Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
He laughed at himself. He was a gruff chisel of a man. Adam and I sat and listened.
Over our shoulders, the Amazon and the Tapajós mixed and flowed, invisible in the dark.
“I don't know what you'd call that,” Rick said. “Something like a religious experience.”
We went to find the
soyeros,
those dirty bastards from the south.
“I found out land was cheap in Pará,” said Luiz. “It was the only place I could afford it.
So we came here to buy a plot of land and own it. That's why we're here.”
Luiz was a short man in his early sixties, with watery eyes and an uncertain gait. He
was a soy farmer, with three hundred hectares under the plow, just up the highway from
Nestor's land. He was also, to my eye, drunk.
“Would you have moved here if the Cargill port wasn't here?” Adam asked.
Luiz frowned and shook his head as Gil translated. “What would I do here?” He had
come for the same reason as the other soy farmers. He had realized that while the price of
soy would be the same in Pará as in Mato Grosso, the cost of transport would be much less.
“We only came here because of Cargill,” he said. “Not that Cargill went to Mato Grosso
and called us. But we watch the news.”
We walked along the edge of his field, deep and crumbly with muddy earth, to the barn
where he kept his combine. Luiz plunged his forearm into a sack of grain and pulled out a
handful of dry soybeans, his balance wavering as he held it up for us to see. “Soybeans are
dollars,” he said.
Luiz could see me staring at the combine, a tall, old machine with green sides. He swung
up the ladder to the driver's perch, and soon the machine rumbled to life, its rows of har-
vesting blades gnashing and turning. He turned it off and I climbed up to the steering wheel.
I peered out at the soy field in front of me, and imagined rumbling through it on the com-
bine at harvest time.
Things hadn't worked out perfectly for the
soyeros.
The value of Luiz's land had crashed
by 60 percent since he'd bought it. Even worse, when he'd bought it, he hadn't known he
wouldn't be able to clear off all the trees.
“The
environmentalists
” He spat the word.
Ambientalistas.
“They came with these laws,
and it was forbidden to clear more than 20 percent of the area.” He had been forced to lease
additional land in order to grow a large-enough crop. It made no sense to him. This was
rich, flat land. It ought to be cultivated. And the forest on his land wasn't even virgin forest,
