Amid Devastation in the Amazon, Diamonds Were Their Best Hope

An editorial in the June 1, 1852, edition of the New York Daily Times, citing the recent admission of California to the union and “the discovery of gold amid its glistening sands,” urged Americans to set their sights on a new frontier below the Equator. One month earlier, the same paper called on U.S. commercial interests to invest in new trade routes into the Amazon rainforest, suggesting that “with an open line of communication from the Amazon to the Coast, emigration must pour in, and the resources of the country be developed in all their richness.” Fortunes awaited enterprising risk-takers willing to push America’s Manifest Destiny southward.

This was not a new way of thinking about the Amazon. Centuries ago, the world’s largest rainforest beckoned to Spanish and Portuguese explorers frantically hunting the precious metals that could buy them social standing. As independence swept the continent in the nineteenth century, upstart national governments tried in vain to establish authority over an area roughly the size of the contiguous United States. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas and an imperial monarchy from independence in 1822 to the proclamation of the republic in 1889, would eventually claim two-thirds of the Amazonian rainforest. Mechanization and improved communications defined the sustained thrust into the deep South American interior during the twentieth century, a process marked by rising deforestation. As recent news headlines make clear, that ruinous drive continues.

The prime culprits are not the original residents of the forest. “Over the centuries,” Chris Feliciano Arnold has written, “warnings about white men had spread to the farthest territories. The distant roar of a machine was enough to uproot a village and push its families ever deeper into the riverine borderlands.” The ongoing struggle between conservation, development, and Indigenous rights in the Amazon reflects the complex legacy of settlement and human interaction in this vitally diverse ecosystem.

In his new book, journalist Alex Cuadros presents a devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives in the region. When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon chronicles the harrowing experience of the Cinta Larga, an Indigenous tribe grappling with the encroachment of illegal logging and mining as well as the hazards of assimilation, from the 1960s to the present. The book recounts the story of a small cast of native men and women who for decades traipse back and forth over the line between resistance and complicity in environmental degradation.

As a reporter, Cuadros has long covered the economic challenges and opportunities presented by Brazil’s massive scale. His first book, Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, released in 2016, examined Brazil’s tarnished, distinctly urban ultrawealthy elite. His latest tells a very different kind of economic story but one no less central to any deep understanding of modern Brazil, where the pursuit of riches goes hand in hand with uniquely destructive environmental devastation. More than 38,000 fires raged across the Amazon in August of this year, the most for that month in almost 15 years. Such ravages are the unsurprising result of a history of reckless extractive activity that dates back to the colonial era. At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself.

Outsiders seeking riches in the Amazon have enacted violence against the natural world for centuries. “What is lost when tropical forest is destroyed is not only greater in variety, complexity, and originality than other ecosystems, it is incalculable,” historian Warren Dean observed in his seminal study With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. After all, “cataloguing a tropical forest is well beyond our resources, now or in the imaginable future. The disappearance of a tropical forest is therefore a tragedy vast beyond human knowing or conceiving.” According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, just over 13 percent of the Amazon has been lost to deforestation. Carlos Nobre, a prominent Brazilian earth scientist, estimates that a loss of 20 to 25 percent would push the rainforest to a tipping point from which it likely could not recover. Such brutality against a biome so rich yet so delicate carries far-reaching consequences for the entire planet.

Another type of violence is that committed against the inhabitants of the Amazonian region who resist the interference and commercial designs of interlopers. The human settlement of the Amazon River basin dates back thousands of years, with evidence of complex societies thriving long before European contact. Indigenous peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapo, and Munduruku, established intricate networks of villages and agricultural systems, cultivating crops like manioc and maize in the fertile floodplains. They created terra preta, a dark carbon-rich soil, and used other sophisticated techniques to sustain agriculture in nutrient-poor environments. Life was not always serene. Warfare between native peoples was common; Cuadros describes bitter rivalries between small resourceful tribes that produced grisly acts of violence in living memory. As was the case elsewhere in the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to mass death at a previously unimaginable scale. One estimate holds that 90 to 95 percent of the Indigenous population of the Amazon had perished by the 1600s. In 2022 alone, the final year of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, over 8,000 people were killed in the Amazon.

Many of those who survived early contact found themselves either pressed into servitude or confined to religious missions that served as incubators of deadly disease for men, women, and children previously unexposed to European pathogens. Many others in the deep recesses of the colony’s interior continued as they had, unaware of the forces changing the world beyond the forest. Unlike Spanish America, which fractured into multiple shaky republics upon independence, the new Brazilian Empire managed to keep the vast national territory intact after breaking from Portugal. But its authority was tenuous. In many respects, the national capital in Rio de Janeiro might as well have been across the ocean.

The Industrial Revolution produced a wave of settlement and extraction in the Amazon centered around a key commodity: rubber. Seeking land and opportunity, some 300,000 people from the Brazilian Northeast migrated to the region between 1870 and 1900. They found an unforgiving terrain and bosses disinterested in their upward social mobility. As it had in centuries past, the rainforest produced vast fortunes for some while feeding the fruitless ambitions of many more. In the 1920s, for example, Henry Ford famously sank millions of dollars into a quixotic attempt to import the type of labor regime he had pioneered in Michigan into the Amazon. Fordlandia, as the undertaking was called, was reclaimed by jungle in less than 20 years.

