The need for land reform was urgent; the wealthiest 1 percent of landowners now owned 43 percent of the arable land; the bottom 50 percent owned only 3 percent of the land. A survey showed that 395 million acres of fertile but undeveloped land—an area four times the size of California—was being held by a few thousand investors while some 30 million rural residents had no land at all. Every year through the 1980s, another 39 million acres of fertile land, an area larger than Florida, were being snatched up by the major landowners. The government started drawing up a land reform plan as well as new plans for the Amazon.
Allegretti’s organization was asked to assess the new scheme for the Amazon. As she studied the policies drafted by the emerging republic, she noticed that there were only scant references to the peoples of the Amazon—and all of them concerned the Indians. Further, all of the plans for the Amazon focused on the proposed free-trade zone in Manaus, building dams and roads.
Thus, the government was giving no hint that it would recognize the existence of the rubber tappers. There was nothing in the new blueprint for society that would help the rubber tappers and Brazil nut gatherers—the tens of thousands of people who were quietly, inconspicuously subsisting in the rain forest. There was no initiative to reach out to these widely dispersed forest dwellers with medical care or education or technical assistance. If anything, the government strategies were designed to get the people out of the forest and onto organized grids of farm plots so that the forests could be knocked down and agricultural and mineral development could proceed. Moreover, there was no indication that the new government planned to do anything for the old sold ados da borracha, the thousands of veterans of the War for Rubber. Technically, they were owed retirement benefits, including a cash payment and a monthly stipend.
When Allegretti confronted several congressmen from the Amazon and asked them what they were planning to do for the tappers, they responded sheepishly that there had been an oversight. One suggested that she write a couple of paragraphs to be inserted into the plan.
Memories of the month along the Tarauacá River came back to her: people shackled by debt and illiteracy, forgotten. And now they had been forgotten once again. She began to think that perhaps it was time for the tappers to come out from the forest and demand some recognition that was long overdue. Allegretti turned to the one man who could help her the most, Chico Mendes.
She wrote a letter to Mendes, saying: “I’m working here talking to congressmen and advisers to the government and they don’t know that you exist.” She suggested that together they could organize a meeting of rubber tappers from Acre. The meeting could be in Brasilia; that way it would generate publicity and force Congress and the new president to respond. The fight was still simply for recognition, for social justice. Ecology was not yet an issue. She told Mendes to talk over this idea with the tappers in the unions in Xapuri and Brasiléia and to give her an answer.
The answer came back: yes.
But the people of the forest were not the only ones who were closing ranks, seeking alliances, and heading to Brasilia to influence the government. The people of the pastures—the ranchers—saw that their interests were being threatened by the increased activity of the left and the rising call for agrarian reform. As far as they were concerned, the prospect of land reform might just as well be a declaration of war. While Mendes and Allegretti planned their assault on the capital, so, too, did the cattle barons.
On the surface, the ranchers’ fight was purely rhetorical; it was spearheaded by a new organization that was founded in 1985, the Rural Democratic Union (UDR). Beneath the surface, there were persistent signs that the UDR was a front for organized violence against the leaders of the agrarian reform movement, and it soon became the bane of the rubber tappers, small farmers, and landless peasants throughout rural Brazil.
Initially, the UDR was cast as little more than a club. The organization built a romantic image around the mystique of the Brazilian cowboy and the agricultural pioneer spirit. Some of Brazil’s leading country singers, such as Sergio Reis, performed at rallies. At first, the UDR stressed that it was not political; it was simply the manifestation of a mass movement in rural Brazil that sought to promote the holy trinity of “Tradition, Family, and Property.” In a way, the UDR used the same tactics to gain the support of the ranchers that the church had used to organize the impoverished masses. Sociologists who have studied the evolution of the ranchers’ league say that the UDR’s leaders fostered a sense of solidarity, a feeling of being part of something.
But politics soon became a central part of the UDR’s strategy, for the ranchers recognized that they needed to influence the policies of the new government. More than anything, the UDR rabidly opposed agrarian reform, claiming that this would put land in the control of uneducated farmers who could not possibly put it to productive use. (In fact, government statistics show that small farmers produce 80 percent of Brazil’s food.) As the battle over agrarian reform intensified, and as the drafting of the new Constitution progressed, Brasilia’s international airport overflowed with the private aircraft of wealthy ranchers, busy pressuring their congressmen for protection.
The UDR was formally inaugurated in August of 1985 with a cattle auction in Goiânia, the capital of Goiás. The event had a festive air, with country music and a huge churrascada. The money raised that day from the sale of 1,461 head of donated cattle would ostensibly be used for public relations campaigns and lobbying efforts against land reform. Later, the UDR confirmed that the money was in fact put to a different use: the purchase of 1,636 firearms, to be distributed to members. The guns were to be used to protect the most fundamental of the UDR’s values: the value of property. Thus evolved the character of the ranchers’ league: harmless on the surface but dangerous down deep.
