The Amazon contingent at the São Paulo hearings also included a delegation of Indians headed by Ailton Krenak, a leader of the Union of Indigenous Nations. In his speech, Krenak made the first public reference to the plan for an alliance of the forest peoples—Indians and rubber tappers together. And when Araújo spoke, he was in finest form, explaining in dramatic terms the new proposal for extractive reserves. His speech was a clear articulation of the new approach that had been promoted by Allegretti and Mendes. “I am a seringueiro,” Araújo said. “My people live from the forest that some want to destroy. We want to take advantage of this opportunity to meet so many people gathered together with the same goal—to defend the environment, to defend the conservation of tropical forests. We seringueiros call for this struggle to be intensified, for pressure to be applied to the banks that send foreign money to Brazil to destroy our forests.... In the region where I live, for example, we extract some fourteen or fifteen different native products. This should be preserved, because it is not only with cattle, not only with grass, not only with roads that we bring about the development of Amazonia.”
Araújo was elected the first president of the National Council of Rubber Tappers a few months later, but he eventually withdrew from the movement. His failure was partly due to his isolation in Amazonas, where he had only a handful of supporters. (Araújo tried to have the National Council set up a branch office in Manaus, but there was no money for such a venture; the only office was in Rio Branco, where the movement’s strength lay.) At the same time, he came under intense pressure from local political enemies. His house was set on fire one night when the anthropologist Mauro Almeida was visiting, and several attempts were made on his life. Ultimately, the pressure was too intense. Araújo disappeared from sight and only turned up again in 1989. But he never returned to the movement.
In the meantime, Cowell had turned his attention to the one man among the tappers who seemed to be smart enough, cool enough, and honest enough to take the tappers’ message out of the forest and straight to the boardrooms of the banks and the halls of Congress, both in and out of Brazil. That man was Chico Mendes. Cowell had quietly observed all the leaders at the Brasilia meeting, and Mendes seemed by far the quickest at grasping new concepts. He was not just quick at absorbing the new environmental approach, but quick at making it a fundamental part of his mental and emotional framework. Mendes equated ecology with his lifelong love for the forests in which he had grown up; he was inherently an environmentalist. His other important quality was that he was not affected by all of the change that was taking place; he stayed himself. Cowell never liked to think that he was meddling in things. He did not want to transform the movement, only to give it a louder voice.
After the hearing in São Paulo, Cowell decided to follow Chico Mendes back to Acre. For the next three years, Cowell and his camera became near constant companions of the union leader. Cowell had spent two decades making impassioned films about environmental and social crises around the world, and his instinct for communication told him that Mendes had the perfect voice with which to communicate the plight of the forest.
Chapter 11
An Innocent Abroad
WHEN CHICO MENDES RETURNED to Acre from the meeting in Brasilia, he threw all his energy into the final battle for mayor of Xapuri. And, as everyone expected, he lost badly to the candidate from the ranchers’ party. This loss took a lot out of him. He was already under great strain, as the sense of danger in Xapuri rose with the frequency of conflicts between the ranchers and the tappers.
To put the election behind him, Mendes quickly resumed the activities he did best: tramping the rubber trails of Xapuri and other counties to organize empates, recruit more union members, build schools, and spread the word about extractive reserves and this new phenomenon called ecologia. The character of the empates had recently become more refined, and women and children had begun to come along. They effectively intimidated both hired gunmen and the Military Police. And with Adrian Cowell’s camera rolling and several journalists regularly filing stories about the empates for the big newspapers of São Paulo and Rio, the women and children also were good for public relations.
Although the media later reported that Mendes had conceived of this as a Gandhian kind of strategy, many women from Xapuri’s seringais insist that they had to fight to go along. One of these women was Mariazinha, the wife of Raimundo de Barros. She was one of the first proponents on the rubber estates of the nascent women’s movement, which had begun to gain strength throughout Brazil in the early 1980s. She said that Mendes and her husband were particularly opposed to having women participate for fear they might get hurt. In the end, the women won them over, becoming a powerful addition to the front lines.
