Introduction

In March 2025, Brazil’s modern democracy turned 40 – four months after I did. I was born too late to remember a military leader, or to recall the waves of protest that brought the dictatorship to an end. My earliest political memories are rather of faces and scenes from the late 1980s: runaway inflation and currency changes; a president with an enormous moustache, a bearded candidate with a hoarse voice, and another with the look of a playboy, whom my mother said was a very handsome man.

That coincidence – the fact that I belong to the generation born alongside the transition to democracy – became the starting point for a series of essays in the monthly magazine Piaui. Drawing on interviews with Brazilians more or less my age, I sought to outline a fragmented portrait of this strange colossus, this limping giant we call Nova República.

But is it possible to narrate a generation’s experience through the accounts of a handful of individuals? From the outset, I admitted that the answer to that question is no. And yet I persisted. A generation is born out of the noise of multiplicity – many lives in different contexts. It is a scene with no single meaning or stable frame, an excess of objects that yields a desire both to comprehend the whole and also to surrender to the deluge of discourses, longings, tastes, smells, first times and last times.

I spoke with Brazilians from different regions and walks of life to understand how they were shaped by the structural transformations that have swept the country in the last four decades. The history of our democracy cannot be separated from the wave of excitement at the victory of capitalism over any alternatives – the tired story of the ‘End of History’ – or indeed from the recent reactionary backlash and the attendant crisis of liberalism around the world.

Like many people of my generation, I falter between a realist acceptance of the limits of democracy (particularly in a developing country like Brazil), a desire for more radical forms of action and imagination, and fear about the return of the darkest moments of our history, which we faced in grotesque exuberance during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote – not coincidentally, in an essay about a brutal existential and psychological crisis he suffered at 40 – “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I should be able to go on functioning. I recognise my immense privileges. I make my way through the forest of midlife and open myself to the small enchantments. I try to think, to act, to contribute to some change. Even so, my unease with the world does not fall silent, and I find myself forced to inspect a stone I carry in my stomach – the sticky, grey stone of political melancholy.

This essay is a profile of the human rights defender Erasmo Alves Theofilo. It is also a picture of Brazilian democracy as viewed from one of its most violent regions, the Amazon – which has been devastated by landgrabbers, ranchers and international mining companies, against whom locals like Erasmo have fought for decades.

On 30 June 1988, Alilzete Alves Theofilo left her rural settlement in the state of Pará, hitched a ride on a timber truck and travelled along the Trans-Amazonian Highway to the Medicilândia hospital, where she gave birth to a son. Erasmo’s destiny was to be marked by that immense work of infrastructure, which he calls the ‘highway of genocide’. Built in the preceding decade to connect the Amazonian interior to the north-east coast, the Trans-Amazonian highway fundamentally redefined the patterns of human occupation in the surrounding area: who would live there, according to what laws, to whom would the adjoining lands belong (today the road cuts through huge municipalities), and how that part of the Amazon rainforest would fare.

Erasmo Alves Theofilo was born three months before the declaration of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988. Today, he is part of the Programme for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders.¹ A peasant and activist, he was was born and grew up in the forested part of Anapu municipality. He traversed this land in his wheelchair, following in his parents’ footsteps – they were also activists. Now he is an exile in his own country, as he puts it: because of threats to his life, Erasmo has relocated to larger city, where he lives under police surveillance.

Anapu is one of the most dangerous regions in Brazil for peasants and human rights defenders. Sister Dorothy Stang – murdered in 2005 at the behest of ranchers – is only the most familiar name on a long list of people killed by landgrabbers and other criminals. “If I had stayed there,” Erasmo told me, “I might have died in anonymity. No one knows about Márcio or Paulo Anacleto, my comrades who were killed just before I left. But at least they know Dorothy.”

In July last year, a few weeks before I was supposed to embark on a journey to Anapu and Altamira, Erasmo called and convinced me to abandon my plans: Ronilson de Jesus Santos, another leader in the struggle for agrarian reform, had been assassinated, and his son had only just made it out alive.

I told Erasmo my alternative itinerary: to travel by boat from Belém near the Atlantic coast to Manaus in the centre of the Amazon rainforest (a childhood dream of mine), talking to people along the way. He replied without hesitating: “Take my advice: be afraid. In these parts you need to be afraid of asking certain questions, of entering unfamiliar places, of taking photos. You’re from the city: if someone wants to harm you there, they’ll defame you, take you to court. Here, they’ll kill you.”

