- Journalist Alex Cuadros’s latest book, “When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon” tells the story of how an Indigenous group in Brazil was forced to reckon with Western culture.
- In an interview with Mongabay, Cuadros says the Cinta Larga group were introduced to Western tools and concepts by the Brazilian state, ultimately eroding part of their lifestyle.
- In a short period of time, the group began to experience money, violence, illegal logging, and mining, while some members of the Cinta Larga profited from these activities.
- “When prospectors started moving into their territory, the Cinta Larga sought them out because they were curious and wanted metal tools,” Cuadros said when explaining the complex relationship with invaders and the “outside” world.
“They got us hooked on Western goods, but never gave us a sustainable way to make a living,” is how Nacoça “Pio” Cinta Larga describes his Indigenous peoples’ relationship with Brazil’s government.
This complex and conflicted relationship is the subject of journalist Alex Cuadros’s latest book, When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon, which charts six decades of earth-shattering change on the frontline of nature.
As well as Pio, Cuadros tells the stories of Oita and Maria Beleza, two fellow protagonists of the Cinta Larga, an Indigenous group that until the 1960s had totally isolated itself from the rest of the world. The contact, when it came, was forced on them with the plowing of the BR-364 highway through the Amazonian state of Rondônia.
The book tells of how the three protagonists were suddenly forced to navigate their way through a new, alien world of capitalism and consumption imposed on them. By the 2000s, some members of the Cinta Larga were running an illegal diamond mine in the rainforest. Confronting clichés while tackling thorny topics of contact policy, assimilation and “pragmatic relationships” with loggers and miners that “frequently devolved into violence,” Cuadros pulls no punches recounting the experience of Brazil’s Indigenous groups surviving — and trying to thrive — on the frontier.
Hailing from the U.S. state of New Mexico, Cuadros formerly worked for Bloomberg, covering billionaires in Brazil. He went on to write Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, which encompassed some of the big stories from the Amazon, such as the construction of the Belo Monte Dam and the seemingly unstoppable rise of agribusiness.
He decided to focus his second book on the Cinta Larga Indigenous people after visiting them on assignment for an article about the diamond mine on their lands and realizing there was a much bigger and more important story to tell. He made 10 extended reporting trips, often staying in the Cinta Larga’s Roosevelt village, and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews as well as reviewed thousands of pages of government documents and court files.
In an interview with Mongabay, Cuadros tells of how that first contact changed things forever, the Cinta Larga’s complicated relationship with the loggers and miners on their land, and the racial resentments that their diamond boom exposed in the Brazilian media.
The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mongabay: Your book is split into three parts. The first part is about contact. Tell us about that.
Alex Cuadros: The book starts off with descriptions of Cinta Larga society through Pio’s eyes as a little boy in the 1960s. Because it’s through the lens of childhood, it’s inherently romantic. We experience their world of hunting, feasts, but also wars with neighboring groups and internal conflicts. They were proud hunters and warriors. After the BR-364 highway was built, settlers, rubber tappers and prospectors moved in. Often, they wanted to kill the Indigenous people to “clean the area” and exploit natural resources.
I heard tragic stories of people losing their families and being orphaned due to organized killings and diseases they had no immunity to. The first flu outbreak was spread by prospectors invited to a feast. Over the next decade, hundreds of Cinta Larga, about three-quarters of their population, died. what really struck me is that they were still able to laugh about the strangest part of encounters with outsiders: the food.
Pio, the main protagonist, told me the first time he tasted salty food, it felt like it was burning his mouth. He also told me about the first time he encountered money. He tried tearing it up because he didn’t understand what it was. How can you explain to someone who grew up without concepts of money, capitalism or markets, what this strange paper could possibly be used for?
The final phase of this time of contact is when agents from Funai, the Indigenous affairs agency, start trying to “pacify” them and bring them into Western society. Here is where they start getting hooked on Western goods. Funai set up “attraction posts” to lure Indigenous people by leaving out metal tools, which were a revelation, they made life a lot easier. A Cinta Larga man named Tataré told me how he marveled seeing how one man with a steel axe could cut down a tree that, in the past, would take several people days to cut down.
Mongabay: What were some of the moments that most stood out for you reporting on the ground?
Alex Cuadros: The first time I visited their main village, Roosevelt, in 2017, I guess I still had some clichés in my mind about how Indigenous people live. The village resembles poor Brazilian communities you might see anywhere else in the country, not the typical image of an Indigenous village with the thatched-roof longhouse.
People now lived in individual homes with metal roofs that made the inside very hot in the tropical sun. There was trash everywhere: packaged foods, consumer goods, candy wrappers, old lighters, single flip-flops. The village had some public services like electricity, but was also woefully lacking in the infrastructure you need to live healthily. The sinks in the homes would drain straight into the mud, which allowed mosquitoes to breed. Pio told me with regret and sadness that he was embarrassed to bring outsiders to the village because he thought it looked like a slum.
