When We Sold God's Eye

Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon

By: Alex Cuadros

Narrated by: Alex Cuadros

In this "remarkable" true story, an Amazonian tribe is forced to reconcile with Westerners entering their territory and running an illegal diamond mine (Douglas Preston).

Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita witnessed the first highway pierced through the century-old trees, and they lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new capitalist reality, discovering its wonders as well as its horrors. They forged an uneasy symbiosis with their white antagonists—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre; an act of retribution that made headlines across the globe.

Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God's Eye is a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of a vital ecosystem threatened by the hunger for natural resources; of genocide and revenge. Most of all, it’s about a few startlingly clever individuals and their power to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.

©2024 Alex Cuadros (P)2024 Grand Central Publishing

Critic reviews

“An extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, telling the gripping and astonishing story of how a small group in the Amazon, invaded and brutally treated by white settlers and miners, ended up exploiting an illicit diamond mine themselves. This is a complex and tragic story, deeply reported and beautifully written—a remarkable literary achievement.”—Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God

“This book reads like a wondrous combination of Heart of Darkness and In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel of modern conquest, capitalism, and murder. Cuadros writes with unsentimental compassion and unflinching moral clarity, investing his protagonists with human complexity while still reckoning with the broader social forces driving the destruction of the Amazon. A stunning work.”—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth and Fordlandia

“To the shelf of anthropological classics that includes Gregory Bateson’s Naven, Levi Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, we can now add Alex Cuadros’s When We Sold God’s Eye. Cuadros takes us into one of the most forbidding regions of the globe, and inside the minds of an ancient people as they take their first―diseased, bloodstained―steps into so-called civilization. A first-class work of reporting, this book is above all a work of compassion for Indigenous peoples everywhere, forced to navigate a nearly impossible passage.”—Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Sontag

"A remarkable feat of research embedded in vivid and compelling prose, When We Sold God’s Eye unveils the story of the once-isolated Cinta Larga people, whose lives and culture are transformed—at the hands of Western prospectors and conflicting government regulations—within the incomprehensible speed of a single generation. Bursting with wild, chaotic clashes of human values and exposing profound greed, corruption, violence, courage, survival, and the everyday contradictions within us all, When We Sold God’s Eye offers us new levels of understanding of Western society’s relationship to our earth and to cultures vastly different from our own. A must read, simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-filling."—Susan Southard, author of Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War