1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [215]
“Nobody understood the implications of this,” said Alberto Lorenço Pereira, undersecretary for sustainable development in the Brazilian ministry of long-term planning, which formulates the nation’s land-use policy. When the new constitution was enacted, he told Hecht and me, its drafters imagined “a few remnant quilombos somewhere in the forest” whose elderly members would be rewarded with their fields. Now many researchers believe that as many as five thousand may survive in Brazil, most of them in the Amazon basin, occupying perhaps 30 million hectares—115,000 square miles, an area the size of Italy. Not only did the quilombos occupy an enormous territory, much of it spread out along riverbanks, which meant that they controlled access into a still-larger expanse in the interior. Conflict was inevitable, Pereira said. “A lot of people want that land.”
I saw what he meant when I visited the quilombo of Mojú, four hours of bone-jarring muddy road from Belém, the city at the mouth of the Amazon. Its twelve linked settlements had been founded by runaways sometime in the late eighteenth century. It had existed in hiding for almost two hundred years, Manuel Almeida, head of the village quilombo association, told me. The end of slavery had brought no relief, Almeida said. The rubber tappers had come first, grabbing Mojú’s rubber trees. Then came the timber companies, stripping the forest of mahogany and dyewood. Cattle ranches had seized land in the 1960s and 1970s—the properties, though little used, were still fenced off. A company punched through roads to a bauxite mine upstream. Two other firms that mine kaolin, a special white clay used in porcelain-making and paper-making, had jammed pipelines through the middle of the village. Now the bauxite firm—a subsidiary of Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, the biggest mining company in the Americas—wanted to put a pipeline for crushed bauxite through Mojú on the way to a big refinery west of Belém. All of this had occurred without permission or consultation, Almeida said. The government had granted the firms concessions that gave them the right to build these things because the quilombo had no legal existence.
Almeida was talking in his home, in a room that was bare except for a hammock and a crucifix on the wall. Now and then his wife and brother walked in and offered glasses of water. He said that he had heard that Brazilian companies were prospecting in the region for natural gas. He said that he had heard that American companies wanted to put in resorts at the mouth of the Amazon. He said that a man had come by with some papers that he said gave him the right to put in a farm for oil palms. He said that Mojú’s twelve communities had existed for two centuries and that this ought to count for something.
THE VIEW FROM DONA ROSARIO’S FARM
Two years after relocating Mazagão from North Africa to the northern Amazon, the Portuguese feted their own bravery by honoring St. James, the patron saint of Iberian anti-Muslim activities. For the colonists, isolated on the equator, it must have been an apprehensive time; according to Laurent Vidal, a historian at the University of La Rochelle who is the author of a study of Mazagão, the clergy, too, were gloomy, fearful that civilization itself was under assault. Perhaps that is why they jointly chose to honor a golden moment in Mazagão’s history: the day, two centuries before, when the favor of St. James had allowed them to repel an attack by Sultan Abdallah al-Ghalib Billah, the powerful ruler of much of what is now Morocco. Something about the occasion took hold in the celebrants’ imaginations—not just those of the colonists, but also their slaves. As the Portuguese left Vila Nova Mazagão, their slaves stepped in to take their places in the ritual. Decades after the last European had departed, its African and Indian inhabitants were still reenacting a faraway battle between