The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  It was this substance, called latex, that lured the grandfather of Chico Mendes and tens of thousands of other men to the Amazon rain forest in two waves over the past hundred and twenty years. Called seringueiros, these men settled in the forests around ports like Xapuri and worked in solitude, fighting to make a life from the living forest—and fighting to free themselves from bosses who saw to it that they remained enslaved by their debts. Recently, as outsiders intent on destroying the forest began to invade the Amazon, the seringueiros had to fight once again. This time, they were fighting to save their homes, their livelihood, and the rain forest around them.

  In leading this struggle to preserve the Amazon, Chico Mendes had made a lot of trouble for a lot of powerful people. He was to the ranchers of the Amazon what César Chavez was to the citrus kings of California, what Lech Walesa was to the shipyard managers of Gdansk. The Xapuri Rural Workers Union, which Mendes helped found in 1977, regularly sent swarms of demonstrators to thwart the ranchers’ chain saw crews. The rural workers had driven two of Brazil’s biggest ranchers clear out of Acre—a man nicknamed Rei do Nelore (King of Cattle) and Geraldo Bordon, the owner of one of Brazil’s biggest meat-packing corporations. With his aggressive tactics and affable, plain-talking style, Mendes had then attracted the attention of American environmentalists, who invited him to Washington and Miami to help them convince the international development banks to suspend loans that were allowing Brazil to pave the roads leading into the Amazon. Mendes made friends abroad, but he made more enemies at home.

  One of his most dangerous foes was Darly Alves da Silva, a rancher who had come north to Acre from the state of Paraná in 1974. Alves lived on a 10,000-acre ranch with his wife, three mistresses, thirty children, and a dozen or so cowboys, most of whom the tappers considered little more than hired killers. Alves and his family had established a tradition of murder as they moved from state to state, starting in the 1950s. When somebody bothered the Alves family, somebody usually turned up dead—if he ever turned up again at all. Darly’s scrappy father, Sebastião, once spent four and a half years in jail in the south for the murder of a neighbor. He only served time because he had had a vision from God that told him to confess his crime. There were many other, unsolved murders that were allegedly his work.

  A fourteen-year-old boy named Genézio, who lived at Alves’s ranch, later testified in court about fourteen murders that had been committed on the ranch or by the family. For instance, one day he saw some urubu, vultures, circling over a little-used pasture. He waded into the weeds and saw a charred corpse. A wooden post, still smoldering, was embedded in the smashed rib cage. Two weeks earlier, a workman named Valdir had disappeared after arguing with one of Darly’s sons, Oloci. Another time Raimundo Ferreira, a worker at the ranch, asked to marry Darly’s nine-year-old daughter, Vera. Oloci told his father that Raimundo was “trying to joke with Darly’s face.” Later, Oloci and his half brother Darci asked Ferreira to go with them into the jungle. After a few days, word got around that the brothers had cut off Ferreira’s ear and nose and then shot and stabbed him to death.

  The Alves clan had threatened Mendes many times, and more than one attempt had been made on his life. But this time was different. With his empates, Mendes had prevented the Alveses from taking possession of a tract of forest that Darly wanted to add to his holdings and convert to pasture. The empates were a frustration, but what really infuriated Darly was that Mendes had forced him and his brother Alvarino into hiding back in September, after a lawyer working with the tappers found a fifteen-year-old arrest warrant from the family’s days in the south.

  Darly did not look dangerous. His eyes swam behind the thick lenses of bulky bifocals that overwhelmed his narrow face. Bony legs and arms dangled from thin shoulders and hips, as if someone had cut the strings on a marionette. His ill-fitting black mustache seemed pasted on. It was his voice, a thin, wispy voice, that hinted that this was a man to handle with care. Quick streams of words had to slip out around teeth that were always clenched. Darly swore that this was the last time Mendes would ever bother him. “No one has ever bested me,” he told a friend. “And Chico wants to do that.”

