Amazonia, four and a half million square kilometres, seven times the size of France: one of the most hostile and least populated regions in the world. In Brazil, the government decided to offer a land without men to men without land. So people come from far away to settle in the middle of the green hell, hoping to build their paradise there: gold prospectors from a rush that sprang up in the heart of the forest, anaconda hunters, aquarium-fish fishermen, an Indigenous missionary, Indigenous people who want to reconnect with the forest. Here, the river is the only road, and Christophe takes it, from Eldorado to Eldorado, as far as the Upper Rio Negro, on the border with Colombia.
Amazonia, for Christophe: a hell for some, an Eden for others, a Wild West for him.The journey begins on tree trunks thrown across a torrent: there used to be a bridge. At the end of the track, Eldorado do Juma, a village seven hours from the next, which sprang up in 2006 with the biggest gold rush of the last twenty years. A thousand people work and live there, around a hole of ten square kilometres. Bashino, whose nickname means little man, head of the gold prospectors’ cooperative, guides Christophe between the pumps and the drums: “advanced manual labour”. The workers go in fours and receive about 6% of what they find, in grams of gold. As long as it was worth nothing, the land belonged to no one; the State and so-called heirs are claiming it, the cooperative is resisting. Antonio comes from Maranhão, nearly 2,000 kilometres away; he wanted to open a snack bar in Santarém, a friend who was a street vendor dragged him here. “Finding gold is a bit like playing the lottery.” And you don’t stop: “the day he finds 200 grams, he tells himself he’ll find better the next day. Maybe a kilo.” Antonio teaches Christophe to work the pan. On departure, revolvers are hidden under shirts: in his satchel, Bashino is carrying half a kilo of gold.
“Without help, it’s just impossible to go any further”: on the track, it is the local men who guide the pick-up.
To separate the gold from the earth, mercury is also used, which disfigures the forest and those who live in it.
On a good seam, Antonio explains, three kilos of earth can yield 150 grams of gold, enough to live on for three or four months. “But that’s very rare.”
The half kilo of gold that Bashino hides in his satchel on departure is worth nearly 10,000 euros; on site, a gram sells for 40 to 42 reais.Three days to reach Manaus, one and a half million inhabitants, at the confluence of the Rio Solimões and the Rio Negro. Despite a recent road, the boat remains the Amazonian means of transport par excellence: departure at 8 p.m., passengers from 6 p.m., hammocks strung side by side, and twice as many people as the fifty or so planned for. Christophe does not sleep. Further up the Rio Negro lives Belo, a caboclo, a dweller of the riverbanks. His family lives in a floating house: in the rainy season, the waters can rise by fifteen metres, and the house rises with them. A sloth wanders there among the life jackets. His son-in-law catches anacondas; he himself, “only caimans”. Christophe: “Me, I only hunt chickens.” Belo has been hunting for twenty years, “to show them to the tourists”. In the flooded forest, the son-in-law finds droppings where the snake was sunning itself, then catches it, some twenty kilos. You have to hold it with both hands while someone else grabs the body, Belo explains, “because otherwise, you can suffocate to death”. The son-in-law has already been bitten; Indigenous people, says Belo, recommend saliva on the wound, “the best way to treat yourself in the jungle”.
“More than a port, it’s really almost like a bus station”: through Manaus pass the manufactured goods of all Brazil and those of the forest.
On the river, time is counted “in days or in hours”: twelve hours of travel, and eight hours of waiting at the quay before departure.
An anaconda can reach eight metres; when prey is scarce on the ground, it sometimes climbs trees to catch monkeys.Two days’ sailing to Barcelos, where the boat for São Gabriel comes only once a week. Two men take Christophe to some fishermen. Francisco is the chief there of some sixty inhabitants who all live from a particular kind of fishing: aquarium fish, here called ornamentals. At dawn it is already thirty degrees; nets are stretched in the drowned forest, cardinals and the others are sorted with a hand net. Christophe crushes one: “It’s an ecological crime”, and laughing, they sentence him to stay the day and learn. The price is the same for every species: ten reais per thousand fish, and some days they don’t reach that. In France, Christophe observes, these fish are very expensive; everywhere, those who fish or farm are the worst paid. Turtle is eaten, everything but the shell and the bones. Three hours away by dugout, açaí waits at the top of the palms; Christophe tries his hand at climbing. Sold for a few reais here, a litre is worth 35 dollars in the United States. Why so far from everything? Barcelos, answers Francisco, “was too aggressive for our children”. He also looks after the village’s health and goes to town only once a month, barring accidents.
Three hours by boat from town, the village is not cut off from the world: supplies can be brought in two or three times a week.São Gabriel da Cachoeira, capital of the Upper Rio Negro: 13,000 inhabitants, one in four of them a soldier. On the border with Colombia and Venezuela, in FARC territory, the soldiers alone hold up the State, and it is they who take Christophe through the rapids. At Taracua, Father Juan, Indigenous and a missionary, has for two years divided his life between God and three hundred faithful. He is a Salesian: educating young Indigenous people, evangelising the older ones. “For us Indians, we live here as if in paradise, because nature gives us everything.” He contrasts it with the West and its bills: “you fall asleep thinking about the bills that are coming, you wake up to pay them. Here, that doesn’t exist.” His diocese is the largest in the world, and the price of oil now allows him only a fortnight’s round every three months. At the end of the journey, Cunuri, seven families. Marcelo, their chief, is trying to reconnect with his origins: a hunt with a single cartridge, the wampé vine used for houses and baskets. “More and more, we are led to live like the whites. This change began with the arrival of the missionaries.” To say goodbye, only one word is spoken, the one that means forest.
“I get there and I come across a church that is gigantic,” Christophe marvels, in the middle of a region “almost as hostile as hell”.
Carrying the faith from one community to another “isn’t profitable”, Father Juan admits, but “the sacrifice, the devotion are worth it”.“I prefer to live like my ancestors, in an almost traditional way, with the forest and nature.”Marcelo