The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  It was not difficult to have land “cleaned” of tappers or peasant farmers. Plenty of men had come to the region as outlaws, attracted to the anarchy of this tropical frontier just as a previous generation of outlaws had found a haven in the American West. These men were a different sort of Amazon pioneer—people who had fled to the frontier. For them, the Amazon was a “refugium” from the law. It is often possible to tell what is significant to a culture by examining the richness of the vocabulary used to describe a kind of person or object. For instance, it is said that Tahitians have thirty different words for “coconut,” and Eskimos have as many different words for “snow.” In the Amazon, there is a rich assortment of words for “hired killer,” among them pistoleiro, capanga, and jagunço.

  If a rancher—even a relatively civilized one—was having trouble “cleaning” his property, he need only hire a few of these professional thugs and the job would be done for him. Many such killers were imported from southern states such as Mato Grosso. Soon, this renegade breed established a new level of violence in the rain forest. At the height of the rubber boom, there had certainly been some vicious seringalistas and bosses, but the merchants could not afford to treat their tappers too badly because there was always a chronic shortage of labor in the forest. The ranchers had no such inhibitions.

  One of the earliest documented incidents occurred in 1973, when a rancher named Benedito Tavares do Couto brought in a gang of pistoleiros to clear two hundred rubber tappers from Seringal Riozinho. Other pistoleiros were hired to intimidate the tappers of Seringal Carmen (where the first empate was later staged). In 1974, a grileiro who had laid claim to a large forest tract just outside Rio Branco wanted to sell it to ranchers but could get a better price if it was emptied of settlers. He brought in some thugs, but this time there was resistance. A squatter named Raul Veras shot and killed one of the grileiro’s employees and wounded another.

  By the time Father Destro and João Maia arrived in Acre, it was common to hike into a seringal and find that several rubber tappers’ homes had been burned to the ground. Sometimes the violence was more spontaneous. Destro was in Brasiléia one day when blood was spilled at the produce market. A rancher had bought a seringal and had bought most of the colocações from the tappers. But one tapper had refused to sell. When he went to the public market to sell some fruit, the rancher saw him and chased him across the crowded plaza. The two men crashed to the ground, and the rancher split the tapper’s scalp with a brick. The same day, swearing revenge, the tapper went out to the rancher’s house and started breaking everything in sight. The police were called, and he was arrested and jailed. Destro found the tapper in his cell, lying in his own blood —his head wound was not bandaged. Only after the bishop intervened was he sent to a hospital.

  Ironically, the rise in rural violence may well have been prompted by the political liberalization and reform that began in 1975. After five years of the generals’ so-called Economic Miracle, from 1968 to 1973, the economy was collapsing, due in part to the worldwide oil crisis. As agitation for an end to military rule was increasing, the generals began their slow policy of abertura. In addition to accepting the growing church and union activism, the government legalized opposition political parties, reduced press censorship, and allowed exiled leftists to return.

  A series of strikes staged by the metalworkers and other industrial laborers in São Paulo in 1978 led to the creation of the most radical opposition party, the Workers party (PT). It was headed by the burly, bearded, charismatic metalworker Luis Inácio da Silva, known as Lula. Lula soon went out to stump the hinterlands, including the Amazon, to organize the first rural branches of PT. Chico Mendes was among those who helped found the Acre branch of PT. By 1982, PT had become Brazil’s fourth largest party, with half a million members. In the cities, PT pushed for higher wages; in the countryside, the issue was land reform.

  The new political freedoms encouraged the rubber tappers’ unions to increase the intensity of their fight. Empates became more frequent. In 1979, the tappers’ unions of Acre staged their most dramatic, coordinated action to date. More than three hundred members of all of the unions went by truck north from Rio Branco into the state of Amazonas and to the town of Bôca do Acre (Mouth of the Acre), which sits at the point where the Acre River empties into the Purus. There they marched through the forest to confront a small army of pistoleiros who had been hired to drive thirty-six families from a huge tract of land. The gunmen had camped on the land and prevented the squatters from planting crops, threatening them constantly. With only machetes, the tappers surrounded the shacks of the gunmen, who apparently did not want a fight—or did not have enough ammunition—and so abandoned an arsenal of twenty rifles and shotguns as they fled into the forest. The victorious tappers picked up the cache of weapons and posed for a portrait; a copy of it can still be found among the valuables of many rubber tapper households.

