One of those men was Chico Mendes’s grandfather. Around the turn of the century, he had moved from Ceará to Pará to cut rubber. He returned to Ceará, married a young Portuguese woman, and fathered six children. In 1925, as yet another drought ravaged the coast, he took his family up the Amazon, past Manaus to the Purus, then up the Acre River to Xapuri. One of Chico Mendes’s uncles recalled the departure vividly: “Our father said to us, ‘My children, let’s go make money in Acre.”’ They packed up their few belongings and boarded one of the small steamers. This time there was no turning back. Chico’s father, Francisco Alves Mendes, was twelve years old when they began the journey.
Chapter 4
Jungle Book
THE FAMILIES WHO MOVED FROM Ceará into the Amazon had to adapt to a shockingly different environment from the one they had left behind. The northeast had been hot, dry, scrubby, windswept. The Amazon was humid, dark, closed—an insect-ridden wilderness. Disease was rampant. There were no hospitals, no schools. Even though Brazil had been collecting millions of dollars in taxes on the harvested rubber, the government had put nothing back into the region. Every aspect of life presented a new challenge. Families were dispersed through the forest, often separated by four- or five-hour hikes. Isolation required self-sufficiency, so each family hunted and gathered what could not be grown or bought from the traveling merchants.
Even hunting for game to supplement the limited stores of rice and beans presented novel difficulties. Many tappers, for example, tell similar stories about the first time they shot a monkey, an act that became a sad rite of passage into seringueiro society. Inevitably, the stories focused on the moment after the tapper raised his shotgun and fired, and a wounded monkey tumbled to the forest floor. As the hunter approached, the monkey’s face contorted in pain. The animal stared uncomprehendingly at its torn flesh, then turned to stare imploringly at the startled hunter, who was horrified to notice for the first time just how human a monkey looks. Then the tapper remembered his children crying of hunger; although repulsed at his own actions, he reloaded and shot again.
Despite the hopes of Chico Mendes’s grandfather, when he and his family settled on Seringal Santa Fé, just a few hours’ walk from Xapuri, a tapper could no longer make money there. The price of rubber had been depressed by the bountiful supplies from Asia. The rubber estates were barely scraping by. The amount of rubber produced in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon had dropped from its 1912 peak of 31,000 tons to 17,000 tons. And, despite the depression, aviamento was still in place. Each tapper got his shotgun, machete, cooking pots, rubber knife, and other necessities on credit; it was usual to start work at least a year’s worth of rubber in debt. The system had become a bit more liberal: the tappers could now grow some of their own food instead of buying everything at inflated prices from the boss. And they could supplement their income during the rainy season by gathering Brazil nuts; the Acre and Purus river valleys were blessed with some of the Amazon’s densest populations of both rubber and Brazil nut trees. But there was no avoiding the burden of perpetual debt.
The rule on the seringal was for sons to follow their father into the forest to learn how to cut rubber. Francisco, Chico Mendes’s father, had trouble keeping up with his brothers. He had club feet; his mother always attributed the deformity to a fall she had suffered during her pregnancy. But he pushed on without complaining and was able to learn the routine of the tapper’s life. By the time he reached adulthood, he had also learned to read and write, which set him apart from many of the other tappers. When his father died, only Francisco stayed on at Seringal Santa Fé; the rest of the children drifted to other rubber estates. He met and married Irace, who was widely admired for her beauty. They made an odd couple. He was a typical nordestino, dark and compact; only his light brown hair was slightly unusual. She was tall and fair and had bright blue eyes —all rare traits in Acre. People recall her as almost a stately presence. Francisco was a serious man, according to people who grew up nearby. He disliked parties and preferred talking politics to spreading fofoca, gossip. And he hated aviamento—the rubber bosses and the rent.
The Amazon rubber trade limped along through the 1930s, and Xapuri and the rubber estates around it were an unchanging world. Between 1900 and 1940, the population of Acre dropped from 100,000 to 79,000, as many northeasterners headed downriver and tried to go home. Then came a brief reprieve. During World War II, the demand for Brazilian rubber rose sharply when the bustling rubber estates of Southeast Asia were threatened by Japan. The Allies desperately needed a secure source of this crucial material, so the United States turned to Brazil. The resulting enlistment of an army of soldados do borracha, soldiers of rubber, was one of the strangest, saddest chapters in the strange, sad saga of the Amazon.
The revival of the rubber trade began when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and soon after attacked Singapore and the rest of peninsular Asia. The United States still had no factories producing synthetic rubber. England had access to rubber plantations in Ceylon and India, but it was estimated that they would meet only a tenth of the Allied demand. The importance of rubber to the war effort is best illustrated by remembering that gas rationing in the United States was not so much an effort to conserve fuel as to conserve tires.
The United States had already been studying ways to boost the production of rubber in the Western Hemisphere—for example, by developing blight-resistant strains of rubber trees for plantations. But the long-term research was meaningless in the face of this crisis. What was immediately relevant was a report by an American survey team in the Amazon. It calculated that there were perhaps 200 million rubber trees in the wild that could be tapped and, given a large enough labor force, could produce as much as 100,000 tons of rubber a year. At an estimated production rate of a ton per rubber tapper per year—an ambitious estimate, to say the least—a work force of 100,000 tappers was needed.
