The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  “I’m in jail now because I decided to be here,” Darly said. “I could have run like my brother. I have places to stay in Espírito Santo, Mato Grosso, Paraná. I didn’t surrender because I was afraid; I did it to save my family and friends from all this persecution by the police. The Military Police took all my wives and put them in the same house and two of them don’t like each other. They took all the food from the ranch and left nothing for my wives to eat.” Another reason he gave up was that one of his lawyers, Rubens Torres, told him that it would be difficult for the prosecution to convict him. “My lawyer said, ‘Darly, keep your head cool, put up your hammock, and rock. In a little while you can buy a fancy pickup, relax, and run your life easier.”’

  Before he returned to his cell, Darly said, “Look, if you ask me who killed Chico, I think it’s people from PT. The people who gained from this are Chico’s friends, the ones who were close to him. These people knew his value. I didn’t know it. I don’t think anybody really knew.”

  On December 30, 1989, what Chico Mendes’s friends feared the most nearly happened. Someone had smuggled two revolvers to the Alveses. When the police received an anonymous tip about the weapons, the warden called the Alveses into his office and had their belongings searched while he met with them. On the way back to their cells, Darci and Oloci overpowered a guard, took his pistol, and the three ran out the front gate. They were only recaptured because Darly, now chronically ill, could barely walk, and had to be half carried along by his sons. The Alveses were moved to a common cell, their punishment thirty days’ confinement.

  As this book goes to press, no trial date has been set. The case against Darly is thought by lawyers to be very weak, based entirely on hearsay. And, despite continuing doubts—such as a cool hood on a speeding car—the prosecutors clearly have no interest in discovering if anyone else in Acre was linked to the murder of Mendes. Darly’s health has deteriorated and he has been moved to a hospital in Rio Branco, where nothing but a lone police guard stands between him and freedom.

  Although the murder of Chico Mendes did little to change the way justice is administered in the Amazon, it did much to improve prospects that large tracts of the rain forest might be saved for the people living there. In a way, Mendes contradicted his prime directive: in death, he accomplished even more than he had while alive.

  The improvements did not come immediately. In fact, the situation got worse before it got better. On January 3, 1989, Senator Robert Kasten gave a well-intentioned floor speech in which he lamented the loss of Mendes. But one line backfired when it was reported in Brazil. In describing the rain forests, Kasten said, “The fact is, we need them and we use them—so they’re our rain forests, too.” Brazilian officials thundered that the United States and Europe wanted to make the Amazon into a “green Persian Gulf.” Said the foreign minister, "Brazil will not see itself turned into a botanical garden for the rest of humanity.”

  U.S. Senators Albert Gore, Jr., John Heinz, and Timothy E. Wirth headed a delegation that flew to Acre to talk with rubber tapper leaders and Governor Melo. Melo told them about his dream to complete BR-364 all the way to the Peruvian border and then across the Andes to the Pacific. A mistake by the senators’ interpreter caused them to leave thinking that a deal had been cut with Japan to complete the road (in fact, Melo had used the conditional tense, saying said he would welcome such a move). Back in Washington, the senators lashed out against Brazil’s damaging development policies. Their trip focused added attention on the rain forest, but it also fomented latent Brazilian nationalism.

  The attention of the media drifted away from the murder of Mendes and the goals for which he had been fighting and turned to more trivial pursuits—such as the battle over which studio would made a movie of Mendes’s life and which widow would reap the benefits. Ilzamar battled privately with the leadership of the rubber tappers’ council and unions, and battled in the courts with Mendes’s first wife, Eunice, over who would profit from such a film.

  The tappers’ movement seemed to flounder—and if the goal of Mendes’s killers was to reverse the momentum of the peoples of the forest, they temporarily succeeded. Environmental groups in the United States were quick to appeal for contributions to help the tappers, but slow to send the money to Brazil. There was a lingering feeling that as soon as international attention disappeared entirely and shifted to some new cause, the chain saws would start up again. Indeed, in some parts of the Amazon, the saws had never stopped buzzing. In the huge state of Amazonas, which contains the greatest remaining undisturbed stretches of rain forest, the governor, Amazonino Mendes, was keeping a campaign promise by giving away six thousand chain saws to groups of peasant families. “Bringing agricultural technology to the small farmer” is how he described it.

