On June 12, 2025, Everton Lopes Rodrigues was found beheaded in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil. An Indigenous Avá Guarani, Rodrigues was the 21-year-old son of the chief of the Yvyju Avary Indigenous village, and next to his body was a letter, left by his killers, containing “serious threats” against Indigenous communities.
Marcelo “Ku’i” Ortiz, a 33-year-old man, also an Avá Guarani, faced the same brutal violence a few months prior. His severed head was placed on a spike.
These were two of 26 killings related to land conflicts recorded in 2025 in Brazil, according to a new report by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a nonprofit affiliated with the Catholic Church. Seven of the victims were Indigenous; another 10 were landless rural workers.
“Extreme violence in rural areas doesn’t happen randomly. It follows relatively well-defined patterns,” report co-author Claudio Lopes Maia wrote. “Murder has turned into an instrument of conflict “resolution” in certain territories.”
The number of killings in 2025 is double the 13 recorded in 2024. According to the report, 2025 was “one of the most violent years of the last decade.” CPT logged an additional 66 murder attempts and 105 death threats in 2025.
Most of the killings, 62%, took place in the Brazilian Amazon. Pará and Rondônia states, which have some of the Brazil’s highest rates of deforestation, also recorded the most killings: seven each. These included two massacres, defined as three or more people killed on the same date in the same place.
One of these massacres took place in Rondônia’s Vilhena municipality. In June 2025, assailants set on fire the home of Josenir Vieira de Oliveira, the president of a local smallholders’ association. He and two relatives, Alex de Oliveira and Luciana Cristiano de Souza, died in the blaze.
A few months earlier, Oliveira had reached out to a local councilman to report that a group of landgrabbers had invaded part of their land and was threatening them, according to CPT. Before his death, Oliveira reportedly quit as president of the association due to threats on his life.
In another case, in January 2025, a farmer fired three shots at landless settler Francisco “Cafu” do Nascimento de Melo, in Boca do Acre municipality, Acre state, killing him on the spot.
Neighbors told a local news outlet that the farmer had previously threatened several families in the region. “This case had a huge local repercussion, as the victim, Cafu, was very well liked by his community,” local police said. The farmer was arrested for murder.
Farmers carried out 77% of the land conflict killings recorded in 2025, either directly or through hired assassins, according to CPT.
Banner image: Munition on the ground of the Guasu Guavira Indigenous territory in Paraná, southern Brazil. Image courtesy of the Avá Guarani people/CIMI.
