Masters of the Lost Land E-Book

Heriberto Araujo

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 731

Beschreibung

'Powerful' Financial Times 'More twists and turns than a Hollywood spy thriller' Spectator 'A story we all need to hear' New Statesman 'Gripping... Araujo's accretion of detail has a powerful effect' New York Times 'Excellent' Kirkus Reviews Deep in the heart of the Amazon, an entire region has lived under the control of one notorious land baron: Josélio de Barros. Josélio cut a grisly path to success: having arrived in the jungle with a shady past, he quickly made a name for himself as an invincible thug who grabbed massive tracts of public land, burned down the jungle and executed or enslaved anyone trying to stop him. Enter Dezinho, the leader of a small but robust farm workers' union fighting against land grabs, ecological destruction, and blatant human rights abuses. When Dezinho was killed in a shocking assassination, the local community held its breath. Would Josélio, whom everyone knew had ordered the hit, finally be brought to account? Or would authorities look the other way, as they had hundreds of times before? Dezinho's widow, Dona Joelma, was not about to let that happen. After his murder, she stepped into the spotlight, orchestrating a huge push to bring national media attention to the injustices in the Amazon. Set against the backdrop of Bolsonaro's devastating cuts to environmental protections, Brazil's rapidly changing place in the geopolitical spectrum, and the Amazon's crucial role in climate change, Masters of the Lost Land is both a gripping epic into one of the last wild places on Earth and an urgent illustration of how people are fighting for - and winning - justice for their futures and the environment.

Leseprobe

Heriberto Araujo is an investigative journalist, author and speaker who has reported on the Amazon for the New York Times. His work on the region has also been published by the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the Guardian. He is the co-author of China’s Silent Army.

This edition published by arrangement with Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, New York.

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Heriberto Araujo, 2023

The moral right of Heriberto Araujo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Designed by Emily Snyder

Title page photograph © Photo Smoothies/Shutterstock

Map by Nick Springer

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-145-0

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-146-7

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-147-4

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To Mrs. Butterfly and Ms. Little Butterfly

Contents

Map

Preface

Part I: It’s All About Land

1: The Escape

2: The Criminal Syndicate

3: Terror on the Nut Road

4: The Chainsaw Murder

Part II: Rise and Fall

5: The Boomtown

6: Early Challenges

7: Crickets and Cattle

8: No Longer Meek

9: Hunting Souza

10: Nowhere to Hide

11: Nothing Shining in Eldorado

12: Death and Salvation

Part III: After He’s Gone

13: An Unusual Case

14: The Evidence Man

15: A Cause Larger Than Death

16: The Law of the Gun

17: Land or We Burn the Jungle

18: Amazonian Justice

19: Sink or Swim

Part IV: The Downfall

20: The Widow Must Fall

21: “Load the Trucks”

22: She Is Out

23: The Trial

24: A Certain Sense of Justice

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Notes

Index

Preface

THE stories of Rondon do Pará had prepared me for a dodgy, crime-ridden place, but when I first visited the little Brazilian town on the eastern edge of the Amazon, it didn’t look particularly threatening to me.

I’d been brought to Rondon do Pará—the seat of a municipality of the same name encompassing some 3,200 square miles in Pará state—by a tip from a researcher who had spent years investigating organized criminality and deforestation.1 The issue of violence in the region had piqued my investigative interest since 2013, when I’d moved to Brazil from China, my former base as a journalist. The fate of the Amazon regularly captured media attention, often due to the appalling rates of environmental destruction, a story that became even more urgent after President Jair Messias Bolsonaro took office. But rather than the headline-grabbing man-versus-nature tale, what fascinated me was understanding why and when the jungle had become not only a front line of climate change but also a place of human contest. Criminality plagues many areas of Brazil, and the state presence remains feeble in the interior of the continent-sized country. But even within this context—which is no grimmer than in other vast resource-rich nations with weak institutions—the pace of homicides in Pará is staggering.

In the twenty-first century, more than 2,000 people have been killed worldwide for defending their lands or the environment—a murder rate on the rise, at least on record.2 Brazil accounts for about a third of these homicides, with most of them in the Amazon. Pará sits at the top of the list of the most lethal states, and murder is just the most extreme tactic used to silence campaigners. Environmental and land defenders also suffer death threats and nonlethal physical attacks, and women activists face sexual assault.3 The stories of these victims rarely reach international audiences, and when they do, it’s because reporters retrace the lives of the victims and their dangerous careers as grassroots activists that exposed them to violence or death.

I wanted to get to the roots of these conflicts to capture, in a single narrative, the factors that have made the largest rainforest on Earth the world’s most dangerous place for environmental and land activists. Pará, Brazil’s second-largest state, covering a land mass almost three times that of California, seemed like an obvious area to investigate. In addition to being dangerous for campaigners, it is also a place where the rule of law is said to be plagued by corruption and impunity, imparting a sense of lawlessness in cattle, wood, mineral, and agro-commodities production on many of the state’s frontiers. These areas are connected to the world through supply chains reaching markets as far away as China, Russia, Spain, and the United States.

My source suggested that I do my research in southeastern Pará, one of the most developed areas and home to tens of thousands of migrants who have moved from throughout Brazil to cash in on the riches of both natural resources and the seemingly endless availability of land. Marabá, a sprawling city built up along the Tocantins River, is the regional hub, where direct flights land from Brasília, but my source advised me to focus on a lesser-known town: Rondon do Pará, or Rondon, as people call it.

For decades, he said, Rondon had been home to criminal organizations that had plundered the region’s rainforest, often resorting to hired assassins to silence opponents. He described the town, which is close to the border of Maranhão state, as a nest of gunmen, or pistoleiros, with ties not only to powerful rural elites but also to law enforcement and politicians in the Brazilian congress. At the top of this entwined and murky system of power, according to my source, were large landowners in the region. They were “os donos do lugar”—the masters of the place.

“It’s a risky town for a reporter,” the source told me, “but I think you should go and contact the people of the local rural workers’ union. They have lots of stories to tell.”

RONDON HAS A history typical of its time and place. In the late 1960s, when the Brazilian federal government decided to build a grid of highways penetrating the hinterlands, settlers moved into the lands of an Indigenous tribe, triggering clashes in what is today Rondon but was at the time a forest so dense and alive that, according to pioneers, a monkey could cross it from branch to branch without ever setting foot on the ground.