The agrarian reform plan that was finally enacted by the Sarney government in 1985—after intense lobbying by UDR members and other wealthy landowners, including many of Brazil’s leading politicians—was far too weak. But it still scared the ranchers enough to provoke them into an unprecedented frenzy of cutting and burning. They were desperate to secure claims to as much land as possible before the government started redistributing undeveloped tracts.
Ironically, the new land reform act intensified the violence against the forest dwellers. The pace of the destruction put to shame past depradations, such as the winning of the American West. Back then, there were no chain saws and bulldozers and knock-down herbicides that burn plants from the inside out. Beginning in 1985, the old slogan of Kubitschek, “Fifty Years in Five,” took on new meaning.
The violence broke out from Acre in the far west through Rondônia and east to the most dangerous place of all, the Parrot’s Beak —a fertile region at the juncture of the Araguaia and Tocantins rivers, where the states of Maranhão, Goiás, and Pará meet. This part of the eastern edge of the Amazon basin had already been thrown into turmoil by the rampant development and deforestation that followed the establishment of the vast Greater Carajás mining project and the Belém-Brasília Highway.
In towns like Marabá and Imperatriz, murder had become a business that was conducted almost casually from storefronts. The Brazilian Bar Association conducted a study in which it alleged that one company, informally known as the Death Syndicate, was operating out of Imperatriz and had a price list for killings. A rural union leader could be murdered for a few hundred dollars. At the top of the list—costing more than $20,000—were judges and bishops. In the Parrot’s Beak, press reports linked UDR members to a small firm, called the Solution, that ostensibly provided security for banks and other risky businesses but in reality supplied hired guns to “clean” disputed property.
Despite the efforts of many lawyers working for the Brazilian left, no one was able to link the UDR directly to any of the assassinations of rural leaders that started to become commonplace in 1985. Even so, there were persistent allegations that private planes laden with weapons supplied by the group began touching down in
Rio Branco, Imperatriz, and wherever else landowners wanted to stand firm against squatters.
In its message and methods, the UDR bore a striking resemblance to another powerful and dangerous ranching organization that had been established in a frontier territory called Wyoming. In fact, the situation in Wyoming in the latter half of the nineteenth century holds some remarkable parallels to that on the Amazon frontier. With the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, the American West was put up for grabs. A homesteader could stake out 160 acres and, if he sat on his claim for five years, get the title. The act was intended to lure small, poor farmers west but instead was used by the wealthy, who paid people to stake claims and thus accumulated vast tracts for cattle pasture. Violent clashes broke out between the small homesteaders and the big ranchers as cattle were rustled and land claims overlapped. Soon after Wyoming became a state in 1890, the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association decided to take action. The organization consisted of a hundred of the region’s wealthiest cattle barons, including the state’s governor and senators. Cattle auctions were held, and the income was used to pay private posses to capture or kill rustlers. One of their goals, which was remarkably close to the goal of the UDR, was to make it safe for a rancher to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
This was the message that the UDR’s president, Ronaldo Caiado, spread as he traveled around Brazil. Caiado was a handsome orthopedic surgeon who had studied in Paris and who owned three cattle ranches covering 8,800 acres of hilly grassland in Goiás. A charismatic speaker, he was able to muster thousands of supporters for banner-waving rallies. Especially effective were demonstrations in Brasilia, which floats like an island in a sea of Goiás pastureland —one of the ranchers’ strongholds. He pushed the idea that Brazil’s Civil Code not only gave squatters the right to use force to defend their land, but also gave that right to ranchers. Caiado came on like a slick salesman at first. Depending on the audience, he wore boots and jeans or tailored dark suits. His dark complexion made his fine, white teeth stand out as if they were fluorescent. He started out smoothly, talking in a deep, even voice about the need for agrarian productivity, not agrarian reform. Then he would start to heat up. His neck would redden and teeth would clench. The smoothness would fade, and he would go on the attack against those who stood against progress. In a rousing finale, he would send his audience home to defend the great Brazilian values of tradition, family, and property.
Quickly, the UDR’s membership grew to more than 200,000. Soon there would be 350 regional divisions, and Caiado would boast of 156 youth divisions and 146 women’s divisions. It became common to see newspaper ads for UDR auctions in rural towns. In one year, there were forty-nine such auctions, in which 35,000 head of cattle were sold, raising some $890,000. There was never any question about how the revenue would be used. Eventually, Salvador Farina, the head of the UDR chapter in Goiás, confirmed the obvious. “Today I think that we can confess that, yes, we bought weapons with the money from the cattle auctions,” he said. “Today we have more than seventy thousand, one for every man in the UDR, men who decided to stop being left out of our country’s history.”
Chapter 10
The Greening of Chico Mendes
IN 1985, CHICO MENDES BEGAN to make the transition from grass-roots organizer to national spokesman for the tappers. The change required great adaptability; he now began to spend time in skyscrapers as well as on the rubber trails. The same flexible mind that had allowed him to absorb the ideas of Euclides Távora was put to work taking in the complex machinations of Brazilian politics and learning a new vocabulary—that of environmentalism.
