When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon

An Amazonian tribe fractures, turns to illegal pillaging of their own lands, and perpetrates a shocking massacre in this intricate and tragic account. Journalist Cuadros (Brazillionaires) follows the Cinta Larga of western Brazil after their first contact with white men in the 1960s. He paints their lives before contact as an idyll of hunting, horticulture, and feasting in the rainforest. (Downsides included bloody feuds and the exploitation of women.) Their encounters with non-Indigenous Brazilians featured occasional violence, but also curiosity and a hunger for the intruders’ steel tools—and finally a series of epidemics that left fewer than 400 survivors. Cuadros recaps the cross-cultural coming-of-age of Nacoça Pio, an orphaned boy who became a Cinta Larga leader skilled at working with government agencies and white settlers, and Oita Matino, a hot-headed, semicriminal hustler; both became involved in despoiling their tribe’s land, selling valuable but banned mahogany wood, and later operating an illegal diamond mine. The latter brought riches, but also conflict with white prospectors who resented their Indigenous bosses; in 2004, that tension exploded into a shocking killing spree. Cuadros depicts the Cinta Larga’s fall from grace with vivid prose (“Now he felt the full weight of open-eyed regret, a kind of regret his father could never have imagined, because his world was so much smaller”). Readers will be riveted. (Dec.)