The tribe was removed by the government and transferred to a reservation, and colonists began to carve out gardens, farms, and cattle ranches. Pioneers recalled arriving in the area on foot and settling in the absolute wilderness, often near streams and rivers. As they waited for their new gardens to provide a first harvest of rice and manioc, they survived on a diet of river turtle eggs, fish, and roasted armadillos. Some died from malaria or snakebite; others aged rapidly due to the great hardships they endured, their hands wrinkled and bony from clearing areas and building wooden cabins with rusty axes. The extreme loneliness of the settlers was eased only by the sense of opportunity.

As the colonization process progressed, with trails hacked through the wilderness, word spread that the region was open for development. Hordes of migrants and entire families of sharecroppers and landless peasants from Maranhão, one of Brazil’s poorest states, flocked into the region to claim a plot. Wealthy ranchers, dealers in wood, and land sharks also moved in, traveling in small planes that flew for hours over a carpet of green before landing on tiny and bumpy airstrips. Covered in sand and dotted with weeds, these were located near Marabá or Paragominas, another outpost that had developed earlier than Rondon. The men in the planes came from rich states in the southeast of Brazil like Minas Gerais or Espírito Santo. Soon these rural entrepreneurs, often referred to as fazendeiros, formed a rural elite influencing politics and shaping the future development of Pará.

Although the Amazon is often imagined as a natural continent of expansive fertility—around 10 percent of all living species on Earth are found there, and the basin, sustained by the mighty Amazon River and over a thousand tributaries, holds about a fifth of the planet’s total supply of freshwater—Rondon isn’t pristine.4 The early roads penetrating the interior allowed settlers to bring in power tools and undertake a frantic process of logging and clearing, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, when Rondon grew and prospered as a logging boomtown before transitioning to agribusiness. The expanding human presence could be seen in photographs taken by satellites. In these aerial images, the human footprint reaching into the wilderness resembled the skeleton of a fish, with state and federal roads forming the spine and thin trails opened by pioneers as the ribs.

Today, these fishbone patterns are visible on the jungle’s most pristine frontiers, mostly in the central area and on the western border of the Brazilian Amazon, but they no longer exist in Rondon.5 Most of the original vegetation has been either burned or otherwise altered, and I witnessed this during my first journey. A smooth two-hour drive on a decent asphalt highway connecting Rondon to Marabá exposed a landscape dominated by rolling pastures and a growing number of soybean fields. Some islands of towering vegetation still abut farmland, but those scattered patches of forest were the object of logging. Even most of the castanheira trees—a species of nut tree that had once provided critical income to gatherers of the nutritious Brazil nut—had been logged, despite a national ban instituted to protect this beautiful and massive tree that can live as long as four centuries.6 While I had vaguely hoped to see a wild jaguar—a beast formerly so common in these forests that pioneers, unafraid, had even domesticated some specimens and treated them like pets—I was disappointed; the sole animal in sight was the humpbacked, floppy-eared, glossy white Nelore cow, the ultimate conqueror of the frontier.7

More disappointment stemming from early misconceptions awaited me in Rondon. Throughout my years as a Brazil-based journalist, I had visited many far-flung hamlets, and I had expected Rondon to be one such wild place. I had been in villages where local criminals were so infamous that heavily armed squads of federal officers sent to fight loggers or gold prospectors stayed in their hotels when they were off duty for fear of being attacked.8 I’d visited outposts where environmental offenders had no qualms about vandalizing pickups or helicopters used by law enforcement for anti-deforestation raids and where envelopes full of bullets were delivered to visiting journalists in their hotel rooms to drive them away.9

But Rondon didn’t resemble any of those backward spots. The city had a rural but modern atmosphere. The highway that had brought me there—the BR-222, formerly called the Nut Road due to the once-ubiquitous castanheira trees—went straight through the town, bisecting it from west to east. The southern part was more urbanized and populated despite its sloping terrain, as the development on the northern area was bounded by a river. Most streets were paved, although saffron-colored dust was everywhere. The architecture was simple and unpretentious. There were some large Pentecostal and Catholic churches and a few three- and four-story buildings, but the structures were mostly unsophisticated one-story cabins with white, yellow, green, and pink facades. Some were encircled by high walls overgrown with the shining leaves of mango trees.

The city had a small university campus and broadband internet service, cable TV, and 4G phone signal. Early in the morning and late in the afternoon, when the heat was less intense, the roadside and Rondon’s central square, Praça da Paz or Square of Peace, bustled with activity. Supermarkets, furniture shops, pharmacies, and agricultural supply stores welcomed customers and advertised their promotions over loudspeakers. Smiling and chatty uniformed students flirted in cafeterias offering bowls of frozen açai berries. Pickup drivers refilled their mud-encrusted vehicles’ tanks at gas stations. At night, the terraces of bars, pizzerias, and barbecue restaurants serving beef cuts from the nearby fazendas became overcrowded by families in shorts and flip-flops. They drank chilled beers as they listened to sertanejo, Brazil’s answer to country music, and watched football matches on LCD televisions. People seemed relaxed, and I didn’t see anyone armed or displaying an aggressive attitude. The only noticeable lawbreakers in that town lacking a single traffic light were motorbike drivers not wearing helmets.

This sense of joviality was also on display during the most important event of the year, the annual livestock convention and exposition, called ExpoRondon. It had been founded by the fazendeiros forty years prior and had grown to become a magnet for tourists from across southern Pará. Caravans of cars and trucks rushed to the city to enjoy a week-long program of festivities, including rodeo shows and concerts of renowned sertanejo artists. Hundreds of the town’s residents put on their cowboy clothes to participate, on horseback, in a spectacular parade through town led by a large truck on which former mayor Shirley Cristina de Barros Malcher launched her speeches to the happy crowd. Although less exuberant and sensual, some of the scenes I witnessed during ExpoRondon reminded me of the Carnival festivities in Ipanema, the beachfront neighborhood where I lived in Rio de Janeiro. My research would soon lead me to scrutinize the story of Shirley Cristina and her father, Josélio de Barros Carneiro.

Life in the interior, access to which involved hours of travel along potholed dirt roads, was less showy. On deserted roads that cut into pastures and vegetation, I passed logging trucks with beds piled up with freshly cut trees, the vehicles driven by shirtless men wearing gold necklaces. I also encountered humble family farmers transporting milk, crops, and fruit on converted motorcycles and, occasionally, I saw fully equipped pickups with tinted windows, engines rumbling, sending up clouds of orange dust as they sped along.

