But this strategy could only save small pieces of land for temporary periods and many tappers lost their livelihoods. The ranchers meanwhile hired more gunmen than cattle hands and started issuing threats to those who dared rally the landless. The first important assassination, in 1980, was of Wilson Pinheiro, the head of CONTAG. After that, Chico, with the backing of the PT, Brazil’s workers’ party, urged tappers to fight, not compromise.
A group of tappers, angered by the police’s failure to find Pinheiro’s murderer and suspecting the culprit was a local ranch manager, ambushed and killed him on a road. More than a hundred tappers were later arrested and tortured. War had been declared.
There was little doubt which side the authorities were backing. The Catholic Church estimates that more than 1,500 rural workers have been killed since 1978 in conflicts over land. Not one of those who ordered the murders has been brought to justice and only two contract killers have been sentenced.
Violence increased after 1985 when the ranchers became worried by the government’s reversion to a policy of settling landless families in Amazonia. A new party, the União Democrática Ruralista (UDR), was set up to lobby for agriculture remaining in the hands of big producers. The ranchers also used increasingly well-armed gunmen to protect what they claimed was their territory. As pitched battles raged, tappers were forced out of the forest and the population of Rio Branco, the capital of Acre, doubled.
The tappers responded to the increased violence by forming a national council to demand a legal right for local people to exploit the forest in ways which preserved the trees. In 1987, only two weeks after the Minister for Land Reform signed a new law giving effect to their demands, he was killed in a mysterious air crash. The law, however, survived: it said that land which had been fraudulently expropriated by fazendeiros could be turned into reserves.
The ranchers were furious. But João Branco, then UDR leader in Acre, denies that they took up arms in protest. ‘If the land in Acre cost the same as that in Japan it would be worth fighting over…this is an artificial conflict created by the press. They have been manipulated, just as Chico was, by the Church and the traditional politicians scared of losing the power they wield through state patronage if we ranchers, who don’t depend on them at all, became too powerful.’
Although Mendes was then unknown in Brazil outside Acre, he had begun to receive international recognition and support from leading ecologists. His battle was presented to millions of American television viewers. Yet for Mendes it was still a struggle for survival. The Bishop of Acre explains: ‘He was defending the jungle, defending ecology but most of all defending their land.’
But the limelight – and a United Nations prize now resting in the grisly shrine that was once his house – made Mendes the champion of the Amazon and a hero of the international Green movement. Suddenly he was caught in the crossfire between those who wished to fence off the whole forest as a museum and those who wanted to destroy it for profit.
Ranchers still believe deforestation is the only course. The cemetery of charred tree stumps along the road to Xapuri and the squalid huts in Rio Branco inhabited by rubber tappers forced out of the forest make it easy to condemn Brazil for its policy in the past two decades of opening up the Amazon. But many Brazilians argue that the First World has no right to prevent development in a country with the largest debt in the developing world and the worst income distribution, and, in spite of its immense size, 12 million landless poor. João Branco argues: ‘In a state with no energy or transport, what economic alternatives are there to cattle-raising?’
At the airport bar where he is drinking with fellow ranchers, Branco hardly endears himself by initially demanding $10,000 for an interview. A stocky man with a bushy moustache, he insists that the tappers’ claims that the land is not suitable for agriculture or pasture are ludicrous. ‘This is good business – we’d hardly be spending $100 a hectare to deforest if it wasn’t. The rubber business on the other hand was finished long before 1971 when we moved in. Preserving the forest is just preserving their starvation.’
The international support for Mendes put considerable pressure on the government, as did his achievement of bringing together the traditional enemies, Indians and tappers, in a Forest Peoples Alliance. He used this influence to fight against the clearing of forests in Cachoeira where he had grown up. The area belonged to Darli and Alvoria Alves, two brothers who had fled from Paraná where they were wanted on murder charges. In September 1988, after Mendes staged a sit-in, the government declared the area a reserve.
