CAMPBELL: For more than thirty years Brazil has been rapaciously developing its vast rainforest, raising fears of an environmental disaster that could affect the whole planet. Now there’s a new push to carve up the Amazon heartland and for those fighting to resist it, it’s become literally a life and death struggle.

It is the world’s largest forest and it’s becoming a battleground. These crosses represent 752 people killed in land conflicts in Brazil’s north since the 1970s. Death now hangs over the Amazon like its forest canopy and this 64 year old nun may well be its next victim.

Sister Leonora Brunetto only travels with police or bodyguards. She’s received repeated death threats because of her work with landless peasants. Two of the men she works with were recently murdered.

SISTER BRUNETTO: They were caught by surprise and besides that, it was an execution because their hands were behind their heads. It was a sad execution.

CAMPBELL: And this is the man she accuses of killing them. He’s a local rancher who wants the peasants’ land. He goes by the name of “Black Hat” but he insists he’s no villain.

BLACK HAT: I don’t know her, I don’t have anything against her, I don’t know anything about her. To me, she’s a religious person. She deserves respect.

SISTER BRUNETTO: We know he is responsible for many deaths – as are other ranchers. They’re very dangerous. We know that guns were found on their farms and they’re still at large.

CAMPBELL: Conflicts like this are being fought all over the Amazon. On one side are impoverished peasants trying to scratch a living from small plots of land. On the other, big ranchers trying to claim the Amazon for themselves. It’s a battle that will determine not just the future of the forest, but of the millions who live here.

SISTER BRUNETTO: The violence, the deaths – six deaths so far in this camp… and they’re staying put. So the people who are here, are here because they’re so poor the have nowhere else to go.

CAMPBELL: Brazil’s Catholic Church has long sided with the poor peasants, arguing their small farms don’t endanger the Amazon. Nuns like Sister Leonora, have tried to stand up to the big farmers trying to seize their land. This camp is part of a network of church run settlements encouraging peasants to fight for their rights. If not for Sister Leonora, most of them would have fled long ago.

PEASANT WOMAN: It’s very hard to face the struggle 24 hours a day – and we’re very sick. So searching for a little plot of land to raise the children is very hard.

CAMPBELL: The families in this camp moved here from the slums of Brazil’s big cities, after the Federal Government promised to grant them sixteen thousand hectares but they were forced off by local ranchers who produced titles to the land, titles the families claim were forged.

And that’s the problem here. Nobody can be quite sure of who owns what land. The Amazon has been settled so quickly and haphazardly that few people have secure title to their plots of land and all risk having it seized by farmers and ranchers in league with corrupt officials. There is a violence and lawlessness here that is killing the Amazon and the weak and defenceless people who call it home.

Until recently, most of northern Brazil was virgin rainforest. White settlers farmed around the Amazon River and its tributaries but there was no way in to the vast interior where the only inhabitants were indigenous tribes. Then in the 1970s, Brazil’s military government decided to colonise the Indians’ land. It built thousands of kilometres of dirt roads into the jungle. The Indians were displaced into squalid settlements and the Amazon land grab began.

CARLOS RITTL: [In plane] In some areas, there’s almost no forest left. It’s really shocking. It is absolutely cleared for kilometres and kilometres.

CAMPBELL: To see just how much has been destroyed, we flew over the forest with the environmental group Greenpeace.

Carlos Rittl has been monitoring land clearing for giant soy and cattle farms. Within minutes we found clearings of up to ten thousand hectares, the size of small towns and all of it had been clear-felled illegally.

CARLOS RITTL: There is no legal ownership of the land.

CAMPBELL: So people are going in and clearing massive fields, totally illegally?

CARLOS RITTL: Absolutely. Most of the deforestation is occurring in public lands.

CAMPBELL: Few developers are ever fined for clearing public land. When they are, it’s usually a small dent in their profits.

CARLOS RITTL: A fine could be considered an operational cost for them because if they could pay that it would be much less than the profit they take from destruction.

CAMPBELL: Like the Catholic Church, Greenpeace supports peasants and Indians building small, sustainable farms in the Amazon but it believes the huge areas being cleared by rich farmers – often with the blessing of corrupt officials – are destroying the forest.

