For more than three decades, Juscelina Silva Batista's life has followed the rise and fall of the Amazon River.

"People used to live there," said Joana Gomes da Silva, pointing to the cluster of skeletal trunks and branches. "It was a very pretty house. It's underwater now."

Although slavery as an institution no longer exists, forms of forced labor persist in the country.

With the miners came violence and diseases like malaria, to which the relatively isolated Indians had no resistance. In one village, no one survived. In others, as many as one-third of the villagers succumbed, some to disease and others to malnutrition.

Maribel’s plight highlights the despair and desperation of many migrants, who flee violence, poverty and, increasingly, drought and the early effects of climate change in Central America.

Allies of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro want to strip Paulo Freire of his patronage of Brazilian education in favor of a Jesuit saint. But he did not count on one thing: the opposition of Brazilian Jesuits.