The city of Rondon do Pará, a remote but fast-growing outpost deep in the heart of the Amazon, lived for decades under the control of Josélio de Barros, one of Brazil’s most notorious land barons. Josélio had cut a grisly path to success, he arrived in the jungle with a shady past, quickly making a name for himself as, an invincible thug ,who grabbed up massive tracts of public land, razing and burning the jungle in the process, falsified private title deeds, summarily executed family farmers, who refused to sell their plots, and kept migrant workers in conditions of modern-day slavery. The government’s support of these practices has led directly, to the devastating super-fires we’ve seen in the past few years, extracting all value to be gotten from the land at any cost.
Enter José Dutra da Costa (nicknamed Dezinho), the leader of Rondon’s small, but robust farm workers’ union, who had been fighting back against these, land grabs, ecological destruction, and blatant human rights abuses for decades. When Dezinho was, killed in a shocking cold-blooded assassination, some 2,000 people turned out for his funeral, and the city of Rondon held its breath. Would Josélio, whom everyone knew had ordered the hit, finally be, brought to account? Or would authorities look the other way, as they had, hundreds of times before
