The Travails of Maria the Beauty: On the Plight of Indigenous Women in the Brazilian Amazon

If her official documents were at all accurate, Maria would have been fifteen when she arrived at the government’s camp on the Roosevelt, a distant tributary of the Amazon where her people had lived since time immemorial. Of course, her people had never known calendars, so her birthday was made up on the spot. As was her name.

With her long black hair, perfectly parted down the middle to reveal a shy hint of a smile, she’d made an immediate impression. Her friend Joana would recall, “Everyone wanted Maria, whites and Indians both. We called her Maria parir”—their people’s word for “beautiful.” Whites could never pronounce Mabeuíti, so one of the camp’s workers dubbed her Maria Beleza—Maria the Beauty. Her last name was the same one given to everyone else in her group: Cinta Larga, Portuguese for the “wide belt” of bark traditionally worn by men.

In the language of Brazil’s Indian agency, the Roosevelt camp was an attraction post, meant to lure Indigenous people into Western society with gifts of metal tools. Maria was one of dozens of Cinta Larga who showed up there in the early 1970s, fleeing the ravages of disease and massacres by settlers. But her travails were only beginning. The agent in charge of the camp, a settler named Alceu, insisted that all the kids wear clothes and flip-flops. Maria hated the long flowery dresses that he pushed on her; she accepted only the underwear. “Maria! Clothes!” Alceu would shout. If she dawdled, he beat her with a belt. Still she kicked off her flip-flops. Eventually he tied them to her feet.

Even Alceu was better than Sapecado, a diamond prospector, who came to take over as head of the camp. He became obsessed with Maria, despite her young age. Claiming to have met her before, he showed her a photo of a naked Indian girl and said it was her. The government, for its part, couldn’t approve of any such relationship. Indigenous people were considered wards of the Brazilian state, “legally children,” as one newspaper put it. In April 1973, when Sapecado made an official request to marry Maria, the government responded that the Cinta Larga remained at a “very primitive cultural stage”—and that, anyway, there were already too few women for Cinta Larga men.

The government ordered Sapecado removed from the Roosevelt camp, but he didn’t go easily: when a new agent showed up to replace him, they exchanged gunfire. He continued to roam Cinta Larga country. One newspaper described him as “an illiterate cowboy who knows all the Indian footpaths in [the territory]”; another observer called him a “savage from the city.” Even the Cinta Larga saw him this way. “All he carried was shotgun shells,” one would recall. “He ate jungle game without salt, just like us.” On the Amazon frontier, it was never easy to separate rumor from fact, but one government agent discovered that Sapecado was wanted for nine homicides in a nearby settlement.

Plenty of Cinta Larga wanted to escape the brutal conditions at the Roosevelt camp, but in Joana’s recollection, when she and Maria left, it was to meet up with Sapecado and another white frontiersman, a third girl’s love interest. Joana is not alone in believing that Maria, similarly, wanted to be with Sapecado. And indeed, it’s possible to imagine the allure, to a young girl who knew nothing of the outside world, of this blustering, cocksure gunslinger. But, of course, she was just that: a girl, barely adolescent. In later years she’d express nothing but revulsion, saying she never wanted anything to do with him at all.

Whatever their reasons, it was a difficult journey for three girls on their own. To avoid being caught, they skirted the usual mule path and walked through the forest, where they noticed jaguar tracks. Unable to hunt or improvise shelter, they had to spend a hungry night in the rain. But Cinta Larga girls could be brave just like the men. Maria would always remember her grandmother as a kind of female chief: “I never saw her hunt but she knew how to use a bow and arrow. She knew how to kill fish with poison. She was like a man, she did everything.” At last the girls reached a road where they found Sapecado. He was on horseback, with mules to carry the girls to a government base that doubled as a free dormitory for Indigenous people passing through.

No one attempted to stop Sapecado from staying. In Maria’s recollection, she woke in the dark to find Sapecado clamping an ether-soaked rag over her mouth—and the next thing she knew, they were on the road.

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Many Cinta Larga would remember the days before contact through the nostalgic lens of a lost way of life—a time before money, when all that anyone cared about was hunting and holding extravagant feasts that lasted days, if not weeks. Maria, too, would pine for those days. Still, she insisted, “It was harder to be a girl.” Whenever she felt too lazy to gather firewood, her father would tell her brother to discipline her, and her brother would fire blunt arrows at her feet. “How it hurt!” she would recall, her face twisting with the memory.

Jealousy was another problem. According to legend, menstruation was the Moon’s revenge for being forbidden from sleeping with his sister; possessive, he wanted to stop her from having sex all the time. Maria’s grandfather had always taught her not to even look at another woman’s husband, lest the woman poison her. True to what she’d learned, when a man once ordered her to dig up some manioc, she didn’t meet his eyes. “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” the man said, but Maria merely replied, “I have ears to hear you with.” He threatened to kill her; still she didn’t return his gaze. Enraged, he brought a steel axe down on her shoulder, leaving a wide, bleeding gash. The scar would remain visible into old age; the man suffered no punishment.