In that hinterland of infinite blue sky, social inequalities were obvious. Peasant settlements were dominated by low-income communities where large families continued to live in the same rickety wooden huts built at the time of colonization, with hammocks serving as their beds. Some even lacked electricity, their inhabitants waking up at dawn to work the fields and going to bed early at night. They relied on their gardens to produce beans, manioc, rice, and fruit that fed entire families; they took away the surplus to Rondon to sell in markets. Their sun-weathered faces and shabby clothes were a testament to their hard work and lives, yet I could see pride and a sense of accomplishment in those people.

Not far from there lay soybean plantations and massive fazendas producing cattle. Long twisted strands of barbed wire and wooden fences paralleled the roads crisscrossing the interior, enclosing massive spreads that looked to me like insular, inaccessible places. They conveyed a sense of possibility, of a frontier still in the making. They also showed that, despite the Amazon’s centuries of resistance to human domination, nature had finally bowed to the will of global capitalism. This dramatic shift in the jungle’s history began in the 1960s, when a new development model was planned and implemented that, as a researcher wrote, valued “commodity production and large land holdings, and devalued nature, devalued forest . . . [and] the people who already live there.”10 The echoes of those momentous policies are still shaping the Amazon.

ONE MORNING, FOLLOWING my source’s lead, I drove to the headquarters of the rural workers’ union, known in Portuguese as Sindicato dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras Rurais de Rondon do Pará. It was an old and rather battered two-story building located downtown, with a peeling turquoise facade and metal security bars over the windows. I entered and met a female receptionist, who immediately recognized my foreign accent and asked, even before I could say my name, if I was the reporter who had been calling over the last few days. I said I was, and she asked me to sit. The room where I waited was plastered with photographs of union members working in bountiful gardens. Slogans on posters urged peasants to produce in a sustainable, pesticide-free fashion and to respect the forest.

Fifteen minutes of silence followed. Then I saw a black pickup pull up by the entrance. A man and two bespectacled women, one visibly younger, stepped down from the vehicle and entered the Sindicato. They all looked at me, the man scrutinizing me closely, and the eldest of the two women walked over. In her fifties, she was short and slightly overweight, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had dark-brown eyes and wore a red blouse and a knee-length cream-colored skirt.

“Bom dia,” she said, speaking slowly while she softly shook my hand. “I am Maria Joel Dias da Costa.”

We were ushered into a large, empty room. Sunbeams filtered through the window blinds, but the room remained poorly illuminated. The man, I was informed, was a police officer who escorted Maria Joel around the clock. He remained outside by the door, which was left ajar. I sat face-to-face with Maria Joel at a small wooden table, and the other woman, who had introduced herself as Joélima, Maria Joel’s middle daughter, sat by her mother’s side. As I opened my notebook and checked the batteries of my voice recorder, Maria Joel lethargically mopped a faint dew of sweat from her brow and then asked me in her tiny, barely audible voice what I wanted to know about her. Some in Rondon considered her a heroine, and I had expected to hear a testimony of unflinching persistence and success, but the first impression I had was one of gravity. I could tell she was preparing to deliver an account that would dig up unpleasant memories for her. It was noon on May 29, 2017, and though I was unaware of it at the time, this tranquil, fragile-seeming woman was one of the most courageous individuals I would ever meet. Perhaps I had been expecting to hear a romantic and hokey narrative of heroes and villains, but hers, in truth, was a testimony of change, adaptation, and survival.

Maria Joel and I would repeat that scene many times in the coming years, and her story had a real impact on my view of the Amazon and the grassroots movements that campaign for both environmental protection and social justice. While I had wanted to tell a story explaining why the rainforest is today a profoundly contested place, Maria Joel’s account would lead me to consider the personal price that individuals are compelled to pay to defend important causes.

Soon after I began working on this book, I realized that the success of the project would rely substantially on Maria Joel’s ability to remain alive and continue with our interviews. Her memories were pivotal to the immersive story I envisioned writing. The facts and the historical context were there, waiting to be unearthed in official documents, court files, press clippings, and eyewitness accounts. But if Maria Joel were murdered—a real possibility, considering that her family had been facing death threats for over a quarter of a century—I might never obtain critical details of her saga.

Later, I would understand why Maria Joel had agreed to grant me access to her life and her memories. She wanted to leave a detailed account as a legacy—a way to prevent her family’s story from fading into oblivion. That had been the greatest mission of her life. Like the history of Rondon itself, her family saga involved many twists and turns. I made clear to Maria Joel that I’d be pursuing the facts and would not allow any personal empathy I might develop toward her or her children to sway me in telling that story. She agreed.

Ultimately, the greatest challenge I encountered while piecing together her story and that of Rondon was corroborating facts and navigating the waters of propaganda. In that town, two versions of history coexist, often in conflict—a public one, in which pioneers had fostered progress and civilization, and another one, often told in undertones, which depicted those same pioneers as feudal lords threatening the foundations of rule of law and democracy.

In the end, to write this book, I would interview two hundred people, from judges and fazendeiros to Netflix celebrities and top federal and state officials. I would scour a dozen archives scattered throughout five Brazilian states, Europe, and the United States. This investigation would involve research into issues from the historical past to the crucial years of Brazil’s contemporary history, right up to the very present. Because this story, which begins back in the 1960s, still isn’t fully settled as of this writing in 2022.

While undertaking this research, I often thought about a statement by the American reporter and author Barbara Demick, who has written books on places as difficult to access as Tibet and North Korea: “Journalists are contrarian creatures. If we are told we cannot go somewhere, then predictably we try to go.”11 When controversial eyewitnesses closed their doors to me, I felt myself bewitched by curiosity and some sense of duty to try to achieve “the best version of the truth you could come up with,” as Carl Bernstein has described the essence of investigative journalism.12 Ultimately, I devoted four years to writing a story that I believe epitomizes why the Amazon, a strategic region in our era of climate crisis, has been blackened over the last half century by the dual flames of fire and lawlessness.

