The government offered tremendous incentives to anyone who was willing to come up to the Amazon and raise cattle: loans at interest rates below the rate of inflation, tax holidays, land concessions.
Ranchers from the South and even multinational corporations lured by the promise of big profits moved in. Gangs of chain saws and bulldozers started leveling the forest, and some of the largest fires in recorded history were set. I saw huge trees that had been blasted into the air and had landed upside down with their root buttresses sticking up like the fins of crashed rocket ships.
The same thing happened in Acre. The tappers, who constituted virtually the entire rural population, and the forest they depended on were just going to have to make way for progress. The methods that were used to move the tappers out were the same ones used in North America to remove the Indians from on—fraud and violence— and similar arguments about eminent domain and Manifest Destiny were used to justify rolling over this defenseless subculture.
No one except Chico had tried to explain to the tappers that they had rights like other people, and most of them just left the forest as they were told. Twelve thousand families went over to Bolivia and started tapping rubber in an area that has become, with Bolivian campesinos beginning to pour in, another time bomb of social conflict.
Others headed for Rio Branco, doubling and tripling its population and ringing it with slums. By the ranchers controlled twothirds of Acre. Many had expanded their original government grants by a practice known as grilagem , or land fraud, notoriously widespread in Brazil, where town clerks, if the price is right, are often willing to make out a false title to any piece of property your heart desires.
Once he has been physically evicted, the posseiro loses his rights. The tragedy of what is happening in the Amazon might be more understandable if significant amounts of beef were being produced on the cleared land, but that is not the case. The Amazon in fact imports more beef than it exports. The real reason the forest is being destroyed is so that the ranchers can get the billions of dollars of government incentives.
A lot of the land is held in speculation. If the government puts a road near or through the land, it can be sold for hundreds of times the original purchase price. This is one of the most criminal land scams, one of the most unconscionable hit-and-run operations, of all time, because in five or ten years the pasture turns into a barren, brick-hard wasteland that may take centuries to recover.
The lushness of the rain forest is the result of a delicate balancing act, a frenetic recycling of nutrients and rainwater from the forest floor back up into the trees. Once the trees are taken down, the whole system collapses. The soil soon shrivels up in the sun and blows away or is washed away by the rain. The paulistas hung out at the restaurant at the Rio Branco airport, talking about cattle and women in the same crude terms, and carving the state up among themselves.
By Chico was beginning to persuade the tappers that they could stand up to the ranchers. He devised a brilliant tactic known as the empate. An empate in chess is a draw, so perhaps in this situation it could be translated as a standoff, but it really was a blockade.
He had never heard of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. He simply took the somnolent passivity of the tappers and turned it into a form of resistance.
In thirteen years he organized forty-five empates and saved nearly three million acres of forest. These victories did not ingratiate him with the ranchers. In December four hooded men bundled him into a car in Rio Branco, beat him nearly senseless, and dumped him on a back road.
The following year Wilson Pinheiro was gunned down on the steps of his local. The two pistoleiros were identified and even how much they were paid was learned, but nothing was done. The only policeman who showed an interest in investigating the murder was fired. This time the wheels of justice turned with amazing speed. Hundreds of tappers were imprisoned and tortured.
Some had their fingernails yanked out with pliers. It was the wet season, and Acre was totally socked in. There was nothing for the paulistas to do at this time of year except eliminate their enemies.
It had been raining for twenty-four hours straight, the taximan who drove me into town from the airport said. We crossed a bridge over the swollen muddy Rio Acre, whose banks were lined with the open, flat-roofed, double-decker riverboats typical of Amazonia. The river was still the best way to bring goods from Manaus, a thousand extravagantly meandering miles downstream. Rio Branco seemed much smaller than its most recent population estimate of , It has a main plaza and a couple of neoclassical administrative buildings, but from there it degenerates into a squalid sprawl of shacks and concrete pillboxes.
