The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  Sebastião ignored the swarm of mosquitoes that danced above his head; at sunset in that part of the Amazon, anyone who does not keep moving acquires such a halo. His thin body was stooped, but his sinewy arms and hands were still strong. His head had a dusting of white hair that crept far down his tanned neck, and his face was covered by silver stubble. The wisps softened all of his features except his eyes, which had the hard, black glint of obsidian. These were sharp eyes that stabbed and probed, conducting exploratory surgery, missing little.

  He still found it hard to believe that the murder of Mendes had created such a stir. “Even when Jesus Christ died, there wasn’t as much publicity,” he said. Sebastião and the other ranchers had marveled at the extent of the reaction. No one understood how this uneducated rubber tapper could have had so many connections overseas and in the south. Ever since, journalists had been coming around, trying to get Sebastião’s picture. “One American reporter came and was incredibly impolite. He asked me, ‘How many gunmen do you have inside your house?’ I got very angry. I said, ‘If I had some pistoleiros here, I’d tell them to shoot you right now.’”

  As the clouds darkened above him, Sebastião denied his family’s involvement in the murder. “We are not violent people,” he said, “but if someone starts to treat you badly, to push you, to beat you, you have two choices: you can go look for justice or you can find a gun and kill the man.” In Brazil, it is not likely that you will find justice through the courts or police, he said. “You show me a sheriff or soldier who obeys the law, then I won’t kill anyone.”

  He spoke of the time he had killed someone in Minas Gerais, then confessed after having a vision from God. He had spent most of his jail term reading the Bible, and his philosophy was clear. “It’s impossible for a man to kill,” Sebastião said. “You can point your gun and you can pull the trigger. But only God decides who lives or dies.”

  His family had always had a tough time with the authorities and so had moved around a lot. “Like Jesus said, ‘If you have some pressure in one land, you should move to another land.”’ But they had a clean record, he insisted. “You go to the court or the sheriff and check the Alves name. You won’t find any crimes.” He jabbed at the air with a finger. “All of this is gossip. My kid has his ranch because he worked for it. That is not stolen land.”

  Now it was getting too dark to see. The mayor strolled past and elicited from Sebastião a friendly “Oi, chefe.” The old man stood up, stretched his stiff limbs, and prepared to finish his daily audience. His son took the baby inside. Sebastião said that the rubber tapper leader had brought his fate on himself. “Chico always used to say that if his death would be a solution for Amazonia, he’d be happy to die. In speeches he used to say ‘Kill me, come here and kill me. My chest is open.”’ The cicadas started their nightly trill. The electricity finally came back on, and moths began to dance around the dim streetlights.

  Through thin purple lips, in a voice that crackled, the elder Alves said, “Chico Mendes spent too much time alive.” Then he spoke in a conspiratorial whisper: “Darly is in jail now, but he’ll be free. There’s nothing that proves that he killed Chico.”

  He pointed down the road; he smiled and his voice grew quieter: “If you really want to know who killed Chico, go to the cemetery. Take up one of his bones. Draw it across your throat. The bone will tell you who the killer was.”

  Sebastião Alves, like most of the ranchers in Acre, had expected that the repercussions from Mendes’s death would fade quickly, just as they always did when someone was killed. And, like everyone else, he had expected that the murderers would never be caught. But this time the situation was different. Faced with an unprecedented media blitz, the Brazilian government did something it had never done before—conduct a thorough investigation of a murder in the Amazon. The chief of the Federal Police, Romeu Tuma, flew up with the secretary-general of the Ministry of Justice to oversee the investigation. Within days, Tuma had transferred the head of the Federal Police in Acre, Mauro Spósito, to São Paulo, where he was given a desk job overseeing passport control.

  For the first few days, roadblocks, house-to-house searches, and a sweep of the forests by one hundred and fifty police officers—including dozens of federal agents flown in for the operation—failed to find the prime suspects: Darly, his sons, his brother Alvarino, and the Mineirinhos. The police had a terrible time of it. They were hampered by the return of the rains and the demise within a few days of all but three of their twenty-one vehicles.

