Corporate (Il)legal Enclosures: How Fraudulent Land Titles Override Community Rights in Forestry Land Conflicts in Bahia, Brazil

This article examines the ethical and legal dimensions of corporate land grabbing in Bahia, Brazil, focusing on the forestry sector’s use of fraud, legal manipulation, and violence to acquire land. Through a case study of Veracel Celulose, a joint venture between the Swedish-Finnish corporation Stora Enso and the Brazilian company Suzano, we analyze how corporations exploit legal ambiguity and manipulate land registries to dispossess local populations. Drawing on archival data from federal and state land governance institutions, we develop the concept of corporate (il)legal enclosure, defined as the process through which corporations transform contested, public, or informally held land into de facto corporate property by mobilizing intertwined legal and illegal practices that exclude local populations from access, use, and control over land. Our findings show how title forgery, cadastral manipulation, administrative procedures, and legal regularization operate together to convert fraudulent land claims into seemingly legitimate corporate property. We demonstrate that land grabbing increasingly occurs not only through violence or outright illegality, but through the strategic mobilization of legal and bureaucratic institutions that render dispossession lawful in practice. By integrating insights from agrarian studies, sociolegal scholarship, and business ethics, the article advances a contextually grounded understanding of land-based injustice and challenges compliance-oriented approaches to business ethics. In doing so, it highlights the need for business ethics scholarship to engage more directly with the role of law in enabling and legitimizing corporate dispossession.