The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  Carneiro tried in vain to continue his traditional ministry, and he continued to attack the activist priests and the growing church and union movement. But increasingly Xapuri’s poor—both the tappers and small farmers—chose to be baptized or married within the base communities, not with Carneiro. The tappers were uniting. Eventually, Carneiro simply ran out of work and returned to Rio Branco.

  The ranchers were also not happy with the church’s new activist stance. Predictably, the new priests started receiving death threats. Destro still had an Italian accent—not a positive attribute now that there was a growing movement to expel foreigners from Xapuri. One day a car pulled up next to him as he was walking down the street; a right-wing candidate for the state legislature was inside. He told Destro to go back to Italy and take his communism with him. Enraged, Destro pulled out his Brazilian identification and yelled that he had just as much a right to be there as his foe.

  The priests were perceived as a threat by the government as well. The mayor of Xapuri abruptly canceled the new priests’ access to the local radio station. Dozens of letters came in from the community asking that the priests be allowed to give the mass over the radio. When Destro and the other activist priest, Claudio Avelline, met with the mayor to discuss the problem, the politician was carrying a bulky, unfamiliar bag. Avelline said, “I bet you have a tape recorder from the Federal Police in that bag.” The stunned mayor admitted it was true. He seemed very depressed and under a lot of pressure, so the priests tried to calm him down, realizing that he was being manipulated by someone else.

  The ranchers tried to push the police to crack down on the church. In 1979, a training session for church monitors in Xapuri was broken up when half a dozen heavily armed men from the Military Police broke down the door. They briefly jailed Destro and Avelline. And Avelline was attacked and beaten while walking down the road a few days later. Destro was confronted by one of Xapuri’s biggest ranchers and told, “We’ve had enough of you people here. We’re going to assemble two or three thousand people in the town square and demand the return of the other priest.” Destro responded, “Okay, call him back. If you’re able to do it, bring Father Carneiro back.” But the ranchers could not find more than a few dozen supporters. The new teachings were taking hold.

  Without the help of the church, it is unlikely that there would now be a rubber tappers movement. The church cultivated leadership and a combative sense of purpose among the isolated forest dwellers. But one other element was required to take them beyond isolated actions such as the first empate: unions. The union movement arrived in Acre in 1974, a year after Moacyr Grechi became bishop. Just as the liberation theology movement had its foot soldiers in priests such as Father Destro, the union movement also required someone to spread the word. For Acre, that person was João Maia.

  Maia was a field delegate for CONTAG, the Confederation of Agricultural Workers. Born in 1968, CONTAG was dedicated to creating unions in rural Brazil. A tall, thirty-five-year-old man with dark hair and a trim mustache, Maia had previously been a seminary student in Canada and Washington, D.C. His mission now was to spend six months setting up unions in the major towns of eastern Acre. He was used to rural conflict, having spent time organizing the sugarcane workers in the northeast.

  He arrived in Rio Branco after an exhausting bus ride from Brasilia. The bus had crossed Mato Grosso and then jostled and bumped its way north and west across Rondônia on BR-364. Rio Branco was beginning to grow, but it was basically a dusty, sleepy Amazonian town. Most of the houses were still raised on wooden stilts. The roads were so bad that the trip from the bus station to the center of town—a distance of little more than 2 miles—required a bone-jarring hour in a bus or one of the few cabs. Maia set up shop in a small yellow stucco building near downtown.

  The idea of a union in Acre was almost unthinkable. The economic history of the Amazon was built from beginning to end on slavery of one sort or another. The ranchers who were busily moving into the state were hostile. The old Acre families who had made their money in the rubber and nut trades were hostile. Anything smacking of human rights or, worse still, land reform had to be done quietly, underground.

  Soon after Maia arrived, the expulsion of the rubber tappers from the seringais reached a peak. Maia and a couple of assistants traveled around the eastern half of the state, learning about the rubber tappers’ problems and building a network of contacts in various towns. Finally, in early 1975, the first union was established in the isolated town of Sena Madureira, about 130 miles northwest of Rio Branco. But it was the second union, in Brasiléia, that became the seed of the broader movement. This was where Chico Mendes began to find his voice.

  Maia moved to Brasiléia in the dry season of 1975 and began giving classes in land rights and union organization to a few rubber tappers. It was extremely difficult to recruit people. Most of the tappers were still locked into the idea that the boss was the boss. And the boss always had the police and the government on his side. No one believed in the potential of organized labor. Maia was frequently attacked by the tappers, who said that union organizing showed a lack of respect. He was also regarded suspiciously as an outsider, having come up from Brasilia, a gangly young man with the intellectual air of a college student. But he simply resolved to become an Acreano. He spent three months hiking around the seringais and small farms, carrying only what fit in a small pack. He continually gave his pitch, emphasizing a few important points. With the help of the church, Maia printed up a little book for the tappers, explaining how they could defend their land.