  Even when they came upon some of their quarry, they were frustrated. On Christmas Day, a squad of Military Police passed the Paraná ranch and noticed some people gathered behind one of the houses. Stopping to investigate, they found that Darly’s son Oloci had slaughtered a steer, and he, the Mineirinhos, and many members of the extended Alves clan were having a holiday churrascadd. The Mineirinhos and Oloci ran toward the forest, pulling handguns from their belts. One of them dropped to the ground and began firing at the approaching officers, who had nothing more than revolvers themselves. As the police ducked for cover, everyone escaped into the trees.

  The police camped out at the Alves ranch and neighboring spreads, and on December 26 the pressure paid off. Darci came out of hiding and surrendered at the army barracks in Rio Branco. He then gave a confession in which he described every detail of the crime scene, from the beam of Mendes’s flashlight to the piece of wood that made it necessary to duck before entering the back yard. He swore he was alone and that he committed the crime because Mendes would not stop harassing his father.

  The next day, the actress Lucélia Santos, who had flown to Acre for the funeral, was riding in the union truck when the driver spotted Darci’s brother Oloci and another of Darly’s sons as they sped toward Rio Branco in a pickup. Oloci held his hand as if it were a pistol, pointed it at Santos, and pulled the trigger. When she arrived in Rio Branco, she immediately told the police, who tracked down and cornered Oloci. In a shootout, Oloci was hit in the right arm and captured.

  On December 28, a team of forensic scientists from the University of Campinas flew to Acre to exhume Mendes’s body and perform a detailed autopsy. The group was led by Nelson Massini, a pathologist who had built quite a career out of examining corpses; his most famous accomplishment was confirming that a skeleton found in Argentina was that of the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. But there was little mystery in Mendes’s death. The specialists quickly confirmed the location of the shooter; within a week of Darci’s capture, they found that a hair recovered from a black raincoat left in the woods behind Mendes’s house was identical to Darci’s. On January 2, Darci participated in a reconstruction of the crime. Wearing a bulletproof vest and escorted by heavily armed soldiers, he walked to Mendes’s house and was videotaped as he showed police how he had entered the yard, where he had waited, and how he had shot. Every piece of evidence fit with his description of that night.

  Meanwhile, the police arrested or questioned anyone remotely connected with the family, and they soon found that Darci’s story did not exactly match the facts. More than half a dozen neighbors had seen two men leaving Mendes’s yard, not one. Under intensive questioning—said by those interviewed to have included painful sessions on the pau de arara—several Alves relatives and employees alleged that the person who actually pulled the trigger was Jardeir Pereira, one of the Mineirinhos, and that Darci was his partner. The most significant accounts were those of the teenager Genézio Barbosa da Silva, Oloci’s brother-in-law. In the past he had acted as a spy for Darly, who, after the old arrest warrant had been issued, paid for Genézio to stay for weeks at a time at the Hotel Veneza in Xapuri and report on the situation in town. Now the boy turned police informer, alleging that Darly had ordered the murder of Mendes and describing other gruesome killings as well. After someone tried to break into the local jail where Genézio was being held in protective custody, he was flown to Rio de Janeiro.

  Other witnesses confirmed what Genézio had sa
id. Maria Gorete da Sena, the wife of Amadeus Pereira, one of the Mineirinhos, alleged that around 11:00 P.M. on the night Mendes was killed, Darci and Jardeir came to the gate behind her house and said, "Now the confusion in Xapuri is ended because we have killed Chico Mendes.“ She said they had camped out in the woods near Mendes’s house for two nights before the killing, returning to the ranch each day to work with the cattle. A cowboy from the ranch confirmed that Darly had ordered the killing. And one of Darly’s women, Francisca, told police that on December 21 she had overheard Darly say that Mendes had to die.

  The pressure on Darly was intense. He was assumed to be hiding in the forest, where there was little food available. The police kept his family under lock and key so that no one could help him or tip him off. Darly’s women, who normally lived in separate buildings, were locked up together in one house.

