{"id":11932,"date":"2019-11-08T15:36:50","date_gmt":"2019-11-08T18:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.amazoniasocioambiental.org\/radar\/blood-gold-in-the-brazilian-rain-forest\/"},"modified":"2019-11-08T15:39:18","modified_gmt":"2019-11-08T18:39:18","slug":"blood-gold-in-the-brazilian-rain-forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raisg.org\/es\/radar\/blood-gold-in-the-brazilian-rain-forest\/","title":{"rendered":"Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

By Jon Lee Anderson<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/strong><\/p>\n

November 4, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Indigenous people and illegal miners are engaged in a fight that may help decide the future of the planet.<\/em><\/h3>\n

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One day in 2014, Bel\u00e9m, a member of Brazil\u2019s Kayapo tribe, went deep into the forest to hunt macaws and parrots. He was helping to prepare for a coming-of-age ceremony, in which young men are given adult names and have their lips pierced. By custom, initiates wear headdresses adorned with tail feathers. Bel\u00e9m, whose Kayapo name is Takaktyx, an honorific form of the word \u201cstrong,\u201d was a designated bird hunter.<\/p>\n

Far from his home village of Turedjam, Bel\u00e9m ran across a group of white outsiders. They were\u00a0garimpeiros<\/em>, gold prospectors, who were working inside the Kayapo reserve\u2014a twenty-six-million-acre Amazonian wilderness, demarcated for indigenous people. Gold mining is illegal there, but the prospectors were accompanied by a Kayapo man, so Bel\u00e9m assumed that some arrangement had been made. About nine thousand Kayapo lived in the forest, split into several groups; each had its own chief, and the chiefs tended to do as they pleased.<\/p>\n

Ever since the Kayapo had come into regular contact with the outside world, in the nineteen-fifties, whites had been trying to extract resources from their forests, beginning with animal skins and expanding to mahogany and gold. In the eighties, some chiefs made easy profits by granting logging and mining rights to outsiders, but after a decade the mahogany was depleted and the price of gold had dropped. After environmental advocates in the Brazilian government brought a lawsuit against miners, the Kayapo closed the reserve to extraction. Since then, though, international gold prices have tripled, to fourteen hundred dollars an ounce, and an influx of new miners have come to try their luck.<\/p>\n

The prospectors whom Bel\u00e9m met told him that they wanted to build a road linking Turedjam with their mine, about forty miles away through the forest. Bel\u00e9m understood why they wanted such a road. Turedjam was situated on the Rio Branco, which formed the northeastern boundary of the Kayapo reserve. The area was rich in gold\u2014and Turedjam had a recently built bridge that could support heavy vehicles. The proposed road would also allow prospectors to sneak machinery through the reserve under tree cover, without being spotted from the air by federal police, who periodically raided their operations.<\/p>\n

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\u201cAll of us here realize we\u2019re fucking the environment,\u201d Jorge Silva, a forty-eight-year-old miner, said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like we want to\u2014it\u2019s that we haven\u2019t found any alternative means to survive.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/small><\/p>\n

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Back in Turedjam, Bel\u00e9m told his chief, Mro\u2019\u00f4, about the proposal. A young chief, Mro\u2019\u00f4 had founded Turedjam four years earlier, leading a group of Kayapo from his home village after a dispute with a senior chief, who wished to allow outsiders to mine and to log mahogany. Mro\u2019\u00f4 had established Turedjam as a \u201csentinel village,\u201d keeping watch over the vulnerable edge of the reserve. He told Bel\u00e9m to let the prospectors know that he wasn\u2019t interested.<\/p>\n

A year later, Mro\u2019\u00f4 died, apparently from diabetes. His brother, a heavy drinker known as Juan Piranha, quickly made a deal with the prospectors, and before long their road was cut\u2014a track through the forest wide enough for excavators capable of moving hundreds of tons of rock and earth a day. Then Mro\u2019\u00f4\u2019s successor began allowing prospectors to work the surrounding land in exchange for ten per cent of their findings. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miners poured in.<\/p>\n

Wildcat mining is less pervasive than logging, but it can be more insidious. Loggers usually harvest valuable trees and leave the rest; miners cut everything. Mercury, used in the refining process, leaves rivers poisoned, and the pollution can spread hundreds of miles downstream. The allure of gold attracts fortune-seekers, who bring prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and violence. \u201cLetting prospectors into the Kayapo reserve is like leaving your children in the protection of a drug gang,\u201d Barbara Zimmerman, a Canadian ecologist who has worked with the Kayapo for three decades, told me. In the past few years, according to environmentalists, several hundred thousand acres of the reserve have been destroyed or degraded by illegal mining and logging.<\/p>\n

The destruction of Kayapo land is just part of what Zimmerman calls the \u201csacking\u201d of the Amazon. In addition to the mining and logging, soy farmers and cattle ranchers have cleared huge tracts of forest, mostly by fire. Brazil\u2019s National Institute of Space Research, which tracks the damage, calculates that one-fifth of Brazil\u2019s Amazonian rain forest\u2014the world\u2019s largest remaining \u201cgreen lung,\u201d which absorbs billions of tons of carbon dioxide\u2014has been destroyed since the nineteen-seventies. Indigenous reserves serve as a bulwark against destruction, green islands amid industrial soy fields and clear-cut ranchlands. But the closer indigenous people live to whites the more vulnerable they are. In these places, all that stands in the way of the destruction of the Amazon is the ability of a few thousand indigenous leaders to resist the enticements of consumer culture. In Turedjam, that battle is being lost. \u201cIt\u2019s like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been let loose,\u201d Zimmerman said.<\/p>\n

There are eighty-two Kayapo settlements, scattered across the green expanse of the reserve. In riverside communities, small boats are the primary means of transportation; prospectors haul away ore on barges, or in trucks where there are roads. In the forest, indigenous people traditionally walked from village to village, on journeys that could take days. During the past few decades, airstrips have been hacked out, so that bush planes can ferry people and goods.<\/p>\n

In the course of a two-week visit, I took several flights over the forest. On one, as the plane cleared the treetops, I saw smoke rising in a\u00a0huge, menacing column, like a cloud of volcanic ash. For hours, the fire burned, unattended, and a dense blanket of smoke settled on the horizon. Fires like this one are an increasingly regular feature of life in the Amazon, where settlers regard them as an essential part of progress.<\/p>\n

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Kupato, the forty-five-year-old chief of Turedjam, stands outside his home.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/small><\/p>\n

