Massacre in the jungle: how an Indigenous man was made the public face of an atrocity |

At the federal courthouse of Vilhena, in the southern reaches of the Amazon basin, Nacoça Pio Cinta Larga limped to his seat, using one hand to steady himself on a table. In the air-conditioned chill and 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 Slomp began.

Pale even for a white man, Slomp 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.

Pio looked back at Slomp 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 $20m (£15.9m) a month in precious stones, frequented by smugglers from Antwerp, Tel Aviv and New York City’s diamond district. In the press, Pio 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.

In a country where dozens of Indigenous groups have been contacted in the past century, legal tradition holds that those accused of crimes who are deemed “isolated” or “integrating” are to receive attenuated sentences, while those who are “integrated” can stand trial like any other Brazilian. Historically, those in the former two categories were said to possess “incomplete mental development”, like children or people with intellectual disabilities. On the face of it, this is racism: a relic of social Darwinism, which relegated the Indigenous to an earlier stage of human evolution. But it also makes sense: how can someone unaware of the existence of laws be punished for firing an arrow at an invader?

Slomp looked at Pio over an open laptop. Seated in an expensive-looking office chair, he almost seemed to be presiding over a conference room. All of the lawyers, too, were white, in suits and ties. Following the script, Slomp continued: “I would like to know, sir, if this accusation against you is true or false.”

Pio sat with his hands on his jeans. He could hardly deny the part about the diamonds; the federal police had tapped his phones. But he would always insist he had tried to stop the massacre. With the unshakable calm he was known for, he responded simply: “False.”

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 standing in for fathers?

Narratives of the Amazon tend to highlight the strangeness felt by westerners encountering Indigenous people. But the experience was just as bizarre, if not more so, for the region’s original inhabitants. Pio could never forget the first time he saw a white person. He was perhaps six years old, accompanying his father on a trip to an uncle’s village. In those days, footpaths were marked only by the occasional broken twig or twisted leaf. Already Pio knew how to tread lightly in bare feet, to avoid the inch-long bullet ants that hauled nectar down from the treetops, whose sting could leave you writhing in pain for a whole day. One kind of wasp made its nest close to the ground, under banana leaves; another attacked from above by swarming into your hair. You also had to watch out for poisonous caterpillars, pit vipers that curled around low-hanging branches, electric thunderfish and six-metre anacondas lurking in waterways.

Little wonder that, in the western imagination, the Amazon was deemed a “green hell”. But for the Cinta Larga, the forest also provided sustenance. Journeys to other villages were never just about reaching your destination. If Pio and his father spotted a bees nest, they’d stop to knock it down and shovel honey into their mouths with rolled-up leaves. They would also stop to gather cacao and the berries that stained your hands purple, which outsiders knew as açaí. Their people got their Portuguese name thanks to the “wide belt” of bark they wore around their waists.

Like every Cinta Larga boy, Pio carried a child-size bow and practiced shooting lizards and little birds with featherless arrows. He dreamed of becoming a great hunter like his father, Mankalu, but he was small even for his age. Full-size bows were six and a half feet tall, taller than Mankalu himself, and you needed muscles like his to pull the string taut. Most of all, though, you needed skill. To take down a wild pig, you had to know exactly where to strike – under its left foreleg, piercing the heart – before the whole pack of fast-moving beasts, with their long, sharp incisors, could charge you. Your bow had to feel like an extension of your body. At weeks-long feasts – one of the main purposes of Cinta Larga life – celebrations culminated in the ritual killing of a wild pig, when men showed off their archery.

Pio’s uncle lived a few days’ walk away, near the Roaring river with its rocky cataracts. One morning, Pio and his uncle were crouched on the bank, drinking water from cupped hands, when they heard a thundering crack like an enormous branch breaking. And then another, and another. Upriver, just visible in the distance, some kind of craft was passing under a Cinta Larga footbridge. Because the Cinta Larga never developed the canoe, boats were alien to them – and this boat was loud, propelled by an outboard motor.

At the time the Cinta Larga didn’t think of the outsiders as “white people” but as mokopey – roughly “those who cover themselves”, a reference to their clothes. The outsiders were known to be dangerous. At the time the Cinta Larga numbered up to 2,000, scattered across a territory roughly the size of Belgium. But they travelled all of it, always trading news, including news of incursions. The most notorious would come to be known as the Massacre of the 11th Parallel, after the latitude where it took place. In 1963, a rubber firm’s gunmen had raided a Cinta Larga village and killed six people with automatic weapons. A woman and her five-year-old child were left standing. The woman was hung upside down and hacked in two with a machete, then the child was shot in the head with a revolver.

