Masters of the Lost Land: The Untold Story of the Amazon and the Violent Fight for the World’s Last Frontier

In this sprawling account, journalist Araujo (coauthor, China’s Silent Army) interweaves a labor activist’s murder in Rondon do Pará, Brazil, with a history of violent land disputes in the Amazon rainforest. Once the home of an Indigenous tribe, Rondon do Pará became a logging boomtown in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1984, José Dias de Costa—known as Dezinho—and his wife, Maria Joel, moved to Rondon to become homesteaders; air pollution soon caused two of their children to fall sick, and Dezinho’s firsthand experience of the logging industry’s heinous working conditions led him to join a rural workers’ union. Elected union president in 1993, he launched campaigns to eradicate debt bondage, fight land grabs, and investigate murders allegedly committed by local landowners. Following Dezinho’s assassination in 2000, Maria Joel (who eventually succeeded her husband as union president) pushed to hold timber baron Décio José Barroso Nunes responsible for the crime. (He has been convicted twice but “continues to fight in courts to dodge jail time.”) Araujo stuffs the account with intriguing details about Brazilian politics, environmental activism, and other killings in the region, but doesn’t always interweave the disparate threads. Still, this is a harrowing and deeply researched report from the front lines of the battle for the Amazon. (Jan.)