2025-03-03
32 分钟This is the Guardian.
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Massacre in the Jungle how an Indigenous man was Made the Public Face of an Atrocity by Alex Cuadros Read by Felipe Pacheco at the Federal Courthouse of Villena in the southern reaches of the Amazon basin, Nacosa Piu Cinta Larga limped to his seat, using one hand to steady himself on a table.
In the air conditioned chill and the fluorescent glare, his crown of black and brown feathers shuddered with each step, a lonely reminder of the rainforest beyond the white painted walls.
A Brazilian flag hung limply in one corner, the national motto Order and Progress concealed in its folds.
The prosecution says that on 7 April 2004, around 11am in the gully of Tranquility, you, sir, together with other members of your tribe, took the lives of several prospectors, judge Rafael Slompy began.
Pale even for a white man, Slompy wore a pink button up shirt beneath his robes.
His goatee was immaculately trimmed, his tone bland, emotionless, entirely mismatched to the crimes he was describing.
He listed 29 victims, 12 never identified a massacre.
He said that, hands tied, they had been unable to defend themselves.
An aggravating factor, the prosecution also alleges a base motive, he went on, that the indigenous people who committed these acts wanted to keep anyone else from mining diamonds on their lands.
Greed, in other words.
Pugh looked back at Slompy through wire rimmed glasses.
His right eyelid drooped, half hiding a prosthetic eye.
For anyone observing that day in November 2023, it was hard to imagine that this frail, diminutive figure could possibly be, as Brazil's federal police had it, the main instigator who controls all the illegal mining activity inside the Roosevelt Indigenous Reserve, an area said to produce $20 million, 15.9 million pounds a month in precious stones frequented by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv and New York City's diamond district.
In the press pew had been labelled a diamond baron, rumoured to own three mansions and a fleet of imported trucks with white chauffeurs.
Even more shocking was that just a generation ago his people, the Cinta Larga, had no concept of money, much less precious stones.
The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest, and their home had once been so remote, so difficult to penetrate, that the first Western expeditions to chart its rivers took place in the 1910s, with none other than Theodore Roosevelt taking part.
It wasn't until 1960 that the first highway pierced through, bringing a flood of settlers and fortune seekers, ranchers, rubber tappers, prospectors.