  Despite the initial confusion and squabbling, serious support for the tappers and their Indian allies began to grow again. Heightened interest in the plight of the Amazon produced a large audience in February 1989, when Indians from thirty-seven tribes gathered at the Transamazon highway town of Altamira. There, wearing war paint and wielding machetes and clubs, they confronted government officials to protest the pending construction of the Altamira-Xingu dam, which would flood almost 25,000 square miles of Indian land. A month later—in a meeting that Chico Mendes had planned—two hundred rubber tappers and Indians convened in Rio Branco to celebrate formally the Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest.

  In Acre, a fledgling state agricultural technology agency was given a million-dollar annual budget to help the tappers boost their rubber and nut production and devise ways for enriching the bounty on a rubber trail by planting carefully selected commercial crops, such as pepper, coffee, and cocoa, in the existing forest. The need to develop alternative sources of income was crucial; the subsidy propping up the price for Amazon rubber was bound to be cut as Brazil entered a new era of fiscal austerity to combat inflation and reduce its debt. A university in Goiás received funding to establish a research center for the study of Indian cultivation techniques and uses of plants.

  The rubber tappers of Acre also received a commitment for more funding from the Netherlands Embassy, more support from the Ford Foundation, and a chance for a five-year, $5 million grant from Canada. Entrepreneurs with a conscience were lured to the Amazon, hoping to develop everything from body oils to pharmaceuticals based on products taken from the rain forest in ecologically sound ways. Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., introduced Rainforest Crunch, an ice cream containing Brazil nuts harvested by Acre’s rubber tappers.

  With his unpopular term coming to an end, President José Sarney was eager to leave behind some sort of positive legacy, so he enacted a series of long-delayed environmental programs. The main effort, called Our Nature, fused many government offices into an overarching environmental protection agency. He pledged to create more extractive reserves and national parks and unveiled an ecological zoning plan for Amazonia. Brazil leased eight helicopters to patrol for illegal cutting and burning. In the first month of that operation, fines totaling $10 million were handed out. The Brazilian space agency devised a system for using the fire-spotting ability of American satellites to alert the forestry patrols. Despite the commitment of technology, the program was uneven; as helicopters flew over accessible parts of the Amazon basin, in a remote western corner of Acre, one forestry official did not have $40 he needed to charter a dugout canoe to head up the Juruá River to check on a report of illegal tree cutting.

  Another positive development was a dramatic drop in the number of killings of rural union leaders. Mendes had been one of forty-eight rural workers and activists murdered in the Amazon in 1988; in 1989, less than half that number were killed. Human rights groups were cautiously optimistic, but the possibility remained that the right-wing ranchers were merely biding their time.

  The most dramatic changes of all occurred in March of 1990. Brazil’s entire environmentalist and human rights community had held its breath to see what kind of cabinet would be ch
osen by President-elect Fernando Collor de Mello. Collor was a wealthy, conservative businessman from the northeast who had long been sympathetic to the cause of the Amazon’s ranchers and gold miners. But, on March 2, in a move that stunned environmentalists from Rio to Washington, Collor announced that the new position of secretary of the environment would be filled by José Lutzenberger, perhaps the most outspoken environmentalist in Brazil.

  It was an improbable alliance: between an adherent of freewheeling, free-market capitalism and a leading voice of the Gaia movement, which posits that the earth is a single organism whose parts are in delicate balance. In several meetings before the selection, Lutzenberger had insisted, as a condition of accepting the position, that Collor cancel plans to complete BR-364 across Acre to the Pacific. The announcement coincided with the World Bank’s approval of a $117 million loan to Brazil—this time to help pay for environmental research, education, and conservation programs.

  Finally, perhaps, a Brazilian president was recognizing the folly of Brazil’s old asfaltamento policy toward the Amazon. On a world tour before his inauguration, Collor heard familiar criticisms of Brazil from environmentalists in Europe, including Prince Charles. The prince chided Brazil for allowing thousands of gold miners to invade the territory of the imperiled Yanomami tribe of Roraima —the largest unassimilated culture in South America. But Collor gave a surprising response: he agreed and promised him that the Yanomami’s land rights would be respected. And he urged world leaders to come to Brasilia in 1992 for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Environmentalists were heartened but still wary. There was always the possibility that Collor was jogando para a torcida, playing to the crowd.