1

The Escape

SINCE first setting foot on the Te-Chaga-U ranch, Gil Bonifácio Carvalho Neto had felt a growing sense of dread—but it was only after uncovering a hidden clearing in the jungle that he began to truly fear for his life. The slender twenty-five-year-old laborer had pushed through the brambly vegetation to investigate a strange cloud of dark smoke rising above the canopy.1 Expecting to find a brush fire, Gil had instead stumbled across an apparent killing field. He should never have discovered that place. But now he could never unsee it.

It was mid-1994, and everything had happened almost by chance. Gil was in a garden, harvesting manioc, when he was approached by Manuel, a cowhand at the sprawling estate where both men lived and worked.2 Manuel was anxious, his tone marked by a kind of nervous exhilaration as he explained his sighting of a plume billowing above the nearby jungle. At that, Gil, his body sweaty from the searing heat, peered up to see the smoke rising through the treetops. He was hesitant to venture beyond the boundaries of his work; people murmured of strange occurrences on that fazenda tucked into the wilderness spanning the municipalities of Rondon do Pará and Paragominas.3

However, intrigued, Gil and Manuel finally decided to have a look. They zigzagged across the ranch, along pathways and dirt roads and past patches of jungle and grassy pastures occupied by Nelore cows.4 As they approached the hidden bonfire, they became transfixed by the scene before their eyes. In the flames, Gil recognized fragments of charred rubber, steel cords, and plastic bags intermixed with what looked like scattered pieces of broken flutes. Shafts of morning sunlight through the thicket illuminated a massive tree toppled on a bed of leaves. Its bark and heartwood, scorched by the fire, had been carved away.

The lack of light made it difficult to decipher the contents of the embers. Gil and Manuel had likely expected to find some brush set ablaze to clear the land, a typical form of the slash-and-burn agriculture common in this region, where environmental destruction was approaching “the worst levels ever,” as the press wrote in those years.5 But Gil finally realized that the remains in the fire were human.6 Immediately, he thought of Ceará, a laborer who had recently vanished from the fazenda.7

Ceará was a compact man in his twenties who, like Gil, had migrated to Pará in search of a better future.8 The military government had launched a series of programs in the 1960s to colonize the Amazon, and since then the sparsely populated state of Pará had attracted waves of would-be settlers and fortune hunters. Ceará and Gil had initially chosen Paragominas—at the time described as “one of the world’s logging capitals”—to pursue economic betterment.9 The men had probably expected to find good-paying jobs in one of the sawmills springing up there, but then a seemingly better opportunity came up.

One day Gil met a recruiter named Chico. He worked for a cattleman named Josélio de Barros Carneiro, who was often in need of workers for his estates. Chico hired seasonal farmhands he found in the hotels of Paragominas, where transient migrants slept while looking for jobs.10 In those dingy places, Chico offered employment on Josélio’s ranches, and to entice laborers to accept the deal, he himself paid their unsettled bills at the inns.11 The day Gil met Chico, the recruiter said that he wanted him to work on a 10,700-acre fazenda called Te-Chaga-U, which means “longing” in the Guarani language and is pronounced Ti-shaga-u.12

In early 1994, Gil was driven to the estate, located some 100 miles from Rondon, along an unpaved, rutted road punching into the jungle.13 It was during that trip that Gil met Ceará. Soon thereafter, both laborers found themselves facing Josélio himself, a pale-skinned, five-foot-seven-inch man in his late fifties with intense blue eyes, chestnut-colored hair, and a deep voice.14 He didn’t live on the ranch, which was run by his overseers, but one of his instructions, according to Gil’s account, was that they were not to leave the property without his approval. “Don’t try to leave the fazenda,” Josélio said, his accent revealing he hadn’t been raised in Pará.15 Apparently, Gil couldn’t even go to nearby Rondon.16 Although Josélio never mentioned how much they would be paid or when, Gil and Ceará worked clearing land for about two months. It was an exhausting, dangerous job, and it was carried out without protective gear. Sometime in April 1994, when both laborers were already unhappy about their situation, Ceará was called to have a talk with the boss.

As Gil stared at the embers near the log that day, he recalled having witnessed Ceará entering the fazenda’s headquarters early in the morning, when other farmhands were having coffee before work. Chico, the recruiter, was also there. Moments later, Ceará had emerged from the white one-story house accompanied by Josélio and the managers of the Te-Chaga-U, a pair of menacing men nicknamed Souza and Rai, according to Gil.17 The group, he said, had jumped into a vehicle and taken off toward the woods, apparently with the intention of repairing a remote fence. That was the last time Gil had seen Ceará. Now he believed that Ceará’s body had been burned along with some old tires.18

“We can’t talk about this to anyone,” urged Manuel, the cowhand, who had also realized that there were human remains in the cinders. “If Josélio or his hitmen know that we have been here, they’ll kill us.”19

Gil recalled the grim accounts other employees had shared with him in confidence. Colleagues at the Te-Chaga-U said that Josélio was a murderer who had ordered many hits. “People were scared to death,” one laborer would later say. “When they spotted Josélio coming to the ranch, employees ran to hide from his sight and pretend they were working.”20 Gil also remembered the words of the stocky, bewhiskered Souza. On one occasion, according to Gil, the overseer had said that “the most beautiful thing in life to watch is the fearful grimace of a laborer who is about to die.”21 Souza had also ordered Gil and several others to load a pickup with beat-up tires and said with a sneer, “Who knows if they will be used with you!”22

As he remembered some of these events, Gil understood that he was in great trouble.23 In a panic, he struggled to figure out what he should do next. This place was cut off from the world, walled in by the rainforest and lacking any public transportation. Born to a poor family in Maranhão, the state bordering Pará to the east, Gil felt more vulnerable than ever before in his life.

He decided to seek help from Luiz Bezerra Cavalcante, a thirty-nine-year-old man with black hair and a slight build, and his wife, Sueny Feitosa Cavalcante.24 Also migrants from Maranhão, they lived on the estate with their ten children. They weren’t friends, but Gil had toiled in the fields with Luiz, and his wife was kind and sometimes invited him to join them for dinner in the shack that Josélio lent to the family. It was a tumbledown cabin without tap water, electricity, or beds, located within the ranch’s boundaries.

Moving quickly away both from the apparent remains of Ceará and from Manuel, whom he didn’t fully trust, Gil headed toward the Cavalcante home.

