Mendes is now a symbol of the global environment movement. The Brazilian government has declared him Patron of the Brazilian Environment. After his death, Mendes's home state of Acre in the western Amazon has pioneered the establishment of extractive reserves. Mendes's story has been the subject of books and films. In recognition of his achievements, there will be memorial ceremonies, documentaries and discussions about his legacy this weekend.
Many of his ideas live on through associates, notably Marina Silva, who became environment minister and put in place Amazon protection systems that are credited with an impressive fall in the rate of deforestation until recently.
But the celebrations will be tempered by the resurgent influence of the landowners' lobby, a recent sharp uptick in Amazon clearance and renewed questions about the Brazilian government's willingness to protect forest workers and conserve the biodiverse habitat on which they depend. Mendes would have recognised the destructive forces at work, though contrary to his reputation as an environmentalist, he was first and foremost a union activist campaigning on behalf of rubber tappers whose way of life was being decimated along with the loss of the Amazon.
Mendes had personal experience of the consequences. Born in , Francisco Alves Mendes Filho — as he was christened — was the son of a soldier in the "Rubber Army", the 50, men recruited in from Brazil's impoverished north-east and shipped to the Amazon to tap rubber for the allied war effort.
With Malaya occupied by the Japanese, the US was desperate for rubber, and Brazil promised to revive its once booming rubber industry to meet the need. The tappers were largely abandoned to their own fate, many dying from disease or attacks by wild animals.
When the war ended, government promises of compensation and tickets home were forgotten and many, including Mendes's father, never returned.
Growing up in the forest, Chico began tapping as a child. Influenced by priests of the progressive Liberation Theology movement and former members of the Communist party, he helped found the Acre branch of the PT, the Workers' party. As president of the Xapuri tappers' union, he set up a national organisation, bringing the tappers' fight to save the forest to global attention.
Thank you for stating so clearly the story of Chico Mendes and his importance to the history and the future of the Amazon. My sister Dorothy Stang introduced me to this great person as she had his picture on the wall in her home. She looked upon him as a hero to the Rubber Tappers and to people trying to survive in the Amazon against enormous odds.
There are many great martyrs in the forest who continue to be murdered by the greedy economic system of cattle, soybean, and lumber exploitation. David Stang.
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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. At the time we are living now, his struggle and the lessons we learn from it could not be more contemporary. We must unite to defend life.
Amazon fires in the state of Rondonia, Brazil, This includes the Chico Mendes Reserve. At the same time, the government is seeking to silence and obscure the work and sacrifice of forest defenders, like Chico, who are standing in the way of their destructive policies. Chico Mendes at home in the forest he loved and protected, tapping rubber in the traditional way. Photo: The Guardian. Marketing Permissions The Gaia Foundation will use the information you provide on this form to be in touch with you and to provide updates and marketing.
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