The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  João and the other tappers talked well past midnight, until the generators were turned off. The air had begun to chill, and condensing mist thickened over the river and flowed into the village. It was nearly a full moon; there was supposed to be an eclipse in a couple of days. João told one last story, about the wonders of the forest that made them want to stay.

  At dusk one evening, he was walking home along an estrada, surrounded by the buzz of cicadas and whoops of night birds. He did not like to hunt and so was carrying only a small, dull knife. That is why he became nervous when he heard some large animal crashing in the brush up ahead. He crept forward and in the dim half light saw a large jaguar—the biggest he had ever seen. He froze and watched as the jaguar circled and then lay down, completely blocking the trail and oblivious of his presence. The jaguar lazily rolled over, stretched, and twisted from side to side, scratching its back.

  João realized that the jaguar had no intention of hurting him, and he had no intention of hurting the jaguar. But it was getting late, and he needed to get home. Finally, he held his dull knife ready, just in case, and spoke to the animal: “Jaguar, I need to pass.” The cat leaped from the trail and vanished into the forest.

  Just before everyone wandered off to find a place to string a hammock, João’s friend Antonio tried to imagine the world that the ranchers wanted to create, the world of open spaces that had already appeared in eastern Acre and was just starting to eat at the jungle along the Juruá. He could not imagine it; his forested world was so complete that any alternative was unthinkable. “If they cut the trees how can anyone live?” Antonio asked. “Can you imagine a country that has only pasture and cattle, without trees and man?” He did not even consider the possibility that there might be men who were able to live outside the forest. “That is no country. Nothing will grow there. There is no game there. The ranchers will die in that kind of country.”

  For him, and, he hoped, for his children, the forest was home. Here was the fundamental bond between a man and his environment that had been the basis for Chico Mendes’s own passionate defense of the Amazon. It was an intimate connection, transcending global considerations and political battles and personal conflicts. “The life of the tapper is very hard,” Antonio said. “But it is much better than the life in the towns. It won’t be easy, even with the cooperative. We have to start our lives from the beginning. But we need to try. It’s hard for me to be outside the forest. When I went down the river to the city once, I started to get a big pain in my head. It only went away when I came back and was on my trail going home.”

  Afterword

  I RETURNED TO Xapuri in December of 1990 to cover the murder trial of Darly Alves and his son Darci for the Brazilian newspaper O Globo. Dozens of journalists converged on the town once again, just as they had in the days following the shooting of Chico Mendes two years earlier. Once again, the cheap hotels overflowed. The phone company frantically installed a communications center in the old Bolivian customs house overlooking the river.

  Rubber tappers arrived by canoe, bus, and truck to stand vigil outside the stucco courthouse. Behind a cordon of blue-uniformed police, tappers held banners calling for justice and children sold pink tufts of cotton candy Up and down the brick lanes, merchants sold portraits of Mendes painted on black velvet, silkscreened on shirts, and emblazoned on buttons.

  Crammed with several hundred spectators, the courthouse became a hot house. The only air conditioner was in the judge’s private chambers, and the ceiling fans did little except redistribute the steamy air. The judges and lawyers wilted under their stiff black robes and tight white collars. In the hard-backed benches sat Mendes’s young widow, Ilzamar, his brother Zuza, and many of the rubber tappers who were struggling to run the union and sustain Mendes’s vision.

  Standing near an open window were Mendes’s allies from outside the rain forest—Mary Allegretti and Stephan Schwartzman. Adrian Cowell’s cameras ran once more. Sitting a few rows ahead of the tappers and their allies was Darly Alves’s wife, surrounded by a grim-faced collection of friends and cowboys from the Alves ranch. Twice a day, the judge allowed a small army of photographers to invade. They rushed in en masse—a bizarre kind of multilegged monster, bristling with glass eyes, flash bulbs flaring.

  The trial was remarkable in three ways. First, a jury was not only assembled, but showed up. The prevailing rumor in Xapuri was that the jurors would flee rather than sit in judgment of the Alves family. But there they were: an accountant, a bank teller, a teacher, and the rest. The middle class of Xapuri seemed determined to put an end to anarchy. Day after day, they sat to the right of the judge, stiff and resolute, listening to endless hours of droning testimony.

  The second remarkable development was the verdict. Almost precisely two years after Mendes was felled by a shotgun blast, the jury found both father and son guilty of murder. Third was the sentence—nineteen years each. For the first time in the long, bloody history of the Amazon, both a pistoleiro and a mandante— the shooter and the mastermind of a crime—received the same prison term.

  Initially, it appeared as if justice were finally coming to the rain forest, where violence against man and nature had gone unchecked for decades.The tappers rejoiced, but their elation was short-lived. Within months, Darly Alves’s conviction was overturned on appeal. He only remained in prison to face the old murder charges dating from his days in the south of Brazil.

