60 Novels: An Essential Reading List
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60 Novels: An Essential Reading List
Read article
60 Novels: An Essential Reading List
Despite the atrocities committed in the rain forest, the drug trade poses perhaps the most conspicuous threat. In December 2015, Arnold took a boat to the town of Tabatinga, where each year some 300 tons of cocaine cross into Brazil from Colombia and Peru. At first, it didn’t seem like one of the world’s highest-volume trafficking corridors, but “it’s hard to find somebody who’s completely clean,” Arnold says. “It’s police, it’s businessmen, it’s lawyers, it’s accountants.”
When the drugs make their way to the cities, violence follows. In Manaus, in July 2015, a spat of reprisal killings claimed 38 lives, reigniting a war between the cartels and law enforcement. The dead included an 18-year-old construction worker; a 25-year-old parking attendant, on duty directing cars; and two young fry cooks, standing outside a home. Afterward, Arnold went door-to-door to interview the victims’ families and realized that trafficking was all around him. “I reached a point where I was no longer sure that I could responsibly continue to pursue the story without making people feel unsafe,” he says.
Looking back, Arnold says he didn’t want to dishonor his home country by writing a negative book. “But I realized, ultimately, that the most important thing I could do was amplify the systemic crises there rather than try to rush past it with, ‘Oh, look, they have the internet now,’ ” he says. He admits that initially the new developments had given him hope. “I was really naive,” he says, “because a lot of the transformation was superficial.”
This story appears in the print edition of the June 2018 issue, with the headline “The Urban Jungle.”
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