When We Sold God's Eye
Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
A CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS NONFICTION FINALIST
The "gripping and astonishing story" (Douglas Preston) of the Cinta Larga, a tribe that had no contact with the West until the 1960s and came to run an illegal diamond mine in the Amazon.
Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new, capitalist reality, discovering its wonders—cars, refrigerators, TV sets, phones—as well as a way to acquire them: by selling the natural riches of their own forest home. They had to partner with the white men who’d hunted them, but their wealth grew legendary, the envy of the nation—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre, bloody retribution that made headlines across the globe.
Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God’s Eye tells a unique kind of adventure story, one that begins with a river journey by Theodore Roosevelt and ends with smugglers from New York City’s Diamond District. It’s a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of an ecosystem threatened by our hunger for resources; of genocide and revenge. It’s a tragedy as old as the first European encounters with Indigenous people, playing out in the present day. But most of all, it’s the moving saga of a few audacious individuals—Pio, Maria, Oita, and their friends—and their attempts to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Journalist Alex Cuadros spins an engrossing true story of a clash of cultures ending in bloody reprisal. The Cinta Larga were an Indigenous people who lived for centuries in the rainforests of Brazil, where despite periods of violent conflict, they thrived as hunter-gatherers. In the 1960s, white outsiders discovered the Cinta Larga and treated them first as an anthropological find and later as a source of land, rare wood, and valuable minerals to be profitably exploited. While the tribespeople welcomed the introduction of metal tools, they were decimated by Western illnesses. When the Cinta Larga came to fully understand how they were being cheated, it led to a conflict that exploded into brutal violence. Cuadros is both a keen historian and a gifted storyteller, and When We Sold God’s Eye is a fascinating, slow-burning exercise in tragedy and suspense. It’s one of the most exciting and shocking adventure stories of the year.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Amazonian tribe fractures, turns to illegal pillaging of their own lands, and perpetrates a shocking massacre in this intricate and tragic account. Journalist Cuadros (Brazillionaires) follows the Cinta Larga of western Brazil after their first contact with white men in the 1960s. He paints their lives before contact as an idyll of hunting, horticulture, and feasting in the rainforest. (Downsides included bloody feuds and the exploitation of women.) Their encounters with non-Indigenous Brazilians featured occasional violence, but also curiosity and a hunger for the intruders' steel tools—and finally a series of epidemics that left fewer than 400 survivors. Cuadros recaps the cross-cultural coming-of-age of Nacoça Pio, an orphaned boy who became a Cinta Larga leader skilled at working with government agencies and white settlers, and Oita Matino, a hot-headed, semicriminal hustler; both became involved in despoiling their tribe's land, selling valuable but banned mahogany wood, and later operating an illegal diamond mine. The latter brought riches, but also conflict with white prospectors who resented their Indigenous bosses; in 2004, that tension exploded into a shocking killing spree. Cuadros depicts the Cinta Larga's fall from grace with vivid prose ("Now he felt the full weight of open-eyed regret, a kind of regret his father could never have imagined, because his world was so much smaller"). Readers will be riveted.
