Please join us for a conversation with Marcos Colón (author) and John Hemming about this powerful book.

The Amazon in Times of War presents both direct and indirect evidence showcasing the deliberate state policies behind the violence and devastation inflicted upon the Brazilian Amazon and its inhabitants. The collection features firsthand accounts detailing not just physical assaults, but also economic and institutional harm.

The essays traverse diverse themes while adhering to a chronological sequence, zeroing in on a pivotal period commencing in 2018. In November of that year, following a second electoral round, Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of an already fragmented nation. The world observed in astonishment as a relatively obscure conservative federal deputy, a former army captain with fervent neoliberal inclinations, rose to helm the largest country in South America. That menace became a calculated political agenda aimed at the obliteration of the world’s largest biome and its peoples, which encompasses nine South American nations. His forthright rhetoric strikingly echoed that of his North American counterpart, leading the media to dub him the “Trump of the Tropics.”

About the author

Marcos Colón

Marcos Colón is an academic, journalist, and filmmaker. His articles have been featured in the Jornal Público, Folha de São Paulo, Harvard Review of Latin America, and El País. He is founder of online journalism platform Amazônia Latitude and director of documentary films 'Beyond Fordlandia' and 'Stepping Softly on the Earth'. Colón is the Southwest Borderlands Initiative Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research focuses on Brazilian literary and cultural studies, with a particular emphasis on the Amazon, Indigenous studies, and representations of nature and culture in documentary film and world cinema.