In May, the same month that the new president put forth his proposal for land reform, Mendes flew down to Brasilia to try to raise funds for the national conference of rubber tappers that he and Mary Allegretti were planning. Allegretti set up an appointment for Mendes with people from Pró Memória, the branch of the education and culture ministry that had supported the rubber tapper schools. The contrast between the stark, flat orderliness of Brasilia and the rambling, shabby towns of the Amazon could not have been more dramatic; but Mendes, on only his second trip to the capital, was already unfazed by the marble and glass and long conference tables and starched shirts.
The meeting took place in one of the identical green glass monoliths that line the broad plaza leading to the halls of Congress. There, Mendes described the hidden forest culture that Brazil had for so long chosen to ignore. He focused on the injustice of it all: these soldiers of rubber had risked their lives to help Brazil contribute to the war effort and now suffered untold indignities and illnesses. A conference of rubber tappers in the capital would allow them to prove their existence, display their culture, and demand justice. His original proposal mentioned only a few dozen tappers from the unions of Brasiléia and Xapuri. The Pró Memória officials told Mendes they would help cover the expense of bringing the tappers down from the forest.
Afterward Mendes, Allegretti, and other advisers discussed the details. They decided that the meeting should take place toward the end of the year, to give them enough time to organize and raise more money. Allegretti had contacts at the University of Brasilia, which gave them a site for the conference. Tony Gross was now in charge of all three hundred of Oxfam’s Amazon projects in the Brazilian Amazon, and he said that Oxfam could also help financially. Mendes was eager to return to Acre to tell Raimundo de Barros and the other leaders of the movement the news. He was also eager to go home because the dry season was beginning and there were empates to plan.
After Mendes left, Allegretti and Gross held their own meeting. The subject was money—or the lack of it. Allegretti’s Institute for Economic and Social Studies, like most Brazilian nongovernmental organizations, was chronically broke. Oxfam alone did not have sufficient resources to sustain long-term initiatives such as rubber tapping cooperatives. The two activists had long discussed ideas for expanding the bases of support for the nascent Indian, human rights, and environmental lobbies in Brazil. One obvious target was the powerful environmental movement in the United States. What better place to find grants and allies than Washington, D.C., where organizations such as the National Wildlife Federation had annual budgets of half a billion dollars. So in May, after Mendes’s visit, Gross convinced Allegretti to go with him to Washington. While there, Allegretti also hoped to find someone who could act as a liaison for her institute, helping it find grants or partnerships that could keep it in business.
This was her first trip outside Brazil, and it provided an intensive education that quickly broadened her perspective on Amazonian issues. Before, she had never really grasped how the rest of the world perceived the Amazon and its troubles. The American public knew little more than the fact that every second, an expanse of rain forest the size of a football field was being leveled by timber companies and land-hungry peasants. Nature magazines and television shows focused on the extravagant lushness of the flora and fauna. Except for a small clique of anthropologists, though, public awareness of the peoples of the rain forest was limited to titillating photo essays about vanishing Indian tribes with stretched lips and earlobes and ferocious demeanors. The struggles of the Indians and rubber tappers were largely invisible and insignificant.
Gross told a few contacts in Washington’s community of Indian rights specialists that they were coming, and word spread that a potential Brazilian ally was in town. At the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental lawyer named Bruce Rich was among those interested in learning more. Since 1983, Rich had been at the center of an effort to influence one of the most powerful engines of Amazonian destruction, the World Bank. He was a prematurely gray, unassuming man with a bookish manner that belied ferocious legal instincts. And veiled ferocity was required of anyone who hoped to take on the World Bank, formally known as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Created to help rebuild Europe after World War II and to promote international commerce, in the 1950s the bank shifted its priorities to promot
e development in the Third World.
It focused on countries with ample natural resources but little capital with which to exploit those resources. Minerals in the ground, timber in the forests, the hydroelectric potential of river water—all were considered development potential that, once tapped, could raise standards of living and stimulate the world economy. At the same time, they could provide a healthy return on the bank’s investment. Even for a country as heavily in debt as Brazil, the banks were happy to lend more. The theory was Reaganomics incarnate: with a little push, countries such as Brazil would grow their way out of debt, just as the United States would (theoretically) grow its way out of the deficit.
More than $20 billion in loans was disbursed each year by the World Bank and three regional counterparts: the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the African Development Bank. (Once a project was approved by one of these institutions, it was considered such a good investment that it quickly attracted two or three times the value of the loan from private lenders—for instance, the Chase Manhattan Bank or the big banks of West Germany.) Potential borrowers would make a proposal that would go through a lengthy approval process as the bank studied its possible impact and fiscal soundness. But to the consternation of people like Bruce Rich, that process rarely took seriously the environmental and social impact of such projects.
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