The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  Besides flooding a chunk of forest the size of Rhode Island, the reservoir displaced several Indian tribes and six villages. The filmmaker Adrian Cowell was there when the dam began to fill. During the filming, something happened that has haunted him ever since—one of those little incidents in the Amazon that are tiny reflections of a greater tragedy. Cowell had hired an underwater cinematographer to shoot some footage inside a church that was disappearing beneath the rising lake, along with the rest of an abandoned village. All that showed was the roof and the spire. As Cowell recalled it, “The only thing that made it into the film was the floating pews, but during the shoot, the diver saw a cat that had climbed up in the rafters above where the water had already reached. Imagine what it must have been like for that poor cat. The water was steadily rising, higher and higher. There was nowhere to go but up. The cat was starving, hardly more than a skeleton. And then, when they tried to rescue it, imagine what it saw: a man with this mask and oxygen tanks and all. The cat dove into the water and paddled frantically away, then paddled out into the open lake,” he said. They lost sight of it on the dappled surface. “Surely it must have drowned.”

  Just as the biological complexity of the Amazon had confounded generations of biologists, its fragile maze of intertwined causes and effects had confounded Brazil’s planners. All of the government’s projects resulted in little more than the destruction of great tracts of forest. Few families benefited. Nationwide, long after the military government began its great program to integrate the country geographically and economically, Brazilian society was more divided than ever. Through the period of the junta, Brazil’s policies satisfied the goals of the military, industrial, and agricultural elite, with almost no regard for the overwhelming majority of the population. As the economy accelerated, fueled by loans from abroad and incentives for the rich, the plight of the average Brazilian grew dramatically worse. The gulf between rich and poor widened until it could not be crossed.

  Before the coup of 1964, the wealthiest 5 percent of the population earned 28 percent of the national income, while the poorest 50 percent earned only 17 percent. Although this imbalance was enormous, the situation twenty-five years later was worse. By 1980, at the height of the military’s power, the income of Brazil’s richest 5 percent rose to 34 percent of the national total while the income of the poorest half dropped to 12 percent. As a small piece of Brazil vaulted into the First World, the remainder stayed locked in Third World poverty. While skyscrapers soared over the bustling downtowns of Rio and São Paulo, a third of all the homes in the nation still lacked plumbing.

  Brazil’s grandiose strategy for occupying the Amazon also failed to take into account an important fact: the forest was already occupied. Thousands of Indians, ribeirinhos, tappers, Brazil nut gatherers, and other groups had been living and working in the forest for decades, some whose cultures dated back centuries. As the roads chewed farther into the forest, carrying cattle and land-hungry people, the inevitable result was violent conflict. Of all the forest dwellers, the Indians suffered the most. As the military government of the 1960s studied the Amazon, it looked on Indian occupants as nothing more than an inconvenience. “Only when we are sure,” explained one general, “that every corner of the Amazon is settled by real Brazilians, and not Indians, will we be able to say that the Amazon belongs to us.”

  For the Indians, the occupation of the Amazon was simply an acceleration of the wave of murder and disease that had swept the indigenous Brazilians for four and a half centuries. Between 1511 and 1650, most of the Indian population in the region around São Paulo—estimated by some at more than a million—was either slaughtered outright or enslaved to work in the brazilwood trade and on the sugarcane plantations. The colonial economy was so dependent on this labor that when, in 1639, Pope Urban VIII threatened to excommunicate any Brazilian colonist who enslaved an Indian, the Jesuits were run out of town in São Paulo and a riot at the Jesuit college in Rio nearly resulted in the deaths of several priests. In the 1700s, so-called punitive expeditions ventured into the interior with the sole intent of destroying the Indians. They were followed by bandeirantes, who fanned out from São Paulo into the hinterlands to take slaves and expand the Portuguese holdings. And this was only the vanguard.

