Beatriz¹1 Name changed. Names used are pseudonyms to protect the identities of those interviewed.View all notes was born in 1939 near Ituberá, a small town on the southern coast of Bahia, Brazil. A proud Afro-Brazilian, she grew up with her parents in the hills and forests west of town. Beatriz’s parents had moved to these hills in search of a way of life away from the hardships of plantation labor. They were known as posseiros, a term that translates roughly as “squatters,” who made their living from foraging, hunting, and cultivating clearings in the forest. They eventually settled on a bit of land where they mostly planted manioc gardens, but Beatriz also remembers small groves of cacao, coffee, and orange trees that her father planted and maintained. She married around 1955, at 16 years old, and left her family to live in town with her first husband. The next time Beatriz returned to visit her family in the hills, the timber company called the Industrial and Commercial Corporation of Ituberá (SAICI) had already seized control of their land.

SAICI was a business venture founded by the late Norberto Odebrecht (1920-2014) in the early 1950s. Odebrecht’s arrival in Ituberá at this time inaugurated a protracted land grab between the 1950s and 1970s as posseiro families like Beatriz’s were evicted from public lands that Odebrecht enclosed for himself. This long episode of dispossession was marked by violence, burning houses, and tears as Beatriz’s family, along with many dozens of other posseiro families who made their living in the hills, were left landless and dispirited. In their place, the region became a site for investment in expansive rubber and cacao plantations that were established over the course of the 1950s through the 1970s. After Beatriz’s parents lost their land, their children were forced to turn to plantation labor. The next 30 years of Beatriz’s life would be spent working on the region’s plantations.

The new generation of plantation laborers created by these dispossessions experienced a significant turn of fate in the early 1990s, as the region’s cacao plantations were devastated by a new fungal disease that ruined harvests and a national economy in crisis. Together, these factors led to mass layoffs as many plantations were reduced to bankruptcy. In Ituberá, unemployed plantation laborers joined together to occupy the lands of several declining or abandoned plantations. One of these plantations contains the site where Beatriz’s parents used to cultivate their manioc gardens and orchards. By the end of the 1990s, a squatter organization had reclaimed this area as part of a larger settlement called Sapucaia, where Beatriz and her second husband own a small plot of land today.

Norberto Odebrecht was not the only person involved in or who benefitted from the land grab that occurred in Ituberá after the 1950s. His business interests were intimately bound up with patronage networks involving the interests of local bureaucrats and even the patriarchs of some posseiro families facing dispossession. But many local people understand that Odebrecht played a key role in the land evictions that occurred after his arrival in the region. For those like Beatriz who still remember, the name “Odebrecht” is shorthand for dispossession and a forced return to plantation labor.

Odebrecht’s Fall and Operation Car Wash

In the decades following his early business ventures in southern Bahia, Norberto Odebrecht would build an international construction company that eventually operated out of several dozen countries. After decades as one of Latin America’s largest construction conglomerates and a powerful force in Brazilian public life, the Odebrecht Group has undergone a stunning decline. The fall of Odebrecht is perhaps unsurprising given that recent Brazilian history has left the names of few public figures unscathed. But for many rural people living near Ituberá, the public disgrace of the Odebrecht name has brought an unexpected moment of reckoning for those who lost their land.

When Brazil’s well-known criminal corruption investigations, Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) began in March 2014, Norberto’s company and family name quickly came under public scrutiny. By June 2015, Norberto’s grandson Marcelo Odebrecht (1968-), who became CEO of the Odebrecht Organization in 2008, was arrested and then sentenced to 19 years of prison in March 2016. Later that same year, Norberto’s son Emilio Odebrecht (1945-) reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors and was sentenced to four years’ house arrest. Norberto did not witness any of this unfold, however, as he passed away in July 2014, only a few months after Operation Car Wash began.

The Operation Car Wash investigations, under the leadership of the Brazilian federal judge, Sérgio Fernando Moro, began as a probe into Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras. Company leaders were accused of receiving bribes from subcontractor companies in exchange for lavish construction contracts. Operation Car Wash quickly evolved into an expansive criminal investigation that implicated not only Odebrecht but many other business people, organizations, and politicians.

