Today there was no one but me at the table; no one outside waiting at the door. Sitting bolt upright, Collor gave a tight little smile, cleared his throat, lit his characteristic Cuban cigar with uncharacteristic shaking hands and began, for the first time since his suspension, to tell of his feelings. ‘I have suffered a lot but am resisting to my limits,’ he said, his tight hold on himself reminding me of a patient on his deathbed making a ghastly effort not to allow the pain to show through.
He could not, however, hide the signs of distraction such as the occasional glassy stare, the inability to remember words and the tremulous shaking of his shoulders. Only the rare bursts of spirit recalled the rich, self-confident 40-year-old who in March 1990 became Brazil’s youngest and first directly elected President for thirty years, on a platform to wipe out corruption and modernise the economy.
Evandro Lins e Silva, the prosecution lawyer in the impeachment trial, calls Collor the ‘Dorian Gray of the Planalto’ (the Brazilian Presidency). ‘Behind the public persona of this slender and beautiful youth with active eyes and impressive gestures, the true painting was the disfigured figure of corruption, vice and fraud.’
Despite his pinched cheeks, Collor still has the good looks which won him a mention in People magazine in 1990 as ‘one of the world’s fifty most beautiful people’. Elegant despite the stifling heat, his hair greased back in the manner favoured by Latin leaders, Collor is hard
to visualise as the man at the apex of a vast network of people within his government collecting kickbacks. They even had a computerised corruption manual accessed with the password ‘Collor’.
Any talk of why he had become embroiled in such a scheme was soon ruled out of order. ‘I’m absolutely convinced of my innocence,’ he said. ‘In no moment did I do anything beneath the dignity of the President. If I’d done anything wrong I could have put my foot down and stopped the whole inquiry process.’
The corruption scheme is shrugged off as ‘a matter for the lawyers’. Of PC Farias, his former campaign treasurer and alleged front man, he says: ‘I don’t even want to touch upon anything so ugly.’
What he wants to discuss is what he calls his ‘summary execution’ by the Senate, which has marked his impeachment for 22 December. ‘It’s completely unacceptable. They’ve already announced the date of my execution. Well, I won’t go to the firing line like they think. Never, never, never. In any country in the world a fair trial is the basic human right of any citizen and above all for a president. That’s all I ask.’
He gets agitated at the mention of resignation. ‘To resign is to run away. I don’t flee. I fight. I was elected for five years and have a programme which I must carry out.’ Adding, through some rather tortuous logic, that he’s staying on for the good of the country, he says, ‘I am still President. I have simply been suspended from my functions.’
I ignored what seemed to be a hint that I should be addressing him more respectfully as Mr President, and asked how he explained the criminal charges. Laughing bitterly, he exclaimed, ‘What did I do to receive such a blow? Was it a crime to modernise the country, to build up reserves to $22 billion, to secure Brazil’s re-entry into the international financial community, to defend indigenous people and children?’
The way Collor tells it, he did nothing wrong and the whole ‘lamentable episode’ (as he calls it) was a campaign against him by those angered by his modernisation programme. ‘I was brought down by a combination of business and union elites that had their corporate interests harmed by my actions, and politicians who wanted power all under a false cloak of morality. These people don’t care about clean administration.’
Apparently unaware of the irony, he continued, ‘I always saw power as an instrument for great social transformation, whereas they saw it as a way to great personal satisfaction.’
Collor seems to believe that this ‘great social transformation’ is now threatened by his successor, Itamar Franco, whom he refuses to mention by name, referring to him only as ‘the Vice President’. ‘The Vice President is dragging Brazil into the fifth world,’ Collor exclaimed.
Then, like a magician, he pulls out of his briefcase sheaves of documents showing measures passed by his government, decrees overturned and measures in progress, as well as a calendar marked with what is expected to be done when. ‘Look at this,’ he crows, picking one at random which turns out to be a rather insignificant measure about trade in tropical plants. I began to wonder what a psychiatrist would make of Fernando Collor.