  Subsequent waves of miners, slavers, coffee barons, rubber barons, and finally ranchers resulted in a toll that far exceeds even the slaughter in North America. The Indians were considered little more than bichos do mato, beasts of the forest. The rubber trade was as devastating to the Indians as any of the other inducements that brought white men into the forest. In some areas, the Indians were forced to tap the rubber trees. The most notorious example was in Peru, where tens of thousands of Indians along the Putumayo River were forced to harvest rubber for a British company and were tortured or killed if they lagged or fled. Skirmishes often erupted between rubber tappers and Indians—with a killing requiring a reprisal and vice versa. (It was only through the efforts of Chico Mendes and the leaders of Brazil’s burgeoning Indian rights movement in the late 1980s that the rubber tappers and Indians improved their relations and forged the Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest. They agreed that the new wave of ranchers and miners flooding the Amazon posed a common threat that far outweighed their old animosity.)

  Wherever white men went in Brazil, Indians who were not intentionally murdered succumbed. Sometimes the cause was disease; the Indians had no natural immunity to influenza, measles, and other infections carried by the civilizados, the white newcomers. And the spread of disease was not always an accident. There are various reports, some from this century, that clothing was taken from smallpox victims and strung along Indian trails as a diabolical gift. At other times, the Indians simply were victims of cultural murder—called ethnocide by anthropologists—as merchants and missionaries ensnared them in the Western net of commerce, religion, and alcohol.

  Not until 1910 did the Brazilian republic make its first effort to limit these abuses. The Indian Protection Service was anything but comprehensive; initiated by Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, it was mainly a one-man show. Rondon was born on the edge of the Amazon, in Cuiabá, and led acclaimed expeditions into virgin parts of the territory now named Rondônia in his honor. Rondon insisted that the Indian tribes he contacted along the way be approached slowly and dealt with humanely. His trailblazing teams of sertanistas became renowned for their ability to establish relations with reclusive tribes. Their motto was: “Die if necessary, but never kill.” Many did die and, until 1930, no Indians were killed.

  When Getúlio Vargas came to power that year, Rondon was forced out, and the Indian Protection Service was soon transformed into a tool of the white settlers. By the 1960s, it was widely known that the agency was participating in Indian massacres. In 1968, an investigation into reported atrocities produced testimony alleging that the “protection” service had helped to poison Indian children, infect tribes with diseases, and force Indian women into prostitution.

  The Indian Protection Service was abolished and replaced by FUNAI, which was headed by military men; its mandate was to incorporate the Indians into Brazilian society and the economy. But it was run under the Ministry of the Interior, whose motto—“Security and development”—succinctly expressed its antipathy toward the goals of the Indians. FUNAI soon became nearly as corrupt as its predecessor, and Indians who were deemed to be making “unproductive” use of their land were often shifted into villages set up by FUNAI. They were put to work, with their income going to the agency, which supposedly returned the funds to Indian projects. In fact, the money often went to feed FUNAI’s own bureaucracy.

  Through the twentieth century, the decimation of the Indians continued. As late as 1900, almost half of Brazil’s Indians had not yet been exposed to whites. As the southern frontiers expanded and the forests disappeared, dozens of tribes were massacred. The Brazilian anthropologist Alcida Ramos projected that by 1989, only three or four large groups of Indians had not been cont
acted. Since 1900, it is estimated that eighty-seven Indian groups have become extinct. Out of the five million Indians who were estimated to have inhabited the territory now called Brazil when Cabral landed in 1500, some 213,000 remained as of 1989, with most of them living in the Amazon. Two states now officially record no Indian residents, and the state of Rio de Janeiro, once occupied by many coastal tribes, now is said to have thirty-four Indians. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss recounted in Tristes Tropiques, “In 1918, the maps of the state of São Paulo, which is as big as France, showed it as being two-thirds ‘unknown territory inhabited only by Indians’; by the time I arrived in 1935 there was not a single Indian left, apart from a few families who used to come to the Santos beaches on Sundays to sell so-called curios.”

  Even as the 1980s ended, pressure on the remaining Indians continued to mount. The army moved ahead with plans for a sweeping 4,000-mile-long military zone along Brazil’s northern borders—the so-called Northern Trench—which would entail canceling the demarcation of Indian lands along the border and encouraging “white settlers” to occupy the land. Brazil’s unprecedented gold rush, which brought several hundred thousand freelance miners into the Amazon, resulted in the invasion of more than two dozen Indian reserves.