  Finally, on January 7, 1989, after a lawyer negotiated terms of surrender, Darly came out of hiding. After dark, so that no one could see what was happening, he was met by his lawyer at a ranch not far from his own and driven to the police. He was haggard and lame after more than two weeks on the run. He handed over a revolver and joined his sons in prison. There was much speculation in the media and around Xapuri that by surrendering, the father and son were acting as the boi de piranha, the ailing steer that is sent across a river ahead of a herd: it gets eaten by the piranhas, allowing the rest of the cattle—in this case, any of the powerful ranchers of Acre who might have helped plan or pay for the murder—to pass unscathed. (Jardeir Pereira and his brothers were thought to have fled with Alvarino Alves. According to Sebastião, Alvarino had chosen not to hide like Darly.)

  Fourteen hours after Darly was arrested, his mistress Francisca cut her throat with a kitchen knife. Margarete da Sena claimed that the police had frightened her into thinking that “North American ecologists were going to drop an atomic bomb on Fazenda Paraná.” But there was speculation in the local papers that she feared Darly would be angry because she had talked to the police.

  Once Darly was in custody, lawyers quickly convinced his son Darci to retract his confession—they said it had been given under duress, that Darci had been tortured repeatedly. The lawyers blamed “friends of Chico” for the killing. One said that only the CIA could have planned such a careful assassination. “Xapuri is full of foreign agents now,” he wrote in a document presented in his clients’ defense. Who has benefited? the lawyer asked. Outside interests and those who oppose the development of the Amazon.

  Pretrial hearings began on February 10, and a parade of witnesses entered the Xapuri courthouse, which was packed with Mendes’s supporters and the press. The alleged murder weapon, which had been found leaning against a tree at a ranch next to Darly’s property, was admitted as evidence. The forensic evidence was presented. Finally, the judge, Adair Longhini, found that there was sufficient reason to try Darci and Darly for the murder. Everyone in a position of authority—from Longhini to Governor Melo—concluded that the murder was a personal matter, a crime of Darly Alves and his family and no one else. On February 28, 1989, the Federal Police withdrew from the Chico Mendes case. Romeu Tuma declared that the evidence against Darci and Darly was clear-cut. Now it was time for the prosecutor to take over.

  But many in Acre felt that the investigation had not gone nearly far enough. The Chico Mendes Committee, representing PT, the Pastoral Land Commission, and other activists, charged that more people were involved in the murder and continued to publicize gaps in the case. No one had questioned the doctor, Efraim Mendoza, even though he had confirmed to Bishop Grechi what he had heard at the card game in the back room of the Rio Branco Soccer Club. Both the bishop and Eva Evangelista, the president of Acre’s Tribunal of Justice, received death threats in the days after the Mendes killing. Evangelista’s daughter, Gilcely, had received two phone calls within twenty minutes in which a man speaking cultivated Portuguese said, “Tell Doctor Eva that I am well paid to make this phone call and she shouldn’t work on the Chico Mendes case or her head will roll just like the head of Chico rolled.”

  Another lead that was never pursued concerned O Rio Branco, the newspaper of João Branco, the UDR president, and his right-wing partners. The same paper that had warned Acreanos about a pending 200-megaton explosion had had two reporters and a photographer at Mendes’s house ninety minutes after the murder, even though the rutted road between its office in Rio Branco and Xapuri makes anything less than a three-hour trip a miracle. That same night, it had taken the chief investigator on the case, Nilson Alves de Oliveira, six hours to make the trip.

  When the reporters pulled up in front of the Mendes house, they boasted about their speedy arrival. A soldier from the Military Police found their story incredible and felt the hood of the car. It was hardly warm, and the front of the car showed no sign of mud or damage. The next day, the paper had a carefully crafted front-page package on the Mendes killing, complete with a photograph of the corpse laid out in Xapuri’s hospital, its right side riddled with holes. There was also a first-person account of the enterprising reporters’ race to Xapuri, in which they changed a tire, sipped a beer, struck a cow—and still got the furo, the scoop. It seemed clear that the reporters had been tipped off in advance.