“New rubber corporations, for all their talk of ‘modern business methods,’ arrived in the Amazon without having developed any new techniques for either the extraction or the coagulation of latex,” historian Barbara Weinstein has noted. Instead, they relied on enticements and threats, the traditional means of inducing locals to do hard labor. “Thus,” Weinstein writes, “the foreign investors intended to impose capitalist relations of production on the Amazon, but had yet to discover any means of overcoming the environmental or human obstacles to such an objective.” Indigenous and migrant laborers seeking economic opportunity braved harsh environments, high mortality rates, and inadequate pay to extract latex from rubber trees on remote plots of land nominally controlled by distant rubber barons. As the boom faded, many ordinary people found themselves no better off than before.

In 1910, the Brazilian government created the Indian Protection Service, or SPI, in response to increasing pressures from settlers and economic interests encroaching on Indigenous lands. The SPI’s mandate was ostensibly to protect Indigenous peoples and their territories from exploitation and violence, and there were idealists in its ranks committed to such aims. Institutionally, however, SPI’s approach was often heavy-handed and paternalistic. It was more focused on controlling and assimilating Indigenous communities into mainstream Brazilian society than on safeguarding their rights and cultures. State policy was geared, Cuadros writes, toward making Indigenous territory “safe for development.” Those committed to protecting—or at least not disturbing—native peoples frequently had to contend with a lack of adequate resources and fickle political support. Indeed, Brazil’s Indigenous tribes have historically had few reliable allies in office, a consequence of the overlap between economic and political power.

In the 1930s, modern Brazil was forged through a top-down political revolution that promised to extend the reach of the state into all corners of the nation once and for all. The U.S.-backed military dictatorship installed in 1964 embraced the same goal, overseeing an aggressive new push to occupy and develop the Amazon—very often at the expense of Indigenous life. It is in this period that Cuadros’s narrative begins.

The title of the book refers to a large, strange stone that Cinta Larga tribeswomen found while collecting clay to make cookware one day. The diamond was so big the women said it resembled Ngurá inhakíp—“God’s eye.” “It would have been worth an unimaginable sum,” Cuadros asserts. “But they had no use for it, so they tossed it back in the water.” This story is the only mention of the titular gem in the book, but it stands for something essential. The Cinta Larga had no sense of the Western conception of wealth until well into the twentieth century. They did not commodify nature. Through their deepening interactions with non-native people, some with good intentions and many without, they realized that the strange stones that frequently turned up in their midst were precious to outsiders. This accelerated a fateful change already underway for the Cinta Larga people, some of whom would dive headlong into age-old efforts to get rich off the degradation of the rainforest.

“Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men standing in for fathers?” wondered Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga, one of Cuadros’s protagonists, who in 2023 stood accused of participating in a massacre of more than two dozen prospectors moving in on Cinta Larga territory. Although the mining operation he oversaw reportedly fed $20 million a month worth of diamonds into an illegal supply chain “served by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv, and New York City’s Diamond District,” Pio rejected the prosecution’s allegation that greed was a central motive of the Cinta Larga’s violence against outsiders. “Any white farmer, if a bunch of people work without permission on his land, will do the same,” he proclaimed in an interview with a major Brazilian newspaper, hinting at the reprisal against the prospectors.

He also bemoaned the fact that, because the diamonds originated in an area with strict environmental regulations, they could not be legally sold to benefit the local Cinta Larga people. “Diamonds are worse than cocaine,” he said. “They don’t let us sell them, they don’t let us work. We don’t want anything illegal like now, selling them out of fear. We’re like criminals.”

As a tribal elder, Pio remembered well the period before his people came into contact with white Brazilians, roughly 60 years ago. Over several decades, the Cinta Larga—who numbered only a few thousand, had no name for themselves, and considered their entire society to be one family—underwent a transformation, driven in large part by the allure of convenience, aided by the SPI.

When the SPI and its successor, the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI, reached out to uncontacted tribes, they provided them with consumer goods as a show of good faith. FUNAI anthropologists, bureaucrats, and agents in the field would deliberately make themselves heard when they knew that natives were nearby. Trying to keep quiet could easily be interpreted as a threat. They would then retreat, but not before leaving a peace offering of machetes, scissors, pots, pans, and other utensils. Such items, used for agriculture as well as to make crafts and war, were life-changing. Soon, “people spoke of a new kind of yearning: ndabe-kala—the desire for metal tools.”

The prospect of easy digging, easy calories, easy transportation, and easy killing appealed to the Cinta Larga, as it did other recently contacted tribes, in the 1960s and 1970s. They got used to certain FUNAI employees and soon understood the difference between them and other outsiders engaged in mysterious exploits that did not involve any of the myriad local tribes. Gradually, the occasional prospector, logger, and rubber tapper were joined in their territory by a more concerted extractive enterprise. In 1984, as Brazil prepared for the return of civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, the Cinta Larga stumbled upon something they had never seen before. “Patrolling the northwestern reaches of their territory … near a river Brazilians called the Fourteenth of April, they came upon an area where all the trees had been knocked down. In their place, a few skinny humpbacked cows grazed on foreign grasses.” One thing was clear in that moment to Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga: “If we don’t remove them, more will come.” He was right.