Most massacres on the Amazon frontier went unreported, but in this instance one of the gunmen told a priest – whether out of guilt or anger that he wasn’t paid his $15 fee, it was never clear. When the news reached Rio de Janeiro and the rest of the western world, the episode briefly made the Cinta Larga into poster children for Brazil’s ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people. But it was just one of many such atrocities. Which explained the Cinta Larga’s other word for the outsiders: dayap, an onomatopoeia for a gunshot.

Pio ran back to his uncle’s village looking for his father, but couldn’t find him. Terrified as he was, though, he wanted to know about the outsiders and their world. Returning to the riverbank, he hid himself in the foliage to watch as they floated by.

Going back centuries, Brazil’s leaders had dreamed of settling the Amazon. In 1907, a young military officer named Cândido Rondon was tasked with building a telegraph line through the vast territory of Mato Grosso (“dense forest”). Rondon didn’t fit the usual profile of western explorers. For one thing, he was himself of largely Indigenous descent. Even more remarkably, he dedicated his life to the Enlightenment principle of universal human rights at a time when most Brazilians agreed with Theodore Roosevelt: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but … nine out of every 10 are.” Entering the lands of so-called índios bravos – “wild Indians” – Rondon often came under arrow fire. But he insisted his men never respond in kind: “Die if you must, but never kill.” This became the founding dictum of Rondon’s Indian Protection Service, later rebranded the National Foundation of Indigenous Peoples, or Funai.

Of course, this institution’s purpose was only nominally to protect the Indians. What the government really wanted was to “pacify” them, making their lands safe for development. To that end, Rondon offered gifts: mirrors, colourful beads and – most appealing of all, for people who’d never known a material harder than rock or bone – metal tools. When Funai agents founded their first “attraction post” on the Roosevelt river in December 1969, they followed the same strategy, and many Cinta Larga came to live there permanently. What the agents didn’t realise was that the Cinta Larga were also coming out of sheer desperation. After the region’s first highway was built, using Rondon’s telegraph line as its backbone, settlers had brought a weapon even more deadly than guns. Among the Cinta Larga, a single outbreak of what was likely influenza had already killed dozens, spreading from village to village. Not for the first time, and not for the last, Funai itself added fuel to the fire. Pio lost his father to measles after the two visited the Roosevelt camp for gifts. By the 1980s, the Cinta Larga had lost perhaps three-quarters of their population.

The US anthropologist Marshall Sahlins famously called hunter-gatherers the “original affluent society” because, while they rarely produced a surplus, their needs were few and easily met. Funai wanted to bring about the exact opposite situation, gradually tapering its gift-giving so as to stimulate new wants, new needs – recalling an older effort, in the United States, to push Native Americans to “wear civilised clothes … cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey, [and] own property” (in the words of Senator Henry Dawes). The ultimate goal was to bring Indigenous people into the Brazilian economy, to make them productive workers.

In Pio’s case, the strategy worked, though not exactly as intended. After he was orphaned, he went to school in a nearby settlement but ended up quitting to work as a Funai interpreter. He was taught to call Funai agents papai – “daddy”. No longer did he dream of being a great hunter like his father; now he hoped to save up for a car. The problem was that whatever money he earned slipped through his fingers, as he found himself constantly needing to buy new clothes, constantly tempted by little luxuries: candy, soda, tinned sardines. It was a common predicament. As the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro put it: “The Brazilian state turned Indians into poor people.”

What seemed like a solution came in 1984, when a group of Cinta Larga discovered an enormous cache of mahogany logs – 800 of them, illegally cut down in the north-western reaches of their territory. It was a Funai agent who told Pio that they had, in essence, won the lottery.

“That there is worth a lot of money,” this agent told Pio. “Don’t let it go to waste. Sell that stuff.”

By the time the first diamonds turned up on the Stream of the Blackflies, a tiny tributary of the Roosevelt river, at the start of the dry season of 2000, Pio – now the “general chief” of his people – was desperate for a new source of income. Commissions from loggers had paid for roads linking their villages to nearby settlements. They had paid for visits to doctors, for useful goods such as shotguns and chainsaws, and for the Cinta Larga to move into western-style wooden houses with asbestos roofs. Now, though, just about all of the mahogany within easy reach of the highway was gone.

Still, Pio wanted to keep any operation small. On the one hand, he worried about invasion – about a repeat of the atrocities of the contact era. On the other, frankly, he worried about his own people. While Pio had spent almost his entire life bouncing between the old world of the forest and the new world of white society, many other Cinta Larga came from the eastern part of the territory, where contact had come later, and the “white man’s law” remained a distant concept. In Pio’s father’s day, there was constant conflict with their Indigenous neighbours – and, like in many other South American groups, the victors consumed the flesh of the vanquished. Even among the Cinta Larga themselves, just uttering a man’s name in his presence – an obscure taboo – could drive him to murder. Men regularly felt the pull of wepíka, which translates roughly as “revenge”, only with a sense of obligation, as with a debt that must be zeroed out.

