Vendor
	Fletcher Agency Yona Levin
Original language
English

Masters of the Lost Land

Heriberto Araújo

The Untold Story of the Fight to Own the Amazon

In the tradition of Killers of the Flower Moon, a shocking inside account of one of the most devastating crimes of our time: the destruction of the Amazon rainforest—and anyone who stands in the way.

When we think of the breathtaking deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest – 20 percent in the last 50 years – we often talk about superfires, barren land, and devastation to biodiversity. But the human story of this transformation remains untold. In the 1960s, the Brazilian government undertook a momentous initiative to make the Amazon a new economic frontier, trading virgin rainforest for vast agricultural potential. A contest took shape between Indigenous tribes and migrant farmworkers struggling to make a life for themselves in the rapidly changing jungle and canny landowners, or fazendeiros, who quickly took control of the region through unscrupulous land grabs and egregious human rights violations. Today, the Amazon is the world’s most dangerous place for land and environmental activists, with dozens killed every year.

One of the most controversial fazendeiros was Josélio de Barros Carneiro, a man with a dark past who ruled over the remote Amazon city of Rondon do Pará for decades. Allegations swirled around the violent tactics he and his allies used to silence opposition, but he didn’t meet a true challenger until the charismatic José Dutra da Costa, or Dezinho, took charge of the town’s small but robust farm workers’ union to mount a campaign for workers’ rights and fair distribution of land. When Dezinho was assassinated in cold blood, his widow, Maria Joel, resolved to finally bring the fazendeiros to justice for their crimes. Against great odds, and at extreme personal risk, she stepped into the spotlight her husband left behind, using her ingenuity and unwavering support from the farmworkers to mount a pivotal legal battle that drew massive international attention to their fight.

Featuring groundbreaking revelations and exclusive interviews, Masters of the Lost Land is the culmination of journalist Heriberto Araujo’s years-long investigation into a lawless world of brutal crimes, impunity, and ecological devastation. Set against the backdrop of President Bolsonaro’s devastating cuts to environmental protections, Brazil’s rapidly changing place in the geopolitical spectrum, and the fires ravaging the Amazon rainforest as the fazendeiros’ destruction of the land meets the unstoppable force of climate change, Masters of the Lost Land is a gripping read that’s also a timely and inspiring story of how people are fighting for—and winning—a better future for one of the last wild places on earth.

Available products
Book Published 2022-05-01 by Custom House/Harpercollins

Comments

"With a journalist’s insight and a scholar’s scrutiny, Heriberto Araujo tells the timeless story of dominance, displacement, murder and social injustice that drive large-scale environmental destruction. Masters of the Lost Land documents an Amazonian version of one culture suppressing another through violence, force, and corruption. On the surface, Araujo’s case study offers more understanding of the past than hope for the future, yet its central heroine provides the kind of inspiration needed to break the cycle of frontier corruption and destruction." —Roman Dial, bestselling author of The Adventurer's Son

“A gripping true crime mystery that transports readers into the heart of the Amazon to witness the human toll of its destruction and the incredible will of its people to fight for the future of this unique place – and the planet. Masterfully reported and engagingly written, this is a must-read.” —Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of Myth

“A tour de force...Araújo's masterful reporting from the frontlines in the war for the world's most important tropical biome should be required reading for policy makers, and for anyone who cares about the fight for social and environmental justice for Amazonia's forest peoples.” —Dr. Jeremy M. Campbell, author of Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon

When I wrote my own book about Amazonian biopiracy, there was so much violence and lawlessness occurring that it was hard to make sense of it all. Deforestation; illegal logging; soybeans; cattle farming; land-grabbers and protesting squatters; kidnappings, executions and assassinations; government and judicial corruption at the highest and lowest levels; boomtowns cut from the jungle; the massive gold mine at Serra Pelada; the killing of Sister Dorothy Stang; and the displacement of indigenous tribes – you sensed it was a massive jigsaw puzzle, but how did it all fit together? I visited Fordlandia twice, separated by three or four years: the first time, Henry Ford’s abandoned dream was a ghost town; the second time, it had residents, families, and even my local friends didn’t know where they all came from. Heriberto Araujo’s Masters of the Lost Land connects these pieces, and amazingly does so by focusing on one town and one family. This is journalism at its absolute best, made even more impressive when one considers the obstacles, obfuscation and threats so often encountered there when trying to ferret out the truth. I’d often suspected that the modern history of the Amazon parallels the 19th- century cattle wars and gold rushes of the American West: it has, but in overdrive. This is an essential book, and my only criticism is selfish – that it wasn’t around earlier (to make my own writing easier). —Joe Jackson, author of The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire