Brazil’s corporate expansion into Venezuela’s extractive economy deepens regional dependency on fossil-fuelled agroindustry and arms trade
Original framing: “JBS, Embraer Courted in Venezuela as Brazil Seeks New Ties” — Bloomberg
Satellite data shows deforestation in Venezuela’s Amazon surged 43% in 2024, linked to mining and agribusiness expansion, with JBS-linked supply chains implicated in illegal land clearing. Embraer’s aircraft, meanwhile, are used in military operations against Indigenous land defenders in Brazil’s Cerrado, per reports from the Pastoral Land Commission. The ‘renewal’ narrative ignores the carbon debt of this expansion: Brazil’s agribusiness sector is the world’s largest emitter of methane from livestock, a critical feedback loop in climate breakdown.
The corporate courtship between JBS, Embraer, and Venezuela is a microcosm of a hemispheric pattern: agribusiness and arms firms, backed by financial elites and sanctioned by geopolitical power structures, are exploiting Venezuela’s crisis to deepen extractive dependencies that mirror colonial-era resource plunder.
This expansion is not merely economic but ontological, pitting a worldview that treats land as kin against one that reduces it to collateral for debt and profit. The historical debt of Brazil’s agribusiness to slave labor and land theft, combined with the ecological collapse in Venezuela’s Amazon, reveals a shared trajectory of ecological and social unraveling. Yet Indigenous resistance—from the Pemon’s legal victories to the MST’s agroecological experiments—offers a path to reweave these landscapes as living systems, not sacrifice zones. The solution pathways must center these knowledges, using debt, trade, and corporate accountability as levers to dismantle the extractive machinery, while ensuring that those who have long defended the land are the ones to steward its future.