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Thomas Lovejoy, an American biologist who for decades has been a pre\u00ebminent authority on the Amazon, told me that the burning of forests, along with climate change, was disrupting the Amazon\u2019s ability to produce rain for itself. \u201cWe\u2019re now seeing historic droughts every four or five years,\u201d he said. \u201cThe problem with droughts is that they dry up rivers and cause more fires, leading to more deforestation.\u201d The Amazon, he noted, produces twenty per cent of the world\u2019s rainwater. If the system is pushed too far out of balance, the forest will cease to be able to regenerate itself and turn into a savanna; a carbon sink nearly the size of the continental United States will become a carbon producer. \u201cWe\u2019re really close to the tipping point right now,\u201d Lovejoy said.<\/p>\n

The conquest of the forest began in earnest in the seventies, after Brazil\u2019s government, which was then a military dictatorship, carved a highway into the Amazon and encouraged people to move in. Since then, millions of settlers have founded towns and cities, built roads, dammed rivers, and burned forests, ultimately clearing an area larger than France.<\/p>\n

Much of their land sits uneasily alongside indigenous reserves, which constitute about thirteen per cent of the national territory\u2014more than four hundred thousand square miles, in which approximately nine hundred thousand people live. (They are what remain of an estimated eleven million indigenous people who lived there when the Portuguese arrived, in 1500.) For decades,\u00a0funai<\/em>, the country\u2019s indigenous-affairs agency, has delineated reserves and helped guard them from developers. But Brazil\u2019s leaders have been lax about enforcing the strictures, and in the Amazon conservationists and indigenous-rights activists have struggled to contain a scramble for land and fortune. While the leftist President In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva was in office, from 2003 to 2010, deforestation decreased for a time. But since last January, when Jair Bolsonaro became President, the destruction has become a kind of perverse political goal.<\/p>\n

Bolsonaro, a former Army captain whose followers call him the Legend, is an unabashed racist, homophobe, and misogynist. A climate-change denier, he came to power with a vehemently anti-environmentalist message, supported by a powerful lobby known as \u201cthe three B\u2019s\u201d: Bibles, bullets, and beef, meaning evangelicals, gun advocates, and the agribusiness industry. Bolsonaro has complained for years that indigenous protections are a senseless brake on development. \u201cThe Indians do not speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have culture,\u201d he once said. \u201cHow did they manage to get thirteen per cent of the national territory?\u201d Before he was elected, he described the Amazon as \u201cthe richest area in the world\u201d and vowed, \u201cI\u2019m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for Indians.\u201d<\/p>\n

During his first days in office, Bolsonaro, emulating Donald Trump, signed a flurry of executive orders dismantling environmental safeguards and protections for minorities. He reduced\u00a0funai<\/em>\u00a0to a subsection of a new family-and-human-rights ministry, led by an ultraconservative evangelical pastor, and stripped its ability to create reserves. (The Supreme Court recently overturned these measures, but\u00a0funai<\/em>\u00a0remains politically disenfranchised.) Bolsonaro also slashed the budget of the primary environmental agency,\u00a0ibama<\/em>, by a third.<\/p>\n

Since last year, the rate of deforestation in Brazil has increased nearly forty per cent, with thousands of fires\u2014many of them intentionally set\u2014scorching forests across the Amazon. In August, as the skies over S\u00e3o Paulo blackened from the smoke of fires burning more than a thousand miles away, concern grew around the world. With the G-7 summit approaching, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, called for international leaders to hold an emergency discussion, and tweeted, \u201cOur house is burning. Literally.\u201d Bolsonaro indignantly accused Macron of a \u201ccolonialist mentality unacceptable in the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In the past few years, hundreds of thousands of acres of the Kayapo reserve have been destroyed or degraded by illegal mining and logging. \u201cThe Kayapo provide a good example of how conservation is an actual war,\u201d an N.G.O. official said.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/small><\/p>\n

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After Germany and Norway announced plans to revoke funding for conservation projects in Brazil, Bolsonaro ordered his military to combat the fires, and declared his \u201clove\u201d for the Amazon. But when G-7 members pledged twenty million dollars to help fight the fires, Bolsonaro refused, then said he would accept the money only if Macron apologized. In the argument over the fires, he mocked Macron\u2019s wife on Facebook and declared that he would boycott Bic pens, because they were made by a French company. His tourism ambassador, a former mixed-martial-arts fighter named Renzo Gracie, told Macron, \u201cThe only fire going on is the fire inside Brazilian hearts and our president\u2019s heart, you clown. Come over here you\u2019ll be caught by the neck, that chicken neck. You don\u2019t fool me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent months, Bolsonaro has given speeches encouraging the development of the Amazon. Addressing a group of miners in October, he noted, \u201cInterest in the Amazon isn\u2019t about the Indians or the fucking trees\u2014it\u2019s about mining.\u201d For Bolsonaro, gold prospectors serve as a symbol of the country\u2019s pioneer spirit\u2014much as West Virginia coal miners do for Trump. In the eighties, Bolsonaro\u2019s father, an itinerant dentist, went to work among the tens of thousands of prospectors at the Serra Pelada gold mine, a brutal place that Bolsonaro speaks of nostalgically. Whenever he has a chance,\u00a0he maintains, he parks his car at a riverbank to take out a pan and try his luck. Miners and loggers understand that they have a friend in office. Last year, Brazil\u2019s military abandoned two river outposts guarding the country\u2019s Yanomami reserve, which had been established to keep out prospectors. Since then, at least twenty thousand miners have made their way into the reserve. In July, prospectors in another reserve killed an indigenous man in his own village; Bolsonaro\u2019s environment minister, contesting the reports, suggested that the victim had got drunk and drowned.<\/p>\n

In Brazil, illegal mining is estimated to bring in more than a billion dollars a year\u2014for Bolsonaro, an apparently unconscionable amount of money to give up. In August, he announced that he was working on a bill that would legalize mining on indigenous lands. \u201cWe can\u2019t keep living like poor people on earth that is so rich,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want to include the Indians in our society, and a large part of them want it that way, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turedjam is a tiny, sleepy place, with two dozen communal homes set around a dusty clearing in the forest. Except for a few signs of relative prosperity\u2014tin roofs, homes made of wood planks rather than of palm thatch, the occasional Chinese motorbike\u2014there is little to suggest that it plays a central role in Brazil\u2019s gold boom.<\/p>\n