During testimony in a U.S. federal court in December 2016, Emílio Odebrecht, Jr. described an expansive network of kickbacks and bribes through which the company had secured numerous building contracts throughout Brazil, Latin America, and other parts of the world. Under Marcelo Odebrecht’s leadership, Odebrecht had created an off-the-books unit called the “Division of Structured Operations,” or what one U.S. Justice Department official described as a “Department of Bribery.” The sole purpose of the division was to distribute bribes to government officials to rig the bidding for construction contracts. The division was established in 2006, but effectively began its maneuvers as early as 2001 by operating through numerous shell companies across multiple countries. As Operation Car Wash caught up with the division’s activities, Odebrecht eventually admitted to distributing approximately $788 million in bribes that would generate $3.3 billion in revenue for the company.

As a result of these investigations, innumerable Brazilian politicians—both beloved and despised, from right to left, and at all levels of government—have been implicated, investigated, prosecuted, or convicted for involvement in the corruption scandals. To date, Operation Car Wash has resulted in the convictions of more than 150 people. More than a quarter of Brazil’s 500-plus-member Congress are under investigation or have been convicted. Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s recently ousted president and member of the Workers’ Party, was quickly implicated in the Petrobras corruption scandal, as she was a member of Petrobras’ board of directors from 2003 and 2010. Rousseff denied knowledge of any wrongdoings, but may now face charges. At press time, Michel Temer, Rousseff’s usurper and Brazil’s current president, faced charges after prosecutors flipped Joesley Batista, former chairman of a global meat-packing company, who secretly recorded compromising conversations with Temer. In one of the most controversial rulings to date, Brazil’s beloved former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was recently convicted for receiving illegal gifts from a construction company in exchange for lucrative contracts. The alleged gift was an apartment valued at $690,000. As Lula eyes a third presidential term in the 2018 elections, the conviction is currently under appeal for lack of definitive evidence.

Public officials across Latin America and other parts of the world have been implicated in ongoing investigations that have spun off from investigations of the Odebrecht Organization. Odebrecht’s network of corruption appears to have been so extensive that it will probably take years to unravel and reckon with the full scope of its fallout.

Odebrecht’s Rise: From a Land Grab to a Multinational Firm

The first issue of the company magazine, Odebrecht Informa, published on October 20, 1973, describes Odebrecht as a “national company.” By this time, the Odebrecht name was becoming well-known in Brazil, taking shape in seaports, airports, stadiums, hydroelectric dams, and other construction projects that would eventually scatter across several continents. By the end of the 1960s, Odebrecht had expanded into the Brazilian northeast and southeast. In Rio de Janeiro, Odebrecht helped to build the Petrobras headquarters building and parts of the Galeão International Airport, among other projects. By the end of the 1970s, Odebrecht had secured its first international contracts in Peru and Chile.

The modern Odebrecht organization was built upon the ruins of Emílio Odebrecht, Sr.’s (1894-1962) construction company, which had operated throughout the Brazilian northeast before closing its doors during the Second World War. In 1944, Norberto Odebrecht, Emílio’s son, would inherit the organization and staff of his father’s company and establish his own construction company in Bahia’s capital city, Salvador. His father’s political and business connections in Salvador enabled the young Norberto to quickly make a name for himself, “earning solid prestige in the community, and in particular among cacao planters, business people and governors,” as described in the December 1983 issue of Odebrecht Informa.

Shortly after its founding in Salvador, the company undertook several ventures in Bahia’s Baixo Sul, a coastal region south of Salvador that encompasses municipalities of Ituberá, Camamu, and several others. The early history of Odebrecht’s activities is common knowledge in this part of southern Bahia, but it is not a story that is well known outside the region. A few issues of the company magazine offer retrospective accounts of the company’s early activities there, but details about these projects are schematic and scarce.

