Rough Justice

As do I. I had come to Rondônia in the wake of this deadly clash to investigate the conflict between diamond miners and the Cinta Larga Indians. The miners’ brutal massacre had been front-page news in every paper in Brazil. As reported, the storyline seemed straightforward: greedy miners, angry natives, incredible wealth on reserve lands, and the forces of law and order — as so often is the case on the Amazon frontier — too weak to intervene. That the violence could have been orchestrated by a third party had never crossed my mind. Not until this night, in the presence of the dead, in a graveyard in the midst of what had once been rainforest.

Flying from Rio de Janeiro, it takes about seven hours to reach the rainforest state of Rondônia, located next to Bolivia on Brazil’s far western border. Twenty years ago this was the front line of deforestation. Settlers poured in to fill the forest and subdue it. Sting and Greenpeace came and sang songs and waved banners — eco-green Canutes trying to whip back the human tide. A generation later, much of the forest has been cut, dried, and shipped abroad, or else burned to make room for cows. The eroding edge of the frontier has swept further north, leaving those in the backwash scrabbling over the scraps of treasure that remain.

In 1999, a lone prospector emerged from the jungle, his back a wriggling mass of fly larvae, his hands grasping a diamond the size of an ice cube. The stone had come from the Roosevelt Indian Reserve, two-hundred-and-thirty-thousand hectares of Amazon rainforest, intact only because, legally, it belongs to the one-thousand-three-hundred members of the Cinta Larga Indian tribe.

Named for the wide fibre belts they traditionally wore (cinta larga means “broad belt” in Portuguese), the tribe first came into sustained contact with the Western world sometime in the late 1950s. At the time, their population was about five thousand. Over the next two decades, disease, displacement, massacres by rubber tappers, and encroaching settlers reduced their numbers to just over one thousand. The tribe finally obtained recognized title to their ancestral lands in 1979: four reserves totalling 2.7 million hectares, which include the Roosevelt Reserve. In the 1980s, the demand for black-market mahogany reached Cinta Larga lands. Some $45 million in tropical hardwood was cut from their territory each year for the better part of a decade, according to figures from Brazil’s environmental protection agency, ibama. The Cinta Larga received but a fraction of the wealth.

With the discovery of diamonds, miners of every kind have poured across the Roosevelt River into Cinta Larga territory. International mining companies have been vying to set up operations with large-scale extraction machines and underground pipes. But the diamonds are so plentiful close to the surface that Indians and miners operating independently merely use their hands or high-pressure hoses to loosen the surface kimberlite.

Mining is illegal on Indian land in Brazil, by Indians and non-Indians both. But laws in Brazil are more often honoured in their breach. The Indians, at first, attempted to profit from the boom, charging miners a $5,000 entrance fee, plus 10 percent of their take. By 2002, the Roosevelt Reserve was home to a mining colony five thousand strong, complete with bars, brothels, Wild West-style gunfights, and miners with little inclination for paying fees or commissions to Indians.

The Indians asked the Brazilian Indian Agency, funai, to remove the miners from their land. funai complied, and by January 2003 most had been removed. The Indians then took up mining on their own, churning out an estimated $30 million worth of gems each month, sold illegally into the international black market. Lured by the easy riches, miners began filtering back into the reserve. The Indians removed them again. The miners went back in. Tempers began to fray. In early April 2004, miners fled the reserve, speaking of an attack by the Cinta Larga, of dozens, maybe hundreds, dead.

Within days, the Brazilian government had called in the army and federal police, who encircled the reserve and put the Cinta Larga under a state of siege. The head of funai said the Cinta Larga were simply defending themselves. But Rondônia Governor Ivo Cassol put the blame squarely on funai. The Indians said little, making themselves scarce and shutting down their own mining operations. When the federal police finally found the bodies of all the miners, the final count came to twenty-nine. The corpses, in various states of decay, were shipped north to Pôrto Velho, Rondônia’s capital.

Two months later, I am at the coroner’s office poring over a stack of autopsy reports.

“Most of the victims were like this one,” the coroner says, pointing to a photo of a man with the side of his face caved in. The weapon was likely an Indian club, what they call a tacapé or bodurna: a long wooden stick with a thick bit at one end.