  Elsewhere in the Amazon—albeit at a reduced pace—the killings continued. On February 2, 1991, just two months after the trial in Xapuri, Expedito Ribeiro de Souza, a union leader in the state of Pará, was shot dead. Shortly afterward, his successor, Carlos Cabral, was shot in the thigh. On March 8 and 9, two more union leaders were attacked. José Alves de Souza was shot three times but survived. Sebastião Ribeiro da Silva died where he fell, on the floor of his home.

  The region made headlines again in the summer of 1992, when Brazil hosted the Earth Summit and more than 150 world leaders signed agreements calling for forest protection and efforts to stem global warming. Brazil boasted that the rate of cutting and burning in the Amazon had dropped by more than half from the devastating peak reached before Mendes’s death. Critics charged that the change was more a result of Brazil’s paralyzed economy than a result of any new environmental policies. And even at the slowed rate, an area of rain forest twice the size of Delaware was being cut and burned every year.

  The deep recession had a direct impact on the rubber tappers as well. Prices for rubber and Brazil nuts were too low to produce a profit. The Xapuri cooperative had built a nut-processing plant that, with 140 workers, was the town’s biggest employer. Nonetheless, the operation continued to lose money. With some new initiatives, such as a partnership, with Deja Shoe—an American company marketing boots and shoes made with Amazon rubber—the tappers are continuing to test ways to make a living from the living forest. But the challenges are daunting.

  Finally, the inevitable happened. In February 1993 plans were under way to transfer Darly Alves from the Amazon prison in southern Brazil. The special treatment he had received in the Acre state penitentiary would be a memory, and the prisons in the south were far more secure. With half a dozen other inmates, Alves and his son cut through the flimsy bars of a window and fled in a waiting truck toward the Bolivian border.

  1 Alves and his son were recaptured in 1996 and sent to more secure penitentiaries. They were eventually released on probation after serving less than half of their 19-year sentences. Alves moved to a different part of the Amazon. In 2003, officials in Acre reopened the murder investigation to examine the evidence hinting that others knew of, or aided in, the murder plot. No one else has been prosecuted as of this printing.

  NOTES

  APPENDICES

  Map of South America, Brazil, and the Amazon

  The Murder Scene

  A Resource Guide

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Notes

  Chapter 1. The Burning Season

/>   Details of the murder came from dozens of interviews with Chico Mendes’s neighbors, relatives, and bodyguards; testimony given by witnesses during pretrial hearings; transcripts of interviews conducted by the local and federal police; and the autopsy report. Ilzamar Mendes initially claimed to reporters that both bodyguards immediately fled from the murder scene. But all of the neighbors who witnessed the incident confirm the guards’ story: Roldão Lucas da Cruz ran to get help; Roldão Roseno de Souza stayed with Chico Mendes.

  Chapter 2. Amazonia

  This chapter drew in part on the articles gathered in what is perhaps the most comprehensive and lucid book describing the biology, geology, and almost every other aspect of the Amazon basin: Key Environments: Amazonia (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985), edited by Ghillean T. Prance and Thomas E. Lovejoy.

  The book that best conveys the subtle yet spectacular ecology and physiology of the rain forest’s biota—from sloths to strangler figs—is Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain Forests of Central and South America, by Adrian Forsyth and Kenneth Miyata (New York: Scribners, 1984).

  An earlier Tropical Nature, by Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Macmillan, 1878), provides one of the first attempts to comprehend the workings of the rain forest. The Naturalist on the River Amazons (London, 1863; New York: Penguin Books, 1989), by Wallace’s collecting companion, Henry Walter Bates, is one of the most spellbinding early descriptions of the river and its environs—and it is much easier to find than Wallace’s book, having been reissued in paperback.

  The Primary Source: Tropical Forests and Our Future, by Norman Myers (New York: Norton, 1985), is an excellent overview, dense with facts, of the wonders of the world’s rain forests and their precarious situation. A compelling personal exploration of this ecosystem is contained in In the Rainforest, by Catherine Caufield (New York: Knopf, 1985).

  Chapter 3. Weeping Wood

  The Discovery of the Amazon, edited by José Toribio Medina (New York: Dover, 1988), includes the full translated account of Orellana’s voyage by Friar Caspar de Carvajal as well as extensive related references. Rich details of life along the Amazon in the years just before the rubber boom are contained in William H. Edwards’s A Voyage up the River Amazon, Including a Residence at Pará (London: John Murray, 1847).

  The history of the human occupation of the basin is contained in People of the Tropical Rain Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), an oversize, lushly illustrated survey of rain forest cultures edited by Julie Sloan Denslow and Christine Padoch.

  Two American scholars have added great detail to the picture of the rubber boom and subsequent bust. In The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), Barbara Weinstein describes the remarkable rush into the rain forest and then the abandonment of the tappers. Warren Dean’s Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987) has a broader scope, detailing the saga through World War II. Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), by John Hemming, provides additional background on the rubber boom, particularly its disastrous effect on the Indians. Finally, a thoroughly researched history of rubber—including the crucial invention of vulcanization—is contained in Austin Coates’s The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  A chronicle of the persistent folly of those who would exploit the Amazon is contained in The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon (London: Verso Books, 1989), by Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn. Jonathan Kandell’s Passage Through El Dorado: Traveling the World’s Last Great Wilderness (New York: Morrow, 1984) describes the perpetual allure of the Amazon and includes a scene in which the author is sitting with the rubber baron Guilherme Zaire and chances to encounter a local tapper leader named Chico.

