Always have been. What is going on in the Amazon rain forest now is what went on a few centuries ago in North America: settler-colonialists invading with cows and horses, wiping out forests, native herbivores, and, of course, indigenous people.

We’re seeing it happen now, it’s not in history. It’s happening IN REAL TIME.

Mongabay has more articles like this:

Rainforest cowboys: Rodeo culture sweeps the Amazon

Here’s a related documentary interview for context: Can the Amazon Rainforest be saved? with Richard Mosse - YouTube

Trailer of sorts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CmeqMe48MQ

This week we talk to photographer, filmmaker and artist Richard Mosse, who spent two years documenting the desctruction of one of the most ecologically sensitive areas of the world, the Amazon Rainforest. Using infrared film, GIS mapping technologies, and ultraviolet cameras, Mosse explores every scale of the rainforest, from miscroscopic organisms to hectares of cleared land. On the human level, the film follows both the indigenous people who are trying to hold on to their way of life and the loggers, ranchers, and miners who are trying to carve out a living at the edge of the world. The result is an immersive, unflinching multichannel film called Broken Spectre

https://jackshainman.com/exhibitions/richard_mosse_broken_spectre

…

And now to read the article…

It’s a common lament in the Amazon ranching community, and one that helps to explain why populist politicians such as the former president Jair Bolsonaro and the US president, Donald Trump, have such an appeal. It taps straight into the existential debate about the role of frontier men and women – farmers, miners, oil workers – in a world where wide-open spaces are increasingly constrained by environmental limits.

It’s not a “wide-open” space. The Amazon is a forest ecosystem that has been “nudged” by indigenous people for a very long time. It’s not an open space, it belongs to the indigenous people there.

He is referring to plans – promised by JBS – the world’s largest meat producer, which is the majority buyer from ranchers in the Amazon – for a new birth-to-abattoir tracking system that will, supposedly by the end of this year, tag and trace every head of cattle in the Amazon to ensure none of them are raised in areas that have been deforested. An investigation by the Guardian and its partners suggests this deadline will be missed. JBS told the Guardian that it respectfully contested the conclusions of the investigation, but added that “while the sector-wide challenges are significant and larger than any one company can solve on its own, we believe JBS has an in-depth and robust series of integrated policies, systems, and investments that are making a material and positive impact on reducing deforestation risks”.

JBS can’t be trusted: Brazilian Amazon ‘cattle laundering’ taints JBS & Frigol supply chains: Report

Ah, they mention it too.

And rather than clean up, many in the beef industry have simply found loopholes that allow them to carry on with the old ways. “Cattle laundering”, which hides the origins of livestock from environmentally embargoed ranches, is so widespread that few farmers bother to hide what they are doing.

At this point, I just want to live long enough to see these takers deal with the Amazon Desert that they’re birthing into existence. I mean:

A keynote speaker at this Encontro dos Pecuaristas (meeting of the Livestock Farmers) is the lawyer and land-owner Vinicius Borba, a slim man with a thin beard and a sharp turn of phrase. Borba says he represents rural producers in the indigenous territory of Apyterewa. Before the meeting, he had spoken defiantly about his own environmental penalties and accusations of wrongdoing, which he blamed on the government’s failure to legitimise his property. “I am called a land-grabber, an invader, a deforester, but it is not my fault,” he said. “I have a property that we have occupied for over 20 years, and to this day the government has not given me the title … Since the regularisation never comes, I end up becoming a statistic, another land-grabber.”

and

All the same, she says, change is coming, whether ranchers like it or not. “Unfortunately, the environmental issue is here to stay,” she says, of the growing pressure for transparent tracking systems to eradicate deforestation from supply chains. “If we don’t wake up, we will be left out of rural production.”

This should be treated as confessions to crimes.