The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail. Mining and logging continue to yield extremely valuable contraband, but the primary driver of deforestation is the rapacious appetite of well-connected ranchers seeking ever more pasture for ever more heads of cattle. Much to the consternation of Indigenous activists and conservationists, big agricultural interests have steadily grown in influence to become one of the central forces in Brazilian politics. (They were a pillar of Bolsonaro’s support, which helps explain his total disinterest as president in enforcing environmental protection laws.)

The post-dictatorial Constitution of 1988 granted Brazil’s Indigenous peoples a right to their own culture and land. Whereas previous generations understood well the rivalries, alliances, differences, and similarities of the Amazon’s many native tribes, increasingly Indigenous people thought of themselves as índios in juxtaposition to the brancos of mainstream society. On one hand, this produced solidarity and unity of purpose in organizing to advance the interests of Indigenous peoples—“Our war is now with the white people,” as some of the more politicized activists put it. At the same time, group identities were diluted, contributing to the fraying of communal bonds and the destabilization of tradition for a people who once saw the entirety of their specific self-contained community as kin. Ironically, by being lumped together, many Indians embraced all the more tightly the striving, noxious individualism of frontier capitalism.

Democratic Brazil embraced robust environmental safeguards in principle, but they remained difficult to enforce even in the best of circumstances. Cuadros’s narrative excels at conveying to the reader how vast and forbidding the Amazon rainforest is. Furthermore, such protections presumed that Indigenous peoples wanted the rainforest to remain exactly as it was. It’s true that areas under nominal Indigenous control have lower rates of deforestation. But assimilation into the hegemonic culture meant that many natives themselves had material incentives to want in on the action of the Amazon. “The Indian has to buy everything” Pio complained in 2004. “He has to go to the supermarket, but when it comes to selling diamonds, it is forbidden. The Indian is persecuted. The police catch him if he has diamonds. If he has a lot of money, they want to know where he got it.” If they were powerless to stop white people from ignoring the law and pillaging the forest, shouldn’t they at least ensure that they benefited as well—legally or not?

Over the course of his narrative, it becomes clear that Cuadros has been building toward an explanation of how and why many Cinta Larga rationalized their participation in the depredation of their ancestral homeland. “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people,” in the words of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vast majority found themselves in dire economic conditions, without the means to sustain themselves and their families in a market they were not equipped to succeed in. How should they sustain themselves if not by selling off the perishable treasures of the forest? Beyond mere survival, some of Cuadros’s protagonists do quite well for themselves for a time by engaging in illegal extractive activities, such as diamond mining. Pio himself was “rumored to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.” Several Cinta Larga men became high-spending regulars at the brothels and bars of cities their parents could scarcely have imagined.

At the same time, while some of the Cinta Larga reaped extraordinary profits off the land, there emerged in the community “inequality unlike any they’d known before,” Cuadros writes. This was a rickety prosperity. It fed a corrosive cynicism among many Cinta Larga, who, in “watching the nightly news, [had] picked up on Western notions of democracy, as well as the concept of corruption, that perennial Brazilian problem.” It was also unsustainable in the face of a national culture hostile to the economic emancipation of Indigenous people.

Eventually, it dawns on many of the Cinta Larga that they are not meant to succeed in the society they’ve been coaxed into. Their children are poorly fed and poorly educated. They are not expected to be capitalists themselves but to stay out of the way so that others—better connected and indelibly part of mainstream society—could benefit. White ranchers on the so-called frontier present themselves as victims of an out-of-touch central government and Indigenous intimidation. “We are the anonymous heroes of this, the last human epic of conquest of the last great empty space on planet Earth,” ranchers proclaimed in an angry statement following a Cinta Larga raid in December 1985. That effort has proceeded mostly unabated in the decades since, with the frontier now reaching much further into the hinterland of Latin America’s largest nation. Brazil once boasted a diversified industrial base. As The Economist noted two years ago, “In the 1980s manufacturing peaked at 34% of Brazil’s GDP. In 2020 it was just 11%.” Today, Brazil depends heavily on exporting beef, soy, and other cash crops, with very little accountability for the excesses of big ag. In economic terms, tribes like the Cinta Larga never stood a chance.

As historian Barbara Weinstein wrote over 40 years ago, “If the current approach to Amazonian development—with its careless and often devastating attitude toward ecological constraints, its willingness to displace traditional inhabitants, and its disregard for the rights of indigenous groups—teaches us anything, it is that economic growth within the context of contemporary capitalism holds little promise for the Amazon.” In a broad sense, this is the takeaway from the saga of the Cinta Larga. By grounding his book in the stories of Indigenous men and women born and raised in the Amazon, accustomed to violence, exploitation, and the disorienting nature of rapid technological change, Cuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces. The rampant deforestation of the Amazon has the potential to be the most devastating policy failure in human history. The experience of the Cinta Larga enriches our understanding of why it’s so hard to arrest the damage.