AFTER A HIKE away from the fire, Gil reached the Cavalcante home and told them what he had just seen. Oddly, Luiz and Sueny, who had been living on the ranch for almost four years, didn’t look entirely shocked at the story. “You know, we’ve heard so many things about him,” Luiz admitted, his wife nodding silently.25

Luiz and Sueny had heard accounts indicating that other workers like Ceará had vanished after meetings with Josélio, their bodies apparently burned up along with tires.26 The wife of an employee had once told Sueny that she had seen a corpse being transported in the trunk of a Volkswagen owned by Josélio’s family. When Sueny had asked around to learn more, Souza had approached her and “threatened to burn her tongue and that of her husband if she mentioned that issue [with people] in the fazenda.”27

Luiz had also heard whispers that gunmen allegedly employed by Josélio had executed rival ranchers in nearby towns, but he had no proof of this.28 Some stories were published by the press, but Josélio rebuffed them, accusing his foes of “fake news.” “I vehemently deny my name being mentioned in the context of such a sordid crime,” he wrote to the Diário of Pará in 1990, in response to an article stating that Josélio hid pistoleiros on his estates.29 “For forty years, I’ve been a rural entrepreneur, and I’ve spent half of this time in Pará, where I carry out large-scale stockbreeding and agriculture.” Josélio liked to be called a fazendeiro, the Portuguese word for a rancher or an owner of a fazenda.

What Luiz and Sueny did know for a fact, because they had experienced it firsthand, were the harsh working conditions on the Te-Chaga-U. In four years, Luiz had “never bought a pair of trousers for himself or a dress for his wife” because of his limited access to money.30 Initially he’d had a work contract and received some payment, but for two years now he claimed that he’d not seen a single cent. When he approached Josélio for payment, the answer was invariably that Luiz was “still indebted” because his wife had bought food and supplies on credit in the sole shop where the family could purchase them—a small grocery store within the fazenda’s boundaries where, in Sueny’s words, “the price of merchandise suddenly doubled from morning to night.” Black beans, rice, and cooking oil were some of the few foodstuffs they could find. Sueny would later report that meat was unavailable to them, despite the fact that the ranch was home to large herds of cattle raised for profit.

“When Josélio gave us some beef, it was only the bones. He treated us like dogs,” she would proclaim.31

After Sueny heard Gil’s hair-raising story about Ceará, the feisty thirty-one-year-old woman decided to escape with her children. Both Luiz and Gil agreed, but the crucial question was how. The commonsense solution would be to simply announce to Josélio that they wanted to quit and be provided with transportation to Rondon. But Luiz knew from his own experience that walking off wasn’t that simple. Josélio had thumbed his nose at the request every time he or his wife had attempted to visit the town. “To do what?” the fazendeiro used to reply, according to Luiz’s account. “You’ve got everything you need right here. If you need something, you can buy it at the grocery store.”32 Not even when someone in their family needed medical treatment—for instance, when Sueny was pregnant and, in her own words, “really needed a checkup”—were they brought to town.33 Occasionally, Luiz admitted, they had no option but “to disobey Josélio and leave the ranch for a few days, because someone in the family really needed to see a doctor” or because they had to deal with urgent paperwork. Then the problem became transportation. “People [in the area] refused to give us passage, because they knew we were workers of Josélio, and they were afraid of him,” Luiz recalled.

The issue of how to escape the fazenda remained unresolved until a few days later, when Sueny saw an opportunity. Alone, she managed to jump on a passing car and traveled to Rondon. Once there, she didn’t go to the police, visiting instead the rural workers’ union, the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais de Rondon do Pará. She was met by the president of the union, José Dutra da Costa, a short, paunchy man in his late thirties with curly ink-colored hair and glittering black eyes. Everyone knew him by the nickname Dezinho (pronounced De-sí-nio). His wife, Maria Joel, was a shy and slim woman with beautiful black hair.

Founded in 1982, the Sindicato—as it was popularly called—was a small union that originally helped farmworkers and subsistence farmers obtain retirement pensions and other financial benefits from the government. Things had radically changed after the outspoken Dezinho was elected president in 1993. He had made it clear that his objective would be transforming the Sindicato into an organization advocating for agrarian reform and defending the rights of rural workers in Rondon. He had two priorities: eradicating debt bondage, or “slave labor,” as he called it, and fighting an array of land-grabbing schemes called grilagem in Portuguese. For this, Dezinho had established personal links with members of the Federation of Agricultural Workers of the State of Pará (FETAGRI), with which the Sindicato was affiliated. With its headquarters in Belém, the state capital, FETAGRI was a larger peasant association with privileged access to politicians of the left-leaning Workers’ Party, or Partido dos Trabalhadores. Founded by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Workers’ Party was rapidly expanding its influence across Brazil.

Dezinho’s involvement in the movement had made him a marked man. The same year he became president of the Sindicato, his name appeared on a list of “people to be eliminated” that apparently circulated among Rondon’s underworld and was published by the press.34 Without delay, Dezinho and Maria Joel enacted draconian security measures to prevent a gunman from killing any of their four children: three girls and one boy aged five to eleven. Their operating principle was that their home was the safest place, and thus the children were outright forbidden, almost overnight, from participating in activities like riding bikes in the neighborhood or swimming in one of the town’s nearby streams, where other kids enjoyed jumping into the water from overhanging palms. Their children protested the strict limitations to their social lives, but Maria Joel, who worried about the consequences of her husband’s activism, ignored her children’s complaints.

When Sueny sat with Dezinho at the Sindicato’s office and revealed her address, the union leader’s head immediately shot up at the familiar name. “How is life in the Te-Chaga-U fazenda?” he asked, looking Sueny straight in the eyes.

Sueny understood that Dezinho, without saying it straight out, was signaling to her that he knew what happened on the ranch and wanted to know more. By that time, the activist already believed that Josélio had committed murders that had never been investigated because one of Josélio’s daughters, Josélia Leontina de Barros Lopes, was a prosecutor in the Rondon do Pará district attorney’s office.35 Ambitious and courageous, Dezinho was eager to confront the rancher, but he had never been able to gather enough reliable evidence to bring him to justice. That day, Sueny trusted Dezinho and told him everything about the plight her family had been facing, also mentioning Gil and his unsettling discovery.

The account led Dezinho to believe that he had at last found his opportunity to prosecute Josélio. “We can help you leave this place,” the activist replied, promising Sueny to find a safe place for her family and for Gil once they had managed to flee the fazenda. Dezinho also said that, once out, they would have support from the Sindicato to rebuild their lives. Sueny agreed and returned to the Te-Chaga-U with the news.

