Land of Black Clay

Land of Black Clay takes place largely in the rural township of Sapé, a town in the northeast Brazilian state of Paraíba, many hundreds of miles north-northeast of Rio de Janeiro. The main character, Jorge Elias, is a newspaper reporter from Rio de Janeiro who is assigned to cover a news story in Sapé. A judge, Odilon Fernandes, has reopened the case of a farmworker union organizer whose murder local landowners ordered. The initial investigation into the murder was perfunctory, but now, the possibility of justice is given a second chance. Land of Black Clay is a political-adventure novel reminiscent of the material from which such Costa-Gavras movies as Z and Missing were made. 


Though this is a work of fiction, such union leaders as João Pedro Teixeira and Margarida Maria Alves actually lived. The land barons and their friends are fictional, as are the events themselves.