There was a floating population of rough frontier types, shooting snooker and brawling in the bars, eyeing the traffic. They all looked like killers, and I wondered whom I could trust. Not the police, clearly. Only a few days earlier a journalist who had been investigating the death squad in the Department of Public Safety in Manaus had turned up dead. It was also probably a good idea to distance myself from the environmental movement.
Roberto Caiado, the president of the U. Being American was enough of a liability. The bishop sometimes criticized Chico for going too far, but he was basically a friend. He conducted the funeral mass. Apparently the caller had reservations about knocking off a man of God.
I asked a young girl cutting through the churchyard where I might find Dom Moacyr, but she quickly broke into a run. I knocked on the door, but no one came. Then I began to pound on it. At last it was opened by a bearded man with long hair, dressed in white, his neck and wrists dripping with Indian beads and animal charms. What was he like? I asked. He forged an alliance between the tappers and the Indians, for instance, who had been fighting each other for years— the Alliance of the People of the Forest.
Nobody else could have done that. The Tribunal of Justice was just down the road. I went up its steps and through its Greek columns to the office of the president, Eva Evangelista.
She was working late, and her daughter answered it. Evangelista is a tiny woman who looks like the actress Elizabeth Ashley and has the same throaty voice and gutsy manner.
In a few days twelve tribunal presidents were coming from all over the country to demonstrate their solidarity with her, she said. We have to discover the authors not only of this murder but of all the murders related to problems with the big landowners. I believe very much in signs from God, and I think Chico died to usher in a new era of justice, to make us think about these problems and act. I took a cab to the offices of the Gazeta. Chiquinha, the youngest of the four women he had installed on his ranch, had confessed that he was hiding on another of his properties, the Fazenda Mineira, and they had sent his seventeen-year-old son, Darlizinho, into the forest to tell him that he might as well give up.
The editor of the paper, Silvio Martinello, a salt-and-pepper-bearded man of about forty, had his feet up on his desk and was listening to the tape of an interview with Darli in jail.
Darli had denied any involvement and claimed that his son had murdered Chico entirely on his own initiative. But the police were saying that he was the mandante, and still others claimed that the big ranchers were ultimately responsible.
I asked Martinello. And their reporters were on the scene half an hour after the murder. It takes three hours to get there from Rio Branco, so they must have been tipped off. The U. Now there are , members with two hundred chapters in nineteen states. In fact, the U. Only 5 percent of the land targeted for appropriation actually changed hands before the program ground to a halt.
It appeals to the autocratic, macho part of the Brazilian psyche: you are the master of your land and nobody can tell you what you can do. The president of the U. Since the U. Twenty-five thousand acres were being cleared annually in the municipality of Xapuri alone. By then 20, tappers had joined the union, and with Wilson Pinheiro dead, Chico was their leader. He was fighting alone, with no government or police protection, at great personal risk. But in he made an important new friend, the anthropologist Mary Allegretti, who would help propel him to the third and final phase of his short career, from union leader to internationally acclaimed environmentalist.
Allegretti came to Acre to study the traditional rubber tappers near the Peru border. Here Chico and companheiros from all over the Amazon were able to tell their problems for the first time to an audience of sympathetic anthropologists, policymakers, and environmentalists. Among them was Steve Schwartzman, an anthropologist who had studied the Krenakore, an Amazonian tribe that was nearly destroyed by sudden contact with the modern world in the mid-seventies.
Something had to be done with the small farmers in the South who were being displaced by the consolidation of large landholdings for capital-intensive agriculture especially soybeans to pay off the foreign debt.
Each family was given to acres of forest and set to work diligently clearing and burning. But in most of the cases the soil proved worthless and the colonists ended up abandoning their homesteads and trying somewhere else.
His charisma was in his convictions. Only after talking with him about his struggle did I realize what an incredibly courageous man he was and the importance of what he was doing. Here was a real grass-roots leader with an extremely organized local constituency fighting deforestation. Chico had noticed that the Indians were better-protected than the tappers because they had reserves that were at least legally inviolable. The tappers were already in the forest, and they were Brazilian, as was the author of the plan.