Children kick balls around, and a few scrawny dogs loll in the shade. Behind the houses, there are hammocks and wooden benches where women sit together, stoking cook fires and making intricate beaded armbands and necklaces. They wear short, sleeveless dresses cut from vividly patterned fabric. When I visited recently, one woman\u2019s was decorated with cartoon squirrels, owls, and lions; another\u2019s had a Christmas motif, with snowflakes and stockings stuffed with gifts. Most women adorn their limbs with black paint, like leopard spots, and their cheeks with geometric designs; their scalps are shorn in a distinctive V. The men traditionally wear their hair shoulder-length and their bodies intricately painted.<\/p>\n

I had arrived in Turedjam with Felipe Milanez, a humanities professor at the Federal University of Bahia, who has spent years visiting Amazonian communities and advocating for indigenous rights. Mro\u2019\u00f4\u2019s widow embraced him with the traditional Kayapo greeting of tears, in which they produced a high-pitched keening to mourn dead friends and relatives. I was new to the area, so the community\u2019s elders\u2014including Bel\u00e9m, the bird hunter, who was also the village schoolteacher\u2014welcomed me with a handshake.<\/p>\n

In the eighties, the Kayapo were known as committed activists, travelling to Europe and the United States to raise awareness about the destruction of the Amazon; the chief Raoni Metuktire appeared onstage with Sting, a distinctive three-inch plate in his lip. But the leaders of Turedjam took pains to talk to me about anything but mining. When I asked Bel\u00e9m about its effects, he demurred. He had spent five years commuting to school in the capital of Par\u00e1\u2014a city called Bel\u00e9m, which also supplied his nickname. Because he had come and gone so often, he said, he hadn\u2019t noticed much mining, so he couldn\u2019t really say what effect it might have had. When I asked if life in Turedjam had been better before the miners came, he hesitated. There was less disease then, he acknowledged. Now there was leishmaniasis (akin to leprosy) and also malaria, and there were \u201ctoo many\u00a0kuben<\/em>\u201d\u2014white people. He paused, and offered, \u201cBut we have free electricity now, which is good.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opening of the reserve was the subject of a long fight in Bel\u00e9m\u2019s family. Born in 1973, he was a nephew of Tutu Pombo, a wily, flamboyant chief who had grown rich in the eighties as he negotiated with whites to extract mahogany and gold from the jungle. Glenn Shepard, an American ethnobotanist and anthropologist who has known the Kayapo for decades, told me that Tutu Pombo devised a template for dealing with the\u00a0kuben:<\/em>\u00a0demand a cut of the take and make sure that they don\u2019t cheat. \u201cHis genius was in recognizing that this was an unavoidable reality and deciding to get organized for it,\u201d he said. At the peak of Tutu Pombo\u2019s wealth, Kayapo people told me, he had five hundred head of cattle, an airplane, and houses in Tucum\u00e1 and Bel\u00e9m; he also had numerous wives, including several white women. His deals with outsiders helped to open a rift among the Kayapo. In the eastern part of the reserve, where Tutu Pombo lived, many people embraced mining and logging; in the west, many resisted, and conservation N.G.O.s came in to support them. In his own community, Tutu Pombo eased dissent by spreading money around.<\/p>\n

Bel\u00e9m\u2019s father died while he was a boy, and Tutu Pombo financed his schooling in the city. But, eventually, the chief asked him to return and work as a bag-checker in a gold mine. \u201cIt was my job to make sure the prospectors weren\u2019t bringing in guns or drugs, or stealing gold on their way out,\u201d Bel\u00e9m explained. \u201cI also made sure they paid their percentage.\u201d He didn\u2019t like the job, so Tutu Pombo installed him as a supervisor at a logging camp; he also arranged for him to marry one of his nieces. Bel\u00e9m stayed in the job until Tutu Pombo died from illness, in 1992.<\/p>\n

After the chief\u2019s death, the Kayapo fell into conflict about how\u00a0much extraction to permit. In 2007, one of Tutu Pombo\u2019s heirs pressed to allow more. Mro\u2019\u00f4 argued with him, and eventually stabbed him in a knife fight. As Mro\u2019\u00f4 prepared to leave and found a new village, Bel\u00e9m was conflicted\u2014he was related to both men\u2014but he decided to go.<\/p>\n

Mro\u2019\u00f4 established Turedjam at the edge of the reserve, across the border from a mining town called Ouril\u00e2ndia, in the hope of bringing some of its benefits to his people. An intelligent, charismatic man, Mro\u2019\u00f4 persuaded local whites to supply his village with electricity, and to pay for the bridge across the river. Before long, Turedjam also had a health clinic and a primary school. But Mro\u2019\u00f4 was adamant about preserving the traditional Kayapo way of life, and tried to keep out loggers and prospectors. \u201cAfter he died,\u201d Bel\u00e9m said quietly, \u201ceverything changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bel\u00e9m seemed embarrassed by what had happened in Turedjam since then, but he didn\u2019t say so; the Kayapo consider it inappropriate to criticize elders, and his elders had decided to allow mining. When I asked to see one of the mines, he offered instead to show me the community farm. We drove to a spot on the prospectors\u2019 road, and he led me into the forest where a tangled patch of yucca and bananas grew. He said vaguely that the Kayapo hoped to expand their agricultural activities, but would need help from N.G.O.s. Somewhere nearby, an excavator churned past, its engines the loudest noise in the forest, but he pretended it wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

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Kendjam, an isolated village at the heart of the twenty-six-million-acre Kayapo reserve, prohibits prospecting and logging.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/small><\/p>\n

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At the riverside, the effects of mining became impossible to ignore. The water of the Rio Branco, the river that runs past the community, was a nauseous pale yellow. In most Amazonian villages, people go to the river every day, to bathe or wash clothes or escape the heat of the late afternoon. Here there was no one. Across the river, on the\u00a0kuben<\/em>-owned ranches, the land was rumpled and gouged, with dirt piled up next to wide craters filled with standing water, the same livid color as the Rio Branco. On the way back from the farm, I asked Bel\u00e9m about the river. \u201cIt changed color when the mining started,\u201d he said neutrally. \u201cNow nobody goes to wash in the river. People get skin rashes if they do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On my third visit to Turedjam, Kupato, the village chief, agreed to show me one of the illegal prospecting operations on the reserve. When I arrived at his home, he and Bel\u00e9m were getting painted by their wives in preparation for the outing, their torsos and faces daubed in vivid swatches of yellow and red. Kupato carried a carved hardwood staff, a chiefly version of the traditional Kayapo war club.<\/p>\n

