bolsonaro’s campaign but was at the meeting in Brasilia. He was granted approximately $10.3 million in funds from rural loans. His mother, Ana Maria Leite, also a rural producer, received more than $19.1 million as a benefit of this public policy. Together, they were able to direct $29 million to their family business, despite having amassed $98,600 in fines for environmental infractions.
On November 1, 2022, days after Bolsonaro lost the election to the current president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), Moura joined pro-Bolsonaro protestors who were blocking a section of highway BR-364 in Rio Branco. In his speech he declared a Lula presidency would represent “the arrival of communism to Brazil” and only the Armed Forces could “save” the country. “The time has come to ask for clemency, should it prove necessary, even on our knees at the barracks door. Only the Army can save this beautiful country from misery.”
Antônio Aparecido Custódio, for his part, commissioned the installation of pro-Bolsonaro billboards for the 2022 re-election—the courts later ordered him to take them down. The billboards associated the left with criminal activity. Questioned by the press at the time, Custódio said he wanted “a better Brazil.”
Jorge Moura’s participation in the highway blockade led the Acre Public Prosecutor’s Office to name him a possible organizer and financier of coup activities. A person who prefers not to be identified out of fear of retaliation claims that in addition to giving speeches on the edge of highway BR-364, Moura would bring food to the demonstrators who were blocking the road. “He had a lot of oxen killed and took them to feed the people who were there. If that’s not financing, I don’t know what is,” the source says. By telephone, staff from the Supreme Federal Court said they had not found Jorge Moura’s name on the list of coup financers, but explained this could be because the process is confidential and some names cannot be disclosed.
In December 2023, the Brazilian Development Bank clamped down on deforesters. In a partnership with MapBiomas, which monitors areas of the Amazon and issues illegal deforestation alerts, the bank says it blocks contracts, freezes funds, and even requires early payment of credit operations deemed irregular. The December 2023 decision, in theory, has blocked rural credit concessions to clients with outstanding environmental embargoes since it became effective in March 2024, even for properties not directly associated with the financing.
Even though the president of the Brazilian Development Bank, Aloizio Mercadante, has said “the overwhelming majority of rural producers respect environmental regulations,” some farmers are given access to the funds, are caught committing environmental violations, and then continue having access to the contracted credit. Jorge Moura, for example, accessed more than $961,000 from the Brazilian Development Bank, but when his property was embargoed on May 23, 2024, for a flora violation, his loans were not disqualified – according to the bank, this is because his loans were secured before the new rule. The money from those loans was used to buy machinery and intensively amend the soil for planting.
Even while financial institutions pledge to monitor resources, the damage being done is irreversible. Millions of animals, plants, and fungi are being wiped out, killed to make way for pastures and soybean fields. This money not only destroys the forest; it threatens the survival of Indigenous people and their lands, such as the Karipuna Indigenous Territory. “If the banks and governments are giving money to kill the forest, they are financing the death of the Karipuna,” says Adriano Karipuna, one of the main leaders of his people.
This reality goes beyond words and statistics: it exposes the imminent collapse of an ecosystem vital for the planet and the future of new generations. In the next article in this series, we will take a closer look at how funding directly affects the resistance and struggle of Indigenous peoples.
What Banks and Lenders Have To Say
In a phone interview on February 26, 2025, Juares Monteiro confirmed trees had been removed from his property without permission from IBAMA. According to him, permission was requested, but due to a communication error with workers on the farm, the deforestation occurred before the paperwork arrived, which caused the area to be embargoed. As to the fine that he received, Juares said that he came to an agreement with IBAMA and paid $125,000. He said the fine still appearing as pending in the IBAMA database is probably due to the system being slow to update.
Asked how he managed to obtain financing for an embargoed area, Juares said the banks were the ones to answer. “The bank asks for information, asks for documents, we provide them and they do what is legal,” he said. “I believe everything is within the framework of the legislation and what is allowed, otherwise the bank wouldn’t approve it,” he said.
Juares also said all the activities taking place on Fazenda Arco-Íris were carried out outside the embargoed area and are therefore in compliance with legislation. Regarding the satellite images of cattle in embargoed areas, he said he didn’t know if there might have been some specific activity there years ago. He acknowledged, however, that there are no fences isolating the embargoed area to prevent cattle from roaming there, as the legislation requires. “Today there’s nothing in the embargoed areas, there’s nothing planted. I can’t tell you if there was five years ago,” he said, adding that he doesn’t live there and goes to Fazenda Arco-Íris every three to six months or so.
In a previous conversation on January 23, 2025, Juares Monteiro said land that appears by satellite to possibly overlap with the Gleba Rio Preto undesignated forestlands is legal and its title registered.
We both emailed and tried to call the businesses Jorge José de Moura is a partner of. We also sent a WhatsApp message to a number linked to him on the websites of some of the businesses, but did not receive a reply.
Landowner José Marcos Leite Júnior sent a ten-page statement through his lawyer. The document states that IBAMA itself, in 2015, confirmed, by analyzing the geographical coordinates of the fine it had imposed, that the deforestation attributed to his property took place outside the boundaries of his farm, which invalidated the infraction. However, the fine is still active in IBAMA’s public archives.
The same document also states that, in 2019, Ana Maria Leite was fined by IBAMA for clearing 42 hectares of vegetation. In 2020, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a lawsuit against her, asking for the recovery of the degraded area and, if necessary, the payment of compensation. At the hearing, a judicial agreement was reached with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in which she agreed to regularize the environmental situation of the farm to conform to the rules of the Forest Code.