A circuitous series of events led Odebrecht to this region in the late 1940s, where he had secured contracts to build several sea ports in coastal towns, including a project to upgrade the old port in Ituberá, which was completed in 1949. According to the December 1983 issue of Odebrecht Informa, this was the moment when “Norberto Odebrecht confesses that he became enchanted with the riches and the beauty of the region.” A now-defunct company website described Odebrecht’s interest in the region with clearer intent: “An area rich in natural resources, including Pancada Grande Falls, a 63-meter-high waterfall on the Sirinhaém River, Ituberá was surrounded by dense tropical rainforest. It was an invitation to diversify the business by generating power and working with forest products.”

And diversify he did. From the early 1950s onward, Odebrecht began to accumulate significant capital from the region by extracting timber, speculating on land, and subsequently investing in rubber and cacao cultivation. What constituted “diversification” for Odebrecht, however, meant the end of a way of life for the rural families who lost their land and livelihood in the process. For those who live in Ituberá today, “Odebrecht” means much more than a fragmentary collection of buildings and structures, but a wholesale transformation of the region’s economy that many people associate with a golden age in Ituberá.

In the early 20^th century, Ituberá had largely languished at the edges of Bahia’s well-known cacao economy that centered on the towns of Ilhéus and Itabuna to the south. Prior to Odebrecht’s arrival, Ituberá was a quiet port town that exported foodstuff to Salvador, including harvests brought in from cacao towns to the west such as Gandu. The hills west of town, from Ituberá to Gandu, were occupied by posseiros. Many of these posseiros, like Beatriz, were descendants of freed or escaped slaves who had taken refuge in the region’s forests during the first decades of the 20th century. They lived from a mix of subsistence and market activities, from foraging and hunting in the forests to cultivating manioc gardens that would be processed into a coarse flour (farinha de mandioca) and sold in regional markets.

One decisive development in the interwar period was the construction of a new road between Ituberá and Gandu, inaugurated in 1935 by the Cacao Institute of Bahia. The new road replaced the old mule and footpaths that formerly connected the two towns, and opened the way for timber extraction and subsequent investment in plantation rubber. This road was part of a larger infrastructure-building project directed by the Cacao Institute, which resulted in 280 miles of new roads in Bahia’s cacao zone.

Shortly after finishing the port in Ituberá in 1949, Odebrecht founded the Industrial and Commercial Corporation of Ituberá (SAICI) and focused on extracting timber from forests that were made accessible by the new road. To supply energy for his timber mill, Odebrecht built a hydroelectric power plant at the local waterfall, Pancada Grande. Odebrecht also constructed an airstrip in town, contracting with a small air company from Salvador to make daily flights to Ituberá, and became involved in transporting fuels to supply the vehicles that began to operate in the region. At its height, SAICI may have employed nearly 1,000 people, and within several years’ time had cleared most of the old growth trees from the region’s forests.

Significant investment in plantation rubber followed timber extraction. As early as 1923, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had identified forests near Ituberá as a potential site for rubber cultivation, but they ruled it out given the area’s hilly landscape.

It was not until the 1950s that aspirations to cultivate rubber in the region could become a reality. Post-war efforts to boost natural rubber production in Brazil were part of a larger project both to diversify rubber imports beyond Southeast Asia and to meet growing demand for rubber products in Brazil, promoted in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In 1952, Brazil’s federal government put forward new legislation that would require international tire companies that operated in Brazil—including firms such as Firestone, Goodyear, Dunlop, and Pirelli—to invest in natural rubber cultivation itself rather than merely purchasing supplies from the extractivist rubber economies in the Amazon basin. The new road, along with the port, hydroelectric plant, and other infrastructure that Odebrecht helped to install, made Ituberá an ideal site for investment. In 1954, Firestone bought a 5,000-hectare property between the municipalities of Ituberá and Camamu, and began to clear the forest and plant new rubber groves.

Clearing the forest also meant clearing out its inhabitants.