About a month after Gil had found the human remains, Sueny made her move.36 The family persuaded one of the ranch’s drivers to transport Sueny and the children to Rondon during one of Josélio’s absences. The man was deeply reluctant, but eventually they managed to convince him. The plan was that Luiz would leave afterward, once he had “paid with work the debts owed to Josélio,” because, in Sueny’s words, “no one left the Te-Chaga-U without paying the debts.”

The cargo bed of a pickup was packed with the ten kids as well as some of the belongings they had gathered over the years—pots, blankets, clothes, shoes. The truck slowly pulled away over the dirt road, engulfing its passengers in a plume of dust. Sitting in the passenger seat, Sueny wished Luiz, the man she had married at sixteen, had been with her, aware that there was a real chance she would never see him again.

He won’t get out of there alive, she thought as the familiar sights of the Te-Chaga-U slowly disappeared behind them.

SUENY’S FEARS OF never reuniting with Luiz were not unfounded. During this period, international organizations and the media painted a gloomy picture of what awaited migrant laborers in that area of the Amazon. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a body of the Organization of American States (OAS) that monitors rights in the American hemisphere, described Brazil’s hinterland as struck by chronic violations of human rights, like “semi-slavery” and “impunity and judicial inaction.”37 In a comprehensive report, the commission wrote that farmworkers in Pará were exploited, enduring “conditions of servitude,” and couldn’t “leave the hacienda without paying those debts. When at times they attempt to do so, the contractors’ hatchet men stop them with the help of firearms, which they will shoot if the threat does not suffice. Since most of the haciendas are in isolated locations, such attempts to get away are fraught with difficulties and danger.”

Despite this, Luiz and Gil did manage to leave the Te-Chaga-U. Never mentioning Ceará or the burned body (or bodies, because at that point it wasn’t clear how many there were in the woods), Luiz approached Josélio and said he wanted to “move on” with his life. After much discussion, the boss agreed, but only once Luiz had settled his debts, which was accomplished some weeks later.38 Afterward, Luiz reached Rondon with the help of an acquaintance who picked him up at a specific location near the ranch. Gil accompanied him, and they joined Sueny and the children in a cabin on the outskirts of town. The context of that departure and the reasons it unfolded without further trouble would be revealed only later.

Having managed to escape without raising suspicions, Gil and Luiz went to meet Dezinho. If for the beleaguered laborers, the escape was the end of a painful experience, for the activist, it was the beginning of a possible legal crusade against Josélio, so Dezinho devoted his attention to getting full testimonies from the farmhands. Both men revealed all they had witnessed and said they would be willing to testify in court. Gil was so determined to expose what he believed was the homicide of Ceará that he even agreed to personally lead the police to unearth the human remains.

Also participating in the meeting was Dezinho’s special advisor, José Soares de Brito. Brito was a grassroots activist who had previously attempted—and failed—to be elected Rondon’s mayor as a candidate of the Workers’ Party. Brito was also a central figure in the ongoing transformation of the Sindicato, and, for this, he was a marked man. Some years prior, his house had been the target of arson while he, his wife, and their son were sleeping inside. When he’d reported the crime, the town’s chief of police had replied that he “lacked the means” to investigate.39 Officers, the press wrote, had refused to collect evidence from the burned cabin or to interrogate a single suspect.40 Brito attributed that attack to Josélio and other local ranchers opposing the Sindicato. The fazendeiro denied any wrongdoing.

After hearing the account of life on the Te-Chaga-U from Gil and Luiz, Dezinho contacted colleagues at FETAGRI. With their help, he reached José Geraldo Torres da Silva, a member of the state legislature of Pará known as Zé Geraldo.41 A former smallholder, the burly man with a husky voice and meaty hands was a member of the Workers’ Party and a friend to the causes of peasants. He agreed to help and, soon afterward, met with the state’s secretary of public security, Paulo Sette Câmara. Zé Geraldo explained that escaped eyewitnesses had revealed the existence of debt bondage, multiple death threats, and at least one murder on a fazenda near Rondon. He urged Secretary Câmara to take measures and send Belém-based officers to raid the Te-Chaga-U without delay.

The possibility of Pará’s top cop taking swift action quickly faded. Secretary Câmara, Zé Geraldo would recall, was not that enthusiastic about the idea of sending in the police. “Everyone talks about clandestine cemeteries in estates [of Pará], but nobody has proof of it,” Zé Geraldo recalls him saying at their first meeting.42

Regardless of Secretary Câmara’s lukewarm response to the case, the wider context didn’t produce the sense of urgency the Sindicato had expected. At the time, Brazilian civil servants tended not to consider debt bondage a criminal offense, much less a human rights abuse. The International Labor Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency that monitors work standards across the planet, would write that as late as in 1992, and despite the evidence confirming multiple cases in Pará and other Amazonian states, “the representative of the Government of Brazil denied that forced labor existed in the country, stating that the cases mentioned [by civil society at an ILO conference] merely constituted violations of labor legislation.”43

The ingrained mentality of outright denial seemed to be founded in the understanding of debt bondage as part of a system of exchange, credit, and dependence known as aviamento.44 Although the foundations of this system date back to when Brazil was a colony of Portugal, aviamento had reached its height in the Amazon during the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when tappers scattered throughout the jungle supplied export houses with latex—the basis of wild rubber, then a strategic raw material for a world undergoing an industrial revolution.45 In a context marked by profound isolation and remoteness, tappers exchanged their produce—extracted from Hevea brasiliensis, or rubber trees—with bosses, patrons, and passing traders who sold them food and supplies “at grossly inflated prices,” thus forcing them to live in a perpetual state of indebtedness.46

Human rights organizations maintained, however, that behind contemporary debt bondage was the shadow of Brazil’s enduring legacy as the last country in all the Americas to abolish the slave system in 1888.47 “Slavery remains a current practice in Brazil, 500 years after Columbus,” decried the London-based group Anti-Slavery International.48 Estimates indicated that at least 18,000 people nationwide were subjected to slave-like working conditions at the time, although the number was likely much higher because the abuses were largely underreported.49 About 80 percent of all known complaints originated in Pará, and the state also accounted for the highest number of murders associated with disputes over the control of land, especially as a consequence of land-grabbing schemes that made fazendeiros, smallholders, migrant peasants, and Indigenous tribes jockey for vast areas.50

