They told FUNAI that they had not interacted
with the strangers but saw footprints and other
clues to their existence. A neighboring home-
steader added to the information. He said he had
come upon ‘‘three brave Indians with long hair’’
who fl ed from his presence.
FUNAI has a division dedicated to maintain-
ing the isolation of isolated groups. In 2009 it
dispatched agents from Altamira to look around.
An Asurini hunter told them of having been sur-
rounded in the forest one night by unseen people
who hurled nuts at him and ran away. Another
man spoke of having come upon a temporary
shelter. Eventually, the agents found footprints
that, according to their Indigenous guides, were
unattributable to neighboring peoples. It wasn’t
much to go on, but protection of the obscure
is the nature of the job, and when the agents
returned to Altamira from their second foray,
they fi led a report suggesting the need for a
temporary reserve to create a haven until further
information could be gathered.
The wheels turned slowly, but in 2011 FUNAI
provisionally set aside Ituna-Itatá for the group’s
protection. The area’s status would have to be
renewed every two to four years. The quest
was then taken up by a newly arrived FUNAI
investigator named Luciano Pohl, who at 38 had
the strength to endure weeks in the jungle and
indeed to thrive on the experience. Accompa-
nied by a few FUNAI stalwarts and Indigenous
hunters, he embarked on a series of extended
explorations of Ituna-Itatá, moving by pirogue
and on foot and largely living off the land. On
the assumption that uncontacted Indigenous
peoples are intentionally so, and that any such
group would be fl eeing from the oncoming set-
tlers, Pohl and his companions pushed south-
ward into forests so remote that they were
unknown even to the guides. Pohl makes little
of it now, but the eff ort was extraordinary. Even-
tually it led to the sort of evidence that Pohl was
looking for: saplings hacked by unusually dull
blades like those of handed-down machetes,
fragments of a temporary shelter — branches
bound with vines — and an area of crushed veg-
etation where people had bedded down. Some
of the signs were fresh. It is possible that Pohl
was being watched at the time. More recently,
in September 2020, a FUNAI colleague of his
named Rieli Franciscato was attacked while
tracking an isolated group that he was trying
to protect from encroaching settlers in the
remote western state Rondônia. The group did
not know that he was on its side. An unseen
archer shot an arrow into Franciscato’s chest.
Franciscato said, ‘‘Ai!’’ yanked it out, staggered
back and died.
I asked Pohl if he had considered such risks
when pushing so deeply into Ituna-Itatá. He said
yes, but pointed out that greater dangers exist
in Altamira, where FUNAI offi cials have been
attacked for obstructing development, and where
he himself has been threatened with death by the
agents of land speculators and loggers. (Offi cial
spokespeople for FUNAI declined to speak on the
record for this article.) At the time of his discover-
ies in Ituna-Itatá, he was mostly concerned not to
expose the unseen tribe to contact, including his
own. That is the biggest challenge of the job, he
said: the need to gather evidence while respect-
ing people’s desired isolation. After documenting
and photographing the signs, he retreated hast-
ily from Ituna-Itatá. He wrote up offi cial reports
that were closely held for the protection of the
group and used to justify the continuation of the
reserve. Pohl has come to believe fi rmly in the
existence of the uncontacted people. He told me
that after more than a decade, the fact that none
have been spotted is evidence that, at least, ini-
tially, the protective strategy worked.