  Darly was confident he could act with impunity. His brother worked in the Xapuri sheriff’s office, just forty paces from Mendes’s front door, and the sheriff was a good friend of the family. The main reason Darly had moved to the Amazon was that it was one of the last places where might still made right. In that sense, it differed little from the American West of the nineteenth century as described in 1872 by Mark Twain in Roughing It: “the very paradise of outlaws and desperadoes.” In the Amazon, when you ask people about justiça, justice, they simply chuckle in a sad kind of way; most of the men in the prison cells are sleeping off a drunk, having had several too many slugs of the blazing, strong sugarcane rum called cachaça, which is sold for pennies a glass. In fact, more than a thousand people have been murdered in land disputes in rural Brazil since 1980, and Amnesty International estimates that fewer than ten of the killers have been convicted and sent to jail. (And not one mandante, mastermind, of a murder has ever been tried.) Sometimes the gunmen meet resistance; there is hardly a rubber tapper’s shack that does not have an oil-stained spot on the wall where the shotgun is hung. But usually the professionals prevail. In this anarchic atmosphere, the pistoleiros often assume the look of their imagined Wild West predecessors, strutting through town with a revolver stuck in the waist of tight jeans, boot heels raising red dust.

  Thus it was that in the latter half of December, the threats against Mendes had been replaced with death pronouncements. “Threat” implies that death is only a possibility; in Mendes’s case, imminent death was a near inevitability. Mendes told his brother Zuza about a series of ominous telephone calls to the union hall and his neighbor’s house (Mendes did not have his own telephone). “Zuza,” he said, “you watch out because things are getting very hot. I have a feeling I’m not going to make it to Christmas.”

  Mendes and his guards finished their domino game and moved to the front room to catch the end of Anything Goes. Everyone jumped slightly each time a seed pod dropped onto the tile roof from the huge benjamin tree that took up most of the small front yard and overhung the house. Finally, dinner was ready. Ilzamar set out a platter of fish and pots of beans and rice. When the table was ready, the two guards sat down on the small wooden stools, along with the wife of one of Mendes’s friends, who had stopped by to chat. The guards were not required to stay with Mendes after dark, but they were friends of the family—and they enjoyed dominoes and home cooking. Normally they ate in the Military Police barracks, several blocks away.

  By now, the insect symphony outside had reached fortissimo, a layered blend of high-pitched hums and creaks and rattles that muffled human speech. Ilzamar took her plate to the front room to eat with the children. Even though he was wearing only a pair of white shorts, Mendes was hot and uncomfortable. Telling everyone else to eat, he threw a towel over his shoulder and opened the back door to head to the outhouse to splash down with cold water. The powder blue towel, decorated with a rainbow and musical notes, had been a birthday present.

  As he had many times before, Mendes muttered about how dark it was in back. He had talked to friends about stringing a new wire for an outdoor light bulb; someone had cut the wire the last time they tried it. They had agreed to do it amanhã, tomorrow—a word that is heard often in the draining heat of the Amazon. Grumbling as he shut the door, he went into the bedroom and picked up the small black flashlight with the high-intensity beam that had been a gift from Mary Allegretti, an anthropologist from the south who had worked with him for years, trying to help the rubber tappers.

  Opening the door once again, Mendes flicked on the flashlight. The narrow beam swept the darkness. It is possible that he saw the two figures crouched by the palm tree in the corner opposite the outhouse. But no one will ever know, because in that instant one of the men pulled the trigger on a .20-gauge shotgun.
r />   In the darkness, the light blue towel must have made a good target. That is exactly where the load of buckshot struck. A tight pattern of sixty pellets buried themselves in Mendes’s right shoulder and chest and sent him tottering back into the kitchen. He screamed once and said no more. Trailing blood, he staggered toward the bedroom, possibly in an attempt to reach his revolver; he had kept the weapon even though the police, who had openly sided with the Alveses, had taken away his permit early in December. But his body suddenly went limp, and Mendes fell into the arms of one of the guards, Roldão Roseno de Souza, who had been with him since late October. Mendes crumpled to the floor on the threshold of the bedroom door.

  He took very little time to bleed to death; later, forensic analysis showed that eleven pieces of lead had found a lung. His blood spread a dark stain across the rough plank floor and dripped through the cracks onto the earth below. The towel, riddled with holes, lay beside him.