Erasmo did not only talk about fear. He would often interrupt our video conversations to show me photos of the simple house his family lives in, his mother Alilzete’s vegetable garden, or a community-built school in a local settlement. During one call, he stopped to point out a flock of birds flying over his house. Another time, he broke off to get an update on a calf that had fallen into a hole. Even from a distance, Erasmo was trying to help coordinate its rescue. Before hanging up, he told me: “I can’t give up, it’s impossible. For some people, asking them to stop fighting is like asking them to die a little.”

“I was born with polio,” Erasmo said:

“My twin brother died in the womb. The disease took his brain and my legs. I was in my mother’s belly with him dead beside me for three days. I weighed 1.2 kg at birth, and was in the incubator for six months. So you see, I was fighting even before I was born.

“I was a typical country boy. Even today, my favourite meal is rice with beans and sardines. From when I was four, my dad would take me out to the fields with him. I was already struggling to walk, but I managed, and he wanted to show me that I could do things like anyone else. While he tended the crops, I scared away birds with a catapult. Then we’d have lunch by the river: rice, beans and sardines.

“I was very active until the age of 10. I walked, I ran, I played. But at 12 I lost the ability to walk. My body couldn’t bear the weight, and the surgery wasn’t helping anymore. My body gave in. I’ve used a wheelchair since then. Sometimes I walk using one of those white plastic bar chairs, step by step, pulling myself along.

“The problems began when I started making trips from our rural community to have physiotherapy in Altamira. I experienced prejudice there. I was bullied. It was really heavy. But meeting other disabled people was my salvation. When I was 16, we founded the region’s first association for disabled people. I was elected president, but as a minor, I could only serve as vice president. The president signed everything off, but I was the one who did the work. That’s where my militancy began. The agricultural workers’ associations came later, and now, today, the environmental cause.”

My first contact with Amazonia was at the World Social Forum in Belém in January 2009. The city was enormous, hot and unequal. My parents had been there for their honeymoon in 1984. “Keep your eyes peeled, there are mango trees everywhere,” they advised me. My father, a truck driver who worked in the region during the military dictatorship, when the great infrastructure projects were being built, used to tell me stories about the forests, roads and rivers of Amazonia. I included some of those stories in a book about him, What Is Mine.

In Belém I experienced the constant presence of the Guamá River, and the punishing heat. Like every Brazilian metropolis, the city was a mixture of shiny new buildings – shopping centres and apartment blocks characterised by architectural and social uniformity – and working-class neighbourhoods, some with houses built on stilts. One such community sat between the two university campuses where many of the forum’s events took place.

Inside those universities, we yelled out that “Another world is possible”. Then we walked out through that starkly poor neighbourhood and were confronted with the real world. In a packed tent on the Pará Federal University campus, I saw Marina Silva – who had been Brazil’s environment minister until May the previous year – give a talk as rain poured down onto the canvas. Marina explained that the rainforest was like that: once a day, it would express itself dramatically, unleashing an ocean of water over our heads. Many of those gathered called her “president” – this was just months after her break with the Lula government, and about a year before her exit from the Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers’ Party. We could not have predicted the political turmoil that would sweep the country in the years that followed. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

On the first page of his book The Apprentice Tourist, Mário de Andrade expresses the mixture of exoticisation and genuine surprise that the sheer vastness of the rainforest elicits in most visitors to Amazonia. His imagination fired by reading about the forest as a wild, primitive land, he describes buying a walking cane in São Paulo in preparation for his long journey through the region: “Half-remembered readings spurred me on more than the truth – savage tribes, alligators, bullet ants. And my saintly little soul imagined: cannon, revolver, cane, jackknife. And opted for the cane.”

Later in the book, he writes of his endless astonishment at the vastness of everything he saw, describing Foz do Amazonas (the mouth of the Amazon river) as the most sublime vision of nature, and the “scent of the pau rosa and the macacaporanga breathing from the resin of all the trunks” as being “so inebriating that we swayed, nearly falling out into that big old world of furious water. What eloquence!”

“What eloquence”, I think too, as I begin to register the infinite scale of the rainforest, whether seen from a satellite or through a microscope. This scale can also be observed in the daily lives of Amazonians, especially the poorest. They might have to travel days to the nearest town for a commonplace task like taking out their monthly bolsa familia payment or acquiring a new state document. In many Amazonian towns you see groups of indigenous people and ribeirinhos² spending the night on the street, waiting for a bank or some government office to open.