For all Maria’s willfulness, she had no way to overpower Sapecado, her kidnapper. He took her first to the dusty boomtown of Vila Rondônia, a hundred miles northwest on Highway 364. One resident, Maria Graça, the wife of a fellow-prospector, would remember Beleza as “striking, very pretty, very, very young, very, very shy”—in contrast to “big, ugly” Sapecado.

Whenever Sapecado was away, prospecting in Cinta Larga country, he kept Maria Beleza locked in a house with a chain around her ankle, long enough to reach the bathroom and the kitchen. He got her to wear the dresses that Alceu had failed to. Once he brought back a doll and said they would have a child just like it. Another time he returned with gold, tossing a nugget on the table. Maria had no idea what it was, but he said the shiny metal would provide a future for their children. She was picking up Portuguese but there was much she didn’t understand. He didn’t call her Maria or even Beleza, much less what her parents had called her, Mabeuíti. He called her nega, a Brazilian term for a dark-skinned woman, which she came to think was her name. (“Sapecado” referred to a mixed-race man with fair skin and kinky hair; his real name was either José João Santana Filho or José João Pereira da Conceição.)

From what Maria Graça understood, Beleza had been a “gift” from an Indian chief. This may have been a tall tale told by prospectors, but arrangements like these weren’t uncommon. At an attraction post in the eastern part of Cinta Larga country, one government agent wrote: “I report a new marriage between the Gavião interpreter and the daughter of one of the chiefs. We gather that their intention is to give women to all of us. We failed to dissuade them of this idea.” The idea was to forge alliances with tool-rich outsiders, an old strategy; in the 1600s, Brazil’s Tupinambá had ceded their daughters to French colonists.

Whatever the truth, most Cinta Larga saw Maria as Sapecado’s “wife,” no matter that she was his captive. Women kidnapped in battles with enemy groups were also considered legitimate spouses, willing or not. And a woman was just about the only possession one could “steal.” This was the word used even when a woman ran off of her own accord with a man she hadn’t been promised to—rare romances that almost always sparked a violent reaction by her male relatives.

As a rule, a Cinta Larga woman couldn’t actively choose her partner, only veto an unacceptable one, asking her father and brothers to take her back. She did, however, enjoy a safety valve. As the anthropologist Carmen Junqueira later observed, “As soon as her husband takes a nap, a woman will allow another man to contribute to the formation of the child in her womb”—as they believed not in a single act of conception, but in a necessary accumulation of semen. These dalliances were usually an open secret. Upon childbirth, the rightful father would make a show of wanting to kill the baby until a relative calmed him down. Still, the theatrics overlaid a quieter everyday violence. In marriage, domestic abuse was common. Outside marriage, while there were plenty of genuine seductions, it was risky to refuse an advance. “In the old days, there was no flirtation,” a slightly younger woman, Peneta, would recall. “A man would come and grab her. If she didn’t accept it, he’d kill her later with poison.”

Maria Beleza lacked any kind of safety valve. Far from her family, she had no recourse to male relatives, no possibility of escape. One year bled into another. Sometime in the mid-1970s, Sapecado took her to live at a ranch downstream from the Roosevelt camp. Paranoid she might sleep with his cook, he forbade her from going into the kitchen. Once, when she thought Sapecado was away, she went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Somehow Sapecado found out. He beat her, chained her up again, said he didn’t want to see her face anymore. Even when he allowed her to accompany him outside, the abuse didn’t stop. Once he abandoned her in the territory of another, almost certainly hostile Indigenous group. A rubber tapper, thinking she was his daughter, brought her back to him.

Maria was washing clothes in a stream when some of the local Cinta Larga came upon her. Amazonians outside the reach of Western society were sometimes thought of as “isolated,” but Maria had experienced a much more radical kind of isolation, so intense that she could scarcely speak her own native language anymore. Thinking she was a rubber tapper’s wife, her own people nearly killed her.

Finally the day came when Maria went into the kitchen while Sapecado was watching from afar, and he came and struck her so hard, she lost consciousness. When she came to, Cinta Larga men had come to her aid, wielding bows, arrows, and clubs, and Sapecado had run off. Bleeding from her nose, ears, and eyes, she thought she might die. She couldn’t find her flip-flops, and was unused to walking barefoot, but she managed to follow them into the forest. The whole way to the Roosevelt camp, a few days’ walk upriver, she was convinced Sapecado was coming to kill her.

Maria arrived at the camp very skinny. But a nurse told her, “You have a baby inside you.”

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Adapted from the book When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon by Alex Cuadros. Copyright © 2024 by Alex Cuadros. Reprinted with permission from Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.