  Now all the dogs in the neighborhood were barking. Roseno cradled Mendes’s head. No one dared open the back door a second time. The other guard, who had only a five-shot revolver, jumped through a window facing the street and sprinted to the military barracks to get help and grab a machine gun. Friends came running with weapons of their own, knowing as soon as they heard the shot what had happened.

  Ilzamar bolted into the street, screaming, “They’ve killed Chico!” But the regular gaggle of policemen and hangers-on sitting outside the sheriff’s office just yards away did not stir.

  The funeral of Chico Mendes was held on Christmas Day. Through what the tappers call radio cipó—vine radio, the rain forest version of the grapevine—word of the murder quickly spread. Hundreds of rubber tappers hiked for many hours through the forest to attend the wake and funeral. On Saturday night the church bell again rang a call to mass; one by one, the rubber tappers filed past Mendes’s body and spoke of how he had changed their lives. Hour after hour they shuffled by, and the singing of hymns went on into the evening.

  By Christmas morning, more than a thousand people had crowded around the church. The rains had returned in force, drenching the mourners who followed the casket to the cemetery on the road leading out of town. At the head of the cortege, a young man studying for the priesthood held aloft a wooden cross with a painted portrait of Mendes fastened to the middle. The painting had been done in 1987 by an artist named Jorge Rivas Plata da Cruz. That was the year Mendes first traveled abroad and began to make headlines for his environmental work. In the painting, his mustache and hair are carefully coiffed and pure black. There are no worry lines around his smiling eyes. He is wearing the first suit he ever owned, the one he wore on his first trip abroad. It had been in a batch of clothing sent from Italy for the poor of Xapuri.

  Along with the hundreds of rubber tappers and small farmers in the procession were dozens of Mendes’s friends from the other Brazil. The funeral brought together the two sides of his life—the people from the forest and those from the outside, who had found in this simple rubber tapper an indispensable ally. Mary Allegretti, Mendes’s first friend from the world outside the forest, had flown down from New York City, forcing her way onto a booked flight to get to Xapuri on time. Now she stood holding her umbrella over Ilzamar and the children, although it had little effect in the driving downpour. A contingent of labor leaders, celebrities, and leftist politicians from São Paulo and Rio had flown up for the funeral, headed by Luis Inácio da Silva, better known as Lula, the gravel-voiced socialist who later came close to gaining the presidency of Brazil. Surrounding the crowd were dozens of journalists, many from overseas. An international version of vine radio had efficiently disseminated the news of the killing.

  Luis Ceppi, Xapuri’s priest, presided over the service. Ceppi, who was Italian and a member of Italy’s Communist party, had helped the rubber tappers’ movement get European support. As he gave the benediction, rain and tears streamed down his cheeks and soaked his white robe. The casket was placed in a brick crypt next to that of Ivair Higino de Almeida, the union member who had been brutally murdered in June—allegedly by Darly Alves’s sons and hired gunmen. A mason closed the crypt and troweled the cement flat. White porcelain tiles were then applied over the bricks. Mendes had told friends, “I don’t want flowers at my funeral, because I know that they would be taken from the forest.” Nevertheless, someone piled freshly picked blossoms on his grave that day.

  The murder of Chico Mendes might well have been an unremarkable event. He was the fifth rural union president murdered in Brazil that year, and just a week later another president of a rural union, in eastern Brazil, was blasted in the face with a shotgun in front of his family. But over the previous three years, Mendes’s close relationships with environmentalists, labor organizers, and human rights advocates from Brazil, the United States, and Europe had focused increased attention on the struggle of the rubber tappers. His empates and organizing skills had brought him awards from the United Nations Environment Program, the Gaia Foundation, and other groups. As a result, this murder deep in the Amazon rain forest—where it once took three weeks for news to travel down the river—instantly became an international story, making the front page of newspapers around the world.