  The empates convinced the ranchers to change their own tactics. Instead of intimidating the peasants and tappers in the forest, they would now combat the movement by gunning for the leadership. From 1964 to 1974, the death toll of peasants, small farmers, rubber tappers, and their advisers and union leaders stayed fairly level—some years only three or five, others fourteen or twenty-two. But starting in 1975, the number of killings in the countryside edged up —thirty-nine in 1975, forty-four in 1976, fifty-one in 1977.

  By 1980, the number of deaths had hit three digits, and the targets had been more precisely chosen. Activist priests and lawyers, union presidents, and the most intransigent squatters were singled out, stalked by hired gunmen, and shot dead. It is a chilling tradition in the Amazon—in most of Brazil, for that matter—that the victim is always given notice that his life is scheduled to be taken, as if he were an employee being terminated. An anúncio, as such a death notice is called, is not so much a threat as a statement of fact. It is meant to prolong the victim’s torment as he waits for the inevitable. The anúncio might be a telephone call (if the victim has a telephone), a couple of pistol shots into the side of his house, or a message from a friend of a friend.

  Although the Amazon held only 10 percent of Brazil’s population, it witnessed half of these killings. The violence followed the advancing fringe of flames wherever it ate into the forest.

  In Acre, the union leadership in Brasiléia and Xapuri began to live in constant fear. One of the most important and vulnerable targets was Wilson de Souza Pinheiro, who had been a rubber tapper in Amazonas. He moved to Rondônia and then to Acre, where he was recruited by the church in 1973; two years later, he became one of João Maia’s most enthusiastic students of union tactics. Some of the first planning sessions for the Brasiléia union were held in his house. (His daughters recalled peeking around the corner and listening as the tappers and organizers met late into the night.) Pinheiro was elected president of the union in 1977.

  He was a lanky man, a head taller than most of his fellow tappers, with a broad smile, long muscular arms, and large hands. He was a powerful speaker and talented organizer, and it was he who first honed the empate into a potent defensive weapon. (He had organized the successful empate at Bôca do Acre in 1979.) Pinheiro was the first tapper from the region to travel beyond the Amazon. In about 1977, he met with national CONTAG officials in Brasilia, where he widened his awareness of politics.

  In the early days of the Brasiléia union, Wilson Pinheiro and Chico Mendes became close friends. Sometimes they would retreat together to the rain forest, where they would shed their worries and tease each other and see who could collect more rubber in a given time. Although they were physical opposites—one tall and lean, the other an ectomorph of average height—the two leaders shared qualities that their colleagues saw in no one else: quiet authority and incorruptibility. Moreover, they were the only leaders who developed the crucial ability to convince rubber tappers in one part of Acre to support other tappers wherever they were—in Xapuri or even in another border state, such as Amazonas. Pinhei
ro and Mendes were able to broaden the perspective of these isolated forest workers, whose concerns had for generations been myopically limited to little more than their own trails.

  When Mendes moved back to Xapuri in 1977, much of the momentum in Brasiléia was sustained only by Pinheiro. In a way, he was too critical a figure; when he was not around, nothing got done. If Pinheiro had a fault, it was that he tried to maintain too much control over the business of the union, making him a vulnerable target.

  As Pinheiro organized more and larger empates, the tension in the region rose. The tappers kept up the pressure throughout each burning season, knowing that the return of the rains in November would stall any cutting and burning until the following year. Pinheiro made a long list of enemies, one of whom was a ranch manager named Nilo Sérgio de Oliveira. In 1979, de Oliveira had begun to deforest a large tract, rich in rubber trees, on the 500,000-acre New Promise Ranch, once Seringal Sacado. Naturally, he planned to drive out the squatting tappers. Pinheiro organized an empate in which ninety-four tappers blocked the cutting crews. When de Oliveira tried, and failed, to get a court order to expel the tappers, he swore that Pinheiro would pay.