  One of the most horrifying recent examples of the abuse of the Indians involves the Ticuna tribe, which has lived along the Solimões River deep in Amazonas since the 1600s. The Ticuna had been the victims of unprovoked attacks by timber crews, who were hired to cut valuable mahogany trees—worth as much as $12,000 each—on Indian territory. On March 28, 1988, about a hundred Ticuna had come into the town of Tabatinga for a meeting. While they were waiting for a FUNAI official to arrive, a gang of timber workers appeared and opened fire. According to Amnesty International, fourteen Indians were killed, including four children under the age of ten. Ten of the victims were shot as they attempted to flee by canoe; their bodies drifted downstream and were never recovered.

  For centuries, Brazil’s Indians fought such attacks, but as many tribes approached extinction, they began to modify their tactics. Violence sometimes proved effective in the short run, frightening the white settlers or driving them from Indian territory; but inevitably they returned, usually with the government on their side. As small farmers and ranchers moved into Rondônia, for example, the Zoró tribe, considered the best archers in the region, went to war on three fronts, attacking the ranchers who had invaded Indian territory from the east and west and fighting two other Indian tribes that had been pushed into their territory when white settlers advanced from the south.

  By the mid-1970s, the Indians had put down their weapons and come under FUNAI’s control, moving to a reservation between two rivers. But in August 1985, when they learned that much of their territory was being invaded by still more settlers, they waged one last, brief war. Gilio Brunelli, an anthropologist who was with the tribe at the time, described what happened in the Cultural Survival Quarterly: “On Monday, August 26, 1985, forty Zoró warriors, adorned with red and black dye, macaw and sparrow hawk feather crowns and black necklaces across their breasts, armed themselves with shotguns, bows and arrows, knives and machetes, left the village and disappeared into the bush. They won their first battle, and seized three whites who were brought back to the village to be kept as hostages.” They went out again in search of more captives, but three days later returned forlorn, realizing that there were far too many whites already established on their land. They released the prisoners and surrendered to their fate.

  More recently, the Indians changed their target. Several times, hundreds of Indians, painted for war and wielding spears, clubs, and the weapon of the 1980s activist—the video camera—took the long bus ride to Brasilia to contest government plans that would further reduce their rights and lands. Created in 1979, the Union of Indigenous Nations grew into a powerful lobby with influence in Brazil’s Congress. The Indians also flew representatives to the United States, where they were welcomed by American congressmen and in the offices of the World Bank and other international lenders.

  The rubber tappers were better off than the Indians with whom they shared the forest; after all, they were white, could resist Western diseases, and spoke Portuguese. But the ranchers had the potential to annihilate their culture and drive them from their land. Just as the Indians found strength in united action, so too did the tappers. As the roads moved north and west, the tappers also began to resist the tide of destruction that threatened to destroy the forest. Along with the Indians, they found allies in the Catholic church and Brazil’s free trade union movement, which was expanding as the military loosened its hold slightly on the country. All the tappers wanted was the right to live on the land they had called home for generations and the right to work within the intact, healthy forest. As Jaime da Silva Araújo, a tapper leader from Amazonas, put it, “The roads bring destruction under a mask called progress. Let us put this progress where the land has already been deforested, where it is idle of labor and where we have to find people work. ... But let us leave those who want to live in the forest, who want to keep it as it is. We have nothing written. I don’t have anything that was created in somebody’s office. There is no philosophy. It is just the real truth.”

  The tappers would have to fight to preserve that truth.

  Chapter 7

  The Fight for the Forest

  THE COLUMN of two dozen rubber tappers came upon the chain saw crew after hiking through an abandoned seringal for an hour. The area, several miles from Xapuri, used to be Seringal Nova Esperança, the Rubber Estate New Hope. Now it was called Fazenda Nova Esperança, the New Hope Ranch. Earlier, they had passed the disintegrating shack of a rubber tapper who had long since moved into town, now that a rancher owned the land. The thatch roof of the shack had come undone, and the plaited fronds chattered in the wind.