And the tappers needed all the help they could get. In the dry season of 1986, the tension between the tappers and the ranchers rose to a dangerous pitch. In May, Geraldo Bordon, the owner of Seringal Nazaré, received a permit from the forestry office to cut down 1,730 acres of rain forest. The tappers were outraged; the area harbored 1,500 rubber trees and 600 Brazil nut trees—each one a vital natural factory producing valuable products. Bordon’s permit was in direct violation of the Forestry Code, which prohibited the cutting of these two tree species as well as deforestation along the banks of rivers or streams. Even so, Bordon was able to enlist the help of the Military Police, who sent eight officers to the ranch, ostensibly to protect the cutting crews.
In June, Mendes rounded up two hundred tappers for a march to the federal forestry office in Xapuri. There, they staged a sit-in but were quickly evicted by the Military Police. Soon thereafter, Mendes and Raimundo de Barros organized several empates against Bordon. Whenever they and their column of tappers came upon a cutting crew slashing through the underbrush, they were almost always able to talk the men into dropping their machetes and saws and leaving. Faced with the steady, relentless opposition fielded by Mendes, Bordon finally gave up and sold his land in Acre.
Another powerful paulista was also driven out by the empates. Rubens Andrade de Carvalho, the King of Cattle, had sprawling ranches in southern Brazil as well as the United States, and he had bought Seringal Filipinas, where de Barros had grown up. But Mendes and de Barros and their companheiros simply made the business of deforestation too difficult, and the so-called king was forced to give up in Acre.
Victories such as these fueled the ranchers’ hatred of Mendes, who by now had become the most prominent representative of the tappers’ movement. Lately, on Friday nights, as rough ranch workers drove into town to drink and chase women, it was not uncommon for them to cruise slowly by the union hall, taunting and threatening Mendes, sometimes brandishing pistols. Since 1983, Mendes had been licensed to carry a revolver because of the threats against him, and he had avoided two ambushes over the previous couple of years. In November 1984, three men with revolvers were waiting for him in the shadows of the bus station in Xapuri. A woman sitting nearby overheard them whispering about their plan to shoot Mendes. She ran to the Military Police barracks, just 50 yards from the bus station, and when the soldiers appeared the gunmen fled. During the dry season of 1986, a tocaia, an ambush site, was found in the bushes along a river where Mendes was scheduled to pass to join an empate at the Bordon ranch.
Despite the power of the ranchers, late in 1986 Mendes decided to run for office one last time as a PT candidate, this time for a seat in the Acre state legislature. He must have known deep down that it was a futile effort—his opponents were heavily funded by the ranchers—but he never let such doubts show. By 1986, it was clear that Mendes had no real gift for conventional politics. He had last held elective office in 1979, when the forced resignation of the president of the Xapuri town council had given Mendes the leadership, if only briefly. And once he switched to the Workers party, PT, he never again won a political race. In 1982, he had lost a bid for state representative, and then came the failed mayoral race. Politics was in his blood, but he refused to do what all politician
s must do to win—bend his principles to suit the electorate.
Even within PT he was constantly battling for support; his Marxist leanings made him unpalatable to the leftist mainstream. The national leadership—which focused on the big cities—always kept him at arm’s length and gave little backing to his campaigns far away in Acre. Compounding Mendes’s problems was the fact that only a fourth of the eligible voters in Acre were registered. In Brazil, substantial documentation is required for registration, and most of the rural poor either lack the papers or do not know how to get them. (On one seringal a three-day hike from Xapuri, a recent survey showed that of 106 adults active in the tappers’ movement, only 3 had documents that would permit them to vote.)
Failed politician or not, Mendes doggedly insisted on launching his new campaign. As the dry season of 1986 ended and the burning season approached, he tried out a new strategy. This time he tied his platform directly to the environmental message of the tappers’ struggle: he would lead the “defense of Amazonia.” His supporters drove through town in a jeep with megaphones on top that blared, “Chico Mendes, in defense of the Amazon forest. For the creation of extractive reserves!”
