Spanish journalist Heribeto Araujo delivers a meticulously researched, vivid and complex picture of the violence and corruption at the heart of the Amazon
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During the 1960s and ’70s, Brazil’s government – then an authoritarian military dictatorship – oversaw the colonisation of the Brazilian Amazon. Roads cut through the rainforest, opening it up to settlers who brought with them power tools and hopes of new fortunes.
In the decades that have followed, an estimated one million square kilometres of forest have been cleared to make way for cattle ranches, mines, dams, logging sites and an ever-expanding human presence. In Masters of the Lost Land, Spanish journalist Heriberto Araujo sets out to uncover not only how the jungle came to sit on the frontlines of climate change, but how it became a lawless place of cold-blooded human conflict.
The story begins in Rondon do Pará, in the northeastern Pará state, home to criminal organisations with ties to Brazilian law enforcement and politicians. Here, as Araujo learns, wealthy landowners and their hired gunmen, or pistoleiros, preyed on would-be settlers freshly arrived in the frontier town, offering them ranch work at their fazendas. Once at the ranch, however, all promises of payment would evaporate, replaced by threats and a stifling atmosphere of fear. Occasionally, labourers would disappear.
One of these landowners, Josélio de Barros, a known murderer, attracts the attention of Dutra ‘Dezinho’ da Costa, Rondon’s president of the Rural Workers Union, after one of Barros’s labourers stumbles upon a burnt clearing full of bones. Dezinho is an outspoken man and an active advocate of rural workers’ rights; according to Araujo, his interest in Barros’s alleged crimes made him a ‘marked man’. Before long, the union leader is shot dead outside his own home. From here on, Araujo follows the story of Dezinho’s wife, Maria Joel, who has campaigned tirelessly to bring his murderers to justice.
Masters of the Lost Land is a dense, heavily researched book in the style of an American work of investigative nonfiction (think David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon). Araujo has pored over police statements and court reports, and conducted hundreds of interviews to produce a vivid, if complex, picture of the corruption and violence at the heart of the Amazon. Although these events took place more than ten years ago, the fight against illegal Amazon landgrabs continues today, and those who stand up to them continue to face brutal consequences.