  Cumulus clouds were piling up in the afternoon heat, and thunder rumbled across the sky, but the chance of rain was slim. It was September 1989, well into the dry season; even the low sections of the trail, once muddy, were now hard, like fired clay. The ground was pocked with deep hoofprints where cattle had ventured into the rain forest in search of fodder.

  The tappers heard the chain saws first. The whine of the revving motors carried for quite a distance through the dense, low forest cover—the secondary growth called capoeira. This area had already been cut once, probably a decade earlier from the look of the wild tangle of growth that is only seen where the canopy has been ripped away and there is plenty of sun. The tappers were convinced that the rancher who had hired the crew, a young paulista named Marcos Carvalho Costa Filho, nicknamed Junior, was having them cut 700 acres illegally.

  Earlier that same day, Dalmo Rufino, a forestry official, had gone out to the ranch by boat. A chunky man who did not take well to exertion, Rufino did not hike into the forest and so concluded that all was in order. The tappers, therefore, had decided to do his inspecting for him, and now they had come to empatar the cutting —quite simply, to stop it. They knew that the rancher did not have a permit; without one he could only cut 120 acres. No one was surprised by the violation: Junior and his father had developed a bad reputation among the tappers. In 1981, when the Costas had offered cash to 127 tappers to leave another seringal they had taken over, the tappers refused to budge. The Costas then sent in the police, who had the tappers arrested.

  Nine months after the murder of Chico Mendes, the empate— the essential element in the struggle to save the Amazon rain forest —was still alive and well. The empate was an instinctive, defensive reaction of the people who had lived in the forest for generations to the occupation of their land by outsiders intent on destruction. To the rubber tappers, it did not matter if the newcomers, these paulista ranchers, had valid or fraudulent titles. It did not matter if they were offering cash or brandishing shotguns. What mattered was that the tappers had a claim to the forest trails that was more fundamental than any piece of paper, and they were not about to
give it up.

  In a way, the empate was the ultimate expression of Brazil’s ancient direito de posse. Acreanos and nordestinos have a very different definition of empate from people in the southern, sophisticated part of Brazil—and from Portuguese dictionaries. Indeed, most press accounts concerning Chico Mendes have misinterpreted empate, using the standard meaning of standoff or draw, as in a stalemated chess match. Rubber tappers staging an empate have no intention of settling for a stalemate; their goal is to stop, to prevent, to drive the ranchers and their workers out.

  The column of tappers—both men and women—was led by the lanky, loping, wolflike form of Raimundo de Barros, Chico Mendes’s cousin and the treasurer of the National Council of Rubber Tappers. Right behind him was the slim, round-headed figure of Júlio Barbosa de Aquino. Barbosa, whose father had taught Euclides Távora how to tap rubber trees, had been voted president of the rubber tappers’ council at its first meeting after the death of Chico Mendes. The other tappers had come into Xapuri for a meeting designed to attract new members to the cooperative. One of them had walked through the night for fourteen hours, with only a two-hour break for a nap. Three people on the empate were political and union activists from Rio Branco. Also on hand was Gomercindo Rodrigues, a thirty-one-year-old agronomist and firebrand who had worked closely with Mendes since 1986. Rodrigues was the only person from outside the Amazon who was strong enough to outpace a tapper on an all-day hike. His long legs, fast feet, and short goatee were a familiar sight on seringais throughout eastern Acre, and his hot temper and combative tone made him a prime target of the ranchers’ gunmen.

  The trail straggled out of the forest and into a field bristling with lopped-off saplings and bamboo spears that required careful footwork. The field needed to dry out a bit more; then it would be ready for burning. Up ahead were two laborers, each wielding a Stihl 051 AVE chain saw weighing 40 pounds. The saws had an aggressive look, with the hand guard shielding the blade studded with jagged projections designed to grip the tree trunk as it bit in.