  Chapter 4. Jungle Book

  Warren Dean’s book (see Chapter 3) describes the situation during World War II in depth. He cites an American document, quoted herein, that sums up the exploitative system of aviamento in fewer yet better words than can be found anywhere else. Some material in this chapter is drawn from the work of Malu Maranhão, a reporter for Folha de Londrina, who began writing about the rubber tappers in the dry season of 1988 and interviewed some remarkable aging veterans of the war for rubber. The rubber soldier ballads were sung to me by Dona Antonia, who runs the only really good restaurant in Xapuri and who was Chico Mendes’s favorite cook. Details on Mendes’s childhood and life on the seringal were gleaned from days of hiking the same trails he once frequented and interviewing tappers who were relatives or friends.

  Details on the design and construction of a rubber tapper’s home are contained in Liliane Robacher’s Habitaçāo Amazonica (Paraná, Brazil: Editora Universitaria Champagnat, 1983).

  The threat posed by some forest species was made apparent to me when I slipped on a log catwalk, reached out for the nearest tree, and whipped my hand back in agony; three Astrocaryum spines had embedded themselves in my palm, and one had plunged into one side of the fleshy part of a fingertip and come out on the other. Then there was the stingray I trod on while stepping out of a canoe. Luckily its spine missed my foot. Tappers say the pain is so bad that “even a strong man cries out for his mother.”

  Chapter 5. Coming of Age in the Rain Forest

  The reclusiveness of Chico Mendes’s mentor, Euclides Távora, resulted in persistent confusion about details of his life. Mendes himself contributed a little to the uncertainty. In the last year of Mendes’s life, when his international work started to attract the attention of journalists from around the world, he always said he had been eighteen when he met Távora in 1962. But more than half a dozen people, including Mendes’s neighbors, Távora’s wife, and his closest friends insist that this man’s influence on Mendes dated from a much earlier age. Interviews with Neuza Ramos Pereira and Francisco Siqueira de Aquino helped clear things up.

  The lives of important Brazilian figures such as Luis Carlos Prestes, “the Horseman of Hope,” and Getúlio Vargas are richly chronicled in a series of excellent volumes by John W. F. Dulles: Vargas of Brazil: A Political Biography; Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900–1935; and Brazilian Communism, 1935—1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967, 1973, and 1983). Descriptions of the prisoners’ life on Fernando de Noronha Island were drawn from the last book. Also recommended is John Gunther’s Inside Latin America, which has a rich profile of Vargas (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941).

  Chapter 6. Roads to Ruin

  Two detailed collections of papers on the occupation of the Amazon have resulted from conferences organized by the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Florida, Gainesville: Man in the Amazon, edited by Charles Wagley, and Frontier Expansion in Amazonia, edited by Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1974 and 1984, respectively). And another indispensable book is The Last Frontier: Fighting Over Land in the Amazon (London: Zed Books, 1985). In it, Sue Branford and Oriel Glock provide both a thoroughly reported overview of the human impact of Brazil’s development policies and case studies that portray the Amazon’s ranchers, businessmen, and colonists. One such account, the sad tale of the São Paulo businessman Carlos Vilela de Andrade, is referred to in this chapter.

  I also refer to René Dubos’s book-length essay The Wooing of Earth (New York: Scribners, 1980), which in hopeful tones describes how human beings occasionally have shown a capacity to live within nature’s laws. The list of American towns that once held the title “Timber Capital of the World” was drawn from Clearcut: The Deforestation of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1971), by Nancy Wood. The World Bank pamphlet “Government Policies and Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon Region” (1989), by Dennis J. Mahar, has an excellent overview of the issue described in its title, as does Robert Repetto’s report for the World Resources Institute, “The Forest for the Trees? Government Policies and the M
isuse of Forest Resources” (1988). Notably, Repetto’s paper has a lengthy section on the ongoing misuse of forests by the United States. Other studies have shown that in Hawaii, for example, the pace of the destruction of the rain forest has exceeded that in Brazil. And Hawaii has the highest species extinction rate on the planet.

  The demise of Brazil’s Indians is described in detail by John Hemming (see Chapter 3). In this chapter, I quote a telling passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (New York: Washington Square Press, 1977). Gilio Brunelli’s report of the last fight of Brazil’s Zóro tribe was published in the Cultural Survival Quarterly (vol. 10, no. 2, 1986). Almost any issue of this respected journal contains up-to-date accounts of threats to indigenous cultures. In November 1988, Amnesty International published a detailed report called “Brazil: Cases of Killings and Ill-Treatment of Indigenous People.”