There was an evangelical church in the middle of the village that seemed to be the center of village life. I also noticed these strange outsiders hanging around. I learned that they were loggers and prospectors. Logging and mining in Indigenous areas is illegal, but they were circulating unmolested. It really sparked my curiosity about the dynamic between these two groups: how the Cinta Larga had ended up in this situation, how much they had transformed so radically in such a short time.
Mongabay: Who are the Cinta Larga?
Alex Cuadros: Today, there are about 2,500 Cinta Larga. According to Funai, they occupy four official Indigenous areas that add up to a land area the size of Belgium, right on the frontier of one of the most deforested areas in the Amazon. All I knew about the Cinta Larga was that they had this terrible reputation — as diamond barons, as brutal murderers, according to the media. In April 2004, a number of Cinta Larga warriors killed 29 non-Indigenous prospectors who had refused to leave their lands. This was a massive story in Brazil and it made headlines across the world.
The first time I visited, in 2017, this was still really present for them. I remember a young girl asking me, “Weren’t you afraid to come here? Didn’t you think we were gonna kill you and eat you?” A lot of Cinta Larga were really ashamed of this reputation. This is emblematic of how the media treated the Cinta Larga. They gained this reputation as murderers even though it was a small group within the larger tribe that carried out these killings. But they were treated as a monolith. I think there’s a tendency in the media to fail to see Indigenous people as complex individuals.
This massacre is an important story in my book because it raised questions about assimilation. It became a central question in the court case: just how “integrated” they were in Western society. In Brazilian jurisprudence, if an “isolated” Indigenous person kills an invader, you can’t hold them responsible. Did they understand that these killings were a crime? It’s an unanswerable question and one that the Cinta Larga themselves wrestle with. I remember Tataré saying to me, with all of the changes in their society, “I don’t know anymore if I’m Indian, if I’m white. I don’t know what I am.”
Mongabay: How is the Cinta Larga experience representative of frontier states like Rondônia?
Alex Cuadros: The Cinta Larga were not the only Indigenous group to emerge from isolation in the 1960s in Rondônia. It is something that dozens of groups went through in Brazil in the course of the 20th century. However, it’s really important not to generalize: every group was a society unto itself. They all reacted differently. The Cinta Larga, in particular, developed an appetite and curiosity for Western things.
Something that really struck me talking to them was that when prospectors started moving into their territory, the Cinta Larga sought them out because they were curious and wanted metal tools. Other Indigenous groups reacted differently and were a lot more resistant to Western society. But in broad terms, it’s the story of a lot of Indigenous groups across Brazil and the Americas. For an American reader familiar with the experience of Native American tribes, the big difference with the Cinta Larga is that the conflicts and transformations that other Indigenous groups experienced over 500 years were compressed into the space of a single lifetime.
Mongabay: What nuances did you find during your work about the relationships between the Indigenous people and the loggers and miners?
Alex Cuadros: Pio would always complain to me that it was Funai that got them hooked on Western goods. And it was also Funai, he would complain, that taught them about money. It started like this: some warriors were patrolling the territory, they encountered this pile of mahogany trunks and discovered that they had been cut down by a rancher who had invaded their land. Initially, Pio reported it to a Funai agent. But the agent told him, “You guys basically just won the lottery, this is worth a lot of money. Don’t let it rot, sell it.”
At this point, in the 1980s, the second part of the book, the Cinta Larga felt like they not only wanted but needed Western goods. Pio himself had this dream of owning a car, having seen cars in nearby towns. Hardwood seemed like the way that they could finally get their hands on these things they wanted. So they started partnerships with non-Indigenous loggers to cut down hardwood and sell it and take a cut for themselves and bring benefits, as they saw them, to their villages. It was the start of this very complicated relationship between the Cinta Larga and their former antagonists. It was important for me to get away from the idea of Indigenous people as mere “victims.” The Cinta Larga had a lot of agency in their story.
In the 2000s, the third part of the book, this diamond mine was discovered. It sparked a rush that was on a completely different level from anything before with the hardwood trade. Thousands of prospectors rushed in from across Brazil. At its peak, there were 5,000 prospectors at the mine, outnumbering the Cinta Larga. Smugglers came from across the world — Belgium, Israel, New York City’s Diamond District. Again, the Cinta Larga formed partnerships with prospectors in the hopes that they could control the mine and derive some benefit for themselves. At the same time that they loved the forest, their home, they were pragmatic about it. They needed to find a way to make a living in the new world of Western society, where you need money for everything.
Mongabay: What happened there?
Alex Cuadros: Prospectors are not necessarily villains. Many are just trying to put food on the table. Brazil is a poor country and there aren’t a lot of opportunities. Still, what they’re doing is illegal and it’s a trade that can often draw criminals and violent people. The pragmatic relationship between the Cinta Larga and the miners frequently devolved into violence.