By the time Zé Geraldo approached Secretary Câmara, some things had nevertheless begun to improve, thanks to President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and his policies. “The existence of slave labor in the country was officially recognized,” according to the ILO, and tougher legislation was passed to ban the practice, although the UN agency accused civil servants of pursuing only a halfhearted campaign to punish the offenders and make the law prevail.51

This complex social and political context explained why Secretary Câmara initially didn’t pay much attention to the case of the Te-Chaga-U. The drama that Zé Geraldo described to him was too common to justify deploying special agents to the interior. However, Zé Geraldo rethought his strategy and realized that one element unexpectedly played in his favor: the fact that a daughter of Josélio, the twenty-nine-year-old Josélia Leontina, had been the district attorney in Rondon since July of 1993. She was also a shareholder of the Te-Chaga-U ranch, which made the conflict of interest too blatant for the top authorities to ignore, Zé Geraldo argued.52

After some months of back-and-forth and a great deal of pressure, Secretary Câmara agreed to send a secretive fact-finding mission to the fazenda. The date he communicated his decision to Zé Geraldo—May 25, 1995—was by no means a coincidence.53 The regional newspaper A Provincia do Pará published a story that day in which Josélio was accused as one of the suspected instigators in the recent double homicide of a fazendeiro and his bodyguard near Paragominas.54 The motive appeared to be linked to Souza, the overseer of the Te-Chaga-U.55

A month later, on June 25, a group of five law enforcement agents finally traveled the 310 miles from Belém to Rondon in a couple of nondescript white vans. At the head of the operation to find whatever remained of the alleged murder site found by Gil a year earlier was detective João Nazareno Nascimento Moraes, an experienced agent who had already heard of Josélio’s bad reputation.56 Zé Geraldo, members of FETAGRI, and an activist lawyer also traveled with them to ensure that the mission was carried out properly and to a satisfactory end, because cases often went cold after the police received bribes.

Sueny, Luiz, and Gil had already rebuilt their lives but had remained in the region, the two laborers making a living as construction workers. When Moraes approached them, it took some time to convince them to participate in the operation, no matter what they had previously said to Dezinho. “Luiz only agreed the day after we arrived, in the afternoon,” recalled Zé Geraldo. “He said: ‘We leave from here with you all, and the very same day, because if we stay a single night in Rondon, my entire family will die.’” The state legislator gave his word that he would make sure this happened. It was agreed that Gil would join the task force going to the Te-Chaga-U.

In the early morning of June 27, a day and a half after law enforcement agents arrived in the town, the operation was launched.57 Gil was a bundle of nerves when the two vans carrying the police officers, Zé Geraldo, and Dezinho, who had joined the group, entered the boundaries of the fazenda. The ski mask he wore to conceal his identity was soaked in sweat, despite the early morning chill.58

“There,” Gil announced once he had identified the area where he had seen the fire. Agents holding sawed-off shotguns followed Gil’s directions to reach the spot—a wooded area a hundred meters or so from the road they were driving on and where the light at dawn struggled to penetrate the wilderness.59 Through the eyeholes in his balaclava, Gil immediately recognized the bulky overturned tree trunk, which helped him to identify the place where he had seen the rubber and the bones.

Detective Moraes ordered his men to dig. Without much effort, the police confirmed Gil’s allegations. Officers unearthed carbonized rubber and plastic bags, bone fragments, and about six kilograms of circular bands of metal, steel cords from inside the tires that had survived the flames.60 The agents piled the evidence into a large white plastic bag similar to a human remains pouch and sealed it.61 The air filled with tension.

“That’s enough,” Moraes said, stepping back, sure that the findings would be sufficient to file for an arrest warrant from Rondon’s judge. Now he took a moment to weigh his options. Should he attempt to arrest Josélio on the fazenda? Previous police operations had confirmed that, although the sale of guns in the country was restricted and, overall, banned to civilians, estates in that area of Pará were filled with weapons, often provided by mobsters or corrupt police officers.62 Dezinho and Brito would later claim to have witnessed Josélio being supplied with arms and ammunition at Rondon’s police station.63

After a few minutes of hesitation, Detective Moraes decided to visit the ranch’s headquarters. Once there, he found only some workers, who told the police that Josélio had been away for “about sixty days.”64 Zé Geraldo suspected that despite his team’s precautions, the fazendeiro must have been informed of the mission as it was being planned in Belém and fled the scene.

When pressed, ten farmworkers told the group of their living conditions. One stated that he and his wife had been employed for a year but had never received payment. “The ‘law’ imposed by the boss to his employees is that they absolutely can’t leave the ranch unless they complete a year [of work],” the man declared.65 Another explained that he had been working for four years but had received only food and shelter in return, and a cowhand claimed he had done unpaid work for nine months.66

“You are free to go,” Moraes told the ranch’s staff. “You are no longer forced to remain here. I’ll send a vehicle tomorrow to pick up any of you who want to leave.”67 None of them accepted the offer. According to Zé Geraldo, they were too poor to flee without a viable alternative. Luiz, Sueny, and Gil provided statements, Gil signing the police transcription of his deposition with his thumbprint, because he was illiterate.

Back in Rondon, Moraes asked the local judge, Ana Lúcia Bentes Lynch, to immediately issue a warrant to arrest Josélio wherever he was caught and thus put an end to the “savagery” found on the ranch, the detective wrote.68 (A scientific analysis of the evidence collected at the scene later confirmed the presence of, among other contents, carbonized vertebrae, shoulder blades, ribs, tibia, clavicle, molars, and skull fragments belonging to at least two adults.69) But Judge Lynch disagreed, denying Moraes’s requests, arguing that the probe wasn’t airtight and lacked “elements proving the existence of the crime.”70 According to the judge, there was no “nexus . . . between the disappearance of Ceará and the human bones found in the fazenda.”71 Only days after unearthing the remains, the case began to collapse.

