The Portuguese Inheritance: Gold, God, and the Logic of Extraction

To film in the Amazon is to stand at the meeting point of two worldviews that have been in conflict since first contact. The Mebêngôkre never chose to become the last line of defense for the rainforest. History placed them there. And the miners and farmers did not choose to inherit an extractive worldview. Poverty placed them there. This collision did not begin with them. It began with an old idea.

In the Portuguese imagination, much like Manifest Destiny in the United States, land was interpreted as something commanded by God to be taken, improved, extrac

ted, and transformed into wealth. The Amazon was not seen as a living system, but as an empty frontier waiting for conquest and submission. This logic continued through centuries, from colonial land grants to Brazil’s twentieth century Marcha para o Oeste, the March to the West, which framed the Amazon as a national destiny, a place whose forests and minerals existed to serve progress and salvation. The founders of towns like Ourilândia do Norte carried this belief with them. Ourilândia was born from gold fever. Miners flooded into the region, and then shopkeepers, bar owners, and settlers followed, all pulled into the forest by the gravitational force of extraction. The municipality was officially created in 1988, its very name, Goldland of the North, a declaration that the land existed for resource conversion, that prosperity was something pulled from the earth and not something grown in community. This is the ideological soil the miners stand on. The worldview they inherit is centuries old, and its promises do not match their lived reality.

I met a miner who lived with his wife and children in a remote clearing, reachable only by long stretches of unpaved and often washed out roads. He was renting land from another man, even though both knew the land had been illegally claimed. He came from extreme poverty, the kind rooted in structural neglect toward the North of Brazil, where entire families survive while governments and foreign companies strip the land of minerals, timber, and power. To him, the forest was a chance. The only chance. His faith in God led him there. He told me he believed the land had been placed before him by divine purpose, in the same framing that shaped the Portuguese worldview itself.

He showed me how he mined for gold. The work was exhausting. He shoveled soil from the riverbanks into large wooden troughs, washed it with water until only the heaviest sediments remained, and searched through them to find the tiny flecks of gold hidden in the residue. To separate those flecks from sand and rock, he mixed the sediment with mercury. The mercury formed a soft metallic ball called an amalgam. He held the small silver lump in his palm like something miraculous. Then he placed it over a flame. As it warmed, the mercury vaporized into the air and the gold hardened.

He breathed that vapor in regularly without knowing the danger. Mercury is one of the most toxic substances on Earth. It attacks the nervous system, accumulates in the brain and organs, compromises memory, movement, and cognition, and crosses the placenta into unborn children. Mercury that flows into the river enters fish, then enters the bodies of anyone who eats those fish. In many parts of the Amazon, mercury contamination in fish is so high that it causes neurological damage in adults and severe developmental harm in children. It is an invisible poison, carried through the water like a shadow.

After he paid rent for the illegally claimed land, almost no money remained. Gold, imagined as a path to wealth, barely lifted his family above survival. With no stores or infrastructure anywhere nearby, the river was everything. They bathed in it. They drank from it. They caught fish from it each day.

What he did not know was that the same river, the Xingu, had become intensely toxic. His own mining introduced mercury into the water, but the greatest danger came from larger operations upriver. A Canadian owned mine was dumping tailings and chemical waste directly into the water. Entire communities downstream were drinking water laced with heavy metals.

When I told him this, his face fell. At first he did not believe me. Most people would not. Especially men whose religious faith becomes a shield against despair, whose belief in providence steadies them against the brutality of their circumstances. But as myself and others explained what mercury does to the human body, he looked at his children and his eyes filled with grief. It was the shock of realizing that the same water keeping his family alive was also quietly poisoning them. His only means of income was also the agent of his destruction.

Another miner understood the system more clearly, but living inside it was the only means of survival available to him. He worked for a large German owned operation. He told me he knew the forest was being harmed, that the waste they disposed of was catastrophic. But he also came from Maraba, a poor town with almost no opportunities. He had a wife and a child. They needed to eat. He said that he could not afford to say no to the only work available.

What do you say to someone living inside an economy that offers no alternatives. How do you tell someone without options that their survival is immoral. You cannot. The system that shaped their lives long before they were born is what is immoral, not the people trying to endure it.

This is the Portuguese inheritance. Land as property. Land as resource. Land as something to be conquered and consumed. Land as proof of God’s blessing. And it is the root of the ideological collision unfolding across the Amazon today.

Against this stands the worldview of the Mebêngôkre, who treat land not as property but as kin, who see the forest not as an economic frontier but as a living partner whose stories, spirits, and relationships hold their world in place. Their model of survival is relational. The Portuguese model is extractive. Both were shaped over centuries, both carry their own internal logic, and both collide violently in the forest. Only one of these worldviews allows the Amazon to survive. And only one of them allows the people who depend on the forest, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, to endure.