Before the trip, Bel\u00e9m explained that he and Kupato wished to pay their respects at the tomb of Mro\u2019\u00f4. We walked along the Rio Branco, into a clearing where a half-dozen earthen mounds rose from the forest floor, piled with former belongings\u2014sun-bleached mattresses, household appliances, pots and pans, flip-flops. Kupato and Bel\u00e9m stood looking at Mro\u2019\u00f4\u2019s tomb, at the center of the site. Kupato whispered a few inaudible words, and the men began to cry. After ten minutes, we walked silently back to the village, climbed into my pickup truck, and drove into the jungle.<\/p>\n

Kupato sat in the front seat next to the driver, using peremptory hand signals to direct the way. (The Kayapo all share a language, with regional differences on the scale of Brooklyn and New Jersey, but few speak Portuguese.) Not far past the community farm, Kupato motioned for us to stop. He led the way down a path to a makeshift thatched hut, where a grizzled middle-aged man clambered out of a hammock and hailed us uncertainly. As Bel\u00e9m introduced us, he relaxed a bit and said that his name was Chic\u00e3o. He walked us over to his site, a couple of hundred feet away.<\/p>\n

Chic\u00e3o\u2019s operation was small, just him and a three-man crew, but in half a year it had torn a chunk out of the forest the size of five football fields: a miasma of muddy pathways, water-filled craters, and fallen trees. In the nearest crater, the crewmen were running a pump off a small generator, washing mud toward a sluice with a hose. The generator shook and roared, drowning out the macaws that flew overhead.<\/p>\n

Bel\u00e9m stared down at the hosemen, his expression unreadable. In the pit, the prospectors cut the generator in order to take a water break: the heat was ferocious, and they were parched. One of them, a thin man with curly hair, introduced himself as Jorge Silva. He told me that he had studied physics, but had never been able to find paying work in his field, and so, in addition to prospecting, he had worked as a gym teacher and as an electrician. Looking me in the eyes, he said, \u201cAll of us here realize we\u2019re fucking the environment. It\u2019s not like we want to\u2014it\u2019s that we haven\u2019t found any alternative means to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kayapo children play in the forest near Kendjam.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/small><\/p>\n

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Chic\u00e3o seemed hesitant to discuss his mine\u2019s yield in front of the Kayapo, but he eventually said that he found three or four grams a day. It wasn\u2019t a lot, but Chic\u00e3o thought that he would carry on for the time being. He was married, and his\u00a0wife visited him from their home town, eight hours away by bus. His only real preoccupation, he said, was his leg. He peeled back a bandage on his shin, revealing a line of deep, festering lesions. He thought it was leishmaniasis, but a doctor had said it wasn\u2019t, so he wasn\u2019t sure what it was. He was taking medicine for it. He shrugged.<\/p>\n

As we drove back to Turedjam, Bel\u00e9m said that Chic\u00e3o seemed to be a poor man, trying to make his way. He spoke as if the mine were a kind of charitable endeavor, helping the unfortunate. A few days later, on a bush-plane flight, I spotted Chic\u00e3o\u2019s mine from above: a tiny, raw rectangle in the forest, like a gum wrapper dropped onto Wrigley Field. Beyond it, a denuded area, hundreds of times larger, came into view. Scores of illegal mines had carved out a vast expanse where there was no green\u2014only mud, dirt roads, excavators, mining camps, and a couple of airstrips, from which, presumably, bigger operators were able to fly out their gold without encountering resistance. Much of the Rio Branco on either side of Turedjam no longer resembled a river; mining had turned it into a spreading mass of craters, filled with toxic lime-white water.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The forest ends at Turedjam. On the far side of the bridge spanning the Rio Branco, a dirt road leads through treeless, rolling hills to the town of Ouril\u00e2ndia, a half-hour journey by motorbike or pickup truck. Ouril\u00e2ndia, or Land of Gold, is the frontier of development in this part of the world.<\/p>\n

Three decades ago, the area where the town stands was untouched forest. \u201cOuril\u00e2ndia started as an airstrip in the jungle,\u201d Zimmerman, the ecologist, said. \u201cThen the settlers came, and it\u2019s exactly like what happened in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties\u2014the land gets cleared and the Indians get pushed back. The reason the Kayapo got as much land demarcated as they did for their reserves is that they were tough guys, warriors, and people were afraid of them. The first thing the Kayapo traded was jaguar skins\u2014pilots flew in to get skins for the fashion industry. And it progressed from there to logging and gold.\u201d As Ouril\u00e2ndia grew, it had an inevitable effect on the indigenous people nearby. \u201cWhen the Kayapo have such close contact with the outside, the elders come under pressure from the youth, who see things they want in the towns,\u201d Zimmerman said. \u201cThey come back with visions of sugarplums in their heads.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ouril\u00e2ndia has a few modest residential neighborhoods; the rest feels like a latter-day Silver City, with Hilux pickups instead of stagecoaches. A bronze sculpture of a prospector stands on one of the main avenues, and dozens of shops sell mining gear: water pumps, generators, bulldozers, hammocks, rubber boots. At Casa do Garimpeiro, two young women buy gold dust from prospectors and sell them gold jewelry, to give to their wives and girlfriends; outside is a giant glass-topped table, fashioned out of the gold-painted metal treads of an excavator. There are \u201ckilo\u201d restaurants, where patrons pay according to the weight of their food; there is also a series of gimcrack Pentecostal churches, a red-light district, and a few seedy hotels. At the entrance to the place where I stayed, plastic sculptures of leaping black panthers stood guard. Parked alongside was a truck that the proprietor employed in his side business, a septic-tank-cleaning operation. Its container was emblazoned with the slogan \u201cExpresso da Merda\u201d\u2014\u201cThe Shit Express.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an office on a street lined with brothels, Wesson Cleber Guimaraes, a spare-looking lawyer, acknowledged that illegal gold was the lifeblood of the local economy. He estimated that some fifteen million dollars\u2019 worth a month was being extracted from the pits nearby. He described Ouril\u00e2ndia as a lawless place. Pointing to a construction-supply business across the street, he told me that its owner, who was now in jail, had been found to own forty-seven airplanes. The man had apparently been operating his business as a front for the cocaine mafias that increasingly invest their money in the mines and also use the miners\u2019 clandestine airstrips to ship drugs. \u201cMoney laundering is a big business here,\u201d Cleber said mildly. When I expressed amazement that an operation as big as his neighbor\u2019s could have gone undetected, Cleber laughed: \u201cHere, it\u2019s the law of silence.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Since gold money came to Turedjam, old customs have coexisted uneasily with a consumer ethos.<\/em><\/p>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Cleber had been in Ouril\u00e2ndia since 2004, offering legal services to the \u201centrepreneurs\u201d in town, but he wanted me to know that he had a social conscience. His current mission was to help the Kayapo overcome their status as third-class citizens. He was part of a group that had drafted a proposal to legalize gold mining and logging on the reserve. It was time, he said, for the Indians to exploit their lands to their full potential, and to benefit from them. When I said that his views seemed to echo Bolsonaro\u2019s, Cleber beamed. \u201cExactly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Cleber showed me a draft charter for the recently created Kayapo Co\u00f6perative, described as an \u201cindigenous co\u00f6perative for the extraction, production, and commercialization of the Kayapo agro-industrial, forest, and mineral resources.\u201d He was not himself Kayapo, of course, but he and his associates claimed to have secured the support of Kayapo elders from various communities. He showed me a page filled with signatures.<\/p>\n