In response, the Sindicato and FETAGRI turned to the media to pressure the authorities. Regional newspapers published a series of articles denouncing the discovery of both “enslaved immigrant workers” and a “clandestine cemetery” on the Te-Chaga-U.72 Gil and Luiz posed for photographs with their faces hidden, and the story was picked up by the influential Folha de S. Paulo, a paper read daily by the political and economic elite.73 Far from an isolated case, the media speculated on the possibility that as many as twenty ranches in the interior of Rondon may each have a “clandestine cemetery” to dispose of bodies of murdered farmworkers.74

As the public pressure mounted, Secretary Câmara announced that he would do all that was necessary to punish the criminals.75 Coincidentally, President Cardoso spoke about slave labor the same day that the remains were found in Josélio’s fazenda. Although he probably wasn’t aware of the raid and was referring to the problem in general terms, Cardoso announced to the nation that he would set up a special task force to combat modern slavery across the country.76 “This needs to stop,” he declared in his weekly radio address Palavra do Presidente (“Word from the President”), aired on June 27.77

Two days later, the Barros family publicly responded to the accusations. Another of Josélio’s daughters, Shirley Cristina de Barros, also a lawyer and shareholder of the Te-Chaga-U, sent a fax to the press decrying the charges against her father as “untrue and totally biased.”78 She said that the bones were part of a graveyard built by the previous owner, a man who had buried six family members there prior to Josélio’s acquisition of the land. In her narrative, the scandal was simply an error on the part of the police or, worse, a setup to justify the Workers’ Party’s “pure persecution” of her family. The operation, she argued, was part of a larger plan to force the authorities to seize the fazenda, break it up into smaller plots, and redistribute the land among landless families with links to the Sindicato. In short, everything was the result of a pernicious politically motivated propaganda campaign.

With Josélio’s whereabouts still unknown, Moraes returned to Rondon to investigate the story of the preexisting graveyard. He found Alfonso Dias Soares, the former owner, and the man admitted that he had buried his family there but denied that the evidence collected was the bones of his kin. “My relatives were buried seven palms deep,” he said.79 (A palm is about 22 centimeters and is a unit of measurement used in Brazil.) Eventually, an officer would confirm his narrative by finding the cemetery 300 meters away from the suspected killing field.80

More frightening details on the Te-Chaga-U and its owner were disclosed by Dias. Asked by the police why he had sold the land to him, the former owner replied, “I feared that my family and I would be killed. . . . Almost all the landholders in that area sold their properties to Josélio out of fear, because we knew that he had the custom of sawing in the middle [cutting in half] with a chainsaw the peasants who displeased him by not selling the plots.”81

Josélio emerged to defend himself on July 17, about three weeks after the raid.82 He reappeared in the coastal state of Alagoas, some 1,200 miles east of Rondon, to claim that he was innocent and deny his involvement in any homicides. In a long statement to the police, he repeated the story that the human remains were of Dias’s relatives, but weeks later, he altered his testimony, arguing instead that the bones might have been dumped on his fazenda by “third parties” traveling on roads across his properties.83 He never fully explained this theory, but the point was that anyone but him could have participated in the murder and the cremation. His daughter Shirley Cristina also attempted to downplay the importance of the issue by declaring to the press, “Human remains can be found anywhere around here.”84

In the meantime, Josélio’s attorney worked to build a defense strategy. In her motions, she depicted Josélio as an exemplary rural entrepreneur who, having been born in Espírito Santo, a coastal state bordering Rio de Janeiro to the north, had settled on the frontier to dedicate “his life to his job.”85 She filed a series of certificates and complimentary statements issued by the police of Pará and by several ranchers’ and loggers’ associations and also a petition signed by dozens of townspeople in which ordinary citizens asserted, apparently spontaneously, to be “astonished by so much injury, defamation, and calumny” against the Barroses.86 The accusations of debt bondage were also rebuffed by the statements of current Te-Chaga-U workers, who, in the presence of Shirley Cristina, claimed to enjoy salaries, paid holidays, healthcare benefits, and even commissions on the cattle business.87 Luiz, Josélio’s attorney said, had received his salary, and Gil was indeed a farmhand hired through Chico, the recruiter, but Josélio had never “met him personally.”88

The Rondon do Pará district attorney’s office—where Josélio’s daughter worked, though she never signed any official document relating to the case—backed the judge’s ruling that human remains were not a sufficient reason to press charges. “The fact that some carbonized human bones were found on this property isn’t proof that the person [Ceará] may have been the victim of a crime,” reasoned a prosecutor.89 Moraes continued to investigate for months to try to shore up the probe, although he never managed to demonstrate that the remains were Ceará’s, failing to even uncover the laborer’s full name. (Ceará probably referred to the man’s hometown—the northeastern state of Ceará—as in Amazonian hamlets where migrants were continually coming and going and laborers often called one another by nicknames referring to their home states.)

Ultimately, the crucial piece of evidence—the charred bones—were of no help for Moraes. The evidence was so fragmentary and carbonized that the forensic experts could not gather data such as cause and manner of death.90 Angered by the lack of support to prosecute Josélio even though human bones were found and testimonies indicated the existence of debt bondage and murders, Moraes began to criticize the “multiple attempts to impede the investigation.”91

“The freedom of these men,” the detective wrote in a report, referring to Josélio and his overseers, “discredits the public institutions responsible for the rule of law and social order.”92 Moraes even quoted Socrates—“Injustice can never be more profitable than justice”—to try to convince the authorities, but to no avail. In 1997, the case was close to dead when the investigation was halted; in May 1999, it was officially shelved due to lack of evidence.

“The indictee Josélio de Barros Carneiro can’t remain ad eternum with the issue looming over his head like the sword of Damocles,” justified the judge.93 The district prosecutor supported the motion to dismiss.94

By then, Gil, Luiz, and Sueny were no longer living in Rondon. They had been removed from the town immediately following the raid. Luiz later claimed he’d been right about the great risk to his family. Days after moving out, a relative informed him of gunmen lurking around the home where the family had originally planned to stay. Luiz and Sueny ended up spending the subsequent ten years hiding in a remote plot deep in the jungle. Gil, who stayed in touch with Luiz and FETAGRI for a while, eventually lost contact.

The outcome for the organizers of the operation was also bleak. Zé Geraldo claimed to have been hunted for two years by pistoleiros who “showed his picture routinely” to neighbors near his farm in Pará. According to him, this form of persecution was in retaliation for his crucial role in the case. A FETAGRI activist who had participated in the mission “received multiple death threats after the raid and ran away to Europe, hiding for three months in Italy.”95 Brito and Dezinho, who refused to leave the town, would henceforth face great hardships. Still, the police operation would be a momentous time for the Sindicato and its confrontational strategy for dealing with the local landed class.