Regarding his presence at the meeting with ruralists and supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, Leite’s statement said “it was an agenda related to the agribusiness sector, which he attended as a member of the Federation of Agriculture and Livestock Farmers of the State of Acre, without any party affiliation.”
We contacted several companies connected to Antônio Aparecido Custódio. CrediSIS CrediAri, where he is vice-president of the Board of Directors, said Antônio Aparecido Custódio does not currently have, nor has he ever received, credit funds from rural lending administered by the cooperative. According to the institution, if there are any such operations, they were carried out with another financial entity acting as intermediary.
In addition, CrediSIS CrediAri stated that the questions involving Custódio are of a personal nature and that, without express authorization of the individual mentioned, it does not have the prerogative to speak about his decisions and private business. We asked for his contact information, but the company did not provide it.
SUMAÚMA tried to reach Banco da Amazônia between January 23 and February 13 by telephone, email, and the WhatsApp of the bank’s press office to clarify the circumstances under which loans were granted for areas presenting irregularities. We stressed the importance of a statement from the institution, but there was no reply.
Regarding loans granted to Juares Monteiro, Banco do Brasil said, “Although the embargo is from 2019, it was only included in databases that allow systematized consultation in 2023. For this reason, operations [loans] were approved in 2020 and 2021.” It also said that, taking into account the timeline of the implementation of new rules, when embargoed land is identified as overlapping with financed areas, the flagged operations are submitted for review and investigation of possible irregularities. Lastly, the bank said it was committed to encouraging the adoption of “environmentally responsible practices.”
Santander assigned a spokesperson to talk to SUMAÚMA. Carlos Aguiar, director of agribusiness, said the institution was the first bank to adopt the CAR environmental registry as a reference for granting credit, instead of property registrations. Starting in 2018, Santander began checking its entire loan portfolio (not just rural credit) to identify issues involving environmental restrictions, embargoes, and labor analogous to slavery, among other problems. The bank said it monitors 18,000 properties via satellite and the databases of Brazil’s environmental watchdog and its records on individual and corporate taxpayers. If a property is embargoed due to illegal deforestation, the credit will come due early, and the client must pay off the debt. The institution also said, in order to avoid false positives, it conducts a detailed analysis of each embargo before making decisions.
Bradesco said its corporate credit operations go through a “rigorous analysis process that considers socioenvironmental factors and fully complies with all rules for granting rural and agricultural credit.”
Banco De Lage Landen Brasil stated that it is a financial institution with authorization from Brazil’s Central Bank and that its asset financing operations, including rural credit, go through a rigorous analysis process as required by the Rural Credit Manual and the Brazilian Development Bank. The bank emphasized its commitment to supervising and monitoring operations and taking into account socioenvironmental and climate factors.
John Deere Bank said that its rural credit operations undergo rigorous analysis and socioenvironmental monitoring, using remote sensing and on-site audits to ensure compliance with environmental standards. The bank also stated that it suspends or cancels financing when it identifies irregularities.
The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) said it stopped financing to all rural producers with environmental embargoes, regardless of the location of the project being financed, as of March 10, 2024. When asked about active credit for owners under embargo, the bank said, “The credit operations cited in the report refer to financing contracted by the BNDES in the period from 2018 to 2023, and therefore prior to the publication of the new rules, applicable as of March 2024.” Furthermore, it noted that in the case of these operations, the alleged embargoes occurred on properties other than those receiving BNDES financing, respecting regulations in force at the time.
How we arrived at our results
The research underpinning this article involved cross-referencing IBAMA’s database of environmental embargoes active as of August 2024 with Brazil’s Central Bank’s database of loans and financing active as of September 2024.
Spatial analysis was also used to identify properties, embargoes, and loans located in conservation areas, Indigenous territories, and rural settlements—data used was from the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change (MMA), the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples (Funai), and Brazil’s land reform agency (Incra).
The main analysis was done by overlaying the outlines of the areas (polygons) embargoed by IBAMA with the outlines of areas that received loans from Brazil’s Central Bank during the period from January 2018 to August 2024 using the PostgreSQL database software with the PostGIS extension to identify areas that both received loans and had embargoes.
The analysis was enhanced by the added variable of polygons from the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), obtained from the National Rural Environmental Registration System (Sicar), as of June 2024, as well as information from the Federal Revenue Service’s corporate taxpayer database.
Monetary conversions from real to dollar were made using the historical exchange rate series from the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), which are calculated using the official rates from Brazil’s Central Bank (Bacen). When values spanned more than one year, averages were taken between the respective years.
All data used is publicly available and accessible on the sites of the following governmental organizations: Ibama, Bacen, Sicar, MMA, Funai, Incra, IBGE, Receita Federal, and Inpe.
Report and text: Catarina Barbosa
Investigation coordinators: Ana Magalhães and Talita Bedinelli
Editing: Talita Bedinelli and Eliane Brum
Calculation reviewer: Plínio Lopes
Data verifier: Victor Barone
Legal editor: Eloisa Machado de Almeida
Proofreader (Portuguese): Valquíria Della Pozza
Spanish translation: Meritxell Almarza and Julieta Sueldo Boedo
English translation: Diane Whitty and Maria Jacqueline Evans
Infographics: Ariel Tonglet and Rodolfo Almeida
Layout and finishing: Natália Chagas
Editorial workflow: Viviane Zandonadi
Editor-in-chief: Talita Bedinelli
Editorial director: Eliane Brum