But now, as they invade, the settlers, loggers
and land speculators scoff openly at the protec-
tions. They say that the reserve was founded on
the wishful thinking of agenda-driven bureau-
crats. They say that no Indigenous people reside
there now, and maybe never did, and that the
reserve is a put-up job by outside interests, most
likely foreign environmentalists or even, some-
what illogically, the opposite: a gold-mining
company with plans for an open-pit quarry. With
the advent of Bolsonaro and his cabinet minis-
ters, such views have gained the upper hand in
the region. Under threat of violence, Pohl quit
FUNAI in November 2020 and in 2021 relocated
his family to distant Manaus.The settlers’ local base, meanwhile, has blos-
somed. It is a ragged village called Vila Mocotó,
which sprawls across denuded land several
miles north of the reserve. Perhaps 1,000 peo-
ple live there, in scattered wooden shacks and
cinder- block houses. A single track leads to the
settlement, several hours from the Altamira ferry
crossing, and is sometimes impassable in the
rainy season. Mocotó has electric power (recent-
ly brought in by the state of Pará), a diesel-fuel
depot, a cafe, a school, an automotive shop, sev-
eral small grocery stores, an untold number of
pirated internet connections, a Facebook page
and at least two Assembly of God churches. Many
residents are armed and all, it seems, are angry.
Agents of FUNAI and IBAMA urged me to avoid
the place lest I be mistaken for an environmen-
talist and assaulted.
It took me two weeks in Altamira to arrange
for a safe visit. As it turned out, the gatekeep-
er was a man with a checkered past, known to
have deployed gunmen against state offi cials.
He praised Bolsonaro and posed for a picture
holding Donald Trump’s book ‘‘The Art of the
Deal.’’ I did not argue with him. He made the
necessary calls. After two forays, the fi rst of which
was defeated by door-high mud, I reached the
settlement in heavy rain and, together with a Bra-
zilian colleague, met with a group of residents— rough-looking men and women who had
assembled on a veranda for our arrival. Among
them were people who claimed to be recently
displaced by IBAMA’s helicopter raids. They
denounced their treatment and portrayed them-
selves as subsistence farmers trying to raise their
families in a wholesome environment. I knew
that the IBAMA agents did not believe them, but
those were the stories the residents told. On their
smartphones, they showed me videos of what
they said were their homesteads being burned.
One scene was set to music.
A minister pulled up a chair for a formal inter-
view. He said that even his church had been
destroyed. He mentioned that he had been on
vacation at the time. I asked him if he intended
to rebuild. With an audience of parishioners in
attendance, he predicted that IBAMA would be
forced to retreat. I may have expressed some
doubt. This was not the safest approach to take
in Mocotó at the time, and it seemed to anger
a small group of men who had been standing
together in the background. Others, however,
were accepting and merely suggested that I seek
out a very smart man who could explain their
side: a certain anthropologist named Edward Luz.
Luz had developed a local reputation for try-
ing to reduce the size of the Indigenous lands
belonging to another group, the Arara. Luz lost
the argument against them, but the settlers in
Mocotó were impressed. He told me afterward
that they said of him, ‘‘He’s not a leftist.’’
So when IBAMA started burning buildings
in Ituna-Itatá, a member of the Mocotó settler’s
association contacted Luz at home in Santarém,
sending him a photograph of his brother’s
burned pickup truck. Luz drove to Altamira and
challenged a senior IBAMA agent. According to
Luz’s account, Luz said: ‘‘This is not Indian land.
It is just reserved for more studies. Why are you
burning houses? Can you just hold off? Can you
be more peaceful?’’
The agent, who prefers not to be named out
of fear for his safety, remembers less-reasoned
wording. When Luz predicted that someone
would die — meaning anyone would or could —
the agent understood it as a threat. Luz went to
Brasília, where he met with Salles, then fl ew back
to Altamira and got himself arrested in Ituna-Itatá.
On the afternoon of his arrest, Luz was hand-
cuff ed, shuttled by IBAMA helicopter to Altamira
and turned over to the police. Altamira is a vio-
lent city. It is riddled with gangs and narcotics
and has at times had one of the highest mur-
der rates in the country. Gunfi re can be heard
most nights on the streets. Some of the police
are themselves racketeers. Out by the airport
stand the ruins of a small prison where in July
2019 fi ve hours of gang fi ghting broke out that
burned the facility and left around 60 inmates
dead; 16 of them were decapitated. The guards
looked on from watchtowers. Some prisoners
recorded the battles on their mobile phones. As38 3.20.22