76 Time September 23, 2019
Amazon rain forest at least once over, but its rain for-
est remained largely intact. Not so its inhabitants.
As with many of the more than 300 tribes that sur-
vive in Brazil, contact with outsiders decimated the
Karipuna’s numbers through illnesses such as mea-
sles and flu.
When the matriarch of the clan, Katicá Karipuna,
was born about 70 years ago, her father led the only
surviving faction of the Karipuna, which was still
isolated from the wider world. Speaking with a soft
lilt in her native language, she recounts that in those
days, the birth of a girl caused celebration: the tribe
would dance for days to the music of bamboo flutes
to hail its endurance.
The 20th century saw more global tree loss than
the rest of history. The Amazon, with
vast mineral riches under its soil, finally
came under threat. In 1964, Brazil’s mili-
tary dictatorship took power and decreed
the “empty” jungle was a security risk.
It went on to create the National Insti-
tute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform
(INCRA) to conquer the forest and make
it an agricultural stronghold.
In the early 1970s, the government ran
television ads for a new mecca of cheap
land—and freedom. Bertola and his fam-
ily, farm laborers descended from Italian
immigrants to the south of Brazil, joined
millions flooding northward on newly
built highways. “Everyone had the same
dream,” says Bertola, now 52. “It just
meant deforesting it all.” Men like Bertola
are the forward cavalry of deforestation.
Where main roads are built, hundreds of
makeshift logging tracks splinter off in
a fish-bone pattern. The land is demar-
cated, often illegally, and lots are typically
sold for a few hundred dollars by grileiros,
or “land grabbers,” to poor farmers, who
raze the forest and build communities.
Over time, electricity and phone lines arrive, and
the jaguars that threaten the cattle disappear from the
landscape. Once infrastructure is in place, wealthy
tycoons buy up the land to build cattle ranches or
vast fields of soy. Bertola and those like him track the
frontier northward into the virgin forest.
Once in motion, expansion is relentless. In Brazil—
one of nine countries in the Amazon basin—an area
larger than Texas has been cut. Here in the frontier
state of Rondônia, ranching is king, much economic
activity is illegal, and state agents are bought off or
outmuscled. Agri business in Brazil generates nearly a
quarter of the country’s GDP, and the Amazon alone
has over 50 million cattle.
For the Karipuna, the 20th century arrival of
outsiders spelled further tragedy. The government
sent an expedition into the forest in 1976 to find
and assimilate the tribespeople, who—innocent and
bare-chested—reacted joyfully at the moment of con-
tact, dancing and holding hands with the outsiders.
The delight did not last. Katicá’s voice drops
with sadness as she explains that over the following
months and years, she watched her husband, parents
and other family members die one by one after being
exposed to new illnesses. The survivors tried to flee
into the forest, but only eight survived.
In 1998, the few surviving Karipuna were granted
a protected territory about the size of New York City.
Indigenous land makes up 23% of the Brazilian Ama-
zon and is a bulwark against deforestation. It binds
the tribes to the fate of the forest—if one dies, the
other likely will too. The next year, a few settlers
placed a marker at a spot deep in the for-
est just a few miles to the west of the Kari-
puna’s territory. Early arrivals used rifle
barrels to shoot pool, and sometimes each
other. They christened their town União
Bandeirantes, after raiders from Brazil’s
past who hunted for gold and enslaved
tribes. United by hardship and a sense of
destiny, the newcomers held church ser-
vices in the open air. “Since we arrived,
we understood our town to be a door God
opened to bless us,” says local pastor Ar-
naldo Bernardinho.eArly in The new millennium, due
to international pressure, Brazil got seri-
ous about stopping deforestation. That
was felt keenly in União Bandeirantes.
The authorities tried to evict the settlers
and, when that failed, raids by the fed-
eral environmental regulator, IBAMA—
along with the army—fined nearly every
farmer in the settlement. One rancher,
Edgar Gonçalves de Oliveira, says he was
fined $40,000 but has no regrets. “I’m
sure if you were in my shoes, you would have done
the same,” the 50-year-old told the IBAMA agent who
fined him. “On the other hand, if I were in yours, I’d
also be here doing your job.” Even though the govern-
ment rarely succeeds in collecting the fees, a fine can
prevent the recipient from getting loans and provoke
aggravation. Such moves worked: deforestation fell
83.5% from 2004 to 2012.
Yet the numbers crept upward once again as pro-
tections were relaxed. As the country fell into its
worst ever recession in 2014, and amid a huge gov-
ernment corruption scandal, Brazilians became an-
tagonistic to the established order. The ground was
fertile for Bolsonaro, then a Congressman known
mainly as a reactionary agitator who glorified the
dictatorship. He ran for President as an outsider in
2018, his stated ambition to turn the Amazon into
Brazil’s “economic soul,” giving free rein to agribusi-^
Antonio
Bertola and
his family
migrated to
Rondônia
in 1975,
when it was
still mostly
forested