So the environmentalists needed Chico to save the forest, and Chico needed the environmentalists to save his companheiros. It was a perfect marriage. In Chico was flown up to Miami to address a meeting of the directors of the Inter-American Development Bank, who were reconsidering the funding of the road.
Extractive use of the forest required no state financing and was indefinitely sustainable, and was more profitable per capita and per acre, even in the short run. Chico made another presentation in Washington, to members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which decides whether or not to release funds to the multilateral banks.
With Schwartzman translating, Chico went over well with them, too, kind of like Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, the straight-shooting, homespun backwoodsman coming to the capital and telling what it was like on the frontier.
The I. His killer was from a family of cattle ranchers, whose efforts to expand their pastures was held up by the empates. Darcy Alves, 22, and his father Darly were convicted in and jailed for 19 years. Although they are now free, former associates of Mendes said the assassination backfired. They thought by killing him, the tappers' movement would be demobilised, but they made him immortal. His ideas still have a huge influence," said Gomercindo Rodriquez, who came to Xapuri as a young agronomist in , and later became Mendes's trusted adviser.
Mendes wanted the forest to be used sustainably rather than cut off from economic activity as some environmentalists wanted or cut down as the farmers wanted. He proposed the establishment of extractive reserves for tappers, Brazil nut collectors and others who harvested nature in a balanced way. After his death the first of many such reserves in Brazil, the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, was created, covering 1m hectares of forest around Xapuri. After years of decline, the demand for latex from a local condom factory has boosted the price of rubber, and many tappers, who had turned to raising cattle, have returned to the forest.
They have become an example, they now exist in other areas of Brazil. The Chico Mendes Reserve has electricity and schools. Many students have graduated from university. Some tappers now have motorbikes and cars and some have become forest guides.
Trees are sustainably harvested, and there is an eco-lodge. Building on this model, 68 extractive reserves have been established in the Brazilian Amazon, covering more than , sq km. The timing was a coincidence, but the effectiveness of this program has been heavily influenced by those who were inspired by Mendes. But this progress is at risk as power in Brazil moves towards big landowners and away from the rural workers, conservationists and indigenous groups that Mendes fought for.
Last year, president Dilma Rousseff — who depends on the rural lobby for support in Congress — signed into law a change in the forest code r eform of the forest code, which diluted environmental protection of the Amazon and other areas of biodiversity. The landowners' bloc in the legislature, which includes former members of the UDR, is now pushing for revision of other environmental laws and policies, including the rights of indigenous peoples guaranteed by the constitution of and the Brazilian National Protected Areas System.
Ahead of this weekend's anniversary, landowners in Congress vetoed a move to give Mendes's name to the room where the parliamentary agriculture committee meets.
But conservation groups have vowed to continue his struggle. This article is more than 7 years old. Deforestation in the Amazon is stoking climate change by releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and threatening biodiversity.
Silva says that none of his 10 children work the rubber trees. The remaining ones live with Silva and breed cattle. They piled up unpayable debts and were forbidden to plant vegetables for their own subsistence. Unlike his children, Silva never went to school. Another significant improvement was the building of so-called lines dirt roads , improving access to the towns. Getting to Xapuri in a cart pulled by oxen used to take Silva around 14 hours.
Along both sides of the road connecting Rio Branco to Xapuri, almost all the forest has given way to pasture. His family stopped harvesting rubber six years ago. He says that sales were uncertain and only took place two months per year, at most. Very often the latex they had harvested went to waste. You take along kilos of cassava flour and spend the entire week struggling to sell it.
The other stuff comes wrapped in plastic. All the guy has to do is put it on the shelves. Over time, Silva and many other families came to see cattle ranching as a more feasible economic alternative, despite it being illegal on such a wide scale. Meanwhile, cattle ranching is seen by rubber tappers as the best alternative, providing savings and easily convertible into cash. The area of forest that has been lost comes to The signs coming from the Bolsonaro administration are that there will be no more incentives for traditional extractive practices.
Under pressure at home and abroad due to the wave of destruction, including a spate of fires in , the Bolsonaro government has increased inspections. He says the family has no way of paying them.
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