Shady Agribusiness: How Coup Plotters and Militias Are Linked to Bolsonaro in the Brazilian Amazon

This investigative series shows the involvement of Nabhan Garcia, Secretary of Land Affairs during the Bolsonaro administration, in land conflicts and the links between agribusiness, coup plotting and militias in the Amazon. 

MATO GROSSO and PARÁ, Brazil—Along the BR-163 highway, it's common to find knives with the message "Agro is top" carved into the blade. At the junction with the Transamazon highway, in Itaituba (Pará), dozens of trucks loaded with harvested soybeans wait at a gas station where the cashier sells clubs with the inscriptions "Respect," "Dialogue," and "Human Rights." 

This is the "soy highway," one of the most important routes for agribusiness in the Amazon. It connects the "north" of Mato Grosso to the ports of the Tapajós River, in the south of Pará. Huge grain silos and hundreds of cattle navigate the highway. 

But knives and clubs are also part of the landscape. There are Brazilian flags displayed on windows, billboards in support of former president Jair Bolsonaro, and advertisements for shooting clubs. An ad combines the politician's image with patriotic yellow-green. The sponsorship comes from the Sorriso Shooting Club (Mato Grosso). Sorriso is the name of the city which grows the most soybeans in the country. "An armed people will never be enslaved," says the message next to a frowning Bolsonaro.

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Repórter Brasil traveled more than 6,000 kilometers, mainly on dirt roads, to investigate the truculent side of agribusiness and its ties to Bolsonaro. Part of the local elite is involved in land grabbing, illegal deforestation, and rural militias, and has obtained a voice for its demands in the former president’s government.

The route was based on the meeting agenda of a prominent figure in the so-called "agro-Bolsonarism": the former Special Secretary for Land Affairs, Luiz Antonio Nabhan Garcia. A trusted man of the former president and one of the main exponents of the Democratic Ruralist Union, a hard-line agribusiness organization, Nabhan Garcia played a decisive role in paralyzing agrarian reform during Bolsonaro's four years in office. 

Between cabinet hearings and trips, Garcia's 610 official appointments reveal how he opened the doors of the capital, Brasilia, to politicians and farmers accused of attacks on rural peoples, such as those investigated for the violence in Anapu (Pará), where missionary Dorothy Stang was murdered in 2005. 

Nabhan Garcia has also received producers fined for deforestation and found guilty of slave labor, such as the mayor of Trairão (Pará), Valdinei José Ferreira, and cattle rancher Murilo Zancaner, from Paragominas (Pará). He aligned himself with businessmen investigated for financing the attempted coup of January 8, 2023, such as Antônio Galvan, former president of the Brazilian Association of Soybean Producers (Aprosoja), and other defendants from Novo Progresso, Xinguara, Marabá, and Redenção, also in Pará. 

During his four years in office, Bolsonaro's secretary sought to make life easier for businessmen accused of socio-environmental violations. As for the Indigenous, quilombolas, and participants of the Landless Workers Movement (MST)—which encompasses thousands of Brazilian families that live in its land-occupation settlements in an effort to redistribute land to rural workers for small-scale farming—he adopted a war-like discourse. In theory, these populations should be served by his secretariat, but they were treated as "land invaders" and no longer able to be formally received by the government. 

"I will not accept ideological bias from those who invade property. Brazil is not a little Republic. Anyone who invades property commits a crime," Nabhan Garcia told Repórter Brasil in 2019, after being asked how the then government would interact with these groups.

From the Wild West of São Paulo to Brasília

Nabhan Garcia is far from being a public policy maker. A technician in zootechnics and agriculture, but above all a cattle rancher and landowner, he took up the post because of his history at the head of the UDR. The organization was created in 1985, in the countryside of São Paulo, to counter the advance of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST).

At that time, Nabhan Garcia had his name involved in attacks on landless workers in Pontal do Paranapanema, in the far west of São Paulo. He was accused by a farmer, in a statement to the Federal Police, of participating in the hiring and training of gunmen who wounded eight landless people with bullets in 1997, during the organization's action to clear a farm in Sandovalina (SP). Nabhan Garcia, however, did not become a defendant in court.