Manoel Garrido led us through a forest trail in the Tumbira region, inside an ecological reserve on the Rio Negro; he used to build boats from local timber but he now works in sustainable community tourism. He alerted us to a small square of forest, no more than two square metres in size. In that tiny patch, we could see a whole universe: fragrant ants (“The Indians rub them on their skin before going hunting so that the animals can’t smell them”), wasps that cohabit with the ants in their nests (“I always wonder how they live together in there”), a hole concealing a giant spider that appears when it detects our presence (“She lives alone in there, I don’t know how she manages, a life of solitude”), jaguar paw prints (“No need to be scared, it must be two days since she came through here”), several kinds of vine, trees with aerial roots (“If you’re lost in the forest you should hit this part hard, because it emits a sound that can be heard far and wide”) and different kinds of trunks (“we don’t cut these ones down to make boats because the wood is too dense and the boats sink”), not to mention all the birds above us (“that one chirping really loudly is the forest’s alarm – it’s only chirping like that because it saw us. They used to alert the ranchers when slaves escaped”).

As soon as I boarded the boat for the long journey up the Amazon from Belém to Manaus, a man roughly my age started chatting to me. He told me that his family has land, lots and lots of land: “We have ranches and cattle across Pará. We cut down the forest, grow pasture, raise cattle, we do it all.” When he realised that I was from São Paulo, he spotted a business opportunity. Was I interested in investing in land or buying cattle? When I said I wasn’t, he invited me to visit one of his family’s ranches during a stop we were scheduled to make in Santarém – maybe I’d change my mind. I changed the subject.

Deforestation, the genocide of indigenous people and the murder of ribeirinhos, quilombolas³ and family farmers did not start in 1985 or 1988, nor with our parents’ generation, or even our grandparents’ generation. The destruction of the Amazonian ecosystem is a direct consequence of colonialism. Its most recent – and most decisive – chapter began in 1964, when the new military dictatorship launched a national project to destroy the Amazon. It used numerous instruments for this purpose, but none was more effective than the Trans-Amazonian Highway, along which cities were established. The highway formed the spine of a new system of roads and trails that opened the forest to all kinds of illegal plunder.

Viewed from Amazonia, Brazilian democracy is fragile – that is, when it’s not an abject failure. It has reinforced the dictatorship’s violent patterns of occupation, with only brief periods of flimsy progress.

It is estimated that between 35 and 50 million hectares of the Amazon had been cut down by 1985. Between then and 2023 another 88 million were deforested. In other words, a great majority of the destruction of the world’s largest tropical forest took place during the current democratic era. Around 17% of the original coverage of the Amazon had been deforested by 2023 – and another 17% degraded. Deforestation peaked in 2004, when the first Lula administration set up the Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon. That plan, together with satellite monitoring by the National Institute for Space Research and the wide-ranging demarcation of indigenous territories and different kinds of protected areas, helped bring about a historical 84% decrease in deforestation by 2012.

However, deforestation picked up again after 2016, as environmental politics were dismantled and an official policy of attacking forest defenders and incentivising the invasion of public land came into effect. (It rose even further after Jair Bolsonaro became president in 2019.) The date of 10 August 2019 is remembered as ‘Dia do Fogo’ (fire day), when landgrabbers burnt down large sections of the forest in a coordinated act, a perverse demonstration of their confidence in impunity. Dia do Fogo could be turned into a national antiholiday, in memory of that diabolically gleeful display of support for Bolsonaro, who is openly contemptuous of conservation.

Deforestation figures came back down towards the end of Bolsonaro’s term, and in a more significant way from 2023, when Lula returned to office. Specialists note that deforestation is a combination of different forays into the land – it is above all an agrarian process, with political and environmental repercussions. It includes landgrabbing, wood smuggling, cattle breeding, mining and, increasingly, the trafficking of drugs, people and animals. These are crimes that connect local elites, impoverished populations, politicians, bankers and international cartels.

This criminal web has only widened in recent years, and there is a growing consensus that the mechanisms that led to the historic decrease in deforestation around the early 2010s are no match for the current crisis.

The first one to show up is the logger, Erasmo told me:

“He strikes deals with the families to buy all the hardwood. The peasant, who used to make a living from farming, loses income. The logger knocks down the forest with a tractor and a chainsaw, and in exchange, he keeps the wood. Then comes the pasture and cattle – the way out for the peasants is to turn the area into pasture.

