Phooto: Ana Aranha/Repórter Brasil
In Brazil, tribal land is protected by strong federal laws. When loggers sought to strip trees from indigenous land in Para state, they found a brutally simple legal expedient for removing this barrier.
“This hurts as badly as if they were tearing out our guts,”
Edwin Chota. Photo: Tomás Munita/Etiqueta Negra.
One day, Peruvian electrician Edwin Chota abruptly abandoned the life of the city, and the various children he had failed to raise, for the jungle and for an indigenous tribe whom he adopted as his own. For over a decade he lived under death threats for denouncing illegal logging on his lands. His pleas for protection were ignored. In the end, the timber traffickers murdered him.
Those who knew him said that Edwin Chota had a wide, exaggerated and contagious smile, with a prominent gap where a front tooth was missing.