As the campaign began, Mendes’s problems went beyond his political difficulties. Once again, Mendes had no money. (In fact, he may have chosen to run because he needed the job.) His union position brought in negligible income, and he spent much of his time working to promote the National Council of Rubber Tappers. Whereas before he had always supplemented his income with occasional work in the forest, now he had no time.
His three-year-old marriage was suffering too. In April 1983, Mendes had married a woman he had known since 1970. Ilzamar Gadelha Bezerra was just a girl then, and he was the man from the government school who used to hike to her father’s seringal to help harvest rubber and teach her how to read. In 1978, when Ilzamar was fifteen, they had become lovers. Finally, when Ilzamar was twenty and he thirty-nine, they were married in a civil ceremony in Brasiléia. But lately their relationship had become sporadic and stormy, with allegations on both sides of affairs and neglect. They had separated for a time after Mendes claimed to have caught Ilzamar having an affair with a male nurse at the Xapuri clinic. Mendes was in such a rage that he told friends he was going to shoot her. Only with the help of friends were they able to get back together.
By 1986, Mendes was traveling nearly constantly. For months, he had hardly spent any time with Ilzamar and their two-year-old daughter, Elenira. They had no house of their own, and Ilzamar was living with her parents on Seringal Santa Fé. Mendes often slept at the church or the union hall in Xapuri or the houses of friends. And when Ilzamar became pregnant in mid-1986, Mendes was never around to help out. With no rancor, Ilzamar later told one reporter, “Chico never should have had a family.... He used to say that although he’d like to give his family more, his heart was with the seringueiros.”
Mendes’s personal problems came to a head in the early hours of August 2. Ilzamar had gone into labor and delivered twins just before dawn. But one of the twins died in childbirth. The surviving twin was Sandino, who as he grew took on a remarkable resemblance to his father. Ilzamar remained hospitalized for several weeks. When Mendes had no money to pay for the hospital bill, Adrian Cowell paid it for him. Cowell and Mendes shared a lot of sorrow at that time; Cowell’s own son died shortly thereafter in a boating accident in Europe. Despite the pressures on him, Mendes remained stoical. Cowell was often amazed by his controlled nature.
As the election drew near, Mary Allegretti flew up to Acre and joined Cowell. (They were in the middle of a three-year relationship.) While Mendes had continued his grass-roots work, Allegretti had returned to Curitiba to create her own nongovernmental organization, which she called the Institute for Amazonian Studies. Its focus was the rubber tappers’ effort to establish extractive reserves, and its primary goal was to get the government to create a legal definition for this novel system of agrarian reform. To keep the budget low, Allegretti ran the institute out of her two-story stucco house on a suburban side street.
Allegretti and Cowell were both deeply concerned now about that road project funded by the Inter-American Development Bank the previous year. By 1986, the asphalt was progressing steadily along BR-364 toward Acre. But the environmental programs that Brazil had pledged to create were lagging far behind.
Allegretti had stayed in close touch with Stephan Schwartzman, who had returned to Washington and written a report that became influential in bringing further attention to the rubber tappers. In the paper, his zeal was evident: “The potential importance of a grass-roots movement in Amazonia calling for forest conservation can hardly be overestimated,” he wrote. Here was a movement by a productively employed local population that had a vested interest in keeping the rain forests as they were. The existence of Chico Mendes and his tappers’ union meant that Brazil could no longer make nationalistic claims that the fight to save the Amazon was merely a case of foreign ecologists meddling in Brazilian affairs.
