The disorganized and illegal occupation of public lands is a defining trait of the
Amazon’s “colonization” process. The unplanned implementation of major State
infrastructure projects, such as the construction of the Santarém–Cuiabá highway
(BR 163), is a major agency in the chaotic panorama found in the lands surrounding
these projects—notably the Jamanxim Valley, located alongside said highway, in the
frontier separating cultivated and forest land. The absence of State policies
overseeing these projects allows for episodes of violence and land grabs—and are
often followed by land regularization processes, which, according to specialized
sources, contribute to State-promoted legitimization of these illegal seizings.
Approaches employed so far have not offered an analysis of land grab and land
regularization conducted under a constitutional perspective that have taken into
account the reality that both shapes and bears the consequences of such binomial.
This thesis stems from Friedrich Müller’s Structural Theory of Law and its
methodological assumptions and encouraged further research into this scenario. By
doing so, it aims at the enforcement of the Constitution against the backdrop of
State-sanctioned policies of land regularization. The results found in this research
portray, on the one hand, the federal government’s sheer oversight in the
management of its lands (dropping of sustainable development goals, systematically
inefficient environmental supervision, and poor jus puniendi exercise in regards to
environmental laws). Furthermore, the findings also expose the unbridled occupation
of public lands, unfretted by the State, via strategies and techniques conditioned and
endorsed by the current land regularization legislation. This research also states that
these land regularization policies have directly influenced the creation of an uncertain
legal outlook, as well as the increase of conflicts and environmental degradation,
subverting thus the very reason for what they have been created in the first place.
The study concludes that the ownership of illegally occupied public federal lands (de
facto possession)—considering their legal proprietor’s (the federal government) stark
omission in repossession attempts and occupation management—has been brought
dangerously close to an acquisitive prescription process (usucaption), due to its
unreasonably facilitated and overly-accommodating regularization nature. It finally
establishes that the current scenario regarding public federal land regularizations
goes against the constitutional norm opposing public land acquisitive prescriptions such illegal processes are described in this thesis as surreptitious acquisitive prescriptions of public lands.
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