When We Sold God’s Eye

The “gripping and astonishing story” (Douglas Preston) of the Cinta Larga, a tribe that had no contact with the West until the 1960s and came to run an illegal diamond mine in the Amazon. 

Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new, capitalist reality, discovering its wonders—cars, refrigerators, TV sets, phones—as well as a way to acquire them: by selling the natural riches of their own forest home. They had to partner with the white men who’d hunted them, but their wealth grew legendary, the envy of the nation—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre, bloody retribution that made headlines across the globe.

Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God’s Eye tells a unique kind of adventure story, one that begins with a river journey by Theodore Roosevelt and ends with smugglers from New York City’s Diamond District. It’s a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of an ecosystem threatened by our hunger for resources; of genocide and revenge. It’s a tragedy as old as the first European encounters with Indigenous people, playing out in the present day. But most of all, it’s the moving saga of a few audacious individuals—Pio, Maria, Oita, and their friends—and their attempts to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.

• “So powerful…Cuadros, an American reporter who spent years living and working in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese, found the perfect man and incident to tell this achingly tragic story. And unlike so many others, he tells it from the point of view of the Indigenous people themselves, at a scale small enough to hold in your hand.”
  Washington Post
• "A devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives...At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself."
  The New Republic
• “An extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, telling the gripping and astonishing story of how a small group in the Amazon, invaded and brutally treated by white settlers and miners, ended up exploiting an illicit diamond mine themselves. This is a complex and tragic story, deeply reported and beautifully written—a remarkable literary achievement.”
  Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God
• “This book reads like a wondrous combination of Heart of Darkness and In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel of modern conquest, capitalism, and murder. Cuadros writes with unsentimental compassion and unflinching moral clarity, investing his protagonists with human complexity while still reckoning with the broader social forces driving the destruction of the Amazon. A stunning work.”
  Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth and Fordlandia
• “To the shelf of anthropological classics that includes Gregory Bateson’s Naven, Levi Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, we can now add Alex Cuadros’s When We Sold God’s Eye. Cuadros takes us into one of the most forbidding regions of the globe, and inside the minds of an ancient people as they take their first―diseased, bloodstained―steps into so-called civilization. A first-class work of reporting, this book is above all a work of compassion for Indigenous peoples everywhere, forced to navigate a nearly impossible passage.”
  Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Sontag
• "When We Sold God's Eye raises the biggest questions of our time and, much to its credit, offers no easy answers. Like the Amazon itself, it is rich, fascinating, and totally alive."
  Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
• “Truly remarkable reporting, opening a window into one of the planet’s most important places, and the people who live out their lives amidst its riches. It will complicate your view of the world, which is usually a useful thing.”
  Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
• “Alex Cuadros spent years culturally embedded with the Cinta Larga, and tells their tragic but exciting story. He achieves the remarkable feat of understanding and sympathizing with both sides’ attitudes, cultures, and motives, with a vibrant cast of real people.”
  John Hemming, author of The Conquest of the Incas and People of the Rainforest
• "In this superbly written account, Alex Cuadros provides an intimate history of the Cintas Largas warriors of the Brazilian Amazon, and of the dramatic changes to their lives that have occurred over the past fifty years. By conducting extensive research in the field over several years, Cuadros has also lent his narrative an unusual degree of authenticity. In the annals of destruction of the world’s wildernesses and their indigenous peoples, When We Sold God’s Eye deserves widespread attention, and seems destined to become a modern classic of literary nonfiction."
  Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and author of Che: A Revolutionary Life
• "A remarkable feat of research embedded in vivid and compelling prose, When We Sold God’s Eye unveils the story of the once-isolated Cinta Larga people, whose lives and culture are transformed—at the hands of Western prospectors and conflicting government regulations—within the incomprehensible speed of a single generation. Bursting with wild, chaotic clashes of human values and exposing profound greed, corruption, violence, courage, survival, and the everyday contradictions within us all, When We Sold God’s Eye offers us new levels of understanding of Western society’s relationship to our earth and to cultures vastly different from our own. A must read, simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-filling."
  Susan Southard, author of Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
• "An essential story, built on deep and empathetic reportage. A hugely impressive piece of work."
  Sophie Elmhirst, author of Maurice and Maralyn
• "An Amazonian tribe fractures, turns to illegal pillaging of their own lands, and perpetuates a shocking massacre in this intricate and tragic account. Cuadros depicts the Cinta Larga's fall from grace in vivid prose. Readers will be riveted." 
  Publishers Weekly, starred review
• "Stone Age people encounter the modern world, with predictable results...An impassioned story."
  Kirkus, starred review
• “A vibrant, in-depth, and eye-opening account of conflict in the Amazon with dire cultural and environmental consequences.”
  Booklist
• "Rather than fading into the setting sun, or bleeding out into modernity, here the Cinta Larga of the Western Amazon find themselves both fully Indigenous and fully modern, nowhere near free agents but never mere victims — making history, like the rest of us, in circumstances not of their choosing. Alex Cuadros, a veteran journalist of South American political economy, spent months on the ground reporting this story and years digging into the history and honing his sense for contradiction to a fine edge, revealing how a tribe found both freedom and catastrophe in the discovery of one of the world's largest diamond deposits in its territory. Imagine Killers of the Flower Moon but set in Brazil instead of Oklahoma...And for once it's the natives who get to do a good deal of the killing."
  Charles Petersen, n+1