The Alves brothers were much feared in Xapuri and that May had sent gunmen to break up an occupation of the local forestry office by rubber tappers, seriously wounding two young boys. Mendes knew he would pay heavily for his victory at Cachoeira. Just before Christmas they struck. Mendes’s assassination provoked an international outcry and two days later Darcy, one of Darli Alves’s sons, gave himself up. Three weeks later Darli confessed, though both men later retracted their confessions.
Since Mendes’s assassination the rubber tappers’ movement has disintegrated, riven by infighting and the desire to cash in on his death. Many have gone to Bolivia. Acre has become an important cocaine-smuggling route; the Church has been weakened by an explosion of evangelical sects; the PT narrowly lost the presidential elections in 1989 and has all but collapsed.
But his influence remains. More than 15,000 journalists, politicians, union leaders, diplomats and ecologists are expected to descend on Xapuri for the two days the trial is predicted to last.
Mendes’s greatest legacy has been the reversal in Brazilian attitudes. Brazil has long been happy to play the role of eco villain, its military drawing up vast plans for the ‘defence of Amazonia’ and complaining that the rest of the world had cut down their forests so why shouldn’t they. Under President Fernando Collor, for the first time Brazil has a government committed to environmental protection. His Environment Minister José Lutzenberger, Brazil’s foremost ecological activist, was a great supporter of Chico Mendes. ‘We want to preserve as much as possible of the Amazon,’ he said on a visit to the Pantanal.
Some landowners are selling up because of the current recession and multinationals have moved out because of the bad publicity. The killings seem to have stopped too, though Francisco Barbosa, the president of the rubber tappers’ union in Acre, fears this is a temporary lull by the ranchers so as not to prejudice the trial.
The struggle over the fate of the forest continues. The Bishop of Acre is not hopeful for the future. ‘Once this trial is over the issue will be seen by the public to be resolved and attention will move on,’ he said. ‘The world must realise that there are thousands of Chico Mendes.’
The trial took place in a small courthouse in a dusty street on the edge of Xapuri. The courtroom was packed every day with journalists, foreign observers, local citizens and rubber tappers, some of whom had walked for days. Those who could not get inside gathered at the open windows. Outside, vendors tried to sell flavoured water, chewing gum and paper cones of river prawns.
It was over quickly because of the unexpected confession on the first day by Darcy Pereira da Silva that he had pulled the trigger. After just four days of testimony, the jury ruled him guilty of the killing and his father Darli for ordering it. They were sentenced to nineteen years in jail.
At the time it felt like an important precedent. But in February 1993, the men escaped from the prison in Rio Branco. Police claimed the men had sawed through the bars of their cells; others said they simply walked out, with the apparent complicity of their guards. It was more than two years before they were recaptured. They were later released after serving less than half of their sentences.
Yet Chico Mendes did not die in vain. The international outcry forced the Brazilian authorities to meet some of the demands of the rubber tappers of Acre and set up reserves where local people are allowed to extract forest products like rubber and brazil nuts, and no one can cut down the trees. On
e of the larger ones, near his home in Xapuri where he was shot, was named the Chico Mendes Reserve and sprawls over 2.4 million acres.
Although the trees from which they tap the milky latex that becomes rubber are now protected, the rubber tappers of Acre eke out a pretty meagre existence. Not only has the world price of rubber dropped, but companies like tyre manufacturers Michelin complain that the rubber produced in places like Xapuri is mixed with too many impurities because of all the twigs and insects that drop into their collecting cups.
Travelling in the Amazon was hard work. From the moment one left the air-conditioned chill of the airport to be slammed with heat and humidity, everything seemed to slow down. The air was busy with biting insects that made you scratch and curse and could give you all manner of horrible diseases it was better not to think about. In the river, which was often the only place to wash, there were bloodsucking piranhas, giant anacondas and tiny candiru, otherwise known as the toothpick fish, which could swim up a penis then emit barbs.
And the distances were huge. Once, the FT foreign desk in London phoned me in Rio to tell me a fax had arrived about a press conference in Manaus that morning. I had to point out it was five hours’ direct flight away and in a different time zone.
