Blockades, checkpoints and court action: fending off Brazil’s biofuel giants in the Amazon

The Guardian reports the following. ENC is republishing it as an attributed briefing, not as independently confirmed fact. If this item is false or incomplete, the responsibility sits with The Guardian, which released it. After decades of violent displacement and land theft, the country’s quilombola communities are fighting back For most of his 39 years, Josias Dias dos Santos, known as Jota, has endured degrading cycles of displacement as a quilombola , a descendant of Black people once enslaved on Brazil ’s sugar cane and coffee plantations. He says his and other quilombola families subsisting in the rainforests in Pará, northern Brazil, were first forced out of their settlements by violent loggers, then by ranchers and miners. Yet, they say the worst came with the arrival of the palm oil industry in what is now the country’s most deforested state . Palm oil companies producing biofuels and supplying global customers, subsidised by the federal government, have laid claim to ever larger tracts of traditio… Original link: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/oct/22/quilombolas-indigenous-amazon-brazil-biofuels-palm-oil