Someone had evidently tipped off the grileiros. Rosa was furious. Next time he'd try to enlist the help of the federal police—men from outside the area. "It's the only way they won't know in advance," he hissed, eyeing the local cop. "But you can't say that here. To survive in Brazil, you have to shut your mouth and play dumb."

The Amazon land rush has its roots in the 1970s, when Brazil's military dictatorship pursued a policy of "integrar para não entregar," meaning "occupy it or risk losing it." Destitute settlers followed the central axes of penetration, the Trans-Amazon and BR-163, into the jungle, escaping poverty in Brazil's overcrowded south and northeast. Many perished or gave up, but others survived and adapted to the harsh life, practicing slash-and-burn farming.

The poorest settlers were rarely given title to the land they worked, but the government awarded concessions to the well connected—blocks of up to 7,400 acres—to encourage logging, ranching, and other development. If grantees (usually absentee landlords) failed to put the land to productive use within five years, they would forfeit the right to permanent ownership, and control was to revert to the federal government. Most grantees did nothing but still considered themselves the rightful owners. Meanwhile, landless squatters moved in from adjacent lots, working plots whose ownership the government failed to resolve. That has fueled a bloody showdown pitting the powerful absentee elites who raze forest for agribusiness against family farmers who clear small patches for crops but still depend on intact forest around them for survival.

"What's happening today in Amazonia is a clash between two models of development," said Felicio Pontes, one of a new breed of government lawyers seeking to prosecute corruption, land fraud, and environmental crimes in the Amazon. We were standing in a mock cemetery of 820 crosses that symbolized the human cost of the land wars in Pará, on the first anniversary of the murder of Dorothy Stang. "The first model was implanted during the military dictatorship, based on timber extraction and cattle. It's predatory because it causes death, it's not renewable, and it devastates the forest." The alternative model, preached by Stang, is what Pontes calls social environmentalism. The first concentrates wealth, the second calls for its dispersion in small-scale agroforestry collectives.

Dorothy Stang, born and raised in Ohio, a sister of Notre Dame de Namur, was revered for her dedication to the ideal of family farmers who extract their sustenance in harmony with the forest. From her base in the frontier town of Anapu, she worked unceasingly to transform settlers along the Trans-Amazon Highway into environmentally conscious, cohesive, and combative communities, able to resist violent cliques of ranchers and speculators who would lay claim to the same land. Stang saw human rights and environmental conservation in the Amazon as inextricably intertwined. Though poor settlers themselves damage the forest, Stang believed they could learn to manage their land sustainably as a matter of self-preservation. "The death of the forest is the end of our lives," she told her followers.

Her last mission, to save a remote tract of jungle known as Lot 55, ended on the morning of February 12, 2005, when two gunmen confronted the petite 73-year-old nun on a secluded jungle path. A conversation ensued, overheard by a witness who later testified at the men's trial. Stang admonished them—the land was not theirs, they had no right to plant pasture grasses for livestock.

"So, you don't like to eat meat?" one of the assailants taunted.

"Not enough to destroy the forest for it," she replied.

"If this problem isn’t resolved today, it's never going to be," the man snarled.