For all the dire warnings of the destruction of the Amazon, I thought I had never seen so many trees. On and on for hour after hour you could fly over an endless mosaic of trees. I soon learnt that to really appreciate the Amazon it was no good just going to towns with airports like Manaus, Belém or Santarém. That was just the start. From there you needed to get a boat up a tributary then a canoe, or one of the ageing single-engined planes that touch down on tiny mud landing strips.
Only then could you see the waterlilies with flowers the size of pineapples or flocks of screeching red macaws. I’d seen from my own terrace in Rio that Brazil is so fecund that you only need to drop a fruit pip for a tree to start growing. But in the Amazon the plants and flowers seem several times larger than anywhere else on earth. Leaves unfurl to the size of tablecloths, roots swell thick and grainy as elephants’ legs, tree trunks spread wide and pleated like dirndl skirts, and flowers pout voluptuously from plants that look as if they belong to the beginnings of time.
It was shocking then to fly north from Santarém along the Tapajós River and suddenly be blinded by thick black smoke which blotted out the sun. Down below as we came in to land, centuries-old trees stood dead and burnt amid bubbling craters of black mud where garimpeiros or wildcat gold miners were using mercury to separate and clean gold.
It looked like a war zone and indeed in the early 1990s much of the Amazon was a battlefield. Small wars were under way between ranchers and rubber tappers, miners and Indians, people of the forest and major companies producing paper, soya or iron ore, landowners and the sem terra or landless.
It was the misfortune of some of the most vulnerable tribes to be sitting on vast deposits of gold, platinum, magnesium or iron. Nor was it always the case of the small man or native against rich powerful interests. Tales of Amazonian gold had brought thousands of poor from the dry north-east and the favelas of Rio and São Paulo to try their luck, as well as desperate young girls working as prostitutes.
Most at risk were the Yanomami Indians, a tribe usually described as Stone Age, whose traditional lands had been invaded by garimpeiros. With them came malaria, influenza, to which the Yanomami have no immunity, and sexually transmitted diseases.
A number of celebrities had taken up their cause. The Amazon had become fashionable. In 1991 The Body Shop ran a ‘Stop the Burning’ campaign, collecting a million signatures on a petition which its founder, Anita Roddick, presented to the Brazilian embassy in London. Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, had started a Rainforest Foundation and travelled to see the Yanomami. It helped that the tribe were very photogenic.
Extermination in Eden
Financial Times, 20 February 1993
‘Those who have already died will have their revenge. They will cut the sky into pieces so that it falls all over the land.’
DAVI KOPENAWA YANOMAMI
THE US AVIATION MAP of the north-western reaches of Roraima, Brazil’s most northern state, warns intriguingly that the area is ‘largely unknown’ and from the air it is easy to see why. Its dense jungle inspired the setting for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. Under the pounding glare of the Amazonian sun, a few wispy clouds throw their shadows on to a carpet of green treetops covering mountains and chasms as far as the eye can see. Stencilled through the heart is the flashing ribbon of the Mucajaí River. Along its banks, the occasional clearings for a maloca (a conical woven hut) are the only signs of human presence.
Almost 500 years after Pedro Cabral discovered Brazil, this stretch of rainforest remains untouched by the highways, hydroelectric projects, woodcutters and settlements that have devoured much of the Amazon. It is home to an estimated 9,000 members of the world’s oldest-surviving isolated Indian tribe – the Yanomami.
The Yanomami are believed to have been there for thousands of years. They do not read or write, and use bows and arrows. Female children are often killed at birth and names must never be spoken. After a death, the body is left in the trees for a week before burning, and the ashes are then eaten with banana paste. They subsist on hunting and fishing and precarious agriculture. The land is poor so the population is sparse and moves often.
The Yanomami reserve is accessible only by small plane after a laborious process of government permissions. The nearest road linking Roraima to the rest of Brazil starts 200 miles away. It was built in 1977 and has yet to be paved. Bulldozers and four-wheel-drive vehicles are unknown. The somnolent day is interrupted only by the shrieks of parrots, unidentifiable whoops and calls from the bushes, and the chatter of monkeys in the trees.
