The local Legislative Assembly had voted in favor of a law that benefited land grabbers and reduced the sizes of the protected areas; the governor had already sanctioned the new legislation

The Federal Supreme Court (STF) has confirmed: the attempt to reduce the limits of the Jaci-Paraná Extractive Reserve and the Guajará-Mirim State Park is unconstitutional. The action shows that the State Complementary Law 1089/2021, unanimously approved by the 25 state deputies that belong to the State Legislature of Rondônia (ALE-RO), reduced the Resex to only 10% of its original area, in addition to breaking up the Park into 55,000 hectares. The justification for the law, which was even approved by the governor of the State of Rondônia, Coronel Marcos Rocha (PSC), was that the land grabbers who invaded the protected areas are poor people and needed the space. The STF, however, rejected this argument, showing that the ALE-RO document neither mapped the areas with precision nor even identified the invaders.

Ciro Brito, the coordinator of the Legal Network of the Amazon at iCS, spoke with Revista Cenarium. “This decision was extremely important and follows a very strict sense of legality. Because these people were not identified, it was not possible to analyze their vulnerability without this identification (…) This is a positive decision because, given the history of these Conservation Units, especially for the organizations and associations that have been monitoring this socioenvironmental defense, they have been very important in order to guarantee conservation, curb deforestation and land grabbing and to guarantee the rights of the traditional communities that live there, extractivists and indigenous peoples.” Kanindé, an iCS grantee, acted as an Amicus Curiae in the action.

Federal Supreme Court / Credit: Creative Commons License, by Leandro Ciuffo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/