  The significance of his murder was further amplified by the disturbing environmental anomalies of 1988. The scorching summer in the United States that year had motivated politicians and the media for the first time to pay serious attention to the greenhouse effect: the theory that billions of tons of gases released each year by the burning of fossil fuels and forests are trapping solar energy in the atmosphere and disastrously warming the planet. And just as the heat was breaking records and fires were ravaging Yellowstone National Park, the television networks got detailed satellite photographs of the Amazon burning season—thousands of fires burning simultaneously. It almost felt as if the heat and smoke generated in the forests were being inhaled on the baking streets of Los Angeles, Washington, and New York.

  Then came the slaying of Chico Mendes. In the months that followed, dozens of television crews, photographers, and reporters from around the world would take the six-hour, four-stop flight from São Paulo to Rio Branco, the capital of Acre, then bounce for four more hours along the rutted, dusty, partly paved road to Xapuri. The Hotel Veneza, the only hostelry in town with a bathroom for each room, quickly filled up. Those turned away had to walk down the block to Hospedaria Souza, where an oversexed rooster liked to start crowing at 3:00 A.M. and one of his hens had a habit of laying eggs on the floor of the outhouse, then roosting behind the toilet.

  The citizens of Xapuri gradually adjusted to all the attention. After a while, the woman who ran the Veneza learned that Americans do not like heaps of sugar brewed directly into their coffee, as is usual in the Amazon. So many journalists wanted to be taken to Seringal Cachoeira, the rubber tapping area where Mendes and the tappers had their showdown with the Alves family, that the tappers started charging $200 to truck the visitors in and put them up for a day or two in tappers’ homes. Mendes’s house was turned into a small museum, and the guest book filled with a thousand, then two thousand, then—by the end of the dry season of 1989—four thousand names.

  Visitors who stayed long enough to walk for a time in the surrounding forest discovered the bounty of the ecosystem that Mendes had died defending. It was a place of spectacular diversity and vitality. Turn over a log and find 50 species of beetle. Survey an acre and find 100 species of butterfly. In the Amazon, one type of rubber tree has exploding fruit that flings seeds 20 yards; three-toed sloths harbor dozens of species of insects and algae in their matted fur; river porpoises are cotton-candy pink. It was a living pharmacy that scientists had only just begun to explore. A fourth of all prescription drugs contain ingredients derived from tropical plants—malaria drugs and anesthetics and antibiotics and more—and less than 1 percent of the Amazon’s plants had been studied.

  It became clear to outsiders that the murder was a microcosm of the larger crime: the unbridled d
estruction of the last great reservoir of biological diversity on Earth. Just a few centuries ago, the planet had 15 million square miles of rain forest, an area five times that of the contiguous United States. Now three Americas’ worth of forest were gone, with just 6.2. million square miles left. A third of the remaining rain forest was in the Amazon basin, and over the past decade alone, chain saws and fires had consumed about 10 percent of it—an area twice the size of California.

  The aggression against the forest was therefore a many-layered tragedy, causing human deaths, killing millions of trees and other organisms, and resulting in the extinction of several species of plant and animal life each day—most of which had not even been noticed, let alone catalogued or studied. In some ways, Chico Mendes and the rubber tappers were simply another endangered species, as much a part of the ecosystem as the trees they tapped, the birds in the branches, or the ants underfoot.

  But the tappers were a species that was fighting back.

  Chapter 2

  Amazonia

  XAPURI AND THE HUNDREDS of other human settlements in the Amazon are like tiny islands scattered in a great green sea. Some are linked by roads cut through the wilderness; others can be reached only by boat or airplane. Even Manaus, once the gleaming center of the rubber boom and now a noisy, polluted city of 700,000, is like an island, connected by only one road to the developed south of Brazil. Overall, despite the devastation around the edges and the fishbone pattern of open space that eats into the trees wherever a network of roads is built, the overwhelming majority of the region remains virgin forest. From above, it seems to be a uniformly mottled green carpet, touched here and there with pink or rust or yellow where a particular tree species is in flower. On a thousand-mile flight over the undeveloped parts of the basin, you look down on nothing but that carpet, the only distraction being the occasional glint of the rivers, which coil and twist like a spilled spool of silver ribbon, or here and there a clearing where an Indian tribe or rubber tapper community has carved out a small patch in which to raise crops.