Until 1987, the Yanomami’s only contact with whites was the occasional missionary. Five years ago it was discovered that these Stone Age people were sitting on one of the world’s richest mineral deposits replete with gold, tin, diamonds and uranium. The result was a flood of 45,000 garimpeiros, or wildcat gold miners. They brought guns, rum and diseases which, in three years, wiped out 10 per cent of the Yanomami population in what human rights groups called genocide.
The international outcry prompted three operations to remove the garimpeiros. The first official trip by image-conscious President Fernando Collor in 1990 was for the widely televised destruction of eighty-four clandestine airstrips. Last year, amid a blaze of publicity, he awarded the Yanomami a 9.4-million-square-kilometre reserve (the size of Portugal) to win kudos at the Earth Summit and reverse Brazil’s environmentally unfriendly reputation. Now Collor is in disgrace, the Earth Summit forgotten and the garimpeiros are back – 12,000 since November.
Once more, Yanomami are dying: 200 in the past twelve months. The Homoxi region under the shadow of the Surucucu Mountains has been mutilated by airstrips slashed out of the jungle. The Mucajaí River has been choked with silt, polluted by mercury used to extract gold, and diverted in the frantic search for the precious metal.
From above, you can see tiny figures working Heath Robinson-type wooden sluice contraptions. Fetid water gathers in the craters they have dug, breeding mosquitoes that carry malaria lethal to the Yanomami. Charlotte Sankey from Survival International, a London-based organisation active in the fight to preserve them, says: ‘If we don’t do something, we will see another people wiped out – for ever.’
Although Brazil’s 1988 Constitution guarantees that all its 180 remaining Indian tribes will be granted their traditional lands by this October – a total of 90 million hectares in 510 reserves – powerful interests threaten the extermination of the Yanomami, like so many others before them. Since 1500, Brazil’s Indian population has fallen from 5 million to 220,000. The ‘noble savage’ has been seen as a barrier to development. Fernando Ramos Pereira, then Governor of Roraima, said in 1979: ‘We’re not going to let half a dozen Indian tribes stop progress.’
That
Constitution is to be reviewed this year. Bishops, mining companies, politicians, landowners, the military, environmentalists and garimpeiros are battling over the mining of Yanomami land. This would provide work for thousands of poor Brazilians and revenue for the government – but probably destroy the tribe.
In Homoxi, Funai, the national Indian agency, and Médecins Sans Frontières, a medical aid organisation, have a clinic tending to the forty-eight Indians living nearby. At the sound of the plane, several Yanomami emerge from their maloca, naked except for small knotted tangas, bodies painted red, and straws protruding from above their upper lips. Like children they come forward, touch and stare, chatter and giggle to themselves. Bored quickly, they go back to their hammocks where they loll listlessly, their stick-thin limbs and distended stomachs no advertisement for the natural life. Suddenly, they begin jabbering. Zelia, the Peruvian nurse, says they want to know if we have come to remove the garimpeiros.
At the other end of the short runway, makeshift huts covered with blue plastic sheeting show how close the invaders have come. Eight planes a day unload more, along with such diseases as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis and syphilis. The pollution of the river has killed the fish and the noise of the planes has scared off animals. To appease the Yanomami, the garimpeiros gave them flour and rice – but their plantations have been left to wither and die. In their brutal introduction to western civilisation, they were given rum and the women were seduced. According to Zelia, two-thirds of the Homoxi Yanomami have had malaria. On the morning of my visit, three more sorry sufferers came in.
The garimpeiros may be well armed and sport gold watches or nuggets round their necks, but most have hollow cheeks, dull eyes and dirty shorts. All the ones I met were from the poverty-stricken northeastern states of Maranhão and Bahia. They had been forced out by drought, and all asked for food. Many have no alternative but to move from place to place, following the latest fofoca (rumour about a gold discovery). ‘I will only leave dead,’ said Vajel, who has been a garimpeiro since he was 15. ‘On a good day, you can get twenty grams of gold – that’s five months’ minimum salary,’ said Raimundo. ‘If they push us out again, we’ll come back. We’ve got no other option.’
Small Wars Permitting Page 14