Masters of the Lost Land

November 14, 2022
In this sprawling account, journalist Araujo (coauthor, China’s Silent Army) interweaves a labor activist’s murder in Rondon do Pará, Brazil, with a history of violent land disputes in the Amazon rainforest. Once the home of an Indigenous tribe, Rondon do Pará became a logging boomtown in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1984, José Dias de Costa—known as Dezinho—and his wife, Maria Joel, moved to Rondon to become homesteaders; air pollution soon caused two of their children to fall sick, and Dezinho’s firsthand experience of the logging industry’s heinous working conditions led him to join a rural workers’ union. Elected union president in 1993, he launched campaigns to eradicate debt bondage, fight land grabs, and investigate murders allegedly committed by local landowners. Following Dezinho’s assassination in 2000, Maria Joel (who eventually succeeded her husband as union president) pushed to hold timber baron Décio José Barroso Nunes responsible for the crime. (He has been convicted twice but “continues to fight in courts to dodge jail time.”) Araujo stuffs the account with intriguing details about Brazilian politics, environmental activism, and other killings in the region, but doesn’t always interweave the disparate threads. Still, this is a harrowing and deeply researched report from the front lines of the battle for the Amazon.

December 1, 2022
A potent narrative that lays out "the factors that have made the largest rainforest on Earth the world's most dangerous place for environmental and land activists." When colonization began in earnest in the Amazon in the 1960s, it unleashed decades of environmental devastation and violent crime, both of which are particularly evident in Rondon do Par�, a settlement in the Par� state in northern Brazil. In 1966, the then-military government launched Operation Amazonia, which encouraged citizens to develop and settle the jungle, colonizing the Kayap� tribal land to create agricultural plots. In the following decades, this region of Brazil would become known for extreme deforestation--one statistic noted that "each year between 1978 to 1988 the Amazon lost an area of forest bigger than the state of Connecticut"--as well as rampant violence and the destruction of Indigenous ways of life. The fazendeiros, Brazilian cattle farmers and planters, who often gained possession of their land through nefarious means, controlled populations of impoverished laborers through capital and viciousness. As Araujo reports, by the early 2000s, "almost everyone was armed...and strong men ruled the roost through extreme violence." Refreshingly, the author resists restricting the text to bleak negativity. In fact, he focuses equally on positive aspects, using activist Maria Joel's courageous life story as a thread running throughout the book. Even as activists were disappeared, the protest movement grew, and across the decades, justice was served. Araujo delivers on his promise to showcase the diverse factors that made Rondon do Par� such a dangerous place, though in covering such a wide time frame and large range of issues, the narrative sometimes rushes from one large idea to the next. Nonetheless, the author provides an excellent overview of the multitude of challenges in the region, and the work is characterized by meticulous research and investigative rigor. An arresting examination of the history of extreme deforestation and violence in the Brazilian Amazon.

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January 1, 2023
Brazil's Amazon rainforest is under attack. Journalist Araujo has spent years documenting the depredations of large landowners against Brazilian laborers, Indigenous peoples, and the environment. In the town of Rondon do Par�, a serene, inviting landscape hides a violent undercurrent of armed henchmen and enforcers. A charismatic leader nicknamed Dezinho organized a workers' movement to oppose the area's near-total control by landowners but was assassinated in 2000. Rather than ending the farmworkers' union, however, Dezhino's killing gave the cause new life as his widow Maria Joel fought determinedly to bring her husband's killer to justice. Despite labor movement support, Maria Joel's path forward was not easy. She faced the power of corrupt landowners who had the impunity to deflect or even ignore court rulings. Although Araujo focuses on this one particular murder, the implications of the workers' crusade and the clash of political and economic forces around it reveal much about the complexities of saving the "lungs of the planet." Readers interested in climate change and ecology will discover these abstractions illuminated through the everyday and the individual.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.