The municipality of São Félix de Xingu, population 60,000, is located in the northern state of Pará. Despite its modest population size, the city extends over 84,600 square kilometers, a space fifty-six times larger that the city
of São Paulo, where ten million people live. For this reason, it’s the second largest municipality in Brazil. There are often conflicts dealing with land ownership, and the municipality has the highest number of land conflict-related homicides in the country. It has the largest number of cattle in Brazil, with 1.7 million heads of cattle reported in 2007, a significant leap from 680,000 in 2000.

As a direct consequence of the main industry, São Félix de Xingu is Brazil’s #1 site of forest destruction. It has been at the top of the list of Brazilian municipalities with the most deforestation, both this year and for the past seven years. In its forty-seven years of existence, the city’s residents have destroyed 15,000 square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest. That’s slightly less than the size of the Netherlands and ten times the size of São Paulo.

Ranchers in the area complain that the government has made it too difficult to receive legal permits to clear the land for cattle, and that the trip to Belém, the state capital where such permits are given, is  too far — 1,000 kilometers away. As a result, most of the forest destruction has been done so illegally.

Despite the enormous wealth produced by the cattle industry, the municipality still seems to be in another century: the city streets are made of mud, with no sidewalks, and the city is made up of small, dusty, hovel-like buildings.

Time will tell to see if São Félix do Xingu makes it to the top of the deforestation list once again in 2008.