Created five years ago, with funding of about US$1.6 million from the Ford Foundation and the NGO Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA), the SIG-F system collected 83,676 documents from three regions within Par\u00e1\u2014Tom\u00e9-A\u00e7u, Jari, and Itaituba\u2014which add up to 19.5 million hectares, equivalent to 15% of the state. The team from the Laboratory for the Integration of Agricultural, Economic, and Environmental Information for Dynamic Analysis of the Amazon (INTEGRADATA), which is the agency of the UFPA Dean’s Office responsible for SIG-F, collected information directly from the registrations and records of 14 of the state’s 104 notary offices. The work of digitizing documents at the notary registry of Santar\u00e9m began in February. At INTEGRADATA the documents are verified, historical data are indexed, and the geographical location coordinates of the properties are inserted in a geographic information system. Open-access programs allow the recording of information, document integration, and automatic map production. In 2018, at the request of the state government of Maranh\u00e3o, the INTEGRADATA team used this method to register 23,616 documents from the Colonization and Lands Institute of Maranh\u00e3o (ITERMA), and two state notary registries.<\/p>\n
Overlaps<\/strong> In his view, the overlaps detected by the SIG-F platform can result from both technical inaccuracies and illegal land possession. “We have to analyze each case carefully, identify the most serious situations, and then construct an appropriate work methodology.” The Ministry of the Environment estimates that the total area of lands obtained through false titles in Par\u00e1, as recorded in real estate notary registries, comes to 30 million hectares, almost 25% of the state’s land surface.<\/p>\n Fernando Santos \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/a> Police officers go to the countryside to contain land conflicts between squatters and farmers in Par\u00e1 in August 1984Fernando Santos \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n The overlaps were rarely apparent to the extent now detected by SIG-F because the public databases are rarely integrated, and the staffs at public agencies prioritize more urgent problems. Geographer Danny Silv\u00e9rio Ferreira Sousa, a technician from the Land Institute of Par\u00e1 (ITERPA), a public agency responsible for land management throughout the state, notes that 6,126 land regularization suits have been filed at the institute’s Cartography and Geoprocessing Administration as of November 2018, an average of 875 cases for each of the seven employees in the division.<\/p>\n The Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), created by the federal government in 2012 to facilitate the regularization of the mandated environmental preservation areas throughout Brazil, recorded an excess of private property in Par\u00e1 of 12.1 million hectares, of which 1.1 million hectares overlap indigenous lands. Because it receives information provided directly by the rural property owners, the CAR allows room for inaccuracies and fraud. In 2016, the Federal Revenue Service arrested a gang headed by a S\u00e3o Paulo businessman, who was clearcutting and filing fraudulent title records for public lands in the state. Registration with the CAR on behalf of various front companies allowed the land to be exploited, leased, and sold. According to a report from the investigative journalism site Ag\u00eancia P\u00fablica<\/em>, the criminal organization moved R$1.9 billion and cleared about 300 square kilometers of forests between 2012 and 2015. The National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), responsible for federal land management, has adopted a program similar to the CAR, the Land Management System (SIGEF), certifying land ownership only when no overlap exists.<\/p>\n “The notary registries are partially responsible for this situation, having recorded new title deeds without verifying previous documents,” observes Jos\u00e9 Antonio Cavalcante, an assistant administrative review judge at the Judicial Court of the Metropolitan Region of Bel\u00e9m. He believes that “due to ignorance of the duty of office or bad faith,” the notaries kept the initial records open, allowing the sale of land even when the area was under the jurisdiction of another notary office. “When we find irregularities,” says Cavalcante, “we have the notaries block further registration to prevent the land being passed on to third parties until the owners present their documents and resolve the problem.”<\/p>\n Anderson Barbosa \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/a> Besides the overlaps with private properties, the indigenous areas of Par\u00e1 are subject to threats such as the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric project in Vit\u00f3ria do XinguAnderson Barbosa \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n Uncertainties<\/strong>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/076-080_Par\u00e1_279-0-en.jpg\")
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\nThe area of properties recorded in the registry documents at the ten municipalities surveyed in Par\u00e1 totaled 32.2 million hectares. As the area studied has only 9.5 million hectares, 22.7 million of these hectares do not actually exist. “They are paper lands,” says agronomist Sebasti\u00e3o Aluizio Solyno Sobrinho, technical coordinator of SIG-F. In another study, the INTEGRADATA team gathered together the maps of protected areas, indigenous lands, and quilombolas<\/em> [areas settled by escaped slaves] under the jurisdiction of federal public agencies in Par\u00e1, and found 792 property overlaps totaling 1.5 million hectares. According to the official documents, the total area of indigenous lands and conservation units is 8.4 million hectares larger than that identified by the SIG-F system. As for public lands, there are 18.5 million hectares that don’t actually exist. “Over recent years, the maps have been corrected on the institutional websites of the federal government agencies, but the erroneous information remains on the official documents,” notes Solyno.<\/p>\n
\nIn 2009, a commission instituted by the Judicial Court of Par\u00e1 to combat fraudulent filings found that the 9,124 documented areas totaled about 490 million hectares, an area almost four times larger than the entire state. In Moju, in northeastern Par\u00e1, the irregularities corresponded to an area eight times that of the municipality itself. The commission requested that about 5,500 real estate titles covering more than 2,500 hectares be blocked, since the sale or concession of public lands above this limit depends on prior approval by the national Congress.<\/p>\n