WHEN WE SOLD GOD'S EYE

Stone Age people encounter the modern world, with predictable results.

Journalist Cuadros, author of Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, has immersed himself in Brazil’s expansion into its Amazonian frontier, a process that began early in the 20th century, exploded after World War II, and is still in progress. He focuses on the Cinta Larga, an Indigenous society of 1,000 to 2,000 people living in the remote jungle near the Bolivian border. Lacking clothes, boats, and domestic animals and perpetually at war with neighboring tribes, they had no trouble feeding themselves. Following the usual scenario, ranchers, loggers, and miners poured in with their magical technology, guns, greed, and diseases, and tribal members who did not go to work for white men became beggars. As one anthropologist put it, “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people.” Cuadros tells his story through the lives of half a dozen Cinta Larga and an idealistic member of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service, a government office designed to protect Indigenous people and encourage them to assimilate. Underfunded and with no enforcement power, the agency could not keep newcomers out or control them, and he eventually grew discouraged. His Indigenous clients are survivors—despite disease and violence vastly reducing their numbers—and they entered the 21st century in an uneasy truce with a rapacious free market culture. The discovery of diamonds in 1999 produced a massive influx of prospectors that dwarfed the native population. Mining in tribal protected areas is illegal, but Brazilian authorities, understaffed when not corrupt, were little help. Near the book’s end, a band of warriors massacres about 30 miners, a climax that turns into an anticlimax because mining continues and government investigation and prosecution are still in progress 20 years later.

An impassioned story with many parallels to the American Indian experience, and equally dispiriting.