MASTERS OF THE LOST LAND: The Untold Story of the Amazon and the Violent Fight for the World’s Last Frontier
Author: Heriberto Araujo
Publisher: Mariner Books
Pages: 408
Price: $29.99
In 1970, the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil launched one of the world’s most ambitious construction projects: The Trans Amazonian Highway, a 2,600-mile road across the Amazon River basin. It was “a necessary effort,” President Emílio Garrastazu Médici declared at the time, “to solve two problems: One of people without land … and another of land without people.”
In 1970, the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil launched one of the world’s most ambitious construction projects: The Trans Amazonian Highway, a 2,600-mile road across the Amazon River basin. It was “a necessary effort,” President Emílio Garrastazu Médici declared at the time, “to solve two problems: One of people without land … and another of land without people.”
Over the next decades, hundreds of thousands of migrants travelled along that highway and other new