Mario Ricardo Farias Gomes was born in 1956, in Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil, the second child of Mario Cardoso Gomes, a director of the State Bank of Amazonas, and Derly Faria Gomes, who had given up studying law to be a mother and housewife. Precocious and energetic, Mario grew up in a middle-class home in what was then a rather provincial, torpid and remote state capital in equatorial northern Brazil in the center of the gigantic Amazon rain forest.