“The peasants have small plots of land, not big enough to raise cattle sustainably. Soon, more small pastures appear – until the big producer buys everything and turns it into a single ranch. All with support from the mayor, the notary and the police, if needed.

“I’ll tell you how it’s happening right now in Anapu. It’s a hard life, and a bit of cash in hand can be seductive. The rancher offers 100,000 reais for a plot of land, and some peasants accept – they see all that cash and decide to sell. Then the rancher tries to buy three or four more plots in the area. He spends 400,000 reais and ends up with 400 alqueires [a unit of land usually equivalent to around 2.5 hectares]. And now he has a farm with more than 300 head of cattle. So now what happens? The rancher, acting as a landgrabber, starts distributing cattle to small farmers who still have plots of their own. But a small farmer can’t keep cattle on 10 alqueires. He puts 10 cattle on one plot, then they eat everything and reproduce, and now there are 20 of them. And so the pasture runs out. But the small farmer has no way of buying more land. Now the rancher shows up again and offers them money for the extra cattle, or sometimes a ‘half contract’: the farmer tends the plot and pays for everything, but 60% of the profits go to the rancher. The land belongs to the small farmer, but the cattle don’t. And over time the rancher keeps buying more and more land.

“Agribusiness is taking over everything. Before, we used to plant bananas, rice, beans, cacao, peppers. Now it’s just cattle. I go out there and all I see is pasture. The small farmers’ plots, which they cultivated their whole lives, were sold for knocked-down prices. The ranchers put all the deeds together to make a single document – that way they can expel 20 or 30 families in one go. When the agro guys buy everything around them, the lives of the families who choose to stay get worse: they’re more isolated, they’ve got no one to swap cultivars with. The agro guys want them all out, because that way they’ll make more cash. I know people who suffered so much from leaving their land that it ended up killing them.”

As our boat skirted around the island of Marajó, I looked up and saw clusters of clouds, patches of open sky, rain on the horizon. We moved slowly through the mouth of the Amazon and into the heart of the rainforest. Both banks were dotted with ribeirinho houses, and I often saw small children playing in little boats on the river, which is their backyard. At night, the Milky Way threw a glowing veil over the sky. The only other light was the one on our boat, which the captain turned on from time to time to help us stay on course.

I spent six days on the boat – it would have been five, but the engine broke down at one point and we had to wait a whole day for repairs. The first morning, I woke up, drank my coffee, and opened my phone to learn that Congress had passed bill number 2159/2021 – the so-called ‘Devastation Bill’. Minister Marina Silva told the media that it was a “death blow to one of the country’s main tools for environmental protection, which is environmental licensing”. I opened Instagram and saw that Erasmo had also reacted to its passing: “We CAN’T accept this! Brazil isn’t merchandise for sale. Our Amazon, Cerrado, Atlantic Rainforest and all its ecosystems are worth more than profit for a few. Mr Lula, you promised to be the president that would stand up for the climate and the rainforest. Now is the time to live up to that: VETO THIS DEVASTATION BILL.”

People killed time in different ways on the boat. I saw an indigenous family dancing with their baby, who thumped his little feet on a table and raised his hands up in joy. Another group embarked in high spirits, clutching bottles of beer and cachaça; they kept up the same vibe for the whole trip. The soundsystem at the bar blasted out brega and sertanejo⁴ music from 8 AM until 11 PM every day.

Like everywhere else, smartphones reigned supreme on the boat. They were good for most tasks, and had even replaced the pocket radios that used to dominate the aural landscape. Walking around the boat, I overheard football commentary, sermons from evangelical pastors and all kinds of music; I saw people watching soap operas and cop shows. High-speed internet comes courtesy of Elon Musk’s Starlink.

A cold shadow hangs over any conversation about this region of Pará: the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, a project dreamt up in the days of the military dictatorship and built while the Workers’ Party were in power, in the face of protests by indigenous people, ribeirinhos, scientists and environmentalists. Belo Monte – the fifth-largest hydroelectric powerplant in the world – is to the democratic period what the Trans-Amazonian Highway is to the military dictatorship: a living ruin, a monument to an idea of progress taken from an authoritarian playbook. Protestors have called it “Belo Monte de Merda” (“beautiful mountain of shit”) or “Belo Monstro” (“beautiful monster”). The dam devastated the Xingu River, destroying fauna and ruining lives in the surrounding region.

