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It’s 9am and the sun is already high above a parched Amazon. Not even stray dogs are out on the asphalt in Paragominas today, but Adnan Demachki knows just the retreat. Turning right off state highway PA-125, the former mayor and native of this restless frontier town of 105,000 people in northern Brazil pulls up to the municipal park a five-minute drive from the town centre.
Inside, a shaded boardwalk winds through the forest to a green-hued lake complete with lily pads and a sculpted serpent rising from the waters. Macaws squawk in the canopy near a soaring sumaúma tree, the giant of the rainforest.
Recently, the optics in the world’s largest river basin have turned ugly. Months of high temperatures and severe drought have turned vast swaths of rainforest into tinder. By November, towns across the tropical biome were still veiled in smoke and soot – an environmental calamity with continent-wide knock-on effects and scant relief forecast from a mild rainy season.
But Paragominas has escaped the worst of the rainforest’s climate-crisis events. Even as seasonal burnings ravaged its neighbours, this fast-growing town in Pará state remained comparatively unscathed by wildfires. The soot and ash darkening the city skyline late this year was mostly secondhand smoke blown in from blazes elsewhere.
In a region battered by predatory logging and ranching, this city stands out. More than resilience, Paragominas is the story of a reversal of fortune, as compelling as it is unlikely.
Not long ago, this was a boomtown with ruthless ambitions. Throughout the 2000s, Brazilian rainforests were being razed at a record pace, prompting international outcry and a federal crackdown. Miscreant municipalities were fined and collectively barred from taking farm loans.
With its forest-gobbling ranchers, bootleg loggers and dodgy sawmill operators, this sprawling township the size of Israel was a big red flag. Environmentalists railed; investors kept their distance.
“We weren’t the worst offender, but we were the best-known municipality on the blacklist,” says Demachki.
On Demachki’s watch, which ran up to 2012, the town banned slash-and-burn farming, shut down predatory logging and morphed into that rare thing in Amazonia: a frontier community that conserved as it grew.
Rainforest scholars, as well as green groups and federal policymakers at Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural research centre, now describe the township as an exemplar of sustainable management, selected among 470 municipalities to represent Brazil at Cop28 in Dubai, and Cop29 in Baku as an example of environmental good practice.
“For decades, Paragominas was one of the Amazon’s epicentres of deforestation and timber extraction. That changed in 2008, with the municipal environmental pact, which reduced deforestation by 80%,” says Beto Veríssimo, co-founder of Imazon, a rainforest-based thinktank. “Controlling deforestation turned the township into a magnet for investment and economic growth.”
In 2008, Paragominas was a pariah. To bring its people on board, Demachki convened civic groups, businesses, labour unions, religious leaders and farmers for an emergency summit. He concluded that Brazilian politics did not offer a solution.
So Demachki, a lawyer, resorted to the only strategy he knew: he talked. He argued his case, he listened, and he brokered a deal. After a tense four-hour meeting, people in the town agreed to transform Paragominas into a “green municipality”, a first for Amazonia.
Signed on 28 February 2008, the pact pledged to end illegal deforestation by 2010, replant forests and put conservation on the school curriculum. Landowners were obliged to declare their holdings with digital coordinates on a geo-referenced property registry, giving inspectors a drone’s view of the countryside.
By 2010, 80% of landholders had complied, two years before the registry became national law. Today, compliance has reached 97%, with a third of rural properties verified by inspectors, compared with just 1.4% of validation nationwide.
The municipality fined environmental violators, closed unofficial sawmills and banned smelters of pig-iron from stoking their charcoal kilns with wood from the rainforest. “The smoke stung your eyes. You could barely breathe,” Demachki says.
The campaign earned him national headlines, a landslide re-election victory – and a mutiny among ranchers, millers and loggers.
On 15 November 2008, federal inspectors seized 14 trucks carrying lumber poached from Indigenous lands and claimed a victory for the rule of law. The haul was stored at the municipal park, which doubled as local offices for the Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), Brazil’s national environmental authority.
A week later a mob attacked the park grounds, torched Ibama’s offices and hijacked the trucks with the confiscated hardwood. With the town in turmoil, an executive order was out of the question, so Demachki suggested the signatories to the deforestation pact reconvene. “Any decision had to be by community consensus,” he says.
He arrived at the meeting hall with two letters. In one, he apologised to the nation for the mayhem, then implored the people of the town to renew their commitment to keep Paragominas green; the other was his resignation. Then he waited.
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As it happened, Paragominas’s path to ignominy stretched back much further. Year zero was 1959, when the then president, Juscelino Kubitschek, climbed on to a bulldozer and toppled a great jatobá tree, symbolically clearing the way for a new Amazon highway. His declared mission was to “rip open” the rainforest”.
For Kubitschek, this was also personal. Days earlier, his engineer envoy to the highway project, Bernardo Sayão, had been crushed to death by a falling tree in a botched forest clearance. “The jungle was the enemy; that was the view at the time,” says Demachki.
Founded a few miles from the highway, Paragominas – a portmanteau for Pará, Goiás and Minas Gerais, the home states of most migrants to the area – quickly became home to pioneers, adventurers, farmers and outlaws. Land-grabbing and shootouts were so commonplace that the town was nicknamed “Paragobala” (Paragobullet).
Fraudulent property titles flooded the market, thanks to a class of con artists known as grileiros – after the popular ruse of “antiquing” deeds by sealing them in a box full of grilos (crickets in Portuguese).
Yet by the turn of the century, Paragominas had reached a turning point. Demachki’s town hall brinkmanship paid off and the municipality doubled down on its green commitments. Demachki tore up his resignation letter and launched his second mayoral term.
The sky-palling charcoal kilns are gone now. The only sawmills still in business harvest timber from replanted forests. If once farmers claimed the right to raze the rainforest, now all the buzz is about sustainable farming, climate-friendly ranching, and environmental services.
There have been setbacks: clear-cutting spiked in 2022, the last year under the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, which landed Paragominas back on Brazil’s environmental watchlist. The city later traced the surge in felling to permits issued by state and federal authorities, then quickly flagged and punished the transgressors.
“Amazon municipalities often pay the price for environmental decisions made higher up,” says Amanda Oliveira, a former municipal environment secretary.
Nonetheless, forests cover 67% of the municipality today, slightly more than 15 years ago – a laudable result as unchecked destruction risked degrading the rainforest into savannah. “Paragominas transformed from one of the country’s worst forest predators to one of the leaders of environmental governance in the Amazon,” says Tasso Azevedo, a forestry expert and former director general of the Brazilian Forest Service.
In 2023, Paragominas earned the 80th-highest score on the environment index of 5,570 townships nationwide. Income by head has more than doubled since 2010, and primary school test scores are up 60% since 2007.
Steep challenges remain. Although “Paragobullets” is yesterday’s joke, officials recorded 49.3 homicides for every 100,000 people in 2022, Brazil’s 33rd deadliest municipality. Nearly nine in 10 homes lack access to sewage treatment, and Paragominas ranked a modest 213 on Amazon’s 772-town social progress index, a proxy metric for overall wellbeing.
That does not seem to intimidate Demachki since he has discovered the path to change. “Decrees don’t work,” he says. “There’s no substitute for sitting down and thrashing out your differences.”
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This story was produced with support from the Rainforest Journalism Fund in partnership with the Pulitzer Center
