The Parakanã people are finally coming home.
After years of being squeezed into less than a third of their own territory, surrounded by 100,000 heads of cattle and thousands of illegal invaders, the Indigenous community in Brazil's Apyterewa land is reclaiming its land. The turnaround began in 2023 when President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered federal forces to remove roughly 3,000 intruders who had built an entire illegal village inside the Parakanã's territory — with gas stations, bars, churches, and even a school.
The operation involved about 300 agents from multiple government agencies working together. They seized illegal cattle, destroyed invading machinery, and dismantled the makeshift village. The results have been striking. Deforestation inside Apyterewa dropped from 102 square kilometers in 2022 — an area nearly the size of Paris — to just 7.5 square kilometers in 2025. The territory fell from being the most deforested Indigenous land in Brazil, and possibly the world, to 12th place.
Wallace Lopes, an environmental analyst with Brazil's federal environmental agency IBAMA who studied the situation for his doctoral research, called the change dramatic. "It was a massive deforestation," said Wenatoa Parakanã, president of the Tato'á Association, which represents the community. "All we can see now is pasture."
The invaders had grown bold enough to build permanent structures after two previous eviction attempts in 2013 and 2017 both failed. The intruders outnumbered the Parakanã by more than four to one — there were 730 Indigenous residents against roughly 3,000 illegal miners, loggers, and land grabbers.
Now, many Parakanã families are moving back to areas they were forced to abandon. "Our plan is to take care of our land, of the forest we still have left," Wenatoa said.
But the community remains worried. Brazil's general elections take place in October, and polls suggest a tight race between President Lula and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whose administration sharply weakened environmental enforcement. The Parakanã have heard the invaders' promises to return.
"The invaders always tell us that they're just waiting for this government to leave so they can come back," Wenatoa said. Lopes warned that territories reclaimed through costly operations can be quickly reoccupied at the first sign of government complacency. "Because now they understand how the government operates," he said. "They know which roads are used, what the strategy is... It's like a kind of bacteria that adapts to the antibiotics you keep giving it."