A special American committee was convened to study “the rubber situation”; it concluded that Brazil’s northeast could again, as it had during the first rubber boom, serve as the source of the new rubber tappers. Agreements were signed with Brazil that guaranteed a high price for rubber for five years in return for exclusive rights to Brazil’s production. Brazil in turn would create agencies to recruit “soldiers of rubber,” to transport them into the forest, and to offer supplies and medical care—and a postwar pension.
At first, the American officials in the Amazon tried to set up their own system of boats and warehouses with which to collect the rubber directly from the tappers. The idea was to offer a higher price than the old bosses and seringalistas and thus stimulate the tappers to produce more rubber. It was a logical idea, but logic does not apply in the Amazon. Quickly it became apparent that the project was being sabotaged at every turn by the established middlemen of the old system. Furthermore, a lack of river craft hobbled the effort. In 1943, as rubber shipments to the United States barely grew, the American embassy in Rio recommended that the whole project be turned “back to the Brazilians.” In Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, Warren Dean cites a document in which the embassy reported that it was impossible to bypass “the established society, with its century-old tentacles stretching up all the thousands of tributaries.” The established suppliers should be used, the document said, even though no “darker picture exists anywhere of what in more progressive societies we choose to call corruption and exploitation.”
During the last few years of the war, posters sprung up in the towns of Ceará: “March to the West,” read one. “While our soldiers are fighting in Italy, you are fighting in the trenches for rubber,” read a second. Another devastating drought, in 1942, helped recruitment. The flagelados, the ever-suffering people of Ceará, were lured with deceptive propaganda. Some were told that rubber grew on the trees in 130-pound balls. All they needed to do was jump up and grab it. As one tapper, Jose Silvério, recalled to the Brazilian reporter Malu Maranhão, “There was training that we did: you h
ad to jump very high, holding a rope. We were told that that way we can get these balls. We were promised medical assistance, money, and a uniform—a white shirt, pants, and a hat. The trip was a torment: a ship to Belém, riverboats to Manaus, then many days walking to the seringal. Then things got worse. There, we could see that the balls of rubber only existed in the heads of the people who told us this. When I saw how the rubber left the tree drop by drop, and took all day to fill a cup, I realized that I was never going back to Ceará.”
Despite plans to ship as many as 50,000 men up the Amazon, only a fraction of that number actually went—estimates range from 9,000 to 24,000. Of those migrants who made it all the way upriver to the rubber estates, almost half died of tropical diseases. Silvério said, “The first year, thirty of my friends died. The only medical help was Doctor Malaria. Those who didn’t die went crazy. A friend, Tenório, spent all day biting his belt and talking with a girlfriend he left in Fortaleza.”
Germany was sufficiently concerned about cutting the Allies’ rubber supplies that submarines were sent to sink the ships carrying rubber soldiers. One woman in Xapuri, who was fourteen years old when her father took the family to the Amazon from Fortaleza, recalled a night when a submarine was spotted as their ship was heading toward the mouth of the Amazon. The passengers, crammed deep in the ship’s hold, were told to climb to the upper deck and don life jackets. They watched as minesweepers and dive-bombers tried to sink the attacking submarine. Months passed before that family was deposited at the mouth of the Acre River, where they had to wait a few months more before they were taken to a seringal. Then came the inevitable disappointment when the stories of a healthy lifestyle and easy labor were replaced by the reality of living in debt in the forest.
After the war, despite the promise of pensions, the seringueiros were forgotten and abandoned—just like the previous wave of settlers after the first rubber boom crashed. Nonetheless, they remained proud of what they considered patriotic service to their country and the free world. Many of the rubber tappers still proudly sing ballads that were originally anthems for the rubber soldiers. More recently, these songs have become a rallying cry for the rubber tappers’ movement that Chico Mendes led. The lyrics reflect something of the plight of these displaced people, many of whom still live in the past:
One day, when the splendid rays of victory come to our country, you will see that your efforts, ensuring this freedom, will make you so happy.
If you suffer from the darkness and the solitude, one day, free from this prison, you will sing the glory of the nation.
Cheers, Brazilian soldier, your product will be useful all over the world.
Cheers, Brazilian soldier, your product will be useful all over the world.
At the moment you join the ranks of the forest battalions and think about the victory of Brazil and forget about your dangerous life, courageous soldier, you will triumph.
Cheers, Brazilian soldier, your product will be useful all over the world.