  First, Brazil’s complex mix of laws and statutes gave tappers and small farmers a right to the land beneath their feet, thanks to the old direito de posse. Second, if the government upheld a rancher’s claim to a tract and insisted on evicting tappers or other legitimate squatters, then the evicted posseiros would have to be compensated with money or land. Finally, and most important, posseiros had the right to defend their land, using force if necessary. In Brazil’s old Civil Code, Article 502 stated, “The landholder has the right to maintain or reinstate his claim through his own force, provided that he does so immediately.” In teaching the tappers these basic rights, CONTAG—and Article 502—gave them the legal basis for their fight and justified the empate.

  The tappers were by now an eager audience, for forest tracts were being incinerated all around eastern Acre. Slowly, they began to trust this outsider. Community leaders, many of them from the church groups established by Grechi’s priests, began taking Maia’s courses. One of them was Chico Mendes. He had quit his teaching job and moved into Xapuri, where he had taken a job as a clerk for the man who had once been the boss of Seringal Cachoeira, Guilherme Zaire. Zaire had always liked Mendes and had always been impressed by his natural intelligence and honesty.

  The union arrived just as Euclides Távora had predicted. He had also foreseen that, initially, the unions would be “yellow”—not independent, but registered and controlled by the government. Távora had told Mendes, “Lenin always said you shouldn’t stay out of a union just because it is yellow. You must join it and use it to organize the grass roots, spread your ideas, and strengthen the movement.” Mendes moved to a small farm in the county of Brasiléia and registered for the first course with Maia and the other organizers. Thanks to his lessons with Távora, Mendes had a head start on the rest of the class and immediately impressed Maia with his knowledge of union philosophy. Maia also noticed qualities about Mendes that set him apart. For one thing, he could read and write at a much higher level than the others. He also had a natural skill as a politician—not so much in oratory, but in his ability to get people talking and acting.

  By the end of 1975, the movement in Brasiléia was sufficiently organized for Maia and the nascent leadership to call an assembly and found the union. Word was sent out to the seringais and farms for the tappers and other rural workers to gather in town on December 12. Because it was the height of the rainy season, Maia, Chico Mendes, and the othe
r unionists did not expect much of a turnout. When nearly a thousand people showed up, it was clear to everyone that a fundamental change was about to occur in Acre. In part because of his political training a decade earlier, and in part because he could read and write so well, Mendes was among the leadership elected that day; he was given the title secretary-general. The founding of the first large union was a dramatic moment in the history of the struggle to save the Amazon. No longer would the ranchers be able to push the tappers away so easily. The invaders would have to fight for the forest.

  Through 1976, the union went through the formative changes and power struggles typical of newborn movements. That things were still in disarray as the dry season arrived was clear by the union’s response to Emiliano when he sought help with Seringal Carmen in May. In 1977, Chico Mendes returned to Xapuri. He had been invited to get into politics by Guilherme Zaire. Zaire was organizing a big push to give the opposition party, MDB, control of the Xapuri town council. Like every other city council around Brazil during the military government, Xapuri’s was controlled by the Arena party, which supported the dictatorship. Zaire convinced Mendes and two other employees to run for council seats representing the MDB and paid for their campaigns. At first, the union leaders in Brasiléia balked at the idea, but Mendes convinced them that it would be easier for him to organize a Xapuri branch of the union if he was a councilman. After a brief campaign, Mendes was elected, along with Zaire’s other two candidates. Soon after, he founded the new union office. The church gave the union a small shed for its headquarters.

  On the town council, the MDB remained in the minority. Arena controlled the group, electing four members. Mendes was never very pragmatic as a politician and always spoke his mind. Often the visitors gallery of the cramped council chambers would empty as he dove into long speeches filled with rhetoric about the rights of tappers. He was ridiculed by the right and even by the other MDB representatives, who opposed his radical ideas. But that did not deter him.

  In 1978, the unions of Xapuri, Brasiléia, Sena Madureira, and other towns in Acre formed a statewide association of rural workers’ unions, which eventually grew to a membership of thirty thousand. The unions could now coordinate their efforts and participate in joint actions. After the empate at Carmen, the unions began to organize more sophisticated operations, some of them involving one, two, or even three hundred tappers, who would march to the scene of reported deforestation and occupy the region, destroying the cutting crews’ shacks and driving them off the land. Often the tappers were forced to leave by the police, who were hired by the ranchers and eagerly beat on the “invaders,” as the ranchers called the tappers.

  As the land boom in Acre accelerated through the end of the 1970s, the rural workers’ unions rose to the task of obstructing the cutting. Soon, the church workers and labor organizers were left behind, and the rubber tappers’ movement began to take an independent, more radical course. Indeed, Mendes and the other tapper leaders often fought with Bishop Grechi and Maia, who preferred to make legal challenges and work within the established—albeit impotent—judicial system.

  Mendes could often be found now in the forests of his youth, recruiting tappers to join the union and participate in empates. To qualify for membership in the Xapuri rural workers’ union, he had to do some agricultural work, so when the town council was not in session, he tapped rubber or harvested nuts. The priest Otavio Destro often traveled with him, hiking those same trails to recruit people for the church groups. Despite a difference in tactics, the union movement and the church movement were clearly complementary. At first, Mendes had a hard time convincing people to join the union, because the ranchers had spread rumors that the whole operation was communist-inspired. But the base communities gave Mendes a structure to build on; there he found people who had become aware of their basic rights and of the possibility of determining their own fate.