Taking out a calculator, Cleber\u00a0explained that the untapped resources in the Kayapo reserve represented an \u201cincalculable\u201d fortune. \u201cThere are twenty-five cubic metres of harvestable wood per hectare,\u201d he said, punching buttons. \u201cThat makes twenty-five million cubic feet of wood, which in turn is worth about twenty-five billion reals\u201d\u2014roughly six billion dollars. This was a conservative estimate, he said; the actual value could be three times that. \u201cThere are about nine thousand Kayapo living in that whole area, which means that, if the wealth they extracted were distributed evenly among them, each of them would be very rich. But today they are living in misery, people in a zoo where you go and take pictures of them.\u201d The co\u00f6perative would change all that, Cleber said with a smile: \u201cThe Kayapo could be billionaires.\u201d<\/p>\n

The main local promoter of the Kayapo Co\u00f6perative\u2014Jo\u00e3o Guerra, a friend of Cleber\u2019s\u2014had an office down the street, across from a Pentecostal church. A potbellied man in his late fifties, he was the president of the local Association of Prospectors, an advocacy group for gold miners. When I pointed out that his association represented an illicit enterprise, he laughed good-naturedly; there was, he pointed out, one legal gold mine in the region, just across the river from Kayapo land.<\/p>\n

The next day, we set off to see it, speeding in four-wheel-drive vehicles on the dirt road that also led to Turedjam. Near the bridge over the Rio Branco, we turned down a private road and into the mine. There were sheds for workers to wash and to change their clothes, a canteen, and, beyond, a landscape dominated by huge piles of dirt and deep craters. The mine had two yellow excavators, which allowed workers to strip the land far faster than Chic\u00e3o\u2019s crew could. The machines were in constant motion, working a pit about twenty feet deep. A forlorn patch of forest stood intact just beyond the pit\u2019s edge. A few hundred feet away was the Kayapo reserve, its jungle hills rising from the river.<\/p>\n

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In addition to miners and loggers, soy farmers and cattle ranchers have also infiltrated the area, clearing huge tracts of forest, mostly by fire. Brazil\u2019s National Institute of Space Research, which tracks the damage, calculates that one-fifth of Brazil\u2019s Amazonian rain forest has been destroyed since the nineteen-seventies.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/small><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Guerra waved toward the jungle. \u201cFrom there to Mato Grosso\u201d\u2014the neighboring state\u2014\u201cit\u2019s about five hundred kilometres, and it\u2019s all\u00a0indio<\/em>.\u201d At three points of the compass from where we stood, he complained, indigenous people controlled the land. \u201cIt\u2019s just not viable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He explained that when the boundaries of the indigenous territories were set, beginning in the nineties, some white settlers had been dispossessed. \u201cThat\u2019s where the problems start,\u201d he said. \u201cThey should reduce the size of the reserves, especially in those places where whites are now living. That would pacify a lot of people.\u201d Pointing to the Kayapo reserve, he added, \u201cAs for that, it\u2019s theirs. But they should have economic activity going on: mining, logging, Brazil-nut collecting, and cattle ranching. If all that were allowed on their land, in addition to the re-demarcation of Indian reserves, it would reduce the conflicts by eighty per cent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Down in the belly of the crater, men held the ends of giant black hoses between their legs and moved the nozzles back and forth, directing torrents of water into loose mounds of scree. Downstream, by the mouth of a larger hose, another man stood in the water, separating rocks from the flow of sediment. The flow was sucked uphill and burst onto a sluice tray, lined with a layer of felt that trapped the gold. Inside a shed, several employees got into waist-deep water in a concrete pool and sifted the final sediments. Using handheld pans, they washed the sediment with silvery streaks of mercury, until they came up with a pinkish blob of unrefined gold. It went into a vial in the owner\u2019s hands. The day\u2019s yield was about a hundred and forty grams, worth some sixty-five hundred dollars.<\/p>\n

For buyers abroad, it is difficult to distinguish between legal and illegal gold. Ore from small mines travels through a complex network of intermediaries before arriving at a processing facility, where it\u2019s melted together with ore from other sources, in a procedure sometimes called \u201cgold laundering.\u201d Much of the resulting alloy is shipped abroad; last year, Brazil exported ninety-five tons of it, mostly to the U.S., the U.K., and especially Switzerland, which refines seventy per cent of the world\u2019s gold.<\/p>\n

The trade in gold provides an index of global sentiment. In times of political anxiety and market volatility, investors stockpile gold bars. Authoritarian governments see deep reserves as a sign of strength; last year, demand from central banks was the highest in decades, with large purchases from Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland. A third of the gold produced is sold as jewelry in China and India, where booming middle classes support demand for wedding bands, ornate bridal necklaces, and New Year\u2019s charms. Tech companies are thought to consume three hundred and thirty-five tons of gold a year. (Pure gold, a corrosion-proof conductor, is used in every smartphone.) The larger companies profess ethical buying practices, but the Brazilian government\u2019s unwillingness to regulate the supply chain insures that \u201cdirty gold\u201d finds its way into the market, much as blood diamonds do. According to a 2016 report by the human-rights group Verit\u00e9, ninety per cent of the Fortune 500 companies that are required to file disclosures had bought gold from refineries linked to illegal mines. Last August, Brazil\u2019s Federal Public Ministry called the current conditions \u201ca breeding ground for fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n

For local workers, these kinds\u00a0of concerns seem remote, even ridiculous. In the mine\u2019s canteen, I met Jo\u00e3o Vieira da Silva, a thin man of sixty-two who was the oldest worker on the site. He had grown up in Piau\u00ed\u2014Brazil\u2019s poorest state, in the drought-stricken northeast\u2014and when he was ten his father had abandoned the family. Silva left soon afterward, hoping, he said, to \u201cescape the poverty.\u201d He had landed at a metallurgy plant in S\u00e3o Paulo but found the work tiring, so he had gone to seek his fortune in the Amazon. There, he had worked in\u00a0desmatamento<\/em>\u2014burning the jungle to create pastures for cattle. In 1983, he followed talk of a gold rush to a place called Castelo dos Sonhos, or Castle of Dreams. In the years since, he had worked when he could as a prospector, or else on cattle ranches, on the crews that drove fenceposts.<\/p>\n

