Getulio Vargas's government launched Ceres in 1941 under the bureaucratic name Colonia Agricola Nacional de Goias - CANG. The pitch was aggressive. Any family willing to settle in the valley on the left bank of the Rio das Almas would receive a 26-to-32-hectare lot, seeds, tools, and free medical and dental care. They would keep 25 percent of their land in forest. They would get a house. Vargas's Estado Novo was trying to pull migrants into the interior during the March to the West campaign, and the offer worked. Migrants arrived from across Brazil, many of them poor farmers from the drought-stricken Northeast. By 1947, Ceres had 10,000 people. The engineer in charge was Bernardo Sayao, later famous for cutting the Belem-Brasilia highway through the jungle until a falling tree killed him in 1959. Ceres became his first monument.

The setting rewarded the recruiters' promises. The Rio das Almas cuts through fertile tropical soil and flows north to join the Maranhão, a tributary of the Tocantins, which eventually empties into the Amazon delta 1,800 kilometers away. The town sits on the Brazilian Highlands at about 350 meters, warm year-round - annual average 26 degrees Celsius, annual rainfall about 1,800 millimeters. Winters are cool and dry enough that nights can dip to 12 degrees. Summer afternoons stay under 29. The town is bounded by Itapaci, Nova Gloria, Sao Patricio, Carmo do Rio Verde, Rialma, and Rubiataba - the Rio das Almas dividing it from Rialma, its immediate neighbor across the water. It is 187 kilometers from Goiania, the state capital, along GO-080 to BR-153, the highway that carries most of the region's traffic.

Adib Shishakli had ruled Syria from 1949 through 1954 as the country's strongman, eventually declaring himself president after a series of coups. His military dictatorship suppressed dissent, and in one operation in 1954 his forces bombed Jabal al-Druze - the mountainous Druze homeland - during a rebellion. When Shishakli was deposed later that year, he fled first to Lebanon, then Saudi Arabia, and eventually settled in Brazil. Ceres offered what he wanted: anonymity, good soil, no political enemies. Nawaf Ghazaleh found him anyway. On his farm outside town, Ghazaleh shot Shishakli in what Syrian sources would describe as an act of blood vengeance for the Druze who had died under his orders. It remains the most unlikely piece of world history to land in Goiás - a Syrian military ruler killed on Brazilian cerrado soil by a Druze avenger.

Ceres peaked at roughly 70,000 inhabitants during the agricultural era. Then it contracted. Between 1980 and 2007, the population fell from 31,400 to 18,600 - a hemorrhage that tracked the national pattern of rural-to-urban migration as farming mechanized and young people left for Goiania and Brasília. The rural hinterland emptied fastest. Today most of Ceres lives in town, not on the original CANG lots. The local economy pivoted from farming to services. The town now specializes in health care and education, with eight hospitals holding 302 beds and three higher-education campuses: a Goiás State University faculty, a private philosophy school, and an agrarian sciences institute. The small industries that remain - furniture, wooden carts, wheat flour, brick kilns, coffee toasters, cereals, dairy - work for regional markets rather than national ones.

The 2006 agricultural census counted 273 farms covering 17,627 hectares, of which 4,700 were actively cropped, and 24,000 head of cattle. The main crops are still what the first settlers planted: rice, corn, sugarcane, tomatoes. The Municipal Human Development Index of 0.782 placed Ceres 28th out of 242 Goiás municipalities in 2000, and 1,019th among Brazil's 5,507 municipalities - the kind of middle ranking that describes a town that got ahead of its region and then stopped. The original colony structure is still visible in the way the streets meet the river, the way the forested lots line the escarpment. Ceres was named for the Roman goddess of agriculture, and the promise embedded in the name outlived the population that answered it.