In just three decades, 15% of the Amazon has been cleared, an area of devastation the size of France.

CARLOS RITTL: They don’t respect anything - not even the streams. They should keep at least 30 metres each side of the streams. They deforest everything.

CAMPBELL: But big cattle farmers like Alberto Cesario bristle at suggestions they’ve vandalised the land. He sees himself as a pioneer, opening up a region he loves for the benefit of Brazil.

ALBERTO CESARIO: It’s a spectacular climate. You can produce a lot and it’s a good business. The Brazilians need this region to survive, particularly the families who came here.

CAMPBELL: Mr Cesario represents the ranchers who Sister Leonora accuses of stealing the peasants’ land. He admits that Black Hat is part of his group but denies they’ve made any threats.

ALBERTO CESARIO: I know Black Hat – his name is part of the region’s folklore but he doesn’t wear the black hat anymore. He’s a very good farmer, he produces a lot. In addition, he didn’t threaten the nun but he himself was shot and the orders were given by the nun and her landless people.

CAMPBELL: We caught up with Black Hat in the nearby town of Peixoto de Azevedo. It’s a frontier truck stop and a former gold mine where men have long meted out their own form of rough justice. Many are believed to be “pistoleiros” – hired gunmen for the local ranchers. Black Hat, whose real name is Sebastiao Neves de Almeida is one of the town’s most notorious residents. He once spent two years on the run after police charged him with keeping slaves on his ranch. He told us the landless peasants were telling lies about him because of his reputation.

BLACK HAT: No… no… I don’t even know them well, but I had a problem with Federal Justice – they put me on a list of people who had slaves. That’s when the nun brought the landless people to this region.

CAMPBELL: In the camp, they tell a different story.

MALE PEASANT: I was at the back door of my hut when a car with Black Hat and a local city councillor arrived. They stopped the car and said we’re going to come here, and we’re going to expel everyone. You’d better be careful when you’re going into the town. Be very careful.

CAMPBELL: Sister Leonora claims local police have refused to investigate the threats. Federal Police accompany her when she visits the camp but she’s turned down an offer of full time protection until the landless people are given the same guarantee. Instead, she tries to stay one step ahead of the gunmen, only visiting her house to pray and pick up clothes.

SISTER LEONORA: We’re here because of a cry from the peasants who have no-one on their side. The Gospel tells us that Jesus attended to the ones who were crying out. So I’m here working and helping these people and this is the threat to the big fish.

CAMPBELL: Ever since the roads were built in the 1970s, they’ve spread development and bloodshed. We travelled hundreds of kilometres along the main Amazon Highway, BR-163. It’s little more than a muddy, dirt track. There aren’t even bridges over the rivers that criss-cross the region. Every car and truck has to be shipped across by barge but as primitive as this road is, it’s already changed the Amazon forever. Every few kilometres there were more dirt roads leading off to more cleared areas and more farms.

Every town had timber mills sawing up the remains of rainforest and almost every town had landless peasants living in fear.

At Anapu near the Amazon River, we found a community in mourning for a murdered American nun. Sister Dorothy Stang was shot dead a year earlier on the orders of a local rancher. She too had been helping the landless to build up small sustainable farms. At this memorial service, they tried to celebrate her achievements and hope her work would not be in vain but others have since received death threats, including the town Priest, Father Jose Amaro. He told us he felt no comfort from the strong police presence outside the church.

FATHER AMARO: People feel insecure. God forbid if you have to trust the police. The State Police come here to oppress the workers. These people denied security for Dorothy and denied security for the workers and today the same police are investigating the case. So who can we trust? In God!

CAMPBELL: To show just how little protection they have, Father Amaro led a graphic demonstration in a field beside Dorothy Stang’s grave. They planted a white cross for each person killed in land conflicts here. Few of their murderers have ever been gaoled. The 68 red crosses represent the number now living under threat of death.

FATHER AMARO: [To gathering] Will things always be the same or are more people going to die? Dorothy gave her life, and others had to die. Comrades who could have been with us now are in hiding as if they were thieves. It’s shameful for us.