  In early July 1980, a public meeting was held in Xapuri at which tappers and ranchers from the area vented their differences. At the meeting, which was conducted by government officials in charge of rubber pricing and aired on the radio, the municipal secretary of Xapuri lost control. A former seringalista, he had recently sold his seringais to some ranchers, and he blurted out what was on many ranchers’ minds: “The only way to resolve the land conflicts here is to kill the president of the union, the delegate from CONTAG, and the priests who are instigating the rubber tappers. Soon there will be many widows in Acre.” At the time, people shrugged off his outburst as irrational bluster.

  All that changed on July 21. As dusk settled over the forests of Acre, Pinheiro was sitting in the tin-roofed union hall on a side street of Brasiléia, watching a detective show on television called João da Silva with another member of the union, João Antonio Bronzeado. Pinheiro thought about heading home for dinner, but Bronzeado—in an act that later cast suspicion on him—urged him to stay for the end of the program. At around seven o’clock, two strangers came up the steps and clumped along the creaky veranda to the door. When they asked for the union president, Pinheiro identified himself. The men said they were hoping to find a place to stay for the night—perhaps they could stay there? One was a foreigner, probably from Bolivia or Paraguay by his accent, the other Brazilian. Neither one looked particularly honest.

  People were always coming and going in Brasiléia, which had more of a honky-tonk feel than quiet rubber ports like Xapuri. Because it was on the Bolivian border, Brasiléia had a long tradition of trading and smuggling in everything from guns to stolen cars, rustled cattle to illicit drugs. The border was as porous as they come. To cross it, one passed an empty guard shack with a drooping Brazilian flag and a perpetually raised wooden gate, then bumped over a flimsy bridge and passed another unoccupied guard shack and open gate. On the other side, Spanish music blared from the speakers in the electronics shops where Brazilians flocked on weekends to buy imported goods they could not get at home.

  It was not surprising, therefore, for strangers to ask for a place to sling a hammock. But this time Pinheiro was nervous. He had recently received an anúncio—a letter from some ranchers—which said, “Stay out of the way or you will get yourself killed.” It was signed “Mão Branca,” White Hand. Then a friend of Pinheiro’s had stopped in Rio Branco at a bar and overheard some ranchers talking about hiring a jagunço to “work on” the Brasiléia union president. And a few days earlier he had heard a rumor floating around town that a Paraguayan had been contracted to kill him. Studying the two men, Pinheiro decided not to take a chance. He politely told them to leave, saying, “I can’t give lodging to someone I don’t know.” The men asked if they could leave their bags for a few minutes while they got their passports stamped by the Federal Police.

  Fifteen minutes later, as Bronzeado and Pinheiro watched the climax of the detective show, the two men apparently returned. But this time they stayed outside. As the television detectives’ pistols went off, there was a very real bang, and a .38 slug came through the open door of the union hall toward Pinheiro, who was sitting with his back to the door. That bullet missed, burying itself in a wall beam. At the sound of the shot, Pinheiro jumped up—but too slowly. More shots followed. The second caught him in the left buttock. The third plunged into the left side of his back, near the kidney, and its upward trajectory took it through his chest and out his right breast. Dying, Pinheiro fell to the floor.

  When Bronzeado left the union hall long after the doctors and the police had finally arrived, he bumped into Nilo Sérgio de Oliveira. “Oh, so they killed Wilson Pinheiro?” the rancher asked, showing no surprise at the news.

  The death of Wilson Pinheiro did at the local level what the murder of Chico Mendes later did globally: it galvanized an intense emotional response to a festering problem. Just a few hours after the murder, tappers stormed the radio station in Brasiléia and began issuing an appeal to everyone on the seringais to come into town for the funeral and a demonstration. More than a thousand tappers answered the call. Some walked; others hitched rides on pickup trucks. They came from Xapuri and Assis Brasil and Rio Branco. And word came from as far as Tarauacá—150 miles distant, in the center of the state—that someone had better take action. The head of its rural union said, “If no one from Brasiléia seeks revenge for the death of Wilson, we will come and do it ourselves.” The rubber tappers of Acre were now ready to fight, just as they had fought the Bolivians and rubber bosses earlier.