Alas, there was no way to keep the Stream of the Blackflies secret. Initially Pio brought in just a handful of outsiders, men who fit a profile common among investors in Amazonian mines: local businessmen with no real knowledge of geology, no special acumen for prospecting and not the faintest inkling of Indigenous culture – just some capital, an appetite for risk and a casual disdain for the law. They set up camp at the Stream of the Blackflies and cleared an area with chainsaws, knocking down the trees to expose the ochre soil. Each team set up what was known in Brazilian prospecting lingo as a “pair of machines”, which used water to separate minerals from worthless sediment. Diesel engines were hooked up to pumps that sent water through a tube to a high-pressure nozzle which sprayed away the layers of mud and clay atop the “pay gravel”, where diamonds could be found. Gradually a “sink” of reddish-brown water formed – the pit where a team would comb the sodden earth for precious stones.

Brazilian prospectors had always followed word of mouth from one site to another – so much so that, in their particular slang, the Portuguese word for “gossip” (fofoca) was synonymous with a mine. As soon as Pio’s partners sold some of their product, fortune-seekers started flocking to the nearby towns of Cacoal and Espigão d’Oeste. No matter if Pio turned them down; they would simply accost any Cinta Larga they could find, offering a pittance in return for access. Unable to stop his fellow Cinta Larga from freelancing, Pio tried to mediate their deals. In the standard arrangement, a prospector could keep 80% of the revenues for himself; 15% would go to his Cinta Larga “partner”, while another 5% went to the Pamaré Association, a Cinta Larga co-operative led by Pio, for wider redistribution. The association would also receive a one-time “toll” for entry. Initially he set the toll at a mere $750 per pair of machines. In October 2000, he doubled it; then in December, he doubled it again. Interest didn’t flag in the slightest. By February 2001, it had reached $6,000.

At its peak, the mine stretched for seven miles along the Stream of the Blackflies, with some 5,000 fortune-seekers living in tarpaulin shacks on the edges. Pio often visited, and it looked to him like nothing so much as ants swarming in an Amazonian ant hill. Hoping to keep the mine as orderly as possible, he banned prostitution, firearms, drugs and hard liquor. Three dozen warriors policed the mine.

In Cinta Larga society, “warrior” had never been a discrete profession; it was merely the obligation of any able-bodied man. As in the old days, though, they painted their bodies with jaguar spots, and prospectors were terrified of them. Some carried pistols or shotguns. Others had spent their whole lives wielding a bow, still made their own arrows, and shot with startling accuracy. Pio may have been “chief”, but these men were nothing like soldiers. Their only allegiance was to their conscience.

The April 2004 massacre might never have happened if not for a prospector named Francisco das Chagas Alves Saraiva, better known as Baiano Doido – the Crazy One from Bahia, a state on Brazil’s faraway coast. Recently acquitted on charges of armed robbery, he bragged to anyone who would listen about crimes he had committed. As one Cinta Larga put it: “Baiano Doido told me that he’s a real man, a fearless killer – not a thief, a killer. That he had killed more than 20 men at a gold prospect in Mato Grosso.”

Baiano was one of some 200 prospectors who sneaked into Cinta Larga country and set up camp in the Grota do Sossego – the Gully of Tranquility, about two miles from the heart of the mine. There’s little question that the Cinta Larga tried to avoid violence, at least at first. When they learned of the incursion, they sent three of their own white mine workers with a message: “Leave now, or the Indians will remove you.” But Baiano just scoffed: “The Indians aren’t in charge any more. We are.” Brandishing a gun, he even ordered one of the messengers to his knees and threatened to kill him, before finally letting him go.

Another question about which there’s no debate: the Cinta Larga tried to warn the government, which maintained a paradoxical relationship with the tribe. Even though Pio was under investigation for illegal mining and money laundering, officials also negotiated with him to shut down the mine. Occasionally, government security forces swept in, arrested some prospectors and seized equipment. The rest of the time, they kept to a few checkpoints near the main points of entry. On 5 April, Cinta Larga warriors captured 15 prospectors on their way to the secret gully – one armed with a sawn-off shotgun – and delivered them to one such checkpoint. The warriors declared that, if the authorities didn’t remove the other invaders, they would. But the officers on duty said they couldn’t do anything without orders from above.

