The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  The trade in rubber and nuts had for a century sapped the state, enslaving its people and leaving little behind. In 1970, Acre had a lower per-capita income than any other part of Brazil, including the rest of the Amazon. The state had no infrastructure. Even the capital, Rio Branco, had few paved roads. Electricity was spotty at best. Television would not arrive for four more years, even though the rest of Brazil was already watching soccer matches and soap operas. No bridge crossed the Acre River where it bisected Rio Branco. It was only natural for a politician to call for growth.

  Dantas had at least learned a lesson from Rondônia’s development policies. The last thing he wanted was grand colonization schemes that would attract poor farmers and peasants from the rest of Brazil. (The disastrous results were already visible in Rondônia when he took office, even though the worst was still to come.) Instead, Dantas wanted big business to come to Acre. He convinced the state legislature to pass a law encouraging the development of cattle ranching as the state’s “basic economic activity.” An intensive public relations campaign was aimed at the same paulista businessmen who were the target of the federal government’s Amazon development plans. According to the government radar survey of 1964, RADAM, in contrast to the rest of the Amazon, most of the soil of Acre was relatively fertile—the “filet mignon of the Amazon,” according to the promotional literature. One advertisement described the state as “a new Canaan, without the droughts of the Northeast or the frosts of Paraná.”

  Almost before the graders had finished smoothing the packed-dirt surface of Acre’s new link to the south, Dantas was calling for the construction of a new road westward to Peru and on to the Pacific coast. He knew what this would mean for Acre. After all, Rio Branco was just 500 miles from the Peruvian port of Callao. In contrast, it was a winding, 2,000-mill voyage down the Amazon to the Atlantic or an equally long truck ride to the industrial ports of the south. His dream was to make Acre into an agro-industrial center that would ship fresh-frozen beef products to Japan. Dantas’s slogan was: “Produce in Acre, Invest in Acre, Export to the Pacific.” That call would be echoed by every governor to follow, including Flaviano Melo, who was elected to office in 1986; he approached the Japanese to seek funding for the road, raising the ire of American legislators and environmentalists.

  Dantas’s efforts paid off. Companies and individual ranchers came by the hundreds, grabbing up both unclaimed land and land with titles held by Acre’s rubber barons. When Dantas began his term, 75 percent of Acre was still terra devoluta, unclaimed public land. By the time he left office, virtually all of that land had been claimed by investors from the south; and most of what was previously claimed had been sold and then resold, with profits from the sales exceeding any money that might have been made with cattle. In Dantas’s term, the prices of land along Acre’s roads jumped a hundredfold, in some places rising from 25 cents to $25 an acre.

  The rubber barons had all sorts of titles, many dating from when Acre was part of Bolivia. Many were not formal titles, but deeds granting the right to tap trees or harvest nuts. (After all, until the 1970s, it had always been the trees that had worth in the Amazon, not the land itself. Only with the invasion from Brazil’s south did the land suddenly assume value.) And many titles were blatant forgeries. The grileiros, land grabbers, who had refined the art of fraud in the south and then in Mato Grosso and Pará, had a new frontier to conquer. Despite the weakness of the titles, even the flimsiest documents were grabbed up in the speculative fever that raged in Acre. It was the perfect real estate market. The ranchers were eager buyers, and the rubber barons were eager sellers.

  In the center of the state, entire river valleys were acquired by rich businessmen, most from the south. Within a decade of Dantas’s inauguration, 28,125 square miles, almost half of the state’s territory, was in the hands of ten landowners. Pedro Aparecido Dotto headed the list, with a tract of 9,370 square miles, an area slightly larger than New Hampshire. The smallest of the top ten parcels was owned by a seringalista turned federal senator, Altevir Leal; he had to make do with a tract that was slightly smaller than Rhode Island. Much of this land remained undeveloped, for the investors were happy to sit and wait for BR-364 to eat its way across the state, raising property values and providing them with a route to markets for their beef or produce.