As Erasmo told me:

“Belo Monte destroyed everything. Our lives would be fuller without it, but apparently our happiness is an inconvenience to them. Everything changed when it was built. I used to swim in the Xingu in Altamira, in the neighbourhood where the ribeirinhos lived. Back then Altamira was semi-urban, semi-rural. Everyone had a plot of land. It was a community.

“Then families were expelled to make way for the powerplant. They were placed in new Collective Urban Resettlements (RUCs): true favelas, ghettos. They were in a miserable place, far away, with tiny two-room houses, no water or drains and very poor access. A whole load of young people killed themselves, and many others got sick.

“The city grew, but without any schools or health services. Fifteen years later, Altamira has some of the worst infrastructure in the country. And for people like us, outside the city? The wells ran dry, the Xingu was diverted. It became unnavigable, the fishermen lost everything. The company paid a few fines, and some people got decent payoffs, but a year later even they were working as day labourers. They are not financially educated, so they got scammed. They borrowed, they lost everything. Lots of people who used to live off the land are now in those RUCs – and they’re still paying the highest energy rates in Brazil. The powerplant is right there and they didn’t even give us a discount on our electricity.

“This land is so rich – which, for outsiders, means exploitation. For us it means risk, expulsion, the end of life as we know it. The dam brought no benefits to those of us who lived in its back yard. Now Belo Sun, the Canadian mining company, is getting involved with everything here: they’re done with the water, and it’s the soil they want next.”

The forest that I saw and heard on the boat – the living forest of Amazonians, of peasants, indigenous people, ribeirinhos, defenders – is nothing like the forest that gets talked about at conferences and forums and round tables in universities and five-star hotels in Brazil or London or New York. The international climate establishment treats Amazonia like a child. The solutions presented are risibly economic: as if a financial mechanism like carbon credits could meet a challenge of this magnitude. Like many other activists I have spoken to, Erasmo says it’s not easy to mobilise people around climate issues when they are approached in an abstract way. The language of the consultants, politicians and academics at COP or the IPCC means little to the peasants of Anapu, the indigenous people of Maranhão or ribeirinhos from the Madeira River. The forest doesn’t need that language to communicate with itself, Erasmo reminded me, and the people who live in it are already affected by the climate emergency, even if they describe it with other words or perceive it through different sensibilities.

The last word should go to Erasmo:

“Nature is warning us that it is dying. The forest is sending a message.

“It’s always been difficult to talk about climate change in the forest. In Belém, people are more direct – it’s hot, deforestation is happening. In my land, where we are surrounded by trees, people say: ‘Are you crazy? That will never happen.’ You try to explain: ‘That tree you’re cutting down will eventually cause the river to dry up.’ And they reply: ‘So-and-so did that 10 years ago and nothing came of it.’ Then five or six years pass and they can’t grow anything anymore. Now they get it. They’re seeing it with their own eyes.

“Before, I was screaming into a void: ‘There will be consequences. Raising cattle like that won’t work out.’ And they thought it was just environmentalist spiel. But in the last three years – especially last year – the water level has gone down, and it’s turned into a tragedy. No one can plant or breed anymore. My mother always had an allotment, but now, for the first time in her life, she’s having to water it. In the middle of the Amazon. She’s nearly 70 and has never seen anything like it: having to water your crops. These levels of drought are unknown to us.

“Ten years ago, the small farmers knew exactly when to plant. The older ones would say: ‘Only plant in the second week of October.’ And it worked – in November it would rain. But from around 2018, everything changed. The rain started arriving later, pushing into December. Now it doesn’t come until mid-January. And it ends in May – it used to rain until June or July. November, which used to be bean month, has become a dry month. Now no one knows when or how to plant.

“It’s September now, and it hasn’t rained for five months. There’s no fruit on the peach palms. They should have been producing by now. And worst of all, the chestnut trees are sprouting shells that have no chestnuts inside. There’s a dispute around the dam near my parents’ house. The animals are coming down to us because there’s no water in the forest. Before, it was us who went out to hunt. Now it’s them.”

This essay first appeared in Piaui.

1. This programme is a cooperation between the federal and state governments, and aims to provide protection to human rights defenders, journalists and environmental activists who are at risk, vulnerable or facing threats as a result of their work. Individuals in the programme often have to move away from their original areas, where they face threats to their security and their lives.
2. A traditional population, often of mixed ethnicity, who live near rivers in the Amazon and often survive through fishing and subsistence farming.
3. The inhabitants of quilombos, hinterland settlements originally formed by runaway enslaved people.
4. Brazilian popular music genres, often associated with rural and working-class culture.