Below is an excerpt from the following New York Post article:

“…award-winning Brazilian reporter Klester Cavalcanti in his new book “The Name of Death,” which chronicles Santana’s career. In Brazil, the book has also been adapted as a feature film.

Cavalcanti said he came across Julio on a reporting trip to the Amazon 10 years ago to investigate modern-day slave labor.

“A federal police officer told me that it was very common in that region for ranchers to contract hired hit men to kill fugitive slaves,” Cavalcanti, 49, told The Post. “I told the officer that I would really like to interview a hitman and he gave me a number for a pay phone and told me to call it at a certain date and time.”

When Santana answered the pay phone in Porto Franco, the small town in the outback Brazilian state of Maranhao where he was living at the time, he was reluctant to speak to the reporter.

“I spent seven years convincing him to talk to me about his life,” Cavalcanti said. “We spoke about everything and not just about his job. He spoke about his childhood, his relationship with his parents and his brothers and the quiet life he lived in the forest as well as the internal drama that he faced when he started to work as a hired killer.”

The article matter-of-factly mentions that Brazilian ranchers routinely hire assassins to kill runaway slaves. This strikes to the heart of why so many lies have been told and so many truths covered up since the 1860s when slavery did not go away but took a lower profile, with most of those enslaved in post-Civil War America being European Americans. In Jim Goad’s brilliant Redneck manifesto he points out that in the Jim Crow south as many “whites” labored as sharecroppers as “blacks.”

On the railroads Chinese joined the “black and white” gangs supervised at the point of a gun, while in the industrial north virtually all corporate slaves were of European ancestry and were subject to brutal private police forces legalized in 1865. Mister Santana’s sad and sanguinary life, killing 500 people while “God looked the other way” is the type of life lived by many am Amerindian man-hunter, gathering runaways of English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Amerinidan and African ancestry adopting the best and returning the rest in exchange for guns, shot, powder and steel.

What has the publisher and writer focused on?

Not the big picture of slavery in postmodern Brazil, but the one and only a front to materialism, killing.

And among the killings, which one is focused on the most?

The writer and publisher choose to absolve the slave-hunter by focusing on his most justifiable killing, the killing of a blond, blue-eyed rapist.

Thanks to Tony Cox for this reference.

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