  The most intensive cutting and burning began along BR-317, the road from Rio Branco to Xapuri, which was gouged out of the forest between 1971 and 1973. The familiar pattern persisted: a road appeared, land values skyrocketed, and, to reinforce flimsy claims, the forests were cut down and cattle put out on the still-smoldering pasture. Most of the seringais in this region were sold to small, independent ranchers who wanted to solidify their claims in a hurry. The change was quick indeed. Between 1970 and 1985, the number of head of cattle in the county of Xapuri jumped from 7,000 to 52,000.

  It is not surprising, therefore, that the fight for the forest began here. Just as the rubber tappers on these seringais were relishing the prospect of freedom from rent and debt and cheating, they were confronted with the new “owners” of their land. The ranchers had no intention of harvesting rubber. And they had no intention of allowing the tappers to stay on the property, no matter what squatter’s rights they might have under Brazilian law. In the Amazon, law meant little. As a federal minister in Brasilia put it in 1973, “The Amazon is still in the bandit stage. It is only later that the sheriff will be required.”

  Just as the tappers spoke of “cleaning” their estradas, the ranchers now spoke of “cleaning” their land. But where the tappers were talking about cutting vines and undergrowth, the ranchers meant driving out people—by any means necessary. Cattle were ranged right through the fields of the tappers and peasant farmers. Soon their huts were being set on fire along with the surrounding forest. Thousands of people began to flee to seringais in Bolivia. Others abandoned the countryside altogether and moved into the growing favelas ringing Rio Branco and Xapuri. But some decided to stand and fight.

  The handful of rubber tappers who staged the first empate, on May 9,1976, still remember the encounter vividly. The tappers lived on Seringal Carmen, near Brasiléia; the town is on the border with Bolivia, 35 miles southwest of Xapuri on BR-317, the red dirt road that arcs along the southern flank of Acre. A rancher nicknamed Coronel Chicão, who even today is often fingered by tappers as one of the masterminds of the violence against their leaders, had bought Carmen and sent out engineers to survey the land. Acre’s rubber tappers by then were angry and restless; word of the ranchers’ tactics for “cleaning” land was rapidly spreading. In some cases, tappers and their families were being rounded up at gunpoint, loaded with their belongings onto a boat, and taken downstream. As one rubber tapper recalled it, the gunmen would say, “We are going downriver. When you see a beach you like, we’ll drop you there. That will be your new land.” The tappers, fearing the worst, would eventually point to the bank and say, “This beach here looks fine.”

  Chicão’s surveying crew walked out of the forest into the clearing at the colocação of a young tapper named Emiliano and began marking trees. When Emiliano asked one of the strangers for an explanation, he was told that the new owner planned to convert this forest into pasture. Later that day, Emiliano hiked into Brasiléia to see if the new rural workers’ union there could tell him what to do. But the union had been formed just five months earlier. Unions were a novelty in the Amazon, where, traditionally, bosses were always masters and workers were always slaves. The union could not yet help, but Emiliano was warned, “If they start to cut the trees, you’re going to lose your rights to the land.” A tapper with no title would not have much of a case against a rancher who could show he was putting the land to “productive” use, Amazon style.

  Back at the seringal, through the dependable links of radio cipó, Emiliano learned when the rancher’s work crew was going to begin cutting down the trees. The night before, he met with five or six friends, and secretly they set out to stop the r
ancher. All that night, they covered the maze of forest trails, stopping at each colocação. Emiliano and Cicero Gaudino, one of the few tappers with red hair, gave speeches, trying to recruit other tappers to help empatar the rancher. “Companheiro, wake up,” Gaudino said. “If you lose this land you’re going to have to move to the town, and then you’ll have nothing.”

  Before dawn, they had gathered twenty-seven men. Armed with shotguns, they marched through the forest to confront the work crew. The tappers moved cautiously. There were some sixty-four men in the cutting crew, and Tonhão, the gato, stood six feet six inches tall and usually carried a pistol. The tappers were more accustomed to aiming their weapons at wild pigs and deer than human beings, but they were ready to kill, if need be, to protect the trees. In the half light just before sunrise, they circled Tonhão’s hut. Emiliano told the gato to come out. “We are all armed,” he yelled. “We are only a few people, but if you cross here, somebody is going to get killed.” Wanting no trouble, Tonhão and his crew quickly gathered up their things and left the forest.

