Acre, the backwoods region where Chico Mendes lived, suffered heavily from the violence and destruction that swept through Amazonia in the s.
Once claimed by Bolivia, the region was incorporated into Brazil in during the rubber boom. The territory became a state in Nevertheless, in the inexorable Brazilian process of settlement, land grabbing, ranching, and social conflict soon followed.
The new state government, having high hopes for ranching, encouraged private investment in land, promoting Acre as a potential corridor to the Pacific—five hundred miles to the west with the Andes standing in between and no roads yet constructed. One third of the land in Acre changed hands from to , much of it with forged titles. Land prices along the highway rose 2, percent. Financial groups from the south of Brazil bought out rubber estates and sought to evict the tappers, leading to violent fights.
Between and , the number of cattle in Xapuri County rose from 7, to 52, head. Augusta Dwyer, a Canadian free-lance writer whose book is among the best written and most evocative of the new books on the Amazon, visited Chico Mendes some months before his assassination when he told her that. Their shacks were burned down, gunmen would show up on their land, their animals were killed.
Others migrated to the capital, Rio Branco, whose population rose from 36, in to 92, in In the new economic situation brought about by the highway and the increase in cattle ranching, the bosses who had controlled the rubber trade and held the tappers in virtual bondage through debt found their profits declining so drastically that they were only too glad to sell off their rubber estates to the ranchers.
The rubber tappers were left to look after themselves as best they could. Thus, as the rubber trade diminished, the tappers gained by default a certain degree of independence, but their livelihood also became highly dependent on government, which imposed tariffs and taxes to keep the price of cheaper imported rubber high. This was the same government that was simultaneously handing out easy credit and tax write-offs to southern businessmen if they invested in Amazonia cattle ranching.
In some 23, families were still directly dependent on tapping native rubber trees for their livelihood. Born poor in one of the most remote and backward parts of Brazil, Chico Mendes was illiterate until he was twenty years old.
Mendes grew up in the forest, working as a rubber tapper from the age of nine. His family lived in a modest hut in a forest clearing at the center of a clover leaf of forest trails used by the rubber tappers. Each trail gave access to between one hundred and two hundred rubber trees over an area of seven hundred or so acres, forming part of a large tract of forest, or seringal.
These estates were owned by well-to-do businessmen in the town of Manaus, a thousand miles down river. Their relations remain obscure but there seems no doubt that Euclides taught Chico to read and write.
Mendes himself later recalled,. Despite the defeats, humiliations, and massacres, the roots of the movement were always there, he said. The plants would always germinate again sooner or later, however much they were attacked. Chico Mendes moved to Xapuri in He had learned enough from Euclides to teach for a year in the literacy campaign sponsored by the military regime and he worked as a salesman in the shop of Guilherme Zaire, a local warehouse owner and rubber trader of Syrian origin.
The rubber tappers, faced with the expansion of ranching and the transfer of titles to the forest where they worked, in devised an increasingly successful method of resistance, the empate.
The empate was an organized showdown between the rubber tappers and the workers sent in by the ranching interests to cut down the forest. Dwyer describes it as.
Their empate was first an attempt to bring these fellow workers around to the other side, to make them understand that they were taking the food from the mouths of their comrades. The problem with this strategy was that the right to defend land by force was also claimed by the rich landowners. In the general atmosphere of lawlessness that permeated the frontier, it is hardly surprising that the larger proprietors, reacting to the empates , turned increasingly to gunmen to defend their claims.
Political changes in the south of Brazil were also beginning to affect Acre during the s. In an artificial two-party system had been imposed after the coup. Ironically, the military thereby created an instrument for expressing antimilitary sentiment. To vote for the catchall opposition group called the Brazilian Democratic Movement MDB was to register dissatisfaction with the military regime.
Sponsored by his then employer, the Syrian rubber trader Zaire, Mendes was elected with two other men who also worked for Zaire. He was not, however, particularly successful as a member of the municipal council.
The chamber would empty when he launched into long, radical speeches, which even his opposition colleagues in MDB found tiresome. You must join it and use it to organize the grass roots, spread your ideas and strengthen the movement. During the late s, however, several elements came together to help the increasingly desperate cause of the rubber tappers.
The Church, long a bastion of landed interests, began to accept new, mainly foreign, priests, who were followers of liberation theology and had experience in organizing grass-roots community groups. The Church moved into the rural regions on two fronts, both of which were important to union organizing in Acre. The radical priests helped to establish grass-roots communities committed to mutual assistance and political activism.
The Catholic church also set up pastoral land commissions in , which soon found themselves in the forefront of the struggle for peasant rights. These organizations, intended to monitor land conflicts and encourage priests and lay workers to help the peasants defend their rights, became more radical as they found themselves caught up in deadly day-to-day conflict. A Catalan with long missionary experience in the Amazon, Dom Pedro still refuses to baptize the children of some ranchers or say mass on their land.
The rural workers unions in the south also sent organizers to the new frontier who provided training, helped in union organizing, and provided legal support for what had previously been mainly isolated and spontaneous resistance.
As the situation grew more tense, a small coterie of activist Brazilian intellectuals, social scientists, and journalists appeared in Acre. Elson Martins set up in Rio Branco a lively alternative newspaper, Varadouro. Between and it provided a forum for people whose views were previously unheard. At the end of the s Chico Mendes, through contacts at the new federal university of Acre, established clandestine links with the Communist Party of Brazil PCdoB , a Maoist splinter party that had taken China as its ideological model and was shifting its allegiance to Albania.