He refuses to admit the strength of the nationwide street campaign against him demanding his impeachment. ‘If a president had to resign every time a few people came out in the streets, then Helmut Kohl and John Major would both be out of office.’
Collor’s main interest now is in mind control, a theory he expounds on at length: ‘We are all born with the same hardware. Einstein’s brain was no bigger than the next man’s. The difference is in how we programme it. For this I am avoiding ignoble thoughts like hate and resentment as these are like a virus in the system.’
Armed with his Einstein-sized brain, Collor clings to what straws he can find. Proudly he talks of letters of support from Fidel Castro and Jacques Cousteau. Someone, he said, had told him that President Mitterrand was sympathetic.
But somewhere in that half-crazed mind Fernando Collor must know there is little chance that he can avoid impeachment and eight years’ suspension from public office, even if, given Brazil’s tradition of impunity, he is unlikely to go to jail. He concluded our interview by stating: ‘The world has not seen the end of Fernando Collor.’ He may be right. Brazilians have very short memories.
In the end Collor resigned to avoid impeachment and fled to Miami. In the final ignominy, his resignation did not even make the front pages. For in the early hours of that December morning, the body of the star of the country’s favourite novela or soap opera had been discovered dumped on wasteland in Rio. Daniela Perez had been stabbed eighteen times with a sharp instrument. The principal suspect was her co-star and jealous screen lover, confused it seems between real life and fiction. In an even stranger twist, Daniela’s heartbroken mother was the writer of the novela. The story had moved on and it was time for me to go too.
Claudio had been transferred to New York and I was supposed to follow. But I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving Rio. Then one morning I suddenly panicked. Rio was so seductive. If I didn’t move I would be there for ever like thousands of foreigners who had fallen in love with the city or one of its beauties.
I had learnt the Brazilian art of jeito or finding a way round things and applied for a fellowship at Harvard, persuading them to take the application despite having missed the deadline. When I left it felt like more than saying goodbye to a country. Brazilians have an expression – saudade – that means missing something in a yearning, sailors-lost-at-sea kind of way. Somehow I knew I would never be as happy again.
In New York, Claudio and I soon discovered we had almost nothing in common besides bossa nova, beach and Rio. He liked kung-fu movies on a wide-screen TV and mountain biking; I liked looking at the Matisse dancers in MOMA and off-Broadway theatre. But even today I cannot think of Brazil without a smile. Whenever I hear people speaking that unmistakable sing-song brasileiro on the tube in London, I am transported back.
A few years later I went back on holiday. I walked up the tree-lined street in Ipanema where Claudio’s grandmother had lived. She had died and somehow I knew what I was going to see. The little house, crammed with mementoes, where she would shout out the names of London sights, was gone. Instead there was yet another glass and concrete apartment block.
* PC Farias would later be found murdered in his hotel room in north-east Brazil.
The Tarantula Crossing the Street
Amazonia 1990–1993
It was the first time I had seen a tarantula in real life. Spiders had been my one reservation about going to the Amazon. I had no problem with snakes or cockroaches or any kind
of beetle or bug. I was sure if it came to it I could eat monkey brains or live caterpillars, particularly if proffered by a head-bashing Indian. But I hated spiders. My skin crawled as I read Amazon travel books that talked of spiders the size of dinner plates, wolf spiders whose bites can leave scars ten inches long, and crab spiders that clamber down the ropes of your hammock while you sleep.
I was not even in the rainforest proper yet but in a town on its edge when I saw the tarantula crossing the street. I had just emerged from my no-star hotel in Rio Branco (summed up by my guidebook as ‘the best of a bad bunch: not clean’) and was crossing the main road when I noticed it alongside. It was not scurrying like spiders back home but walking quite nonchalantly, one thick hairy leg in front of another.
