Gold makes monsters of men.
November 15, 2019 7:19 AM   Subscribe

Letter from the Amazon
Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rainforest. (Long read New Yorker).

Some pull quotes:
All of us here realize we’re fucking the environment,” Jorge Silva, a forty-eight-year-old miner, said. “It’s not like we want to—it’s that we haven’t found any alternative means to survive.”

Bolsonaro has complained for years that indigenous protections are a senseless brake on development. “The Indians do not speak our language, they do not have money, they do not have culture,” he once said. “How did they manage to get thirteen per cent of the national territory?” Before he was elected, he described the Amazon as “the richest area in the world” and vowed, “I’m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for Indians.”

“The government is not only not working with us—it’s actively against us,” the official said.
posted by adamvasco (1 comment total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
It feels like there were two authors to this article: one on the ground, to describe the horrifying inexorabilty of extractive (self-)colonialism currently reigning in Brazil, and another to pad it in some quick&rough geopolitical context. (The photographs are quietly impressive.)
posted by progosk at 9:13 AM on November 16, 2019


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