The Wrong Way of Presenting Murders at a Brazilian Diamond Mine

The story “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.” Up until this point, I had no idea if this is a work of fiction or non-fiction. It seems to be fiction because the story focuses on three young characters, and describes events from their autobiographic perspective. “Based on six years of immersive reporting and research,” it “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…”
The “Prologue” opens on November 9, 2023 in Brazil, where the limping Nacoco Pio is accused of being among the “members” of his “tribe” who “took the lives of several prospectors” back in 2004 by a Judge. The story loses me as the author describes what Pio is thinking: it’s never a good sign that research has been done when the author says he can read a character’s mind, instead of reporting what this person said to them in an interview. After a long digression that distracts readers from the subject at hand, Pio is said to have “tried to stop the massacre”, and so he pleads innocent.
Chapter “1: A New Kind of Yearning” begins absurdly by arguing: “Pio could never forget the first time he saw a white person.” Would this really be that significant, if he saw a lot of them afterwards? And why does he call himself “wild” before this meeting, as if adopting concepts of barbarism imposed by colonialism? The next paragraph also begins absurdly: “Of course, the forest also provided sustenance…” The previous paragraph said it was a good place to hide, but it doesn’t need to be stated that there’s food in the forest…
There are many ways this book could have been written that would have made this narrative interesting and sympathetic, but the way it is written is not that way. There are curious fragments about getting a “bee hive”, but the details of being stung while getting it are omitted, as the author rushes forward to describe other foods. I turned to a random page, later on, and found this: “One of Pio’s most profound regrets, later in life, was that he didn’t give school more of a chance…” There’s a mention of him learning “to read” “more or less”, before a sentence leaps to add that he “even got along with the white kids”. What does reading have to do with tolerating white children, who were also trying to learn to read? This is an unreadable book: conclusion.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024