  The twenty-seven-year-old editor of the paper, Júlio César Fialho —one of the reporters who sped to Xapuri—ned from Acre on February 13 in a car rented to O Rio Branco. When he turned up in Brasilia in May, he said he feared that his bosses, João Branco and his partners, were going to kill him because he knew too much; Branco in turn charged that Fialho stole the car and sold the newspaper’s exclusive photographs of Mendes’s corpse to a photo agency for $3,000. Fialho was also never questioned by the police.

  Despite these lapses, compared to most murder cases in the Amazon, the Mendes case was proceeding at a blistering pace and was remarkably successful; after all, the principal suspects had surrendered and damning evidence and testimony had been compiled. Even so, most citizens of Xapuri still assumed, like Sebastião Alves, that Darly and Darci would never come to trial. And although Oloci and Darci were also charged with the shootings at the forestry office in May 1988, it was doubtful that that case would be heard either. Even with all the pressure from outside forces, the cases seemed to be falling into the familiar tropical rhythm of Amazon justice: they were slowly disintegrating, like a tree trunk rotting on the forest floor.

  The date of the trial was pushed farther into 1989 and then 1990 as the defense lawyers sought a change of venue to Rio Branco and filed one appeal after another to try to get the charges dropped. They had an easy time controlling the pace of the proceedings. Xapuri still had only a part-time prosecutor, and three different people filled the position in 1989. The last one, Eliseu de Oliveira, knew almost nothing of the Mendes case and seemed disinclined to open new lines of inquiry. Indeed, he never understood what all the fuss had been about. As he told one visitor, “The fact is, everybody knew Chico Mendes was going to be killed sooner or later.”

  At the same time, potential witnesses began to die. One of Darly’s pistoleiros, nicknamed Zezão—who may have helped plan the killing—was shot dead in January 1989. The Alveses claimed that Zezão was shot by Mendes’s brother Assis (who is an officer in the Military Police), but Mendes’s allies said it was the Alves family performing the old Brazilian custom of “burning the files.” Both of the bodyguards who had been at the card game in Rio Branco turned up dead the following year in separate incidents. Early in the morning after Xapuri’s São Sebastião festival in January 1990, José Britto was gunned down by someone on a passing motorcycle. Britto was the former rubber tapper who had sold his colocação at Seringal Cachoeira to Darly. Investigators said his murder was probably related to testimony he gave which confirmed that Oloci Alves had a pistol at the time of the forestry office shooting.

  Media interest in the Mendes case quickly faded after the first few months, as did the energy of the police investigators. Nilson Alves de Oliveira, a
highly trained former paratrooper and judo instructor, at first had diligently tried to check new leads. But by the end of 1989—just as he claimed to be closing in on links between Gaston Mota and the murder—he left Xapuri for a new, unrelated job in Rio Branco. “I have to think of my family,” he said.

  To top it all off, the Rio Branco penitentiary in which Darly, Darci, and Oloci were being held was hardly secure. Only ten guards oversaw two hundred and forty prisoners, with a single guard on duty at night. The budget was so meager that the warden often had to use his own car to pick up bread from the bakery. One guard told a visitor that the going price for an escape in 1989 was $800. In August of 1989, a nephew of Darly’s who was serving eight years on a murder conviction escaped with twenty other prisoners while the guards watched Brazil play Chile in a soccer match on television.

  One week later, Darly walked into a holding room at the penitentiary to meet with two visitors. The window was wide open, yet had no bars. A breeze filled the room with smoke from the trash fires at a nearby sawmill. A guard, wearing civilian clothes and carrying a revolver, stood in the hall outside the door. Darly looked older than his fifty-nine years. His shirt, open to the waist, hung loosely on his thin shoulders, and his sockless feet rattled in ankle-high boots. He scoffed at charges that he had ordered the Mendes killing. “I had nothing to do with it. Two or three times, I saw Chico on the street—before he had any bodyguards. If I wanted to, I could have killed him right then. Instead, I put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Chico, you can sleep in the middle of the street. I don’t have anything against you. What’s done is done.”’

  He said that a man would be crazy to send a son to do such a job. “Do you really think that with three or four bodyguards around someone I’d tell my son to just go and kill him? Darci could easily have been killed himself.” And Jardeir had just moved north from Paraná a few weeks earlier to join his brothers. What would he have to do with such a crime?