Green (Blog about energy and the environmental  of The New York Times By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

After the murder of several activists in the Amazon rain forest, Brazilian officials have pledged to boost the presence of federal law enforcement in the region and to open several offices devoted to resolving the land disputes behind the violence.

Last Tuesday, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva, a forest conservationist, and his wife, Maria, were gunned down in the northern state of Pará. On Friday, Adelino Ramos, a well-known peasant advocate, was shot dead in the western Amazon state of Rondônia. The local police said on Monday that a suspect in Mr. Ramos’s killing was in custody.

A man who may have witnessed the shooting of Mr. da Silva and his wife was also murdered on Sunday in Pará, the local news media reported. No arrests have been made in the couple’s killing.

Federal officials, led by Brazil’s vice president, Michel Temer, held an emergency meeting on Monday to discuss the violence and announced afterward that additional resources would be devoted to protecting activists and settling land conflicts in the Amazon.

“Crimes like these cannot become a routine practice in our country,” Maria do Rosário Nunes, the country’s human rights minister, said in a statement.

The Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic agency that tracks rural violence in Brazil, said that the names of Mr. Ramos as well as Mr. da Silva and his wife had appeared on a list of advocates and workers who had received death threats in recent years.

The commission has given the federal authorities a list of more than 1,800 people in the Amazon who have received credible death threats over land disputes since 2001. Dozens on the list have been killed, while many others have survived attempted assassination or suffered physical harm, the group said.

Luiz Paulo Barreto, Brazil’s justice minister, vowed to analyze the list and to boost protection efforts by the national police. Federal investigators are already investigating the recent crimes, as local courts and police forces are widely considered understaffed, ineffective and rife with corruption.

The government also plans to open two federal environmental offices in the areas of conflict to help resolve land disputes, officials said.

“The federal government will not hold back on efforts to bring peace to the region,” Mr. Barreto said at a news conference.

The slayings have drawn attention to the violence and lawlessness still common throughout Brazil’s remotest states, even as the country seeks greater prominence and respect on the global stage.

“This makes the Brazilian authorities very nervous,” Paulo Adario, Amazon campaign director for Greenpeace, said of the violence. “It’s very bad news for everybody.”

“Brazil still has a lot of work to do to become a superpower,” he added. “One of these tasks is to really solve the land conflict issue.”

More than 1,000 environmental activists, religious workers, organizers and rural workers have been murdered in the Amazon in the last 20 years, but successful prosecutions of those who order the killings are virtually nonexistent, according to watchdog groups.

The violence is closely linked to deforestation and land-use conflicts, with smallhold farmers and indigenous people reliant on the forest for survival pitted against loggers and agricultural interests eager to extract valuable timber or clear the forest and convert it to farmland.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has ebbed significantly in recent years due to better monitoring by the federal authorities and a series of major sting operations against illegal loggers.

But the recent murders coincide with a sharp uptick in illegal logging, with satellite measurement in March and April revealing that loss of forest cover had jumped nearly six-fold since last year.

In response, Brazil’s environment ministry formed a crisis center in late May to combat the surge in deforestation.