  The appointment of Chico Mendes’s old ally as environmental czar might have seemed a fitting legacy of Mendes’s battle, but more surprises were in store. On March 12, 1990, three days before Sarney’s term expired, his environmental chief, Fernando César Mesquita, convinced him to sign decrees creating three extractive reserves encompassing 6,553 square miles of forest in Acre, Rondônia, and the eastern Amazon state of Amapá. (In January, Mesquita had created a 2,000-square-mile reserve on the Juruá.) An act of Congress was required to nullify the decrees. Moreover, if a rancher claimed to hold the title to the land, he had to prove the validity of his document; tappers no longer had to undertake the difficult process of proving that they had squatter’s rights. Mary Allegretti and Osmarino Rodrigues, secretary of the National Council of Rubber Tappers, had spent weeks in Brasilia trying to convince military officials to approve Mesquita’s plan. Their hope was that the reserves were large enough that the Acreano tappers who had fled to Bolivia could now come home.

  No one expected that extractive reserves alone could save the Amazon; the problems, like the region itself, were enormous and variegated. A mosaic of solutions would be required rather than a simplistic grid. After all, there were already more miners in the Amazon—perhaps a million—than rubber tappers and Indians combined. And there were twenty times as many cattle as people. But the reserves were a giant step in the right direction.

  The new Acre reserve alone made eighteen seringais federal property, with deforestation banned and the right of sustainable use granted to the tappers. It stretched from the forests where Chico Mendes had grown up north to Rio Branco and west to Sena Madureira. Its name was Reserva Extrativista Chico Mendes. When Rodrigues sent word back to Acre that even the generals had agreed to the plan, there was dancing in the forest.

  On Seringal Cachoeira, people remarked about how accurate a tapper named José had been when he composed a song a few months after the murder of Mendes. The lyrics went, “Last Christmas tasted like bile. But next Christmas will taste like honey, because Chico Mendes is going to send many gifts through Santa Claus.” The gifts now were pouring down like a tropical cloudburst.

  Even so, the tappers’ joy was muted. Acre’s ranchers were not expected to give up without a fight. Indeed, after the decrees were signed, a tapper heard some ranchers in the Rio Branco airport plotting to burn down every union hall. Everyone waited nervously for the arrival of the next burning season.

  Perhaps most remarkable, though, at least initially, the matchup of Collor and Lutzenberger seemed to be working. On March 24, Collor made his first trip as president—a helicopter tour with Lutzenberger of the devastation wrought by Roraima’s miners. After he looked down at the dozens of airstrips that had been carved into the forest, Collor told Romeu Tuma, the Federal Police chief, “Dynamite them, and be quick about it.”

  Not all of the developments of significance occurred in Brasilia. Back in the forest, two events had the rubber tappers saying that Chico Mendes was looking down and smiling. In Xapuri, late in 1989, the rubber tappers’ cooperative moved from a cramped, dilapidated warehouse to its new home along the riverfront, a grand old building that formerly belonged to one of Acre’s biggest rubber-trading families, Hadad. The building had a green art deco façade and great swinging doors, just like the warehouse down the way that belonged to Cachoeira’s old boss, Guilherme Zaire. Huge storerooms in the back were soon piled high with balls and slabs of good-quality rubber waiting to be trucked to the factories of the south. The cooperative’s flatbed truck, the one that Mendes had driven around town the day he was gunned down, sat out front, its chrome gleaming.

  The front room of the warehouse was stacked with bags of beans and rice and boxes of textbooks, medicine, pads, and pencils, bound for the schoolhouses out on the seringais. At a desk in the rear of the room, the members of the cooperative made their entries in a big ledger—just like the books the estate bosses once used to keep track of the tappers’ debts. Space was cleared for a $20,000 Brazil nut processing and packing machine that had been bought with profits from the sale of Rainforest Crunch. If all went well, Brazil nuts hulled with the machine would soon make their way directly to the ice cream maker, bypassing the middlemen who had cheated the tappers for so long.

