Murder in the Rainforest
Nov 2013
Vanity Fair by Alex Shoumatoff
One evening Chico Mendes stepped out his back door and was blasted by a twenty-gauge shotgun. It could have been just another killing in Brazil’s badlands, but Mendes was a central figure in the worldwide movement to save the rain forest, a sort of Amazonian Gandhi, and he immediately became an environmental cause célèbre. Alex Shoumatoff journeys to a remote corner of western Brazil to investigate and chronicle a death foretold Darci Alves, the twenty-one-year-old son of a local rancher, confessed to Chico’s murder. He is thought to be the tool of a vicious right-wing organization of landowners."
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