As darkness descended upon the isolated village, two gunshots echoed in the still grasslands. Then, a longer burst: eight shots.
Alexandre Apolinário, a leader in this Indigenous territory, said he should have known what they meant. He’d seen the arrival of the gang, with its guns and thirst for gold. He’d watched it recruit villagers, turning his people against each other. He knew the extreme violence it had brought to neighboring Indigenous lands could one day come to his own.
But when the shooting finally began this September, Apolináriostruggled to believe it. Dismissing the shots as errant hunting and reminding himself that his Macuxi people had experienced relative peace here, Apolinário finished his evening bath and sat down to rest inside his thatched roof hut.
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