This first arachnid encounter was not the only thing that made my first experience in the Amazon in December 1990 rather alarming. I knew from the books that the Amazon contains half the fresh water on the planet and its forests provide a tenth of our oxygen. I’d read of a place of great mystery, a vast green cathedral that had led people into crazed schemes such as taking grand pianos up the river or building opera houses in the middle of the jungle. I had imagined being silenced by the majesty of trees thousands of years old and of dizzying height. I had pictured waking gently to the splash of fish, chatter of monkeys and whoop of brightly feathered birds, perhaps peering out from my hammock in the night at a painted Indian with a toucan on his shoulder or into the yellow eyes of some passing jaguar.
Instead Rio Branco was a shabby town where everything smelt of mould and people looked poor and underfed. The buildings shimmered with heat and the humid air felt like thick wet cotton and induced a sullen kind of torpor. Only the river was busy, small canoes jostling for space along the banks of muddy waters to unload slabs of blackened rubber to sell to waiting buyers.
I sat in the central plaza in the shade of the enormous ceiba trees and ordered a chopp, a draught beer that I wished was ice-cold. I asked for a menu and someone brought me a bowl of tacaca, a soup of tiny river prawns and dark green jambu leaves that looked like spinach but left my mouth numb.
Soon a man appeared trying to sell me a Chico Mendes T-shirt. At the next table I could hear American accents. I was in the middle of Brazil’s nowhere – so far from Rio that the time was two hours behind – but the place was packed with foreigners. Correspondents from everywhere from the New York Times to Asahi Shimbun, environmentalists and competing Hollywood scriptwriters had turned out for the trial of the killers of the world’s first international eco martyr.
The men who assassinated rubber tappers’ leader Chico Mendes had undoubtedly expected that the killing would go unpunished and unreported – as had those of hundreds of Brazilians murdered in land conflicts over the previous twenty years. He was the ninetieth rubber tapper to be killed in 1988 alone. But that fatal shotgun blast had reverberated around the world. More than 4,000 people had attended his funeral and the trial seemed set to be the first time a rancher behind such a killing would be convicted and sent to prison.
The year Mendes was murdered had been a scorching hot summer everywhere, from New York to Paris. Suddenly people started listening to scientists who warned that the burning and clearing of the Amazonian rainforest was contributing to a gradual warming of the earth known as the greenhouse effect, altering our climate and melting polar ice caps. Amazon burnings had reached their highest ever level in 1987, with 350,000 fires detected and the loss of 48,000 square miles of virgin rainforest – the equivalent of six football fields every minute. Thirty per cent of the world’s plant species were found in the Amazon and scientists argued that a living pharmacy – perhaps containing cures for cancer and Aids – was going up in smoke before even 1 per cent of the Amazon’s plants had been studied.
The forest martyr
Financial Times, 8 December 1990
THE SMALL BLUE HOUSE rising on stilts from the Amazonian mud of the sleepy jungle town of Xapuri looks unremarkable. But on its rickety back wall, bloodstains and bullet holes mark the place where, just before Christmas two years ago, a rubber tapper was gunned down for defending the world’s largest rainforest. Little known in Brazil, Chico Mendes had achieved international fame even before his assassination.
The remote state of Acre on Brazil’s north-west border with Peru and Bolivia is an unlikely location for the world’s first ecological martyr. And Mendes, short and pot-bellied with owlish eyes, was not an obvious hero. Yet he, more than any other person, has come to symbolise the plight of the Amazon forest. On Wednesday in Mendes’s home town of Xapuri, a father and son will stand trial for his murder amid a ferment of debate about the basic question of Amazonia – can modern man and rainforest co-exist?
Mendes mobilised rubber tappers and Indians in an unlikely alliance against developers who were tearing out the green heart of the region, wanting to turn it into ranches to raise cows to supply the world with hamburgers. In the process he managed to save Acre from the deforestation that disfigured other western Amazonian states.
The Green movement could not have wished for a more harrowing tale to promote its cause. It reads like a movie script: indeed, the film rights to the story of Chico’s life were auctioned in Hollywood last year for a reputed $1.76 million and there are already several competing versions in preparation.
