Money trees

THE INDIGENOUS territory Sete de Setembro draws its name from the “first contact” with the Paiter Suruí tribe: September 7th 1969. At the time, tribe members thought white men, with their pale skin and strange beards, were a sort of monster, whereas the indigenous were “real people”, or paiterey in their tongue.

Cousins Almir and Henrique Suruí were born in the following decade. As boys they saw the arrival of thousands of settlers, the conversion of tracts of forest to farmland and the death of hundreds of Suruí from disease and violence. As men they became caciques. But their paths diverged in the mid-2000s. Almir tried to protect the forest and find a sustainable income for his village, Lapetanha, home to 115 of the tribe’s 1,500 members. Henrique got involved in illegal logging and mining, which led to his expulsion. He founded a village elsewhere in the territory, which spans nearly a thousand square miles in Rondônia and Mato Grosso.

Such rivalries reflect a double failure on the part of the government: to keep invaders off indigenous lands and to reduce the poverty driving people in the Amazon into illicit activities. Since 1969 the region’s population has quadrupled to nearly 25m. It comprises 60% of Brazil’s territory and 13% of its population but just 8% of GDP. The area richest in...