I lived in Brazil's capital, Brasília, for many years. Illegal land grabs were very, very common there. This wasn't in the jungle. This was a modern city, and there were as many middle class and upper middle class land grabbers as poor ones. This infuriated me. Since the upper middle class neighborhoods were becoming too expensive to buy into, rich people simply invaded protected land and started building there. Or owners of large farmland transformed the land into urban plots and sold the plots illegally, mostly to rich middle and upper middle class people. And everyone knew it was illegal. Everyone. Still to this day, a decade later, I still know people who have very nice homes in very nice neighborhoods, and they still don't have an official, legal land title. They have some semi-bogus, semi-official 'land use' sort of document, and they can't legalize it, and it is all a complicated legal mess, but hey, they got to buy very cheap land and live the middle class dream, right? Who cares if it was illegal, who cares if it the land was supposed to be preserved. And these are the same people who complain that we have corrupt politicians. Really, these are the same people. Everyone in Brazil blames our problems on corrupt politicians, but everyone pulls this kind of 'semi-legal' crap. That's why Brazil sucks. Too bad it's very, very good also.