On one side, the simple rubber tappers and brazil-nut gatherers fight for their right to use the forest as they have for a hundred years. They are up against landowners who want to bulldoze the rainforest for pasture, foresters who want to sell its wood, and big companies, foreign and Brazilian, which bought parts of Amazonia cheaply for speculative profits.
The tale is set in Xapuri, an Indian word which means ‘the place where there didn’t used to be a river’. It’s a one-horse town where guns settle disputes and tropical storms swallow up the muddy red road for weeks on end. It was during one such storm on 22 December 1988 that Mendes sat in his kitchen, a baby on each arm, restlessly playing dominoes. His young wife, Ilzamar, glanced repeatedly from the stove to the window, alert for the gunmen who they knew were waiting their chance.
Tearfully recalling the moment, she said: ‘In all our five years together Chico never spent a whole day with me. He was a man who belonged to everybody. But that day he wouldn’t leave me.’ When dinner was almost ready, Mendes picked up a towel and rose to take a shower in the outhouse. Ilzamar stopped him from taking their 4-year-olddaughter, Elenira, because she was sickening for flu. As Mendes opened the door into the sheeting rain, bullets thudded into his chest. It was the sixth and final attempt on his life. Screaming, Ilzamar ran into the street for help, but the police guards who had been assigned to them after Mendes began receiving death threats had long fled. She showed me the bloodstained towel she has kept as a relic.
If it had not been for a chance encounter in 1962 when he was 18, Mendes might still be alive, scraping a living as a rubber tapper like his father and grandfather before him and as he had been doing since the age of 9. But one sweltering afternoon he was introduced to Euclides Tavóra, a former revolutionary in hiding in the forest and the only person the young Chico had met able to read newspapers.
For three years Mendes would walk three hours through the jungle every day to learn to read and write. It was a political education too. Together they would listen to the BBC and Voice of Moscow, the news interpreted by Euclides, who had taken part in a Brazilian uprising in the 1920s before going into exile as a communist in Bolivia.
From Euclides, Mendes came to understand the oppression of the tappers by rubber barons who had brought them from the poor northeast in the late nineteenth century and kept them as slaves to debt. They did this by holding wages below the cost of subsistence provided by company shops. But after the rubber boom of World War II, international competition from the Far East (caused by Britain smuggling rubber seeds from Amazonia to Malaysia) slashed Brazil’s share of the world market from its historic monopoly to the 4 per cent it is today. As the b
arons went bankrupt the tappers became their own masters, able for the first time to sell directly to buyers and to grow their own food.
Mendes began educating fellow tappers, none of whom had ever seen a school, and organising them to resist the buyers who were paying a third less than the fixed government minimum price. In 1975 he became secretary of the local branch of CONTAG, the state-sponsored union for agricultural workers. He soon encountered a dangerous enemy – the ranchers.
Many were managers working for multinational companies and businessmen in São Paulo, attracted by a new government policy of cheap credits to buy up vast tracts of Amazonia. Tappers were evicted at pistol point by ranchers waving dubious land rights to old rubber estates. According to Dom Moacyr Grecchi, the outspoken Bishop of Acre, 81 per cent of the state is now in the hands of fazendeiros or large landowners, mostly holding fraudulent titles.
Terrified of the ranchers with their big cowboy boots and pistol-packing manner, the rubber tappers flocked to the union Mendes set up in Xapuri, drawn by his slogan ‘Against Eviction of Men for Cows’. Styling himself the Gandhi of the Forest, the avuncular Chico was backed by the Church and its network of padres across western Amazonia. He persuaded his fellow rubber tappers to join hands with their women and children around each threatened piece of land to prevent its deforestation. At that time the burning of the forest was so heavy that the sun and moon were blocked out and Xapuri was constantly coated with a layer of soot. But Mendes would lead his band of fifty underfed tappers through the smog-filled undergrowth to surround the holding. The presence of women and children meant the police could not fire; the rancher would be forced into court to prove his right to deforest. Mendes claimed he saved 3 million acres by this non-violent tactic known as empates, or stand-offs.
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