After discussing the road project, Allegretti and Schwartzman agreed that the time was right to make the conceptual alliance between the American environmentalists and the Amazonian rubber tappers a reality. Schwartzman, who now worked for the Environmental Defense Fund with Bruce Rich, said that the lobbies were ready to assault the bank again, but they needed that all-important voice from the forest—proof that the road was going to harm someone—to justify their attack. Through Cowell, Allegretti knew that Mendes had included attacks on the road paving in his campaign speeches; it was an unpopular stance in Acre, where an all-weather road was seen as vital to the development of the state. Meeting in Rio Branco, Allegretti and Cowell concluded that Mendes would be much more effective if he left local politics behind, came out of the forest once again, and directed his criticisms directly at the bank.
They left Rio Branco and caught up with Mendes on the campaign trail. He was with Raimundo de Barros and Gomercindo Rodrigues, the agronomist and PT firebrand who had moved to Acre and was helping the tappers organize. He was also serving as Mendes’s campaign manager-bodyguard. They all met up in the tawdry border town of Plácido de Castro, which sat on a sand embankment 40 feet above the Abunã River. On the opposite bank was the Bolivian village of San Luis, which looked like a mock-up of Main Street in a Hollywood Western. There was nothing beyond the two rows of unpainted two-story wooden buildings except forest. Each housed a duty-free store stuffed with electronic toys and watches, perfumed pens, and Johnnie Walker at half the Brazilian price. Andean music blared, and a steady trickle of Brazilians paid two cents to be paddled across the slow, murky river.
Mendes had come to Plácido de Castro to give a speech along with the local candidates from PT. Cowell decided to film the speech, but it had been dark all day, so he had to set up some floodlights. Soon a crowd gathered. The first speakers urged the workers to get out the vote. Then two Indians spoke, supporting Mendes’s call for the defense of the forest. Finally it was Mendes’s turn. Cowell turned on the floodlights and rolled the film. Instantly, the streetlights dimmed, then everything went black. It seemed typical of Mendes’s luck in politics: they had shorted out the entire town.
In the darkness, Mendes, de Barros, and Rodrigues retreated to a small bar with Cowell and Allegretti. They all drank some beer by candlelight and talked of what lay ahead. In the ensuing conversation, Mendes made a commitment that would take his life down two dramatically different tracks. One Chico Mendes would become something of an international celebrity, the subject of profiles in leading newspapers around the world, the recipient of prestigious environmental awards; the other would remain a man of Xapuri and face a growing number of death threats, political attacks, and domestic troubles.
During the discussion that night, Cowell and Allegretti raised the prospect of Mendes’s flying to the United States to deliver his message directly to the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.S. Congress. They spelled out why this action would be useful: the Am
erican environmentalists could effectively campaign against the road only if the rubber tappers themselves formally said they did not want it. The environmentalists needed to campaign on behalf of someone.
Allegretti well knew what it meant to take the fight overseas. In May 1986, while Mendes was staging empates against the Bordon ranch, she had made her second trip to Washington. She and Schwartzman had testified about the situation in the Amazon at a Senate hearing, chaired by Senator Kasten, on the environmental problems created by multilateral bank loans. Back in Brazil, Allegretti had been attacked by both politicians and the press as a front for American interests who wanted to control the Amazon’s riches. She was the papagaio da pirata—the parrot of the pirate. The National Confederation of Agriculture, the most conservative ranchers’ lobby, issued a white paper denouncing her.
Once the proposal was laid out, de Barros said quite flatly, “I can’t understand any of this.” Mendes was quiet and seemed distracted. He may have been thinking about his probable loss in the upcoming election and trying to chart his future. Finally, putting his trust in the strengthening—if improbable—friendships he had forged with these people, Mendes said he would go.
The thicket of beer bottles on the table grew denser, and talk turned to other ramifications of the decision. The group debated whether this step would increase the risk of Mendes’s being killed. Several times recently, people had been seen following him or hanging around the union hall at night. Rodrigues and Mendes both said that going abroad certainly could not make things worse than they already were—and might make them better. If Mendes had a higher profile, people might be less apt to try to kill him. There was no turning back, Mendes said. But first he had to finish his campaign.
The Burning Season Page 25