Back at the Stream of the Blackflies, Pio tried to persuade the warriors to stand down: “Let’s work in peace.” He’d already alerted Funai, which promised to intervene, though it lacked the resources to do so right away. Still, as one Cinta Larga described it: “We couldn’t arrive at the same thinking. And during the conversation, one person started remembering the past. Another started remembering. They remembered … every white man who harmed us, the diseases. They told of the many killings carried out by rubber tappers, prospectors – all of our old relatives who died at the white men’s hands. And they asked one person after another: ‘What do you think?’”

According to the logic of wepíka, these atrocities weren’t isolated events but part of an accounting that left one side of the ledger – the Cinta Larga side – sagging beneath the weight of hundreds of deaths. The fear of another Massacre of the 11th Parallel was all too real. The warriors always came back to Baiano and his threats. “It’s him or us,” said one. “We have to do it before he does,” said another.

There are conflicting versions of what happened the next morning. But the basic facts are not in dispute: while Pio went to beg the authorities to intervene, 53 warriors made their way to the gully. Most of the 200 prospectors fled into the forest. According to the Cinta Larga, though, not only did Baiano Doido refuse to leave, he also called them “animals”. True to his reputation, he even threatened to come back and kill them all. Forensic examiners would find him shot through with 11 arrows. Two other men were killed along with him, right then and there. The other 26 were led into the trees before being executed, some with arrows, some with bullets, others with blows from heavy wooden clubs.

It’s hard to overstate the panic that gripped the region afterwards. A Cinta Larga schoolteacher named Donivaldo was tied up and beaten in the town of Espigão, and a 15-year-old named Moisés was shot to death on a forest road. Pio would remember receiving threats in town: “Five years might pass – 10, 20, 30 years – but we will have our revenge.” As the story consumed the press, old prejudices resurfaced. One columnist called the Cinta Larga “civilised cannibals”. In Brasília, a member of Congress decried the “impunity of murderous Indians who massacre Brazilians searching for a place to work”, as if the prospectors were simply law-abiding strivers.

The Cinta Larga never had a word for “justice”, and the Brazilian state did a laughable job communicating what it was supposed to be. In the ensuing investigation, the federal police found no evidence to place Pio at the scene of the massacre. Instead they resorted to armchair anthropology, quizzing suspects on the role of a Cinta Larga chief to prove Pio was somehow responsible for the warriors’ actions.

Never mind that one police officer had heard Pio’s appeals for intervention relayed by radio, and two government officials said they were meeting with Pio at precisely the moment the massacre was taking place. Never mind that the best evidence against him, and many others, was hearsay from prospectors. The federal police accused him and a few other chiefs of “leading” and “instigating” the killings. All in all, 22 Cinta Larga men (and one white Funai agent) were charged with homicide.

When it came to the question of whether they were “integrated” enough to stand trial, a judge tried to argue that this step wasn’t even necessary, because “the Cinta Larga’s involvement in [Brazilian] society is well known … given that some can be seen driving vehicles and making commercial transactions” – which, in his mind, suggested “perfect integration”. Funai lawyers successfully appealed, but the anthropologists they brought in only deepened the confusion. Insisting that the Cinta Larga were bound by an age-old “warrior ethos”, they failed to explain Pio’s stand against bloodshed.

Every outsider seemed to have an idea of what the Cinta Larga were supposed to be, even though Pio and the others of his generation could hardly resolve these questions for themselves. His friend Tataré would state the dilemma out loud: “I don’t know if I’m white, if I’m Indian … I don’t know what I am.” As much as they yearned to possess the white man’s things, they never felt at home in the white man’s cities, never felt at ease like when they bathed in the Roosevelt river. As much as they did business with white men, they never quite understood how white men’s minds worked – how a life could be an individual timeline in which the future grew logically from one’s own actions, missteps and investments, divorced from the fate of one’s family, one’s tribe. Learning about money, similarly, was like learning the white man’s language: the grammar never quite felt natural.

Brazil’s justice system is notoriously slow. After the media circus died down, the case passed from one judge to another. It had almost faded into oblivion when it heaved back to life in November 2023, with the hearing presided over by Judge Slomp. And then something extraordinary happened. Last month, a new team of prosecutors narrowed the case to just six Cinta Larga men, some of whom, according to transcripts of police interrogations, admitted having gone to the gully. The prosecutors asked Slomp to throw out the charges against Pio, Tataré, the Funai agent and others for whom evidence was thin.

It could almost seem like the dysfunctional Brazilian state was finally righting one of its wrongs. But the fact remains that, for two decades, Pio was forced to stand as the public face of a gruesome atrocity, rather than the survivor of one. The rubber barons who ordered the Massacre of the 11th Parallel never faced charges at all.

This is an edited extract from When We Sold God’s Eye by Alex Cuadros, published by W&N on 5 December