  On these forest hikes, Destro noticed qualities in Mendes that he saw in no one else. The main quality was sheer dogged energy. Mendes displayed the unwavering determination that later pushed him into politics as a socialist candidate in a conservative state—against all odds—and then pushed him to fly to foreign countries and lobby against loans from development banks that were threatening Acre’s forests. And it was this same doggedness that pushed him—perhaps too far—to harass the men who were threatening his life and work. Mendes had also retained certain qualities of the seringueiro that were crucial to garnering support with the isolated rubber tappers. He had a quiet style that appealed to the tappers—perhaps because they lived in a silent realm, where often the loudest sound was a Brazil nut pod’s thud on the forest floor.

  When Mendes first arrived in a seringal, he would not immediately call a meeting. He would walk up to the house of an individual tapper and sit for a while. After taking a tin cup of water, he would ask the tapper about his life, his situation. Mendes would play with the children as he sat, admiring the construction of the house or the quality of the manioc growing nearby. He would try to learn about that one tapper’s problems. Then he would go to another colocação and collect more information. Only after he had personally gained the trust of each tapper would he start talking about the union, about organizing, about resistance.

  Destro admired Mendes’s approach, which was so natural that it was not really an approach at all; it was simply Mendes’s nature. This personal style was very different from that of the priests, who would make an announcement over the radio and gather a hundred people or so, then eventually put someone in charge who had the makings of a leader. In this way, Mendes won over the whole of Xapuri.

  But Chico Mendes’s effectiveness also increasingly made him a target. Although he was quiet, he would freely denounce anyone who posed a threat to the forest. This began to irk Xapuri’s ranchers, who swore that Mendes would have to go. But Mendes displayed a remarkable skill for avoiding trouble. As Destro described it, “Chico had the wisdom of the Indian and the guile of the Indian, so it was difficult for a rancher to catch him in the forest.” Mendes needed all the wisdom and guile he could muster.

  Chapter 8

  The Wild West

  MANY OF THE RANCHERS who moved into Acre in the 1970s were not bad men. They simply had a different way of measuring the potential of a tract of land from that used by the people who already lived there. A rubber tapper or Indian might take days to survey a patch of forest, checking the springs, counting Brazil nut and rubber trees, buriti and paxiúba palms, and other useful species. When someone from the new ranching class looked at the same forest, he saw the trees only as a costly impediment that had to be knocked down and burned. The springs could be dammed to make ponds. The giant trees could be sliced into fence posts and siding for houses. Most of the land’s value lay in the soil, not in the tangle of wild vegetation that grew on it.

  In Brazil, the ranching culture had a certain sense of manifest destiny. The ranchers were the agricultural bandeirantes, pioneers, who were leading the country toward its new status as a major exporter of food. They spoke proudly of the natural progression in Brazil as a new region was settled. Cattle always came first because pasture was easy to create on almost any terrain and the product, beef, carried itself to market. After cattle came agriculture, particularly the farming of grains and beans, and after that, industry and services—and the end of the frontier.

  These new arrivals had been raised on the rolling grasslands of Rio Grande do Sul or Minas Gerais, the rich uplands of São Paulo state or the deforested plains of Paraná (which five decades earlier had been Brazil’s forested agricultural frontier). They had come because they had outgrown their holdings in the south or because land there was now too expensive. Their goal was to raise beef cattle, and cattle needed pasture. Beef was so central to their existence that they even calculated the price of land in terms of pounds of beef; with Brazil’s growing inflation, it was best to use some measure that changed with the value of the currency. Twenty-six pounds of beef per
acre was a good price in 1975. Because of Acre’s reputation for relatively fertile soil, the state was truly perceived as a “new Canaan,” just as its governors had described it.

  When the ranchers first found that their new possessions were occupied by seringueiros, they were puzzled. Many of them had never heard of seringueiros before. When they saw how these men lived—scratching tree bark and carving out small clearings, only to abandon them—they scoffed. The tappers were considered a pathetic atavism, unaware of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that would allow them to farm the same plot of land in perpetuity. There was bound to be conflict between this new culture that sought sunny pastureland and the entrenched culture of the rubber tappers, who craved the shade of the canopy. Soon enough, the ranchers’ puzzlement and derision gave way to consternation; finally, as more empates were staged and cutting crews turned back, consternation gave way to outrage.

  Once the land rush of the 1970s accelerated, the tappers and peasant farmers constituted little more than an inconvenience that had to be removed from the land along with the weeds and trees. When a rancher was confronted by a forest full of recalcitrant tappers, he had only a few options. He could negotiate with them, and some did, offering parcels of forested land in return for the right to cut down other tracts. He could use the tricks of the grileiro, faking titles, destroying conflicting titles, and the like; some did that also. Or he could use violence, intimidation, and extortion. For many ranchers, this was the most expedient solution.