Rough Justice

“Is one blow enough to kill a man? ” I ask. “Oh, yes,” he says, surprised that anyone should consider death a difficult thing to achieve. “Swelling inside the cranial cavity cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain. The victim never regains consciousness.”

He opens more folders. Some of the victims had had their hands tied behind their backs. Four or five had been killed with bullets. Thirty-eight calibre. Also twenty-two. The coroner takes a bullet from a plastic evidence bag and places it in my hand. It’s cool to the touch, like a grape. Six were killed with piercing wounds, probably lances or arrows. Two were burned after death. Part of a ritual, maybe. Or to send a message.

Before I go, the coroner adds one final detail: most of the victims were eviscerated, their stomachs and intestines slit open from top to bottom. Miners, he explains, are accustomed to transporting diamonds in the digestive tract. “Someone must have been searching,” he says.

That afternoon, I climb up a set of rusty stairs to the office of cimi, the indigenous mission of Brazil’s Catholic Church. cimi doesn’t work directly with the Cinta Larga, but they do maintain a substantial file on the tribe, one that provides interesting insight into Rondônian politics.

Their files contain clippings from Rondônia’s two main newspapers, the Folha de Rondônia and the Diário da Amazônia. Both read like rainforest versions of the ussr’s old Pravda — practically every move, thought, twitch, and wiggle of Rondônia’s governor, Ivo Cassol, is the subject of laudatory headlines.

cimi’s legal counsellor, Maria Filipini, tells me there aren’t a lot of readers to support the press in Rondônia, so the newspapers’ financial survival depends on advertising from government agencies. In return, the governor demands positive coverage. Many of the stories, I notice, concern the governor’s strong interest in the Roosevelt diamonds.

It’s dark by the time I return to my hotel. I’m travelling with a colleague, a journalist for Radio Netherlands, Marjon van Royen. Out by the pool, I find her sitting with two older gentlemen. Their table is covered with silver ice buckets and half-empty bottles of Beefeater and Johnny Walker Red. One of them is wearing a shirt that reads “Polar Bear Diamonds.”

“Some fellow Canadians for you,” Marjon calls out. “This is Jeffrey. That’s Roger.” Introductions, apparently, are to be kept to first names. “Over there is Roger’s son, Jan.” She points to a younger man at a nearby table.

Roger, the one with the T-shirt, is from Calgary. Jeffrey speaks with the plummy vowels of British private schooling. They’re diamond prospectors, Marjon has discovered. They’ve just come back from the field. And what’s more, they’re celebrating — but what, we can’t discover. Every time we make a pass at the topic, they glance away. Marjon finally asks, straight out, what they’ve found.

Jeffrey sets his voice to extra plummy. “I don’t mean to be rude,” he says, “but we’re in a business where you really don’t talk about things.”