In this period, other companies began to invest in the region, including Esso Standard Oil and the Brazilian firm Matarazzo, to cultivate palm oil. A federal land-colonization project, popularly referred to as the Colônia (Colony) was established in the 1950s, and administered by the National Institute of Immigration and Colonization (INIC), a precursor to Brazil’s federal land reform agency. The Colônia represented an early effort at agrarian reform, which settled migrants from several northern states (including Paraíba, Pernambuco, and Ceará) as well as a number of immigrant families from Japan. In addition to cultivating other cash crops, administrators of the Colônia also promoted rubber cultivation among the new settlers.

A man named Bernardo, who worked for Esso as a teenager, recalled in an interview that it was Odebrecht “who brought Esso, he was the one who brought the airport, he was the one who brought Firestone, and he was the one who brought Matarazzo.” He also added that as each firm arrived in the region, it was Odebrecht who “arranged land for Esso, arranged land for Matarazzo, arranged land for Firestone, and with those lands there he went enriching himself.”

As a former INIC administrator named Júlio explained in an interview, Odebrecht had secured title to a significant area of state-owned land: “[Odebrecht] was able to get this whole region—which was state land— and through the land commissioner, he measured an entire ocean of land and started to sell it and transfer [its] title,” he explained. “He first used the land for his sawmill … and then he sold to businesses looking to plant rubber.”

A posseiro named Alonso reflected that Odebrecht had “enclosed this area, he enclosed Ituberá into SAICI … He divided up the whole forest into lots, and sold those lots off to the plantation owners.” From the perspective of the posseiros, Odebrecht’s acquisition and resale of these lands was an act of theft.

Matarazzo’s palm oil venture eventually failed, and Esso later relocated its facilities to Ilhéus. But numerous Brazilian firms joined Firestone to invest in rubber cultivation in the 1960s and 1970s. These investors relied upon new financial incentives promoted by state and federal governments. The federal Superintendency of Rubber was created in 1967, which distributed rubber investment funds through several programs until the office shut down in the early 1980s. By the end of the 1970s, these investment activities had expanded into corridors of plantation rubber along the road that connected Ituberá with Camamu to the south and along the road that connected Ituberá with Gandu to the west. While the scale of Brazil’s plantation rubber economy would never compare with natural rubber production in Southeast Asia, Odebrecht had nonetheless left a tremendous and transformative mark on the region.

Development and Dispossession

To some, the emergence of this diversified regional economy represents a success story of rural development, rational land use, and the establishment of a robust labor market. Nowhere is this clearer than at the entrance to the plantation that Odebrecht kept for himself, in the hills between Ituberá and Camamu. There, one encounters a crude statue that pays homage to a man named Jeremias, who appears on horseback with a rifle strapped over his shoulder. The plaque beneath the statue characterizes him: “The man who didn’t talk. He made it happen,” and then proceeds with a vague account of Jeremias’ contribution to Odebrecht’s success in the region. The text concludes with a triumphant statement about how Jeremias helped to usher local municipalities onto “the road of communication, technology, and citizenship.”

In an interview, the real Jeremias explained that Odebrecht had recruited him from among local poor families in the town of Camamu sometime in the early 1960s. Jeremias knew the region’s forests well, and would come to play a pivotal role in Odebrecht’s efforts to acquire its timber, land, and other resources. In order to access these resources, most of Jeremias’ early efforts focused on evicting posseiro families from lands that would later be incorporated into the plantation that Odebrecht kept for himself, which was founded in 1965.

Jeremias and others who were involved in removing the posseiros from the land typically described the forests as empty and uninhabited. Whenever Jeremias mentioned the posseiros’ presence on the land in our interview, he characterized them in a way that implicitly justified their removal: “There wasn’t anyone here, there wasn’t anything … It was just pure forest,” he explained. “Sometimes you’d encounter a straw hut on the margins of the rivers, which belonged to people who didn’t like to work much. That was why all these lands here remained. The posseiros liked to fish and hunt. But producing, planting—that wasn’t really their thing.”

Jeremias failed to mention the orchards planted by people like Beatriz’s father, or the many small cacao groves that they took from the posseiros and later incorporated into Odebrecht’s own landholdings. Details such as these contradicted Jeremias’s narrative, and belied his claim that the posseiros were uninterested in planting or production. The posseiros were simply uninterested in planting and producing for the owners of a large latifundia.

