The knock on the door that Valdemir Maria de Jesus had been hoping for came at 3am.
The early hour was strange, but after three-and-a-half months of clearing rainforest, the salary owed to him and his friend Antonio was finally to be paid. It was a moment for celebration.
Like thousands of Brazilian labourers working in the Amazon, the meagre £600 (R6 750) the two men had earned from their back-breaking efforts in the frontier state of Para would provide them with the means to start new lives - enough to build a new house, marry or support their families.
But, when Valdemir opened the door to the house where he was staying, it was not a wad of banknotes that his boss, Maciel, was brandishing, but a gun.
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25 000 men working as slave labourers With the bullets still lying under his skin, Valdemir, a slight young man in his early 20s, said: "I opened the door and he shot me. When the first shot hit me, I fell down and pretended to be dead. He shot me a second time.
"Then he went over and shot my friend. After he finished with him, he came back and kicked me several times in the head to check if I was dead. After he left, people found me and they somehow got me to hospital."
The first bullet hit Valdemir in a lung and the second lodged in his back. But, despite being critically wounded, his instincts saved him. He is in now in hiding at his father's home, hundreds of kilometres away in another province, awaiting surgery to remove the bullets.
Antonio was not so fortunate. The wife and children he left behind to seek his fortune in Para probably do not even know he is dead. His ID card was stolen by his murderer and nobody knows his surname.
Perhaps the most shocking element of this tale is that, far from being an isolated incident of greed and inhumanity, it is part of the dark secret that lurks in Brazil's rural heartlands.
'For each murder or incident of violence, many more go unrecorded'
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