  The day after the shooting, João Maia had raced to Rio Branco in the union truck to meet with the governor and the secretary of public security and warn them about the blood lust of the tappers. Then he picked up Pinheiro’s oldest daughter, Iamar, at boarding school. Maia looked grim, but at first he told the fifteen-year-old only that there had been an accident. He also picked up Chico Mendes’s cousin, Raimundo de Barros, in Rio Branco. De Barros had just quit his job with a government health agency to work for the union movement.

  On the way back to Brasiléia, they stopped in Xapuri. Iamar, unaware of her father’s death, sat nervously in the truck while Maia and de Barros talked heatedly with people at the union hall. She noticed a revolver in the glove compartment. Then a woman walked by with some cans of paint. When she saw that it was the union truck, she asked Iamar bluntly, “Have you heard that they murdered the president of the union in Brasiléia with three shots?” Iamar screamed and fainted, breaking a tooth as her head hit the door.

  Pinheiro’s body was laid out for two days so that all of the mourners could file past. Each tapper walked up, took off his hat, and made a little speech, such as: “Companheiro, this is the last time we will see each other, but you can be sure that whoever did this will pay for it.”

  On the second day, the tappers were stunned to see de Oliveira walk up the union hall steps and stop to view the body. Radio cipó had been working overtime. Word had got out that the police had heard testimony confirming the rumor that someone had sold a pearl-handled, long-barreled, Smith & Wesson .38 revolver to de Oliveira a year or so earlier. And it was already widely known that this ranch manager had several Paraguayans working for him. Then, chillingly, de Oliveira’s fate was sealed. When he walked by the corpse, several people noticed that, for the first time since Pinheiro had died, the corpse started to bleed. In the Amazon, there is a superstition that when the murderer is near the body, the blood drips, asking for revenge.

  The tappers used another bit of folklore to ensure that the murderer would not escape. Two days later, as the body was being prepared for burial in a crude cement crypt, a coin was placed under Pinheiro’s tongue and the body wrapped in white sheets. It was placed in the coffin upside down—which was said to prevent the murderer from leaving the area.

  In urgent
meetings, the tappers plotted their response. They said they would give the authorities seven days to find the killers, then they would take over. In the middle of the night, they would surround the houses of de Oliveira and six other ranchers who were thought to have been involved in the murder. The houses would be set afire, and anyone fleeing would be shot dead.

  On the day of the deadline, a long-planned union meeting and PT political rally was held in Brasiléia. Chico Mendes, who had been in the western corner of Acre helping to organize a union branch, returned for the meeting only to find his friend in his grave. There were some indications that Mendes’s trip may have saved his life. Strangers had been seen around the union hall in Xapuri the same night that Pinheiro was killed. Mendes was stunned. Until now, the violence against the tappers had been somewhat haphazard and, to a certain extent, cautious. Seven months earlier, Mendes had been bundled into a car in Rio Branco by four hooded men and severely beaten, then dumped on a side street. But the men, who could just as easily have killed him, had stopped short. Pinheiro’s death was the first real assassination.

  Hundreds of tappers and small farmers attended the rally. Lula, the president of PT, and an associate named Jacó Bittar had flown up from São Paulo; they delivered blistering speeches in which they both celebrated the arrival of PT and attacked the violence that had now reached a new level in Acre. The national director of CONTAG, José Francisco da Silva, who had flown up from Brasilia, also spoke. Various other speakers then took the microphone and began to whip the crowd into a call for vengeance.

  Chico Mendes urged caution. He opposed a violent response to the killing—a stance that he consistently favored throughout the spiral of murder and intimidation that was building. But nothing said that day had any pacifying effect. Blood had to answer blood. If the ranchers had thought that by murdering Pinheiro they would squelch the movement, they were mistaken. Quite the opposite. The workers resolved to protect themselves. They knew that if there was no response, the killing would only get worse.