  The tappers staged a brief victory celebration but then worried about revenge. For eight days they camped in the forest, guarding the two paths into Seringal Carmen. But the only people who came were government officials, who wanted to work out a compromise between the tappers, with their squatter’s rights, and the rancher, who apparently had a título quente, a hot title, one that had some validity. The clearly fraudulent titles held by land-grabbing grileiros were considered título frio, cold titles, with little value.

  Despite the immediate success of the empate at Carmen, the results in the end were hardly a compromise. At an eight-hour meeting with the ranch manager and government officials, forty tapper families lost their colocações, which averaged 700 acres, and were given new plots of land of 70 acres apiece, much of it already deforested. These families, who for so many years had walked the shaded trails of the rain forest, were forced to adapt to a new livelihood, farming in the full glare of the tropical sun.

  Emiliano missed the life in the forest but could not possibly have returned. One year after the spontaneous empate, his old colocação —which had been called Nova Vida, New Life, and had held more than five hundred rubber trees—was transformed into sun-baked pasture. Even after the tappers were moved to the small plots, their troubles did not end. In 1977, the rancher was using an airplane to sow grass seed, and the hardy, weedy capim grass invaded the tappers’ fields. Another time, the rancher was deforesting an area near their holdings and used his plane to spray the herbicide Tordon. Emiliano later claimed to have lost thousands of manioc plants to the weedkiller. And the chemical made many of the tappers sick.

  The lesson of Carmen was that an isolated empate by a few tappers on one seringal was only a brief deterrent to the destruction of the rain forest. The power of the ranchers could only be overcome with a much broader, more organized effort. It would take an alliance of three forces—the independent tappers of eastern Acre, the church, and the union movement—to slow the advancing fires.

  In Acre’s capital, Rio Branco, the way the buildings are placed clearly reflects the balance of power in the Amazon. The center of town sweeps uphill from the Acre River, where lopsided, makeshift shanties cluster on the crumbling banks. The government palace is near the top of the slope, just below the Plaza of the Seringueiro. Flanking the park just downhill from this imposing structure are the gray modern offices of the big banks that have financed much of the recent growth in the region. The Tribunal of Justice, the state supreme court, is tucked on a side street—an accurate portrayal of the minimal role that the courts have played in the Amazon.

  Across a plaza from the governor’s palace is the castellated, blocks-long fortress of the Military Police—one of the largest structures in the city. That is fitting, because the military still holds most of the power in the Amazon. The building is whitewashed and trimmed in bright blue. The soldiers of this police force, which grew dramatically after the coup of 1964, far outnumber the federal and local police officers. Even now, five years after Brazil’s return to civilian rule, when people are asked why a military police presence remains even in the smallest Amazon town, no one has a good answer. That is just the way it is, the way it has always been. Many Brazilians talk of their society as being inherently divided into two cultures: civilian and military.

  But there is a counterweight to the military presence. On the other side of the government palace, on the highest knoll in town, is the Cathedral of Nossa Senhora de Nazaré, and it towers over all the rest of the city’s buildings. Brazil is overwhelmingly Catholic, a fact that reverberates throughout the society, from its strict laws prohibiting abortion to its innumerable saint’s days to Carnaval, the world’s most extravagant celebration of the feast before Lent.

  Beneath the steep, peaked roof of this cathedral and those of the smaller churches on the town plazas of Xapuri and Brasiléia, the nascent organization of rubber tappers gained much-needed shelter, guidance, and sustenance. In the early 1970s, a large faction in the church began to preach social justice to its minions. That effort was led in eastern Acre by Dom Moacyr Grechi, who was ordained bishop of the prelacy of the Acre and Purus river valleys in 1973. He was perhaps the palest man in Acre, with waxy skin, thin hair that he slicked back, and an accountant’s slouch and spectacles; the overall effect was absolutely the opposite of his true nature.

