Stang saw him reach for his gun. She opened her Bible to Matthew and read from chapter five, "Bem-aventurados os que têm fome e sede de justiça, pois serão satisfeitos—Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied." As she turned to go, Rayfrán das Neves Sales leveled his revolver and squeezed the trigger.

Blairo Maggi, governor of the state of Mato Grosso, is seen by the environmental movement as the poster boy for predation. Maggi is "O Rei da Soja," King of Soy, the world's largest single producer. Maggi acquired a less flattering honorific when Greenpeace gave him its Golden Chain Saw award in 2005, Mato Grosso having led Brazil in Amazon deforestation for the third straight year, coinciding with his first three years in the governor's palace.

Besides growing soy, corn, and cotton on three gigantic ranches and several smaller ones—almost a million acres in all—Maggi extends credit to and buys soy from some 900 midsize growers. His company, the Maggi Group, built an entire city, Sapezal, in western Mato Grosso to service a single plantation. And rather than waiting for the federal government to pave BR-163 all the way to the Amazon River at Santarém for transshipment of soy overseas, the Maggi Group created an infrastructure of silos, tugs, and barges to store and transport it down the Madeira River to its own deepwater port at Itacoatiara.

With reddish hair and a spreading paunch, the 50-year-old Maggi retains a boyish air that belies his reputation as a foe of the forest. His tough, can-do image has made him intensely popular in his home state and a rising star on the national scene; he does not discount a run for the presidency. Maggi is of Italian descent, having inherited land—and his business acumen—from his father, André, who once sold seed to farmers in the southern state of Paraná, then worked his way north, opening the agricultural frontier of Mato Grosso and founding an agribusiness empire.

Blairo Maggi's fortunes have paralleled Brazil's accelerating deforestation and emergence as a global agricultural powerhouse. The country is the world leader in beef exports and second only to the U.S. in soybeans. "The only place left for serious expansion of soy is Brazil," says Oswaldo de Carvalho, a biologist with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM). That means more trees will fall in Pará and Mato Grosso.

To Maggi, deforestation is an overblown issue, a "phobia" that plagues people who can't grasp the enormity of the Amazon. "All of Europe could fit inside the Amazon," he says, "and we'd still have room for two Englands."

What does he think of Dorothy Stang's vision of small growers carrying out sustainable projects in harmony with the land? "Totalmente errado—Completely wrong," Maggi says, adding that without heavy subsidies, such projects run counter to the march of history and are doomed to failure. "All business tends toward concentration. Unit prices fall, and you need huge volumes to survive."