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The tragedy of the ex-soybean king

Driver of Olacyr de Moraes kills former Bolivian Senator who promised to restore the businessman to the world of billionaires

Por Bela Megale
Atualizado em 31 jul 2020, 04h02 - Publicado em 15 abr 2014, 18h02

In the 1980s few Brazilians had not heard of Olacyr de Moraes. He was the owner of 50,000 hectares of grain plantations, the soybean king and the youngest Brazilian billionaire to appear in the Forbes ranking. He was the ultra-rich guy who went to the best parties in Brazil – always accompanied by a couple of blondes who were over 1.70 meters tall and younger than 22. His empire brought together 40 companies and his wealth was put at US$ 1.2 billion. However, a series of bad investments and accumulated debts in the following years turned the wheel of fortune against him. He lost farms and closed down a number of his businesses. Today he is left with assets of around R$ 29 million in companies in his name. This may not be a negligible amount but it pales when compared with what he had at the time he was regarded as a king. In recent decades, he has dedicated himself to try and recover the lost money and prestige. This hope led him to get close to a Bolivian called Andrés Firmin Heredia Guzmán. Guzmán was a lobbyist and former Senator in his own country and promised to transform de Moraes into a king of ore this time and de Moraes believed him. He still believes the Bolivian would have complied with his promise had Guzmán not been murdered on April 4 by de Moraes´ driver, Miguel Garcia Ferreira.

De Moraes and Guzmán were introduced more than 20 years ago but their relationship only strengthened from 2002. Guzmán became the international director of one of de Moraes´ mining companies, Itaoeste. He used to present himself as a “minority shareholder” of de Moraes although this was never the case. Itaoeste was founded to exploit rare metals like thallium and scandium although the mines he acquired in Bahia state have still not received authorization to operate. Among the promises Guzmán made to de Moraes was to obtain these licenses. “In a bid to raise money to get the business going, he went to de Moraes´ house every week and left with bags containing R$ 200,000, R$ 300,000, R$ 400,000,” said one of de Moraes´ employees. All this money was in cash, taken from the safe. Guzmán also represented the company in meetings and travels with authorities. The latest was with the committee which accompanied President Dilma Rousseff to Russia in December 2012. De Moraes also went in this trip. He saw in the Guzmán´s resourcefulness and, above all, his contacts with the federal government the key to re-enter the billionaire´s club. However, for some members of his family and employees, Guzmán was a bloodsucker who had managed to extort money from an 83- year-old man who was recovering from a complicated surgery.

Guzmán´s background helps to reinforce this lack of faith in him. He had been intermediating business for Brazilian businessmen in Bolivia since the 1990s. In 1996, he helped Wagner Canhedo, the former owner of the Vasp airline, to buy half of the Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano. The transaction ended with a call for Canhedo and his son to be imprisoned. In 2006, Guzmán was elected as a replacement Senator for the opposition but he broke with the mandate holder — Roger Pinto Molina and moved closer to the Bolivian President, Evo Morales. (Note: Bolivia, like Brazil, has a system in which Congressmen have a replacement in case they stand down for any reason.) Molina later sought refuge in the Brazilian embassy in La Paz where spent 15 months and now lives in the Brazilian state of Acre. This break with the mandate holder led Guzmán towards the government side and he gave it his vote whenever needed. His relationship with the Bolivian President opened new doors. In April 2006, Guzmán received José Dirceu in his penthouse in the wealthy district of Cota Cota in the Bolivian capital. Dirceu, the former chief of staff of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, is currently serving a prison sentence for his involvement in the bribes for vote scandal known as the “mensalão”. At that time, Dirceu was trying without success to prevent the Morales government from nationalizing Petrobras oil refineries in Bolivia. Guzmán also acted as a lobbyist for Brazilian construction companies that managed to obtain contracts to build roads in Bolivia. In Brazil, he has been a defendant in at least four legal suits involving non-material damage and debt recovery. In another case, one of the nine sons he had outside his three marriages, accuses him of desertion him and is demanding R$ 150,000 in compensation.

When he left de Moraes´ apartment on the day he died, Guzmán was carrying a case containing R$ 400,000 in cash (“a loan I made him,” de Moraes told the police). Ferreira was waiting nervously for him in the hall of the building and asked for a lift when they met. In Avenida Morumbi, Ferreira killed Guzmán inside the car with two shots in the chest and one in the head. Under arrest, he confessed to the crime and said he had had no intention of carrying out it. He had just wanted to give the Bolivian a “fright”, as he could no longer watch Guzmán extort money from de Moraes, whom he said he idolized. (“I owe everything I have to him.”) Policemen soon noticed that Ferreira, who had only the most basic level of education, did not know the exact meaning of the word “extort”. “He regarded it as the same as ‘cheat’ and from his point of view Guzmán was cheating his boss,” said one of the policemen investigating the case. Ferreira, who is 61 and was born in Rio Grande do Norte state, has worked for de Moraes for 38 years. The confidence that he enjoys in the family was such that he was the person charged with carrying R$ 2 million to criminals who kidnapped de Moraes´ sister-in-law, Darci de Moraes, in 1993. The money was never paid and Darci was rescued by the police after nine days in captivity. Ferreira sent a message to his boss through a colleague he met in the police station in which he said: “I apologize to doctor Olacyr. I never meant to harm him”.

When de Moraes received the news of the murder of Guzmán in a telephone call from his son he started to cry. “Everything was in his hands. It was going well. What am I going to do now?” he said. He was at home in his pajamas recovering from an eight-hour operation carried out three weeks earlier at the Albert Einstein Hospital in which part of his stomach, pancreas and intestine was removed. He had originally been reluctant to accept the diagnosis of cancer and before being submitted to surgery, he took the risk of trying out some alternative treatments such as a spiritual operation with a medium called João de Deus. The illness forced him to celebrate his 83rd birthday with a quiet dinner in his apartment as he can no longer go to the restaurants he used to frequent. The meal brought together 20 people, including friends and relatives along with a young beauty who posed for pictures smiling by his side to uphold the tradition. He is now six kilos thinner and has constant crying fits. He laments the death of his friend Guzmán and the imprisonment of his loyal driver. These episodes have put his name back in the newspaper headlines once again but this was not the way he wanted to make a comeback.

Additional reporting from Luciano Pádua and Gian Kojikovski