Created by federal decree in June 1988, the Bom Futuro National Forest originally encompassed an estimated 280,000 hectares in the municipalities of Buritis and Porto Velho. As recently as 1995 it was relatively intact. The original vegetation was a layered mosaic: open submontane rainforest and dense submontane rainforest formed the core, with savanna-rainforest contact zones, open alluvial rainforest, and pioneer alluvial formations filling the gaps. The forest holds the headwaters of tributaries feeding both the Jamari River, via the Candeias, and the Jaci Paraná River, via the Rio Branco. To its south lies the Rio Pardo Environmental Protection Area, to the southwest the Jaci Paraná Extractive Reserve, and to the west the Karitiana Indigenous Territory. The forest was meant to be a keystone in the proposed Western Amazon Ecological Corridor, linking these conservation units into an unbroken chain of protected land.

The invasion began around 2000 with loggers cutting roads into the forest. Associations formed to promote the allocation of cleared land to farmers and ranchers. Within a few years, the settlement of Rio Pardo had coalesced along the road connecting to the BR-364 highway, complete with the infrastructure of a functioning town. IBAMA's two attempted expulsions collapsed under the weight of inadequate funding and, reportedly, the political connections of the invaders. By 2007, according to the research institute Imazon, about 78,800 hectares of the forest had been cleared — 32 percent of the total area, at an annual deforestation rate of 4.34 percent between 2002 and 2007. That April, IBAMA documented 236 ranchers operating illegally within the forest boundaries, running approximately 18,600 head of cattle where only trees and wildlife were supposed to be.

In July 2009, the federal government created a working group to address the social and environmental crisis inside Bom Futuro. By September, national public security forces were authorized to support IBAMA in curbing deforestation. But the most dramatic response came in June 2010, when Law 12249 redrew the forest's boundaries. The original 280,000 hectares were reduced to approximately 97,357 — a loss of nearly two-thirds. The road linking Rio Pardo to the BR-364 was excluded from the protected area, effectively legitimizing the loggers' highway. An additional 31,300 hectares were removed where the forest had overlapped with the Karitiana Indigenous Territory. A separate law created a program to compensate families relocated from the forest, and in December 2014, a consultative council was finally established. The forest that remained was barely a third of what had been decreed in 1988.

Bom Futuro is administered by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, or ICMBio, the agency named for the rubber tapper and environmental activist murdered in 1988 — the same year the forest was created. It is classified as IUCN category VI, a protected area permitting sustainable use of natural resources. The stated objective is to support sustainable forest management and scientific research, with emphasis on methods for exploiting native forests without destroying them. That mission statement reads differently now, measured against 78,800 hectares of cleared land, 236 illegal ranches, and a town built inside the boundaries of a national forest. What Bom Futuro demonstrates is not that protection fails — it is that protection without enforcement is simply a line on a map, and lines on maps have never stopped a chainsaw.