The New York Times Magazine - USA (2022-03-20)

Photograph by João Castellano for The New York Times

best I know, none of the videos were set to music,
but one of them included narration like that of
a sporting event. Altamira is that kind of place.
For the police there, Luz was just an annoyance.
They booked him, then released him.
But Luz was determined to maintain the
struggle. Twice — immediately before and after
his arrest — he barged into the local offi ces of
FUNAI and announced that the new national
policy was to stop shielding uncontacted Indig-
enous people and to usher them into the main-
stream of modern Brazilian life. This was false
and wishful thinking, but not beyond the imag-
inable. Bolsonaro was in the process of naming
an evangelical missionary named Ricardo Lopes
Dias to lead FUNAI’s department for isolated
peoples — Luciano Pohl’s bureau. Dias was an
especially provocative choice. Previously he
proselytized for the New Tribes Mission (Luz’s
childhood group), and he was notorious for later
insistently intruding into the Javari Valley, an
Indigenous territory near the Peruvian border
that shelters one of the largest concentrations
of isolated groups in the world.
Pohl was in the FUNAI offi ce during Luz’s vis-
its. He told me that Luz gloated over the coming

appointment of Dias and was accompanied by

various shady characters. Luz denies such char-

acterizations of his companions but confi rms the

encounter. He and Pohl each say that on one of

those visits, he demanded copies of the original

reports and that Pohl refused, saying that the

reports were confi dential for the safety of the iso-

lated group.

Pohl is a man of obvious courage. Other staff

members in the offi ce had been unnerved by the

violence in Ituna-Itatá. Some sensed that they

were being surveilled — an intuition that had to

be taken seriously in those parts. When I asked

Luz about this, he shrugged off their fear. Of his

visits to FUNAI, he said that he had proposed

a de-escalation to calm people down. But he

spread the video of his arrest through social

media from which it was picked up by national

newscasts, where it sparked disapproving panel

discussions whose tone bolstered his credentials

as a defender of impoverished settlers and a

consultant to the right-wing fringe. This seems

to have been his calculation. He became known

as ‘‘that crazy anthropologist.’’ Before speaking

to him, I went to see a retired Catholic bishop

in Altamira, an eminent liberation theologist

named Erwin Kräutler, who is the author of

‘‘Indians and Ecology in Brazil’’ and lived under

full-time police protection because of his advo-

cacy for Indigenous rights. When I mentioned

Luz to him, he frowned and asked if I knew that

luz means ‘‘light.’’ He said a better name for the

man would be Edward of Darkness.

whose name is also Edward Luz, heads the Bra-

zilian off shoot of the New Tribes Mission today.

The parent organization in the United States

and its affi liates deploy about 3,000 missionaries

worldwide. It subsists on ample donations from

evangelical churches throughout North America.

In 2017 it changed its name to Ethnos 360, a few

years after a child-abuse scandal in its boarding

Settlers in Mocotó meet with Edward Luz in 2020.

The New York Times Magazine 39

The father ofEdward Luz,