On a recent morning, Reginaldo Nunes Fonseca smoked cigarettes from the porch of his friend's wooden shack, watching the rain come down hard in an area now known as Nova Conquista — New Conquest — where pristine rainforest in Brazil's Amazon stood a year ago.
The rain meant he couldn't work on building his own house or do odd jobs for others in the area, but the weather wasn't the only thing holding him back. Like thousands of others who have moved to the small city of Oiapoque, in Brazil’s northern state of Amapa, Fonseca is waiting for an economic boom that may or may not come.
