It’s moving fast. It’s not just a ground fire. It’s reaching up into the canopy here, too, and just scorching everything. Is this the usual amount of fire that you see? Are you worried about the illicit activity that happens here? Pará, Brazil. Parts of the rainforest in this region have lost so much tree cover it hardly looks like the Amazon. I’m on a highway called the BR-163. In August, this corridor for soy and beef exports lit up like an inferno. Many of the fires were started on protected lands on a single day, a so-called Day of Fire. So, I take the highway here to a protected reserve that saw major burning on that day. It’s called the Jamanxim National Forest. This year, the Jamanxim lost over 45 square miles of tree cover. That’s an area twice the size of Manhattan. It’s the worst deforestation of all protected areas in Brazil. But many people who live here see this as progress. And it has a lot to do with beef. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef. About half of the cattle are raised on pasture that used to be rainforest. And demand is growing. I’m visiting an annual barbecue and auction near the Jamanxim. But it’s not your typical backyard get-together. Some landowners and ranchers here brazenly defy environmental laws. Last year, a government report linked this man, a union leader, to land-grabbing schemes. This woman, head of a national association, was fined for burning 350 acres of rainforest. This man, a local mayor, was caught destroying over 700 acres of virgin rainforest inside the Jamanxim reserve. They all deny wrongdoing. What producers here want is to privatize the reserves, and there’s hostility here towards anyone who tries to stop them. The producers are petitioning an important government official, Nabhan Garcia, appointed by President Bolsonaro to open up the Amazon for development. There’s no question which side Mr. Garcia’s on. He’s a rancher and farmer himself. According to your own government studies, many of the people in some of these protected areas came in after the park was created. They’re in there illegally according to your own government standards right now. Part of the reason we’re here is because of all the fires, right? To be clear, deforesting land without authorization is illegal in Brazil. It’s seized land that’s logged, burned and converted, mostly for grazing. We’re talking millions of acres, billions of dollars and a web of criminal activity. But at the core of the issue is what turns out to be a pretty complicated question. Who does all this land belong to? I catch up with Luiz Helfenstein, who I’d met at the barbecue. His ranch is right at the edge of the Jamanxim National Forest. He considers himself one of the pioneers here. When you started, is this the first settlement that you built? Luiz came here back in the ’80s. He was handed 4,000 acres of rainforest, part of a government plan to develop the Amazon. That’s the BR-163. November 1994. Then the political winds shifted and preservation became the priority. In 2006, the government established the Jamanxim National Forest, taking back most of the land previously given to Luiz and other producers. They felt cheated, and some have responded by grabbing and burning protected land. I take a ride with Agamenon da Silva Menezes. Is this your car? He’s the head of a union for ranchers out here. Was the Day of Fire an example of that disobedience? But satellite data confirms there was an unusual spike in the number of fires on Aug. 10. Local reporters wrote about this so-called Day of Fire, exposing a coordinated plan among ranchers and land-grabbers to burn newly cleared forest. One of those reporters, Adecio Piran, soon found his face on a wanted poster. Did you ever receive death threats or threats to your personal safety? That type of intimidation helps explain how so much criminal activity can go unpunished. Last year, 30 environmental activists were murdered in Brazil. I follow a group of firefighters with one of Brazil’s environmental agencies into a biological reserve. The agency has been attacked by locals and their authority undermined by Bolsonaro’s government. None of the men will speak on the record. So this is what the effort to protect the forest here now looks like: a handful of men carving control lines and putting out brush fires with a leaf blower. It takes a bird’s-eye view to capture the magnitude of what they’re up against. This fire is nearly four miles long. According to Brazilian satellites, more than a soccer field worth of rainforest is cleared every minute. I’m back on the road, driving off federal land, when I see these two trucks. They pull on to the BR-163 highway with loads of fresh logs.