Elsewhere, most deforestation is for cattle pasture.
"This is Chico's legacy," said Gomercindo. "The extractive reserves have meant the preservation of the forest – all around it has been destroyed for cattle pasture.
Last year, with the involvement of local conservationist groups, we helped purchase about 270 acres of cattle pasture that separated two patches of their habitat.
All across the Brazilian Amazon, the jungle is being razed for cattle pasture, crops, logging, highways and human settlements at an increasingly faster rate, contributing to fears that the climate balance here may soon be permanently tipped.
The Liberal National opposition defended the level of clearing by farmers – 91% of which was for cattle pasture – saying it had reached a similar level of 261,000 hectares in the final year under Labor's previous restrictions.
Yet the skies south of here are already thick with smoke as big landowners set the jungle ablaze to clear the way for cattle pasture and lucrative crops like soybeans.
During the mid 1980s the country was engaged in mass deforestation but then took the historic step of seeing its forests as worth more intact than when converted to cattle pasture.
"If the concessions didn't exist, the zone would be one big cattle pasture," said Wilson Martínez, the forest manager for Yaloch, a concession area near the border with Belize.
Soon the way became time, and we were still drifting, fresh from the worst slaughter, drifting west and west and west to a party in a cattle pasture, the cattle vaguely suspect.
The agreement, signed by meatpacking companies JBS-Friboi, Minerva, Marfrig and Bertin, imposed a moratorium on buying cattle linked to deforestation in Brazil, where nearly two-thirds of deforested land is used as cattle pasture.
The black and gray species, however, number fewer than 1,500 each; the gray is protected, but the black is hunted, and its habitat is being deforested to provide cattle pasture.