Every two weeks, he took a few days off in the nearby town of Tucum\u00e3, where he had a small house. A widower with no children, Silva spent his free time in complete idleness, eating his meals in a local restaurant. He didn\u2019t own a car or a motorbike, so he got around on his own \u201chooves,\u201d he said, but sometimes people gave him rides. He didn\u2019t know how to read, so whenever an official signature was necessary he made a thumbprint.<\/p>\n

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In the indigenous reserves, all that stands in the way of the destruction of the Amazon is the ability of a few thousand local leaders to resist the enticements of consumer culture.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/small><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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At the mine, he worked as a\u00a0despedrador<\/em>\u2014the last man in the pit, who removes rocks from the water before it is sucked into the sluice. His hands were deeply calloused and rough, like a barefoot runner\u2019s feet. \u201cI could drive an excavator, and I wouldn\u2019t have hands like these,\u201d he said, without regret. He smiled, and added, \u201cProspecting is my favorite kind of work. It\u2019s better than clearing forests and driving posts. I grew tired of that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On the way back to Ouril\u00e2ndia, Jo\u00e3o Guerra talked about the allure of the gold-mining life. He had come to the region, with his two brothers, during the boom of the eighties. Smiling nostalgically, he said that they had been successful enough to buy themselves ranches. A few years ago, when Ouril\u00e2ndia\u2019s gold rush began, he had returned to the business. He laughed ruefully, and said, \u201cIt\u2019s easier for a man to become a prospector than for a prospector to become a man.\u201d He meant that once gold fever gets into your blood it doesn\u2019t easily leave.<\/p>\n

A survey published last December by the regional environmental group R.A.I.S.G. identified some twenty-three hundred illegal mining sites in the Amazon, spread across six countries. \u201cThe craving for valuable minerals resembles an epidemic,\u201d the report said, adding that the proliferation of mining \u201cis not comparable to any other period of its history.\u201d Guerra figured that there were more than two hundred thousand prospectors working illegally in Par\u00e1, but he suggested that the real problem was government intervention. Although conservation laws are spottily enforced, the federal police had at times worked with N.G.O.s to mount aggressive raids. \u201cWe don\u2019t repair the areas where we mine, because we are always ready to run from the police operations,\u201d Guerra said. If prospectors could work legally, he argued, they could institute safeguards in their use of mercury, and could also bulldoze their tailings and plant tree seedlings.<\/p>\n

\n

In 2013, a wave of new miners arrived with heavy excavators, radically accelerating the damage to the forest. Locals surmised that drug gangs were involved in the trade; no one else could afford such expensive equipment. The Kayapo asked\u00a0ibama<\/em>, the environmental agency, for help. The agency co\u00f6rdinated a series of assaults with the federal police, in which helicopters firebombed dozens of machines and a handful of trucks. \u201cIt was pretty good,\u201d an N.G.O. official who has worked extensively in the reserve told me. \u201cBut it\u2019s not enough\u2014it\u2019s a bit like chemotherapy with aggressive cancer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guerra complained that, in the past two years, as many as forty-five excavators had been destroyed. The machines cost more than a hundred thousand dollars apiece, and losing one could put a small operator out of business. Guerra himself had lost an excavator on the reserve, he confessed; he was fighting the fine, the equivalent of about six thousand dollars.<\/p>\n

The campaign of raids had cooled the mining activity in the region. But since Bolsonaro took office the raids have stopped. \u201cThe government is not only not working with us\u2014it\u2019s actively against us,\u201d the official said. The agencies that look after the environment and indigenous concerns are practically defunct\u2014and, the official said, the Bolsonaro administration is trying to block funding for conservation N.G.O.s.<\/p>\n

This summer, when fires in the Amazon attracted scrutiny, Bolsonaro claimed that N.G.O.s had set them in order to discredit his administration. On Brazil\u2019s far right, it is an article of faith that N.G.O.s are conspiring with outside powers to seize control of the Amazon. In S\u00e3o Paulo, a Bolsonaro adviser named Dom Bertrand de Orl\u00e9ans e Bragan\u00e7a told me that environmentalists were akin to a Communist insurgency, saying, \u201cGreens are the new Reds.\u201d (A descendant of Brazil\u2019s last emperor, he is scheduled to join Steve Bannon this month at a legislative hearing on the environment.) This kind of talk exacerbates a tradition of hostility toward anyone who resists mineral extraction. N.G.O. workers in the region raise the example of Z\u00e9 Cl\u00e1udio, an environmentalist in Par\u00e1, who was murdered, along\u00a0with his wife, in 2011. Several of them explained that they often received threats, and had begun to restrict their movements in the countryside. The official told me, \u201cThe Kayapo provide a good example of how conservation is an actual war.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Just outside the Kayapo reserve is a bar built in a roadside shack, with a jukebox and a couple of cloth-sided rooms, where prostitutes entertain prospectors who work in the reserve. At the entrance to Turedjam, another shack serves as a bodega and a rest house; the clients I saw there were invariably non-Kayapo, hanging out, avoiding eye contact. My hosts passed by without acknowledging the place at all.<\/p>\n

I asked Bel\u00e9m whether the Kayapo were concerned about having so many strangers in their midst. How did they know who was trustworthy? Bel\u00e9m spoke cautiously, but he acknowledged that security and trust were issues. The Kayapo had appointed men to guarantee that the prospectors paid a fair commission, but there were suspicions that some might be cheating their own communities. He mentioned a recent rumor that a prospector had found a giant gold nugget, weighing forty-six pounds, and hadn\u2019t paid a commission. \u201cWe were told it was a myth,\u201d Bel\u00e9m said. \u201cLater, we found out it was true.\u201d The prospectors were sometimes violent, Bel\u00e9m added. The Kayapo women didn\u2019t go alone into the forest to harvest food, and the men took care to bring a partner when venturing outside Turedjam.<\/p>\n

