in a conagration intense enough to be detected by the Euro-
pean Space Agency. Dressed in a T-shirt and Bermuda trunks,
Vargas was meeting with 200 landless workers, many of whom
live on the farm, tilling small plots and raising chickens or pigs.
The land at Santa Lucia, and the murders that took place
there, remain at the center of the battle over the Amazon. The
courts have yet to turn over the farm to the squatters, as required
by the Brazilian constitution, and no one has been convicted of
the murders of Oliveira and the other farmers. Local landown-
ers have blamed the victims, portraying Oliveira, Tonho, and
Lico as a criminal gang who invaded Santa Lucia by force—a
tale that Vargas dismisses as a “smear campaign.” Oliveira, he
says, “believed in the rights of the landless worker, and in the
end, gave her life for the cause.”
Ever since the massacre, families of the victims have been
subjected to a terrifying campaign of intimidation. Black cars
with tinted windows have parked outside their homes, and
most have ed Redenção for other parts of Brazil. Vargas was
also forced to move his family after he returned home to nd
open beer bottles on his porch, the windows and doors standing
wide open. The week we met, what appeared to be a bomb was
left in front of his law oce. “The message was: We can get to
you whenever we want,” he said.
We were sitting in a pizza joint in Redenção, just o the main
drag. Vargas, who had a haunted look, seemed jittery, his gray
eyes ringed in dark circles. For our safety, he suggested we
move to a dierent restaurant: We were being watched.“If there was someone else who would take this case, who
could pick up where I am and see it to the end, I would leave,” he
said. “But there is no one else. If I give up, the case will simply die.”
He knows the odds are stacked against the farmers. Charges
are almost never brought against police who murder peasants.
Of the 29 ocers suspected of killing the squatters at Eldorado
dos Carajas—the massacre that inspired Vargas to become a
lawyer—only two were sent to prison. But Vargas hopes he will
be able to identify whoever ordered the killings at Santa Lucia
and bring them to justice. In a sense, it is a murder case in which
millions of lives hang in the balance. By defending those who live
on the “arc of deforestation”—the demarcation point where Bra-
zil’s agricultural frontier is relentlessly advancing upon the rain
forest—Vargas is ultimately ghting to save the Amazon itself.
Vargas says he couldn’t bring himself to go to Oliveira’s funeral
or see her body after the autopsy. He hasn’t even been able to look
at pictures taken after the massacre. That’s not how he wants to
remember her. Instead, he prefers to think about how she looked
when he rst met her, when she was full of hope and possibility.
His focus has turned to those Oliveira left behind. The courts
have ruled that the squatters must be evicted, but Vargas says
there is no place for them to go. And so in all likelihood they will
either return to Santa Lucia once more, or occupy another farm,
and their battle for the Amazon—one that began long before
Oliveira’s death—will rage on, like the res all around them. QThis story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.SILENT SPRING
Farms like the
one at Santa Lucia
remain central
to the battle for
the Amazon.97©^
SPE
NS
ER^
HE
AP
S;^
PRE
VIO
US
SP
REA
D:^
SEB
AS
TIA
N^ L
IST
E/N
OO
R^
APRIL 2020