How diamond mining has re-shaped an Amazon tribes worldview: Environmentalists will be disappointed by this

One of Brazil’s largest diamond deposits exists in the territory of the Cinta Larga — an indigenous tribe in the country’s South West.The tribe have a legend about a group of indigenous women digging clay to make cooking pots from a stream bed who once found a diamond so large they named it Ngura inhakip — “God’s eye.”However, to them it was little more than a shiny rock with no practical use, so they threw it back.Since then Brazil’s now $700m+ diamond industry has moved into the territory, completely changing the indigenous peoples’ way of thinking and resulting in an almighty culture clash between the modern market economy in the world’s largest rainforest.San Francisco-based journalist Alex Cuadros took 10 trips deep into the Cinta Larga’s lands beginning in 2017 to research his latest book on the subject, “How We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder and the Clash of Worlds in the Amazon.”Some of the Cinta Larga, who number about 1,300 and live on a 2.7 million hectare reserve, which was granted to the tribe in 1979, were immediately suspicious of the journalist’s motives.“There were rumors I was an undercover federal police agent there to investigate them, and that my voice recorder was actually radar to detect minerals underground so I could send information to the US government,” he told The Post last week.“And there were outsiders, non-indigenous people involved in illegal logging who didn’t want a journalist sticking their nose into their business.”For a reporter, the story often shifts based on who is telling it, and much of it involves corruption at high and low levels as well as deforestation on an industrial scale, writes Cuadros.

For instance, the Brazilian government set up its federal agency in the1960s to protect indigenous groups, but a lack of funding and corruption have hampered their mission over the years, and endangered native communities in the region.At one point, the Service of Protection of the Indian ...