Hijacking legality: Corruption and property creation in Brazil's frontiers

Abstract

Corruption undermines natural resource governance and conservation efforts, fueling deforestation and violence against land and environmental defenders. To address this complex issue and avoid stereotypical and colonial perspectives, the literature in political ecology and geography has called for shifting the focus from legal definitions of corruption to an emphasis on power dynamics. While this approach has led to innovative analyses, it has often pushed the question of legality into the background. In this paper, we bring law back to the forefront and analyze the relationship between corruption and landed property. We examine land tenure laws and regulations, along with 15 inquiries into corruption in land-grabbing schemes in Brazil's two main agricultural frontiers, the Amazon and the Matopiba. We argue that, in resource frontiers, corruption and legality co-constitute each other. Corruption hijacks different legal processes establishing and protecting landed property. Regarding the recognition of land claims and property formation, land grabbers can (1) dismantle policies recognizing competing land uses to make them illegible; and (2) capture tenure formalization policies to legalize land grabs. Likewise, processes intended to protect property rights and ensure legal certainty are vulnerable to hijacking, as (3) land registries and cadastres can be defrauded to distort property rights; and (4) law enforcement mechanisms can be co-opted to enact abusive land claims. Therefore, we reject the notion that legality precedes corruption in resource frontiers. Instead, these findings suggest a recursive relationship between corruption and legality. The uncritical use of legal dichotomies to guide understandings of corruption can reproduce legalized abuses.