I met a lot of prospectors. By the time I visited, the mine was a little quieter, but in the 2000s, when there were 5,000 people there, Pio told me it looked to him like an anthill. I talked to people who would go completely broke running their machines, going into debt, then they would find a big diamond and it would feel like it was all worth it. I met the prospector who discovered the mine. He went by the nickname Old Luca. In the year 2000, when he discovered it, he was already around 80 years old. I met him when he was 103, swinging in a hammock. This man who lived his entire life as a prospector had made and lost countless fortunes. When I met him, he was living in a shack on the outskirts of Porto Velho, [the Rondônia state capital].
Mongabay: What about the Brazilian media depiction of the Cinta Larga?
Alex Cuadros: It was sensationalistic. The story was already incredible enough without need for exaggeration. An elite formed within the tribe. They were buying imported cars. One chief told people that his dream was to own a different car for every day of the week. Another leader, people started calling him “Doctor,” a Latin American term of respect. I saw the house that he owned in this nearby city. It’s not exaggerating to say that it was a mansion. He also owned a ranch and put 200 cattle on it.
But the media made it seem like the whole tribe was becoming incredibly wealthy. There was a story that said how they’re sitting on a fortune of billions of dollars, even though the estimate was completely made up and all those diamonds were still buried deep under the ground. The fact was that most Cinta Larga saw very little money. The coverage was not only sensationalistic but it betrayed a racial resentment. It felt as though the mainstream media in Brazil was discovering inequality. Certain newspapers in Brazil would never make a big deal about a CEO earning 30 or 100 times his workers, and yet they complained about the Cinta Larga supposedly living better than other Brazilians. So clearly the problem was not the inequality itself, but who was benefiting from it.
Mongabay: One of the key themes in your book is how the Cinta Larga were forced to deal with capitalism.
Alex Cuadros: An elite formed within the tribe that were the people who had the savvy to become the leaders of the diamond mine. This, for the first time, produced the most brutal — I should say the most extreme — material inequality. From the first time I visited, I heard ordinary people from the tribe complain about the chiefs who made all the money from the mine and didn’t share it with the rest of the group. People complained about how their way of life used to be very collective. Now, people were becoming individualistic in a way that was unfathomable before. One thing that seems like it’s been positive is that women’s lives have improved. Maria Beleza, who figures prominently in my book, told me how difficult life was for girls and women in the tribe’s society before contact. Now, girls are able to go to school. Some are getting university degrees. That’s not to say that this cancels out the shattering of their society and their former way of life, but it’s one mitigating factor.
The book is very much about the human appetite for natural resources, how inevitably it seems like we consume them voraciously until they’re exhausted. In the case of the Cinta Larga, it didn’t take long after they formed partnerships with loggers in the 1980s for all of the mahogany within economical reach of the highway to be exhausted. Something similar happened with the diamond mine in the 2000s. There were estimates that $20 million worth of diamonds were being extracted each month. But, within a few years, they dug up all of the diamonds that were easy to get, at least without an industrial operation that they can’t do because it’s illegal.
Mongabay: Your book raises the question of whether Indigenous people should be “helped” or just left alone.
Alex Cuadros: Once I was at Pio’s house and there was news about a group of Indigenous people who had just been contacted. It was this classic heroic narrative. But Pio said it was really sad because they’ll never again have peace. He told me that he thought it was best to leave uncontacted Indigenous people alone. He was very clear about his belief that there’s no way to go back. Once Pandora’s box has been opened, there’s no way to close it. It’s like salty food. When Pio first tasted it as a kid, it felt like it was burning his mouth, but now he can’t go without it.
There is a phrase I quote in my book, by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: “The Brazilian state turned the Indians into poor people.” The Brazilian government introduced scarcity to what used to be a society defined by abundance. Pio would always complain, “They got us hooked on Western goods, but never gave us a sustainable way to make a living and acquire these things.”
Mongabay: How do the Cinta Larga feel about the international “Save the Amazon” discourse? What do they want for the future?
Alex Cuadros: It’s a group of 2,500 people with sometimes what seems like 2,500 opinions. But I will say that a lot of them were really skeptical. I think they felt like it’s easy for an outsider — someone in Europe or the United States — to say, “We have to protect the rainforest.”
When they think about the future, they want to maintain their culture, their traditions. I’m thinking specifically about Pio here. He would always say that they want to maintain their culture, their traditions, but they also want to take what they like from Western society and incorporate it.
Two of his daughters got university degrees. One is a teacher, the other is a nurse. They’re bringing these professions back to their villages. His vision of the future is one where they take the best from both worlds and try to create a new society on their land.
Banner image: Logging operation in the Amazonian state of Rondônia. Image by Fabio Nascimento.
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