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

When the powerful may purchase the law itself, the citizenry learns to mistake the absence of violence for justice, and the soft despotism that follows is not felt as tyranny because it arrives with a receipt.

If the deed is granted by law, and the law is made by the men who hold the deed, then the appeal must run from law to a higher law, or the appeal is no appeal at all.

Record the boundary years, the granting authority, the acreage, the vegetation removed, and the population displaced, so that when the ledger is later disputed the arithmetic will not depend on anyone's recollection of goodwill.

A plantation that consumes three generations of cane and then three generations of bodies has produced something the planter did not intend, and it now speaks in its own voice and will not return to the study.

From the checkpoint side of the fence the company's quarterly report reads 'sustainable sourcing,' and from inside the quilombola's doorway the same document reads as the schedule of what was taken and when.

Call it not a land dispute but a question whether a legal title can be manufactured faster than the settlement it disposes of, and note that the Portuguese-language record predicts outcomes in Bahia and Pará that the English coverage has not yet tested.

The courts, when they finally rule, will grant the community a form of relief that stabilizes the surrounding plantation economy, and we must ask whether the reform preserves the very relation it was meant to abolish.

The neighbors watch from their own fields and say nothing, and in their silence the eviction is performed a second time, and the court records it as orderly procedure.

Feed into the machine the deed, the registry entry, the tax assessment, and the notary's seal, and it will output a single column headed 'owner' - but the pattern beneath was determined by whoever chose which cards to punch.

You ask the community to wait for the courts, and I ask you whether you have ever known a court to hurry for those whose fields are on fire, and I ask you again whom the waiting serves.