Important changes were also taking place nationally. The intrigues of the secret services began to threaten the military hierarchy itself and the generals found themselves confronted by growing pressure for change within society which they could no longer contain by force alone.
Pressure from the Church, unions, and other sectors of civil society, in an alliance not dissimilar to those forming in Acre, forced the regime to begin a slow process of liberalization. In the constraining and artificial two-party system was abandoned and an amnesty was declared for both those accused by the military regime of political crimes and those accused of gross human rights violations. The conflict between union and ranchers in Acre, however, had by become increasingly ugly.
Pinheiro had befriended Mendes and given him advice, and many assumed that Chico Mendes, who was traveling at the time, was also a target. The reaction of the Brazilian authorities to the death of the rancher was rapid. He retreated into the forest. The charges were dropped in By two producer cooperatives had been founded, located at two of the five schools then in existence.
In effect, OXFAM and Mendes had chosen to support the more radical of the two opposition parties to the military regime. Chico belonged to this second group.
Adrian Cowell was an awardwinning film maker who had been visiting Amazonia since the late s and had watched with growing resentment and exasperation the senseless destruction of the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants.
In , while making a film in Washington, Cowell met Bruce Rich, an environmental lobbyist leading the campaign against the banks that were financing Brazilian development, and a leading member of the Natural Resources Defense Council. A year later, in , at a strategy meeting in the United States, Cowell argued. But as tropical forests were in the Third World, everything depended on political decisions in those countries.
At this meeting Cowell also met Stephen Schwartzman, a trained anthropologist who had worked with the Kreen-Akore, the Indians whom Cowell had first filmed in the s, and whose remaining numbers had been subsequently relocated in Xingu Park.
The American Beldon and Threshold Foundations later financed a visit by Schwartzman to Brazil to solicit Brazilian help in developing a campaign to oppose the activities of the banks.
And then they tried to put an end to it with a. But 25 years later, the vision Chico died for lives on. The Brazilian government has declared him Patron of the Brazilian Environment.
Institutions have been named after him, including the main state agency in charge of conservation. After his death, Mendes's home state of Acre has pioneered the establishment of extractive reserves. The powerful landowning lobby in this country has failed to silence Chico even in death. He has become a symbol social change. Chico wanted the forest to be used sustainably rather than cut off from economic activity or cut down.
This became a reality soon after his death when the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve was created on 1 million hectares of forest around Xapuri.
The reserve has electricity and schools, and many students have graduated from university. Based on this model, 68 extractive reserves have been established in the Brazilian Amazon, covering more than , sq km. Down the road is the Chico Mendes Museum, which houses photos, texts and objects used by the union leader. But he is today a defeated man. His story has been immortalised in books and films.
As a model of grassroots activism, from South America to Asia, people follow his vision of protecting their sustainable way of life. Mendes established the Nazare School on a rubber plantation to train teachers who, in turn, started other schools. In , at the national rural workers' organization convention in Brasilia, Mendes proposed a land system that would create rural land modules for the tappers, but the proposals were rejected.
In , Mendes and a colleague, Maria Allegretti, spent five months organizing a national meeting of the Rubber Tappers of Amazonia, which included seminars, cultural events, and strategy meetings. One hundred and twenty rubber tappers attended the affair in Brasilia, many of whom had never been more than a few miles from their homes.
Mendes, Allegretti, and the tappers embraced a new approach that focused world attention on their plight. Mendes influenced the rubber workers to position themselves as defenders of the rainforest: to forego the issue of declining rubber production-to politicize instead for the preservation of the rainforest environment; and to stress to the world the value of other forest products including oils, nuts, and cocoa.
At the Brasilia meeting the tappers established a national council and called for a system of land reform based on Mendes's earlier proposal of rural land modules.
The system created extractive reserves, and allocated areas of the rainforest for rubber and nut harvesting. Mendes left Brasilia and returned to Acre to publicize the system of extractive reserves and to solicit support for the ecology measures discussed at the convention.
He continued his work, built more schools, and supported the empate offensives until December 22, , when he stepped from his house in the Brazilian town of Xapuri and into the path of a bullet. The murder of Chico Mendes drew international attention, and over 1, mourners attended his funeral. The Brazilian government was compelled by the worldwide publicity to seek out the killer.
After two years of stalling, the gunman, Darci Alves da Silva, went to trial. He was convicted of the murder along with his father, Darly, who was convicted for his role in plotting the murder. Mendes died one week after his 44th birthday, leaving a wife and children.
His first marriage to Maria Eunice Feitosa in , ended in divorce. The couple had two daughters of whom only Angela, the eldest, survived past infancy. This marriage lasted a brief two years because his devotion to the cause of the tappers kept Mendes away from his family. In the s, Mendes married a woman named Ilzamar, whom he had taught as a young girl on one of the rubber plantations. They had two children: Elenira, and Sandino.
He explained that cattle ranchers systematically destroyed the rainforest and created hardship for the natives and rubber tappers. Mendes won two awards in for his efforts to preserve the environment: the Global Award and Protection of the Environment Medal. His untimely death served to focus greater attention on the plight of the rainforest and, in , a contingency of U. Brazil passed laws to protect the rainforest and approved a plan to replant 2.
The government further agreed to create extractive reserves in the Amazon region. The first was named the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, and served as a home and refuge to 3, families of tappers and farmers. All rights reserved. Turned Activist Initially, Mendes attempted to bring about change through a direct appeal. An Untimely Death Mendes left Brasilia and returned to Acre to publicize the system of extractive reserves and to solicit support for the ecology measures discussed at the convention.
Audubon, Jan-Feb Humanist, March-April
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