  And on August 12, 1989, on the upper reaches of the Juruá River in western Acre, rubber tappers in an isolated village cheered the arrival of an aging riverboat with a nameplate that still read Alessandra but soon was to be changed to Chico Mendes. On board was a delegation of rubber tappers, Indians, and advisers who had come to a meeting to recruit members for the region’s new cooperative. More than one hundred tappers were there, having been notified by a local radio station, Radio Green Forests. They had come by canoe or on foot, eager to find a way out of the grip of the bosses. On the Juruá, the issue was not yet deforestation and land grabbing, as it was in eastern Acre; it was still aviamento.

  The delegation was headed by Antonio Macedo, a leader of the local movement who was living proof that the grass-roots work Mendes had done in eastern Acre was continuing. Macedo was proof, too, that the dangers that Mendes had faced persisted. On March 7, 1989, when a jagunço came at Macedo with a revolver, the attacker’s hand was blown off by Macedo’s shotgun-toting bodyguard.

  The four-day trip upriver had been slow and hazardous. The 55-foot boat, a recent gift of the Netherlands Embassy, frequently got hung up on sunken tree trunks or sandbars, requiring eight or ten men to jump into the water and heave it free. After it had hit yet another sandbar and lay canted on its side, one passenger, a São Paulo artist named Rubens Matuck, lowered his binoculars. He was illustrating a children’s book on the rain forest and had been scanning the trees for flowers and birds. Idly watched the swirling current pass the immobilized hull, Matuck said with a smile, “This boat is a bit like Brazil. It’s leaking. It keeps stopping and starting. Sometimes it goes in circles. But slowly, somehow, it keeps moving upstream. ”

  When the boat finally arrived at the village of Marechal Taumaturgo—named after a hero of the uprising that gave Acre to Brazil—the tappers set off fireworks in celebration. Here was the movement as it had been in Xapuri when Chico Mendes started to build a union.

  Everyone gathered that night on the steps in front of the town hall. The electr
icity had come on at 4:00 P.M., as it did most days. This was one of those odd Amazon towns that still lacked running water and plumbing but had electricity and a few color televisions that became beacons each evening, attracting dozens of villagers with their glow, just as the street lights attracted thousands of moths. Macedo acted as the master of ceremonies and, using a crackly public address system, told the assembled tappers about the union, the National Council of Rubber Tappers.

  “I came from this forest,” said Macedo, a small, muscular man with warped gold-framed glasses that always threatened to topple from his nose. He had a mop of tightly curled gold-brown hair and the heavy shoulders and thick arms of a stevedore—acquired from years of hauling slabs of rubber. “I’m not from Cuba, as some bosses say. I am a worker like you are.” The audience roared its appreciation as he spoke of better health care, schools, and—most of all— freedom from the tyranny of debt. He was followed by the local monitor for the union, an earnest young rubber tapper named Francisco Xavier de Ramos. “All these people here are fighting for the environment. If you don’t know what the environment is, it is the place where man and the animals live together.”

  Late into the night, the tappers and their families and these visitors from the outside world drank beer and cachaça, talked about the future and the past, and danced the sinuous, sensual forró (pronounced fo-haw), the rough, upcountry version of the lambada, which was about to sweep Europe as the latest sexy dance craze. The music was simple and happy. It had the beat of Louisiana Cajun and was played with the same instrumentation: fiddle, triangle, and accordion. Some inebriated voices strayed on the high notes, but everyone was smiling and not one song was played in a minor key.

  Three tappers sat in a row on a cement curb near the square, watching the forró band and the dancers, whose hips were locked together and swiveling in impossible synchrony. One of the tappers, João Gonzaga, had traveled by canoe for two days. It was less than a year since he had first met with tappers from other parts of the river to talk about the union and cooperatives. It had been a revelation that so many others shared his problems and sought a solution. He was sitting with his brother Sebastião and a friend, Antonio, whose growth was stunted and body misshapen. João said that before the National Council of Rubber Tappers had come up the river, they had had no idea of their rights. Now they had stopped paying rent for their trails and started buying their goods from the cooperative at fair prices. He was also excited that there were plans to build the first school on a seringal. “We are like blind people because we cannot read and write,” João said. "For me, the National Council of Rubber Tappers is really the national council of liberty.”