One of the regime’s first initiatives was to conquer the Amazon by penetrating it with roads and encouraging permanent settlement. The effort was couched in military terms as “Operation Amazonia,” and was presented as a matter of national security. There was a sense then, as there is now, that without a strong Brazilian presence greedy foreign forces might invade the land. The regime believed that the program would stimulate the economy by making room for large cattle operations, and also that it would relieve the pressure for agrarian reform by doling out small parcels of unwanted jungle to peasants. But fewer poor settlers than expected arrived, and having hacked their parcels from the jungle, many of them failed and became laborers to survive. Large corporations and the rich began to clear the forests wholesale, deploying gunmen to remove anyone who got in their way. There was no law. There was no order.

Exploitation of the poor formed the very foundation of the Amazon’s development. By 1970, this was clear. After years in Africa, a Spanish priest named Pedro Casaldáliga had moved to the remote river town of São Félix do Araguaia, on the agricultural frontier in the state of Mato Grosso, and had been shocked by the oppression he observed. More than a decade later, in an interview with the journalist Jan Rocha, he said, “In our first week in São Félix, four children died and were carried past our house down to the cemetery in cardboard boxes which looked like shoe boxes. We were to bury so many children there—each family loses three or four dead infants—and so many adults, dead or killed, many without even a coffin, and some without even a name.” The local Indians were being removed from their territory, and wretched conditions prevailed on the big new cattle ranches. All this was happening in obscurity, with no mention in the press and only silence from the Church. Casaldáliga wrote a pastoral letter in which he denounced the horrors and, borrowing from the penal code, applied the term “conditions analogous to slavery.” Here’s the definition you ignored, Casaldáliga was saying. The military regime responded by banning the letter, but copies of it got around.

Plassat knew nothing of this at the time. He was an activist Catholic and student in Paris at the elite Sciences Po, where he was concentrating on economics, management, and finance in order to apply that knowledge to leftist causes. Two years earlier he had been on the streets confronting the police during the quasi-revolution of May ‘68. Now he was too busy studying to worry about slavery, let alone the Amazon.

As it turned out, the event that would ultimately draw him to Brazil had already occurred. It was the 1969 arrest in São Paulo of a young Dominican friar named Tito de Alencar Lima, known as Frei Tito. He was suspected of having ties to left-wing guerrillas and was severely and repeatedly tortured by the notorious Department of Political and Social Order, under the direction of a baby-faced sadist named Sérgio Fleury. The torture sessions broke Frei Tito, who managed nonetheless to smuggle out a note describing the procedures. In one case, he wrote, a torturer had come into his cell dressed in religious garb, saying, “You’re a dirty homosexual priest. We’ll give you Communion. Open your mouth.” He inserted wires and began to deliver electric shocks.

Frei Tito’s smuggled note caused a scandal. In 1971 he was deported to Chile, and from there he fled to Rome and then to Paris, where the Dominicans gave him shelter. But he was in a state of permanent anxiety and paranoia. He saw Fleury everywhere. In 1973 the Dominicans moved him to a peaceful priory above a small valley near Lyon, where a smart and idealistic young friar took him on and became his friend.

Deforestation continues, abetted by slave labor. By Kay Chernush/Free The Slaves.

IV. The Red Bishop

That friar was Xavier Plassat. He had graduated from Sciences Po, earned another degree, in Third World development, and joined the Dominican order as a means of committing to social action. He was fascinated by Frei Tito, who in his lucid moments had much to say about theology and conditions in Brazil. But Tito was continuing to unravel. Repeatedly he disappeared, and Plassat had to go searching for him through the streets of Lyon and the surrounding countryside. One afternoon, Plassat returned from a trip and found him sitting under a tree at the priory, trembling, crying, and babbling incoherently. The other friars said he had been there all day, refusing to come inside or to eat or drink. Plassat sat with him for hours. Eventually he understood that in Tito’s mind the sadistic Fleury had arrived in a village that lay across the valley, and from there he was giving Tito orders, forbidding him from entering the priory and threatening to torture his family. Plassat tried to dispel the fantasy, but to no avail. Finally Plassat addressed Fleury directly, saying, “But, Mr. Fleury, surely you don’t object if Tito has a coffee?” Fleury reluctantly agreed. Plassat laced a coffee with Valium and gave it to Tito. The Valium had little effect. It started to rain and the sun went down. They stayed together under the tree all night. In the morning Plassat got Tito to a psychiatric hospital. In the waiting room Tito stood with his back to the wall, his arms outstretched. A nurse asked him what he was doing. He said, “Go ahead. You can shoot me. I am ready to die.” South America can be such an opera. It was September 12, 1973, the day after the coup d’état in Chile. Ten months later, Tito went into a forest and hanged himself. He was 28 when he died. Plassat was 24. Sorting through Tito’s few effects, he found papers full of sad musings. One read, “It is better to die than to lose one’s life.” In São Paulo, the only mention allowed was a notice in a diocesan newspaper stating that Frei Tito had succumbed to an illness contracted in Brazil.