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The violence of the gold economy unsettled the Kayapo, but Ouril\u00e2ndia\u2019s white community regarded it as normal. Everyone I spoke to accepted that the Brazilian state was weak, and that vigilantism was necessary. \u201cCriminals who pop up around here tend to end up dead,\u201d Cleber, the lawyer, told me with a smile. At the mine I visited with Jo\u00e3o Guerra, an employee named Patricia Soffa mentioned in the canteen that the local police had killed three\u00a0criminosos<\/em>\u00a0the day before. The official version was that the police had been tipped off about the location of their hideout and gone to arrest them. When they arrived, the criminals had begun shooting, so the police had fired back, killing them all. It sounded a little pat, I remarked, and asked, \u201cSo, they applied\u00a0la<\/em>\u00a0ley de fuga<\/em>?\u201d The \u201claw of escape\u201d is a euphemism that Latin-American police use for the summary execution of suspects. Soffa and the prospectors burst into approving laughter.<\/p>\n

Soffa told me that a local criminal had recently filmed himself murdering a man and then shared the video on social media. She handed me her phone and played me the clip. It showed a man falling to the ground, twitching, and then the face of a teen-age boy, who smiles and says, in Portuguese, \u201cI just killed that motherfucker.\u201d Soffa said triumphantly, \u201cThe police caught and killed that boy the next day, along with his friends. He was stupid. Now he\u2019s dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a restaurant one evening, a man and a young girl in pigtails walked over to my table. The man, a comfortable-looking Brazilian in his late thirties, politely introduced himself and said that his daughter was learning English. Would I mind exchanging a few words with her? I agreed, and in several minutes of earnest conversation I learned that the father was an engineer for the Vale mining consortium, and that the family had visited the United States seven times, to go to Disney World. \u201cShe loves Disney,\u201d he said, looking at his daughter indulgently.<\/p>\n

A half hour later, the girl returned to my table with her mother. The mother explained that they had come to Ouril\u00e2ndia because of her husband\u2019s work, and they loved it. \u201cIt\u2019s like the Brazil of the eighties,\u201d she gushed. \u201cWe can sleep with the doors and windows open. The kids can play in the streets, and you don\u2019t have to worry about them. You can\u2019t live like this in S\u00e3o Paulo anymore.\u201d I asked her why Ouril\u00e2ndia was so safe. She replied, \u201cIf anyone does something criminal around here, we just kill them.\u201d She made a shooting gesture with her hands. Her daughter giggled.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Iolanda, a nurse at the clinic in Turedjam, had worked among the Kayapo for years, moving from settlement to settlement. During our conversations, she spoke of Kendjam, an isolated village at the heart of the reserve that had prohibited prospecting and logging. She described it as a kind of utopia. I should go, she said, if I wanted to see a place that hadn\u2019t been ruined by gold fever.<\/p>\n

Flying there, I passed over an almost completely uninterrupted landscape of wild forest. At one point, I spotted a diamond-shaped clearing\u2014all that remained of a cattle ranch that Tutu Pombo had carved out of the jungle and then abandoned. A quarter century later, the trees had not grown back.<\/p>\n

Kendjam sat alongside a glass-clear river, the Irir\u00ed, with a dozen traditional houses next to a grass airstrip and a red rock formation jutting several hundred feet above the treetops. At a small building that served as a health clinic and a radio-communications post, I was greeted by Pukatire, the chief of Kendjam, a tall, slender man with long gray hair and a wry sense of humor.<\/p>\n

Pukatire was unsure precisely when he was born, but he thought he was \u201caround seventy-two.\u201d He had grown up\u00a0bravo<\/em>, he said\u2014the Portuguese word for wild. When he was\u00a0about ten years old, the Kayapo were contacted by white outsiders. Pukatire recalled that sickness had spread, and many of the Kayapo had died. Missionaries came next, providing medical care and establishing a mission school, where Pukatire had learned Portuguese and a little English. (As he translated the Kayapo word for\u00a0bravo<\/em>, he revived an English phrase. \u201cNo-good boys,\u201d he said, and laughed.) He had fond memories of the missionaries but had learned to fear and distrust most other whites. In one of his early memories, he was in the woods with his uncle and his cousin when rubber tappers sneaked up and fatally shot his uncle. His cousin had killed two of the white men with his bow and arrow.<\/p>\n

Pukatire was worried about Bolsonaro\u2019s call to open reserves to development. \u201cIf prospectors come here to explore for gold, we\u2019re going to lose,\u201d he said. \u201cThe whites are the only ones who win at that.\u201d Pukatire grumbled about young Kayapo taking up white life styles. \u201cThat path is a troubled one,\u201d he said. \u201cIf the Indian leaves his community and does white things, like cutting his hair, drinking alcohol, mixing his blood with that of the whites, and losing his traditions, he loses everything.\u201d He visited other Kayapo settlements to warn about these risks, but fewer people listened these days; more than a third of the villages in the eastern part of the reserve have succumbed to gold mining.<\/p>\n

Every afternoon, the children of Kendjam gathered in the water of the Irir\u00ed, laughing and splashing. During my visit, I joined a young man named Ikatipe, his wife, and their two teen-age daughters on an excursion upriver, in a skiff with an outboard motor attached. The river was an iridescent blue, and the forest was intact all around. On sandbanks, we saw the tracks of tapirs and large turtles. Parrots and parakeets and macaws flew overhead. After a couple of hours, we pulled up to a rocky shore, and Ikatipe\u2019s family went off into the forest carrying baskets with straps, like backpacks. They returned laden with hard-shelled fruits from cumaru trees, which the local Kayapo sell, along with Brazil nuts, through a co\u00f6perative set up with help from an N.G.O. (A British company, Lush, makes soap from the seeds of their cumaru.)<\/p>\n

