Rough Justice

“Like prostitution,” says Marjon.

Jeffrey barks. It’s unclear whether he’s laughing or choking. “Yes,” he finally says. “How witty of you.”

I decide it’s a good time to seek out Jan, who seems oddly keen to impress.

“Jeffrey? ” he says when I ask about his father’s friend. “He was the head of DeBeers in Brazil for years. He knows everyone in Brasilia.” Jan leans in. “He writes Brazil’s mining legislation.”

The next day, Marjon and I head south on Rondônia’s one paved highway, the BR-364. Punched through the rainforest in the 1960s, it brought progress and settlers and the end of a million-year-old forest. Nowadays it’s a sea of potholes. A five-hundred kilometre drive takes nine hours of bobbing and weaving through a string of frontier cities with Indian names: Ariquemes, Jaru, Ji-Paraná, and finally Cacoal, our destination. At the office of the Indian Agency, funai, we are met by Orlando Castro Silveira, a bluff, friendly man with grey around his temples. He has spent the last thirty years in Rondônia, about half of that time working with the Cinta Larga.

Silveira shows us a satellite map of the Cinta Larga territory. The Roosevelt Reserve appears as a pretty green field of moss, one spot infected by a squirming pink worm — the mining site.

“We have five barriers up,” Silveira says, pointing to dirt access roads leading into the reserve. Each barrier is guarded by five funai agents and three Forest Police officers. “We do weekly patrols through the reserve — two 4•4s with five men each. In addition, there are two Indian families stationed permanently on the mining site.”

It sounds impressive, I tell him. Also expensive.

“There’s money enough in the budget to last to the end of the year,” he says.

“And then?”