When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon

Investigative journalist Cuadros (Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country) spent six years embedded with the Indigenous Cinta Larga tribe in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. The Cinta Larga lived a traditional lifestyle, hunting and foraging, until the 1960s. They watched Theodore Roosevelt’s scientific expedition in the early twentieth century from a distance. Prospectors began invading their land from the 1920s on, culminating in a massacre in the 1960s. Cuadros spent hours interviewing tribe members who were young in the 1970s when mutual contact was made with outsiders. There are echoes of early meetings of colonists and Indigenous Americans in the U.S. in a feast the Cinta Larga celebrated with outsiders, during which they contracted disease that killed whole families. They were tempted away from their traditional ways of life with gifts of tools from prospective entrepreneurs interested in harvesting first rubber, then hardwood (particularly mahogany), and finally diamonds. At every juncture, prospectors took advantage of them, destroying their environment and way of life.