That afternoon, while his wife pounded fruits to extract the seeds, Pukatire sat in a hammock, carving a war club. Years before, he recalled, he had visited a series of European capitals to speak about the plight of the Amazon. He would like to return, but he couldn\u2019t leave Brazil, because authorities said that there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest, for the murder of a\u00a0kuben<\/em>. He threw up his hands with a mystified expression. He had never killed a white man, he said. He had killed an Indian, but long ago. It had occurred after the Kayapo moved into the territory of the Panar\u00e1 indigenous group, and the Panar\u00e1 began raiding their farm plots and stealing their bananas. A series of skirmishes killed several Panar\u00e1 and many Kayapo, including Pukatire\u2019s mother. On a revenge mission, Pukatire killed a Panar\u00e1 man. His party also kidnapped four children, one of whom he had raised as his daughter. \u201cShe is grown up today, a Kayapo,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A beat-up shotgun hung from a pole in Pukatire\u2019s hut, and a bow was stashed in the rafters, along with a variety of arrows. He explained that arrows made from a stingray\u2019s barb were best for killing jaguars, tapirs, and people, while smaller ones of palm wood were ideal for fish, birds, and monkeys. Pukatire had spent many years passing on his knowledge to Kayapo youngsters up and down the river. But when I asked if they were still seeking him out he shook his head. Staring into his cupped hands, he said, mockingly, \u201cOnly cell phones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Glenn Shepard, the ethnobotanist, believes that the Kayapo in Turedjam are losing their traditional way of life, their security and autonomy. \u201cThe door they opened a crack has now opened wide, creating a situation they can\u2019t control,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can see what it\u2019s doing\u2014the forest it\u2019s destroyed, the people it has killed. But it gives them access to money\u2014and greater clout, or so they believe, especially with other Indian communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shepard mentioned the Xikrin, a group, related to the Kayapo, whose reserve is rich in nickel. In the eighties, Vale began mining there, paying millions of dollars in compensation. The Xikrin quickly became the wealthiest Indians in the Par\u00e1 state. \u201cBefore long, the Xikrin were throwing big parties, and inviting the Kayapo to attend as guests,\u201d Shepard said. \u201cThey even chartered bush planes to fly in crates of soda pop.\u201d Such displays of wealth, he explained, inspired a local ethos of competitive consumption.<\/p>\n

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For President Bolsonaro, gold prospectors serve as a symbol of the country\u2019s pioneer spirit\u2014much as West Virginia coal miners do for Trump.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Photograph by Mauricio Lima for The New Yorker<\/small><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

No less than the residents of Rio, or of Park Slope, the indigenous people of the Amazon were satisfying their immediate needs at the expense of nature. \u201cThe Kayapo don\u2019t really know what \u2018development\u2019 is, but they do have a desire for cash, for things like boats, guns, and cell phones,\u201d Zimmerman said. \u201cAny Kayapo will tell you, \u2018We really want to protect our land, we don\u2019t want the miners and loggers to come in\u2014but we need cash.\u2019 \u201d Zimmerman collaborates with several Brazilian N.G.O.s to devise sustainable-development plans for\u00a0the Kayapo\u2014mostly harvesting nuts but also running a fishing camp for ecotourists. A majority of the communities they work with, representing perhaps half the Kayapo, are becoming self-sustaining. But Adriano Jerozolimski, the head of the N.G.O. Floresta Protegida, told me, \u201cIt takes a while to build a sustainable economy from Brazil nuts and cumaru\u2014and it\u2019s hard to compete with the money that comes from gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

In ways, the Kayapo of Turedjam were stranded between the\u00a0kuben<\/em>\u00a0world and their own traditions. The first visible change, after the mining started, was the tin-roofed houses; in Mro\u2019\u00f4\u2019s time, the village had decided to replace the traditional palm-thatch huts, which rats had invaded because there was less surrounding forest. Their houses still have dirt floors and no partitions inside; the Kayapo sleep in hammocks strung around an open space. But electricity from the Ouril\u00e2ndia grid has allowed them to install televisions, on which they watch variety shows and soccer matches. There is also a small Pentecostal church\u2014an increasing number of Kayapo have converted\u2014and the clinic.<\/p>\n

At the edge of Turedjam was a kind of toll booth, where a rope barrier had been strung across the road, so that a Kayapo family could extract a fee from prospectors passing through. During my last visit, the site was abandoned, and the village nearly empty. I learned that a large group of Kayapo had gone to a party on the Xikrin reserve, while another had gone to attend an evangelical jamboree. At the clinic, I spoke with Iolanda, the nurse, who came in from the city three weeks a month. She said that she spoke with the Kayapo women about sex, drugs, and other health issues, and tried to inculcate basic hygiene, such as washing hands and putting garbage in closed containers. The incidence of disease was typical of areas where forest was cleared, she suggested: a little malaria and a little TB. What was worse was the cultural transformation. The Turedjam Kayapo had lost interest in their traditional diet and begun to eat more processed food, and some were suffering from digestive problems. \u201cThey have left their culture aside,\u201d she said. Some of the men also drank, she said, and the community showed \u201csigns of exaggerated consumption, in everything from electronics to clothes and food. They are becoming dependent on the consumer life style of the white world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Turedjam one morning, Bel\u00e9m told me about the village school, established six years earlier. Four days a week, he taught Portuguese, math, geography, and history; one day was devoted to the Kayapo language. He was aided by four non-indigenous teachers, provided by the government, and by several local monitors and translators. The younger children seemed to be thriving, but the school stopped at the sixth grade, so promising students went on to study in Ouril\u00e2ndia. They didn\u2019t do very well there, he said, because they didn\u2019t have the benefit of the monitors and the translators who had helped them in primary school. But that wasn\u2019t the biggest problem. Last year, one of the Kayapo boys had bought a motorbike in Ouril\u00e2ndia. When he was unable to keep up the payments, the former owner had hired a hit man to pursue him. The killer had brazenly come to Turedjam and stabbed the boy to death. The other students\u2019 parents, terrified, withdrew their children from the school.<\/p>\n

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For the local Kayapo, the killing was a harsh reminder of the difficulty of accommodating themselves to the outside world. Bel\u00e9m told me that the Kayapo felt discriminated against whenever they went into town. When they visited doctors, he said, \u201cif we go to them wearing our traditional clothes, they won\u2019t see us.\u201d Pointing to the piercings in his ears and lower lip, he said, \u201cThese piercings are our tradition and should be respected.\u201d To fit in, he and other Kayapo men had donned\u00a0kuben<\/em>\u00a0clothing, but that didn\u2019t work, either, he said. \u201cThere are those who say the Indians aren\u2019t Indians anymore, because we wear shirts or speak Portuguese, but that\u2019s not true. We have to learn Portuguese to defend ourselves. I learned how to speak Portuguese and drive a motorbike, and I live in a wooden house. But my culture is here\u201d\u2014he patted his torso. \u201cI am an Indian. Even though I live in a wooden house, I can\u2019t be a white person. Look at my hair\u2014it\u2019s not curly. And my body is painted!\u201d Bel\u00e9m had spoken in a torrent, and with visible feeling. He paused for breath and went on. \u201cSome white people come to teach us things, and then other white people come and say, \u2018You\u2019re not Indians anymore,\u2019 but that\u2019s not true. Even Indians who live in the city for years are Indians when they come back. You cannot turn white.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bel\u00e9m looked around the village and said in a quiet voice, \u201cThis used to be a great place to live. Now it\u2019s so-so. If we can get the miners out, it will be good again.\u201d ♦<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n