The complaint reached the Joint Parliamentary Land Inquiry Commission (CPMI da Terra), set up in 2003. The final report called for the indictment of Nabhan Garcia and other ranchers for the crimes, but political articulation by members of the rural caucus managed to change the document and get him off the hook.

During his 30 years as president of the UDR, Garcia became close to then federal deputy Jair Bolsonaro. "Ever since Bolsonaro entered Congress, I've followed him, who even though he's not a rural producer, has always defended the productive sector," Garcia said in an interview with Repórter Brasil.

He was the one who opened the door to agribusiness for the former president, touring agricultural fairs and exhibitions during the 2018 elections. The first official trip of that campaign was a tour of the interior of São Paulo, starting in Presidente Prudente (São Paulo), Garcia's region, and ending at the Festa do Peão in the city of Barretos—nationally known for attracting people from the agribusiness sector. 

His friendship with Bolsonaro led to his name being considered for Minister of Agriculture in the new government, but Nabhan Garcia was passed over by the rural caucus in Congress, which he used to criticize, accusing it of being more concerned with big agribusiness companies than with rural producers. 

He was left with the Special Secretariat for Land Affairs and the symbolic position of "Deputy Minister of Agriculture"—non-existent in the state bureaucracy, but displayed on his business card and in local and international meetings. 

With the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) under his control, Nabhan Garcia would write a new chapter for agrarian reform in the country, putting land policy at the service of the Ministry of Agriculture, something that had only happened during the military dictatorship (1964-85) and in the government of former president José Sarney (1985-89).

The end of land reform

In his first week in office, INCRA paralyzed agrarian reform, freezing all land purchases and expropriation processes. It was a sign of what the next four years would be like.

For the first time in a century, INCRA stopped buying land for agrarian reform, which actually happened in 2021 and 2022—one of the factors behind the worsening conflicts in the countryside. 

The agency's spending was cut by almost 40%, from R$2.8 billion to R$1.7 billion between 2018 and 2022, according to Siga Brasil. The government also reduced investments in family farming, which reached their lowest levels in 2020 and 2021, according to the same data source. 

"He was hand-picked for the job because he was explicitly against agrarian reform and social movements, and Bolsonaro took over saying that the landless were enemies and needed to be fought," analyzes University of São Paulo professor Adalmir Leonidio, who researched land violence in Pontal do Paranapanema.

Under Nabhan Garcia's administration, land reform was reduced to a program of distributing property titles. The focus became land regularization, to the detriment of creating new settlements. "This program is a step backwards, because it puts public lands on the market and facilitates land concentration [by farmers]," says Yamila Goldfarb, president of the Brazilian Agrarian Reform Association (Abra). 

Shady agribusiness in Brasília 

Garcia's arrival at office has yet another element: the rise of the Green and Yellow Brazil Movement within Brazilian agribusiness. 

Created as an opposition front to the second term of former president Dilma Rousseff, the movement gained strength during the impeachment process and aligned itself with Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 elections, explains anthropologist Caio Pompeia, author of the book "The political formation of agribusiness". 

One of its main leaders was Antônio Galvan, accused of financing the attempted coup against the Lula government on January 8, 2023—and a "particular friend" of Nabhan Garcia. 

Before Bolsonaro came to power, Galvan and Garcia mobilized farmers and ranchers who were unhappy with the agro-elites because they felt rejected by them, Pompeia says. 

According to the researcher, Bolsonaro saw this marginal group as an opportunity for political support. Once in office, the former president endorsed agendas that appealed to these farmers, such as reducing rural taxes and making environmental policies more flexible. Pompeia calls this group "agrobolsonarismo."

Agribusiness elites, on the other hand, represented by associations such as the Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil (CNA) and the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (Abiove), maintained a more pragmatic stance, according to Pompeia, negotiating agenda after agenda with the far-right government. 

The one who defined the differences between these two agribusiness groups in a less subtle way than "agrobolsonarismo" was the Minister of the Environment, Marina Silva. During a hearing in the Chamber of Deputies in May 2023, she said that the government would bet on the transition to low-carbon agriculture to get Brazilian agribusiness out of the condition of "ogre-business." 

A deputy reacted, saying that the minister was disrespecting rural producers and that the minister only wanted to show off on social media. "I'm a poor Black woman who got here because I worked hard, not because I showed off on social media," the minister replied.