On December 15, 1944, toward the end of the second, smaller rubber boom, Irâce Mendes bore a son, Francisco “Chico” Alves Mendes Filho. The seringal where he was born, called Porto Rico, is now partly deforested ranchland. Life for the Mendes family differed little from that of their neighbors. Almost everything that was needed could be grown in the clearing around the house or harvested in the forest. Over the preceding decades, the seringueiros had evolved a remarkably uniform lifestyle. Each family received from the estate boss an identical kit of implements and a fairly uniform plot of forest—often about 700 acres. Also, most rubber estates at that time had a mateiro, who was employed by the boss to ride herd over the tappers. Often a veteran tapper, he laid out the estradas and determined which rubber trees should be tapped and which should be allowed to recuperate. He often taught the tappers about the medicinal qualities of various plants, most of which he had learned from the Indians. In many cases, the tappers had intermarried with the Indians, creating another conduit for passing forest lore to this new, hybrid culture.
The Mendes colocação, or collecting area, was called Bom Futuro, Good Future. One family’s colocação was just like another’s, right down to the finest details—and most of these details remain the same today. The family compound is called the centro, the center, and it is indeed the heart of the family’s existence. Everything outside the centro is the rua, the street. (Today, when a tapper ventures into town or a child grows up and moves out, he is said to have gone to the rua.) The compound consists of a rectangular house, called a tapiri, and sometimes a separate shed for animals. The buildings are raised about a yard off the ground. This is not just to avoid flooding but to allow the pigs and chickens to circulate beneath the house. The structures are built of one species of palm tree, the paxiúba.
Paxiúba is a remarkably versatile tree. It produces edible nuts that also can be pressed for oil. But its main value is in construction. The tree became the basis of seringueiro carpentry because nothing more than a machete was required to cut down even a large specimen—and few tappers had much more. The tree’s trunk does not thicken as it nears the ground; instead, it is held up by clublike, thick roots that descend in all directions from about a yard up the trunk. One need only hack at these individual supports for the tall, slim trunk to come crashing down.
The house is built on thick stilts made from sections of tree trunk. A smaller chunk acts as a step leading to the entrance. Almost all the tappers’ homes have an entry that leads into an open room that is a covered veranda. In houses that are more exposed to the elements or that have a bad insect problem, this room is walled in with thin battens of paxiúba, which are produced by splitting a tree trunk, then pounding the fibrous wood flat. When guests stay overnight, this area is often filled with swinging hammocks, strung from the paxiúba rafters. (Hammocks were invented by the Amazonian Indians and have been universally adopted by the tappers, although the husband and wife in a family frequently have a traditional bed in their bedroom.)
The roof is a double layer of palm thatch separated by an air space that keeps the entire roof from rotting when the outside layer gets wet. Also, the wind can sweep in beneath the roof, keeping the house cool. Before the fronds are plaited into mats to make the roof, they are left to dry “until they make noise,” as the tappers say.
Inside, the house is split into several bedrooms and an eating area. The floor is made of half-rounds of small paxiúba saplings, but the sections are never so close that crumbs of manioc flour and rice cannot fall through to the ground below. The kitchen, in a separate wing, has a wood-fired stove made of clay dug from the stream beds. The stove is waist high, and a chimney made of sections of tin cans shunts about half of the smoke from the fire obliquely through the nearby wall. The rest of the smoke rises to the rafters and soon blackens the underside of the thatch. Every kitchen has a wooden platform, called a jirau, that juts out from the house; there, dishes are washed and food is prepared. Water and scraps fall to the ground below. Herbs and scallions are grown near the house in a hollow log, or sometimes an old dugout canoe, that is filled with soil and propped up on stilts to keep the rats and pigs away.
A tapper’s house is something like the surrounding forest. It is an efficient system, designed so that the water dripping from the kitchen or the rice grains falling through the cracks in the floor are not wasted. The water forms a puddle for ducks and a wallow for pigs; the rice is soon gobbled by the ever-present flock of fowl.
Childhood for Chico Mendes was mostly heavy work and, when there was some free time, a little play—kicking a handmade rubber ball or plucking at his father’s guitar. If all of his siblings had lived to adulthood, Chico would have had seventeen brothers and sisters. As it was, conditions were so difficult that by the time he was grown, he was the oldest of six children—four brothers and two sisters. In the more remote rubber estates of Acre, even today it is not uncommon to meet a mother who tells of the loss of more than half her children without batting an eyel
ash. Most of the deaths are ascribed simply to “fever.”
When he was five, Chico began to collect firewood and haul water. A principal daytime occupation of young children on the seringal has always been lugging cooking pots full of water from the nearest river or igarapé—the tappers’ term for the spring-fed streams in the low sections of the rain forest. Another chore was pounding freshly harvested rice to remove the hulls. A double-ended wooden club was plunged into a hollowed section of tree trunk filled with rice grains, like an oversize mortar and pestle. Often two children would pound the rice simultaneously, synchronizing their strokes so that one club was rising as the other descended.
By the time he was nine, Chico was following his father into the forest to learn how to tap. It was important for Chico and his brothers to learn tapping because their father simply could not walk fast enough, with his crippled legs, to tap efficiently. Francisco wanted to let his sons do the tapping so that he could concentrate on tending the beans, rice, and corn that were vital to the family’s existence. So every April, as the estradas began to dry out after the rainy season, the boys would follow their father each day as he made the rounds of the trees.
The Burning Season Page 9