From a legal standpoint, as Jeremias explained, the posseiros did not own the land. Indeed, the posseiros’ notions of property and land ownership were based upon actual spaces of cultivation and use. Few could muster documents that could demonstrate legal ownership of the land. Consequently, when Jeremias arrived, the posseiros had little legal recourse against their evictions. Jeremias explained that the posseiros could, however, claim legal ownership of any improvements they had made to the land, such as their houses, orchards, and any unharvested manioc gardens. Therefore, upon informing the posseiros that Odebrecht had acquired the lands upon which they resided, Jeremias offered meager compensation for whatever improvements the posseiros left behind. In exchange, the posseiros agreed to sign papers that would definitively divorce them from any claim to remain on the land. In the process, Jeremias helped to impose bureaucratic and legal forms of property over which local families could exert little control.

By all accounts, and with only a few exceptions, the vast majority of posseiro families simply ceded to the fate that was forced upon them. Most accepted the meager payouts, abandoned their land, and moved on to other horizons or into plantation labor. Very few families fought back, and those few that did would quickly find themselves surrounded by unfriendly neighboring plantations.

Jeremias was only one among many people who were directly involved in the posseiros’ dispossession. There are various accounts of how this occurred, but the stories share common features. The posseiros’ eviction did not occur all at once, but was a piecemeal process. In the 1950s, their dispossession began with prohibitions on the posseiros’ productive activities. Beatriz and others recalled that Odebrecht had hired “forest guards”— glorified pistoleiros (gunmen) as some described them— who patrolled the hills in the name of protecting the region’s timber resources for Odebrecht’s mills at SAICI. They prohibited families from collecting firewood in the forest, which they would use for cooking and other purposes. Others recalled that the guards prohibited the posseiros from clearing garden plots in the forest.

As rubber investors arrived in the region, repression of the posseiros’ productive activities transitioned into their outright eviction from the land. This began with Firestone in the mid-1950s, and continued into the 1960s and 1970s as other firms arrived in the region. The posseiros’ presence had not impeded timber extraction—and in some cases, may have helped to facilitate extraction by providing labor and local knowledge. But the rubber plantation economy required either their removal from the land or their conversion into wage laborers.

This second phase of eviction is captured in stories like that of a woman named Felícia, who moved to Ituberá with her parents at age 11 in 1944. Felícia said in an interview that she remembers hearing stories about posseiros’ homes being burned down. Fire was a powerful negotiating tool for recalcitrant posseiros who refused to sell their improvements and sign the necessary papers. Felícia recalled stories that used to circulate through town:

A man named Cezar, born in 1928 and migrated to Ituberá in 1955 to work at Firestone, recounted similar stories about the posseiros’ evictions: “You lived here in the forest, and Firestone encircled you. You were forced to leave the house you lived in. Oftentimes, they’d take the children out and set fire to the house.”

Odebrecht’s Legacy in Ituberá

Remnants of the posseiros’ lives are scattered about the hills west of Ituberá. The foundations of numerous old house sites can be found hidden away under cover of regrown forests. On one plantation, an abandoned posseiro cemetery persists among expansive groves of cacao and rubber. These graves are still surrounded by ornamental plants originally used to mark their location, which have proven resistant to decades of herbicides and other chemicals used on the plantations.

Odebrecht’s legacy likewise endures in Ituberá, where he remains an ambivalent and polarizing figure. From the standpoint of the region’s traditional elite, Odebrecht was an outsider who operated beyond their own patronage networks. From the standpoint of the region’s landless families, “Odebrecht” is synonymous with suffering. But Odebrecht is also admired by the many local people for whom Odebrecht brought employment in his business ventures over the decades, and whose good favor they sought to maintain. Jeremias described Odebrecht as a humble and hardworking man who maintained good relationships with his employees. He recalled that Odebrecht would visit worksites on a regular basis, and that he would bring food and drink to share with the workers: “He’d come at that scheduled time. He enjoyed bringing a roasted chicken, some beans … a little bit of Cinzano—a liter of Cinzano for more than 50 men. Well, he divided the chicken with the workers, they ate, and the workers were really excited,” he recounted in our conversation. Indeed, there is little evidence to suggest that Norberto personally mistreated his employees, or that he believed anything other than the idea that his own enrichment would simultaneously help to ‘develop’ the region and improve the lives of its inhabitants—including the posseiros whom his agents helped to dispossess.

