One of Brazil’s largest diamond deposits exists in the territory of the Cinta Larga — an indigenous tribe in the country’s South West.
The tribe have a legend about a group of indigenous women digging clay to make cooking pots from a stream bed who once found a diamond so large they named it Ngura inhakip — “God’s eye.”
However, to them it was little more than a shiny rock with no practical use, so they threw it back.
Since then Brazil’s now $700m+ diamond industry has moved into the territory, completely changing the indigenous peoples’ way of thinking and resulting in an almighty culture clash between the modern market economy in the world’s largest rainforest.
San Francisco-based journalist Alex Cuadros took 10 trips deep into the Cinta Larga’s lands beginning in 2017 to research his latest book on the subject, “How We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder and the Clash of Worlds in the Amazon.”
Some of the Cinta Larga, who number about 1,300 and live on a 2.7 million hectare reserve, which was granted to the tribe in 1979, were immediately suspicious of the journalist’s motives.
“There were rumors I was an undercover federal police agent there to investigate them, and that my voice recorder was actually radar to detect minerals underground so I could send information to the US government,” he told The Post last week.
“And there were outsiders, non-indigenous people involved in illegal logging who didn’t want a journalist sticking their nose into their business.”
For a reporter, the story often shifts based on who is telling it, and much of it involves corruption at high and low levels as well as deforestation on an industrial scale, writes Cuadros.
For instance, the Brazilian government set up its federal agency in the1960s to protect indigenous groups, but a lack of funding and corruption have hampered their mission over the years, and endangered native communities in the region.
At one point, the Service of Protection of the Indian became informally known as the ‘Indian Prostitution Service’ because many of its members trafficked indigenous girls and worked with corrupt local politicians and judges to sell indigenous lands to Brazilian industrialists, he writes.
Researching the book was a dangerous mission, made even more so after the murder of Cuadros’s friend, British journalist Dominic Phillips in 2022. He was shot dead on a reporting trip in the remote Javari Valley in the western part of Amazonas state while he was researching a book.
“He was apparently killed by someone who was doing illegal fishing,” said Cuadros. “It’s enormously sad and shocking for those of us who do reporting in the Amazon. This place can be really dangerous.”
In April 2004, members of the Cinta Larga — which means “wide belt” and refers to the bark sashes that men in the tribe traditionally wore around their waist — went on a bloody rampage against wild cat prospectors who had invaded their land and were mining their diamonds.
Using arrows, clubs, guns and other weapons, members of the indigenous group killed 29 people in a massacre that made headlines around the world.
Two decades later, Brazilians are still trying to make sense of what happened in the remote corner of the rainforest, writes Cuadros, whose book sheds light on the conflicts surrounding the economic development and ecological preservation of a rainforest that covers more than 2.3 million square miles.
Cuadros begins his book in November, 2023 at a hearing in a courtroom in the Amazon state of Rondonia where a judge asks Pio Cinta Larga, an elder of the tribe who has been labeled a “diamond baron” by the Brazilian press, if greed was the primary motive in the 2004 massacre.
After all, at that time the diamond mining operation at the Stream of the Blackflies on Cinta Larga land was said to be worth $20 million a month. It had also been overrun by smugglers from Tel Aviv and New York City’s Diamond District after the precious gemstones were first discovered in 1999.
Prospectors invaded Cinta Larga land on the banks of the Roosevelt River, named for Theodore Roosevelt’s excursion to the region in 1913-1914, and they brought with them disease, drugs, liquor and prostitution, writes Cuadros.
“As for the question of greed, Pio would be left to ponder: Was it greedy to desire the things he’d been taught to desire by white men?”
For once the Cinta Larga are ushered into the market economy, many stop hunting, amass piles of cash which they squander on prostitutes, drugs and alcohol as well as vehicles and western-style homes, and their old community-based way of life begins to recede into the past, Cuadros said.
The former financial reporter for Bloomberg News in Sao Paulo, said he was drawn to the story because he wanted to understand how an isolated Amazonian group “who had never experienced money” was suddenly thrust into a market economy that they had no way of understanding.
“They were really navigating an alien world,” said Cuadros, whose 2016 book “Brazilionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country” chronicled the rise of Brazil’s wealthiest entrepreneurs.
“The analogy I came up with is like trying to learn a foreign language as an adult. It isn’t natural. In the same way it wasn’t natural for the Cinta Larga to deal with money, to deal with investing. They discovered capitalism. Only they discovered one of its darkest corners.”
Cuadros goes back in time to document Pio’s first encounters with a white man, which took place when Pio was six years old and accompanied his father on a visit to his uncle’s village in the 1960s.
The group already had various violent encounters with prospectors since the 1920s, and were wary of outsiders. In 1963, prospectors working for a rubber company killed 30 members of a Cinta Larga village in what came to be known as the Massacre of the 11th Parallel.
Among the most interesting things Cuadros found in his reporting is that many Cinta Larga supported Brazil’s former right wing president Jair Bolsonaro for what they saw as his “pragmatic” approach to developing the rainforest and helping to improve their quality of life.
“Some people who are environmentalists will be disappointed by this,” said Cuadros. “A lot of Cinta Larga supported Bolsonaro.
“There is a cliche of indigenous people in the Amazon as ‘forest guardians’ and while there is some truth to it, at the same time they love the forest and want to put food on the table and they look at western models of success.
“The sad reality is that sustainable activities like collecting Brazil nuts is not workable right now.”
