After the military coup in 1964 a policy took place in Brazil to
stimulate big Brazilian and foreign companies to explore the natural
resources of Brazil. Various governmental organizations for the
development of the Amazon were founded. The first big development plan was
realized between 1972 and 1974. Its aim was to implement huge cattle
farms. 
In
the course of this policy the state credits to support the rubber
companies were canceled without advance notice. Suddenly enormous areas of
rain forest that previously belonged to the rubber companies were for sale
for very low prices. The buyers were usually cattle-raisers from the
richer south of Brazil who became owners of huge ranches that way. In Acre
it was mainly between 1971 and 1974 that the governor Francisco Vanderlei
Dantas executed the economical policy of the military regime. Many areas
didn’t even have a legal owner and the resident Seringueiros and
Indians who were the legal possessors of the land often did not know about
their rights or didn’t have the means to make them good. An important
role within these appropriations had the so called "Grileiros":
speculators who usurped land through corruption, falsification and violent
expulsion of the inhabitants of the forest and then sold that land to the
cattle raisers. The Seringueiros tried to defend themselves.They
organized the so called "empates"forming chains of
people holding hands to inhibit the clearings or circling the group of
workers who were in charge of the clearing and making their leader sign a
document that would guarantee the suspension of the clearings. At that
time the seringueiro’s union wasn’t yet strong enough, neither
had they other possibilities to assert their rights. Many times the new
landowners achieved with the help of their lawyers the title deeds.
Between 1978 and 1991 more than 2.000.000 acres of forest have been
destroyed in Acre. Every year more and more rain forest becomes pasture
and seringueiros become dwellers of the poor districts in the cities...
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