During a phone call to Bahia earlier this year, I talked with a friend named Damião about the ongoing corruption scandals. Damião had spent 15 years laboring on Odebrecht’s planation, and I was curious to hear what he had to say about the ongoing corruption scandals. I suggested that Norberto Odebrecht must be rolling over in his grave, given what was happening to his family and company, but Damião interjected to say that he thinks that Odebrecht faked his own death. He pointed to the fact that there was never a wake held for Odebrecht in Ituberá. How could anyone be sure that he was really dead? Damião’s comment pointed to the outsized, almost superhuman role that Odebrecht played in Ituberá’s transformation—and a need for closure among some of its residents.

A Case for Reparations

The story of Odebrecht’s success, from early beginnings in Bahia to international expansion in the 1970s, is a familiar one. At least since Marx, we have understood that hard work is not all that it takes to succeed, for many fortunes are secretly built upon the ruined lives of others. And as Hegel also taught, the spirits of those injured lives live on in the stories they leave behind, which hang over and haunt those who have lived by the “illusion of trespass.”

The trespasses described above, from the dispossession of Beatriz’s family to the rigging of government contracts, are rather different in scope and scale. But they share this consequence in common: what was gained through trespass, and at the cost of others’ lives and livelihoods, has ended in self-ruin and a loss of public standing. To wit, the Odebrecht parent company has begun a concerted rebranding effort, purging the Odebrecht name from subsidiary companies with the exception thus far of the holding company itself. Odebrecht has not quite inflicted the punishment of damnatio memoriae upon itself—condemnation from all memory—but the name will likely be remembered in each and every way that Odebrecht the elder neither intended nor desired.

The Odebrecht organization has confessed its sins in court of law and is now making amends for its transgressions by paying reparations for damages it incurred to innumerable private and public interests throughout Brazil and Latin America. A U.S. judge recently ordered Odebrecht to pay fines of $93 million to the United States, $116 million to Switzerland, and an incredible $2.39 billion to Brazil. In separate plea deals, Odebrecht has also agreed to pay damages of $220 million to Panama and $184 million to the Dominican Republic. Earlier this year, the Peruvian government demanded $60 million in reparations. Odebrecht is still negotiating reparations with several other countries in Latin America.

The names of dispossessed posseiros, meanwhile, continue to haunt the Odebrecht name in southern Bahia. Nobody affiliated with any Odebrecht name or organization has ever publicly acknowledged the damage that Norberto Odebrecht and others caused to the lives of the families living in the hills west of Ituberá. The land occupations of the 1990s returned some of the land to those from whom it had been taken as well as to many who toiled on the plantations that emerged in the land grab’s aftermath. Odebrecht’s own plantation still operates in the region.

Friends in the region tell me, however, that many laborers have been laid off from work on Odebrecht’s plantation as Brazil’s economic crisis persists. They say that significant areas of the plantation are in a state of abandon. The poor cacao harvests of the past two years, in part the result of unusually low rainfall, have only made the situation worse.

As Odebrecht continues to make amends with the Brazilian and global public, perhaps this is also the moment to consider reparations for those residents of Ituberá who were dispossessed by Odebrecht and his agents after the 1950s. Some former laborers on Odebrecht’s plantation recently suggested in conversations that a true act of good faith on the path toward forgiveness would be for Odebrecht to divide up its plantation and to turn the land over to the region’s landless families. Beatriz agreed: “It would be good if he divided it up because each would return to what is theirs … But tomorrow—in four, five, six years, another group would come take it away again. You don’t think it’ll be this way until the end?”