  Grechi was one of the Amazon’s leading proponents of the “liberation theology” that had swept South America since 1968, when a conference of bishops in Colombia called for the church to devote itself to bettering the lot of the poor. The bishops vowed to return to their dioceses and “awaken in men and in nations a living awareness of justice.” For the church of Brazil, which a century earlier had been tightly allied with the elite, it was a dramatic change.

  The church soon became a haven for anyone hoping to effect change. It was a social “refugium” of sorts, not unlike the biological refugia to which the many species of the Amazon rain forest retreated when a harsher climate drifted over the region. Virtually all other liberal institutions had been suppressed. Only two political parties were allowed: Arena, the party of the establishment, and MDB, the government-approved “opposition.” The press was heavily censored. Student movements were brutally squashed. Unions were tightly controlled by the government, and activists were jailed and tortured.

  The church worked on two fronts: the urban slums and the countryside. Outlying regions such as the Amazon, with widely dispersed communities, presented novel challenges to anyone who wanted to organize and instruct the masses. In the early 1970s, the church began setting up “Christian base communities,” groups of rural settlers who met weekly for Bible study and political indoctrination that played up the parallels between the struggles of Christ and those faced by the poor in Brazil. In Acre, most of the members were rubber tappers.

  As the junta began its policy of abertura, opening, that was meant to lead the country back to democratic rule, the church became more aggressive. Its growing involvement with rural conflicts was acknowledged formally in 1975 with the creation of the Pastoral Commission on Land, which has grown into an internationally respected source of information on human rights abuses and violence in the Brazilian countryside. This commission’s annual body count of murdered peasants, priests, activist lawyers, and union organizers became a chilling barometer of the intensity of Brazil’s land conflicts as the numbers rose steadily through the 1970s and then jumped by a factor of ten in the 1980s.

  The base communities were organized by lay workers and a scattering of priests—priests were (and still are) in short supply—who were sturdy enough to withstand the hardships of tropical life and the lengthy hikes through the forest that were usual on the seringal. An important objective of the organizers was to identify potential leaders who could be cultivated into self-sustaining monitors for the forest communities. Júlio Barbosa de Aquino, Osmarino Amâncio Rodrigues, and almost all of the other
men and women who went on to lead the rubber tappers began their activism as monitors for the church. And Chico Mendes—who by the mid-1970s was so busy building a union that he had no time to participate in the church’s work—maintained a close relationship with the priests who organized the base communities around Xapuri and nearby towns.

  One of the priests was Otavio Destro, who was raised and ordained in Italy, then moved to the grimy concrete jungle of São Paulo to minister to the poor. In 1975, Father Destro was sent up to the Amazon to help establish Acre’s base communities. He was of the same order as Bishop Grechi, the Servos de Maria, an Italian order begun in the thirteenth century by seven wealthy Italian noblemen who gave up their fortunes and worked for the poor. The church had long before given this order the prelacy of the Acre and Purus rivers. Its first goal was to become familiar with the problems of the underclass in the countryside. Destro was based at the cathedral in Rio Branco but spent most of each month wandering the trails and cruising the rivers around eastern Acre, returning to town at the end of the month for a few days to let his feet rest.

  Destro often passed through Xapuri, where the current priest, Father Carneiro, resented these newcomers and openly attacked the activist swing of the church. Carneiro was closely allied with the emerging power brokers, the ranchers moving into the region. There were persistent claims that he was an informer for the National Information Service. He was convinced that the base communities were inspired by communists: “religion for people with no faith” was his description of liberation theology. Despite this opposition, Destro and the other new priests were able to create ninety base communities on the seringais. One of the movement’s central teachings, which probably accounted for its popularity, was that the existing social order—with a few very rich and many very poor—was in no way the will of God. If they acted together, the poor could force a radical change in the system through land reform and justice.