CAMPBELL: The Federal politician trying to sort out the mess knows only too well the terror facing such communities. Marina Silva was born in a poor Amazon village and raised by nuns. She became a green activist, working with the Union leader Chico Mendes when he was murdered for defending rural workers in 1988.

MARINA SILVA: We knew each other since I was seventeen. The violence against him was a violence against what we were working for.

CAMPBELL: In 2003, she was appointed Minister for the Environment in the new left wing government of President Lula. She insists progress is being made.

MARINA SILVA: I feel at ease to say that we’re making structural changes. It’s just like doing basic sewerage – you can’t see it, and people don’t see it immediately but it makes a huge difference in the end. We’re doing things that will be written in the history of environmental policies in Brazil.

CAMPBELL: But the slow pace of change has frustrated her former colleagues.

FATHER AMARO: The problems haven’t been solved because the Minister is the head, but the body is rotten. The Minister has good will but when the government budget comes, the scum is inside and they don’t let her work.

CAMPBELL: The community fears it’s now facing an even bigger wave of land grabs. The Federal Government has approved plans to upgrade the main road BR-163, making it the first paved highway through the Amazon. For truck drivers like Mario Manioto, it’s long overdue.

MARIO MANIOTO: The state of the road is precarious. It’s very dangerous – we have many problems. Last night we were bogged and we were stuck there all night. People have a lot of problems.

CAMPBELL: In the wet season, it can take him several weeks to drive the often impassable dirt track to the Amazon River port of Santarem. Sometimes he has to literally dig his way through. Now the sheer difficulty of transporting goods has been a stop on the rapacious development of the Amazon, but when the highway’s paved, the journey will take just hours. It will be an “el Dorado” for export and some fear, it will spend the end of the Amazon heartland.

Even the announcement the road will be paved caused a frenzy of land clearing as developers rushed in to claim land beside the highway. The Federal Government estimates deforestation rose 500%. Environmentalists claim it will explode once the road is paved.

CARLOS RITTL: If the government doesn’t take control of the area, this will be an absolute disaster for the region, for the community - for everybody. Everybody will lose.

CAMPBELL: The project has powerful backers. One of Brazil’s biggest and potentially richest industries is soy farming, producing cheap cattle feed for European markets. A fast and cheap export route would allow Brazilian farmers to compete with soy producers in the US. Big farmers like Carlos Prevadello insist it’s essential to revive Brazil’s exports.

CARLOS PREVADELLO: If the Brazilian government subsidised us in a few years the Brazilian harvest would beat world records because we still have many millions of hectares to be cleared and explored.

CAMPBELL: There’s no doubt Brazil needs development. The problem is how it’s carried out in a region where corruption is endemic and many politicians are themselves big developers. The State Governor, Blairo Maggi, is also the world’s single biggest soy producer. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

CARLOS RITTL: Since he was elected Governor of Matto Grosso the deforestation of this State increased a lot. From 2003 to 2004 we had more than one million hectares of forest destroyed in Matto Grosso state - and he wants to have more soy.

CAMPBELL: Marina Silva has been caught between this strong agricultural lobby and a vocal campaign by environmentalists. She’s proposed creating 15 million hectares of reserve land along the highway to stop more clearing and to crack down on the violence that’s claimed so many victims.

MARINA SILVA: If the highway is made according to plan, the communities will be strengthened as they’ll have better access to goods and services. And their areas will also be protected because they’ve already been set aside by the President.

CAMPBELL: But time is running out in communities like this landless camp where Sister Leonora continues to urge them to keep the faith.

MALE PEASANT: The poor guy was killed over there. Who knows who killed him?

SISTER LEONORA: Do you think I have the courage to take a bus on my own?

MALE PEASANT: For you it’s even worse, Sister. You’re worse off because you go all around Brazil. These poor guys have to go around unarmed.

CAMPBELL: Few can see an end to this long running war in which the rule of the gun has always been stronger than the rule of law. They came here to build new lives for their families but their hopes have been cut down with the forest around them.