It’s not just a ground fire.

It’s reaching up into the canopy here, too,

and just scorching everything.

Is this the usual amount of fire

that you see?

Are you worried about the illicit activity

that happens here?

Pará, Brazil.

Parts of the rainforest in this region

have lost so much tree cover

it hardly looks like the Amazon.

I’m on a highway called the BR-163.

In August, this corridor for soy and beef exports

lit up like an inferno.

Many of the fires were started on protected lands

on a single day, a so-called Day of Fire.

So, I take the highway here to a protected reserve that saw

major burning on that day.

It’s called the Jamanxim National Forest.

This year, the Jamanxim lost

over 45 square miles of tree cover.

That’s an area twice the size of Manhattan.

It’s the worst deforestation of all protected areas

in Brazil.

But many people who live here

see this as progress.

And it has a lot to do with beef.

Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef.

About half of the cattle are raised on pasture

that used to be rainforest.

And demand is growing.

I’m visiting an annual barbecue and auction

near the Jamanxim.

But it’s not your typical backyard get-together.

Some landowners and ranchers here brazenly defy

environmental laws.

Last year, a government report linked

this man, a union leader, to land-grabbing schemes.

This woman, head of a national association,

was fined for burning 350 acres of rainforest.

This man, a local mayor,

was caught destroying

over 700 acres of virgin rainforest

inside the Jamanxim reserve.

They all deny wrongdoing.

What producers here want

is to privatize the reserves, and there’s hostility here

towards anyone who tries to stop them.

The producers are petitioning

an important government official, Nabhan Garcia,

appointed by President Bolsonaro

to open up the Amazon for development.

There’s no question which side Mr. Garcia’s on.

He’s a rancher and farmer himself.

According to your own government studies,

many of the people in some of these protected areas

came in after the park was created.

They’re in there illegally according

to your own government standards right now.

Part of the reason we’re here

is because of all the fires, right?

To be clear, deforesting land without authorization

is illegal in Brazil.

It’s seized land that's logged, burned

and converted, mostly for grazing.

We’re talking millions of acres, billions of dollars

and a web of criminal activity.

But at the core of the issue is

what turns out to be a pretty complicated question.

Who does all this land belong to?

I catch up with Luiz Helfenstein,

who I’d met at the barbecue.

His ranch is right at the edge of the Jamanxim National Forest.

He considers himself

one of the pioneers here.

When you started,

is this the first settlement that you built?

Luiz came here back in the ’80s.

He was handed 4,000 acres of rainforest,

part of a government plan to develop the Amazon.

That’s the BR-163.

November 1994.

Then the political winds shifted and preservation

became the priority.

In 2006, the government established

the Jamanxim National Forest,

taking back most of the land

previously given to Luiz and other producers.

They felt cheated, and some have

responded by grabbing and burning protected land.

I take a ride with Agamenon da Silva Menezes.

Is this your car?

He’s the head of a union for ranchers out here.

Was the Day of Fire

an example of that disobedience?

But satellite data confirms

there was an unusual spike in the number of fires on Aug. 10.

Local reporters wrote about this so-called Day of Fire,

exposing a coordinated plan among ranchers and land-grabbers

to burn newly cleared forest.

One of those reporters, Adecio Piran,

soon found his face on a wanted poster.

Did you ever receive death threats or threats

to your personal safety?

That type of intimidation helps

explain how so much criminal activity can go unpunished.

Last year, 30 environmental activists

were murdered in Brazil.

I follow a group of firefighters with one

of Brazil’s environmental agencies

into a biological reserve.

The agency has been attacked by locals

and their authority undermined by Bolsonaro’s government.

None of the men will speak on the record.

So this is what the effort to protect the forest here

now looks like:

a handful of men carving control lines

and putting out brush fires with a leaf blower.

It takes a bird’s-eye view to capture the magnitude

of what they’re up against.

This fire is nearly four miles long.

According to Brazilian satellites,

more than a soccer field worth of rainforest

is cleared every minute.

I’m back on the road,

driving off federal land, when I see these two trucks.

They pull on to the BR-163 highway

with loads of fresh logs.