The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  The truck emerged into the smoky sunlight and squeaked to a halt under a lonely Brazil nut tree. The tree’s 150 feet of height was exaggerated by the absence of anything around it except a field planted in head-high manioc shrubs. All across the Amazon, Brazil nut trees can be seen standing in the middle of otherwise denuded landscapes. The dispersed trees, many dead or dying, are a fitting memorial to the rain forests that once surrounded them. They illustrate vividly how no element of this elaborate biological system can thrive on its own. In 1965, Brazil created a forestry code that, among other restrictions, prohibited the cutting of Brazil nut trees. The government recognized that the economic value of the living tree far outweighed the value of the timber or pasture; tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Brazil nuts are exported each year, mostly to the United States.

  But the problem is not solved so easily. To produce nuts, the trees have to be pollinated. Biologists have since found that large euglossine bees, which are the commonest pollinator of Brazil nut trees, cannot thrive outside the forest. Male bees can only catch the attention of females for mating by gathering in a dense swarm. And the only way the males can find each other is for each bee to collect an aromatic compound from certain forest orchids. When a Brazil nut tree is isolated, the progression is simple: no forest, no orchids; no orchids, no aroma; no aroma, no swarm; no swarm, no mate; no mate, no bees; no bees, no Brazil nuts. Even though the trees are no longer cut, they no longer produce nuts. Moreover, most slowly die as fires are set every other year or so in the surrounding pasture, for the fire steadily chars the bark around the base of the tree.

  At Cachoeira, fortunately, most of the Brazil nut trees, unlike the solitary giant at the entrance, were still surrounded by thick forest. Beyond the tree, the rutted track straggled to a dead end, where it dropped off into something resembling a diorama of the Grand Canyon—a network of steeply eroded gullies of orange-stained clay leading 20 feet down to a slow stream, one of the hundreds of spring-fed rivulets that laced most of the region. During the rainy season, the gouge in the earth filled with a foamy torrent that gave the seringal its name (cachoeira means “rapids” or “waterfall”). It was at this spot that the confrontations with Darly Alves and his workers and the police had taken place.

  Across the stream and up a hill was the central clearing of the seringal. Four tappers’ houses ringed several acres of pasture. Nearby was a schoolhouse named for Ivair Higino de Almeida, the twenty-six-year-old member of Xapuri’s rural workers’ union who had been killed six months before Mendes. This seringal no longer had a boss. For years now, the tappers of Cachoeira had been able to sell their rubber directly to a variety of merchants. One was the Syrian Guilherme Zaire, who owned the seringal until 1968. Another buyer lived on the seringal, in a pink house on the far side of the pasture that was once the boss’s house. This buyer paid less for the rubber than Zaire, but he transported it to town himself.

  The house of Mendes’s uncle and aunt, just uphill from the stream, served as a sort of gateway for visitors to Cachoeira. During the weeks-long confrontation with the Alves family, the house was taken over as the commissary for the empate. Several women had cooked day after day while several hundred tappers occupied the seringal to block the Alveses’ chain saws. The house was a typical tapiri, but the spot in the woods out back, where the family did its bathing and laundry and got its drinking water, was unusually beautiful. The garapé ran clear and cold over a packed bottom of white sand. The banks were lined with ferns. A small grove of citrus trees stood nearby—a refreshing sight and a rarity on seringais. Although lemons and oranges can grow easily in the tropical climate, they are not commonly cultivated; the tapper culture that evolved out of a century of debt bondage still has not developed a balanced diet. In contrast, the original diet of most Indian tribes in the Amazon was well rounded; they cultivated and harvested dozens of fruits and vegetables along with such basic crops as manioc.

  Sitting in the common room of the little house was Joaquim Alves Mendes, a younger brother of Chico Mendes’s late father. He sat at a roughly crafted table and began to shuffle dominoes beneath a shred of cheesecloth. His head had just a faint dusting of white hair. Even though, at seventy-five, he was one of the oldest men on the seringal, Joaquim was still lithe and bright-eyed. He and his wife, Cecília, had lived in this house since 1968, after moving from another seringal, Santa Fé. Cecilia was in the kitchen, scraping the skin from some hunks of manioc root. She had aged beautifully, as, it seems, did many rubber tappers’ wives. Her thick silver hair fell below her shoulder blades.

  Joaquim explained to a visitor that everyone was taking it easy today because of the holiday. As he started slapping dominoes onto the kitchen table with some friends, he explained that at Seringal Cachoeira, for as long as anyone could remember, Independence Day marked the official start of the burning season. By waiting to light their fires until the holiday, the tappers could combine work and pleasure. In the rain forest, fire is a form of celebration—the celebration of man’s ability to control nature. The tappers and Indians have always cleared small plots and burned them to make room for crops; such clearings eventually grow back, having little impact on the rain forest. It is only in the past two decades that the ranchers have used fire to attack the forest as a whole.

  As if to underscore Joaquim’s remarks, popping and crackling sounds echoed from the forest behind the clearing where the family grazed its animals. A thin brown cloud billowed above the treetops where Joaquim’s son Sebastião was clearing a newly cut forest patch to plant some manioc. Smoke began to filter through the walls, through gaps in the makeshift wallpaper of pages from a child’s textbook.

  The conversation slowly shifted to Chico Mendes, to the time when he was entering his teens, about to become a man. Cecília and Joaquim had known Chico as well as anyone; they had watched him grow up. Joaquim explained how Chico’s father, Francisco, hampered by his crippled legs, began to turn over more and more responsibility to Chico and his older brother, Raimundo. Early one evening in 1956, when Chico was twelve, the course of his life—which might have simply followed that of his father and every other tapper—changed forever.

  Chico was helping his father cure a batch of latex that they had collected in the afternoon. As they sat ladling the white “milk” over the slowing rotating ball of coagulating latex, a stranger hiked up to the family compound. He gave the traditional rubber tapper greeting, a solid clapping of the hands three or four times, to announce his presence without alarming anyone. The man was different from any Seringueiro Chico had ever seen. Of medium height, he was stocky and square and heavily muscled, not slim and taut like most of the tappers. He had a full dark beard, a mane of thick black hair, and a stentorian voice that carried far in the forest. Most unusual, he had a sheaf of newspapers—a rare item—stuck in his pocket.

  The man did not bother to introduce himself by name; in fact, even to the handful of friends he made around Xapuri over the next few years—even to the common-law wife whose house he shared for four years—he never spoke much of his past. He told them he had recently moved from Bolivia to a colocação not far away. That was all he said initially, but in the relaxed rhythm of the Amazon, where nothing can be rushed, the conversation slowly opened up.

  They began to discuss the articles in the old newspapers, which the man read with remarkable fluency; “he did not stutter in front of a newspaper,” recalled a tapper on Cachoeira. Chico’s father was impressed with the man’s knowledge of politics, and Chico was intrigued by his broad awareness of the outside world and his ability to read so effortlessly. Chico and Francisco said they would visit the man at his hut the next weekend.

  In the following weeks, they paid regular visits to the stranger, who lived a three-hour walk from Pote Seco. His colocação had been abandoned for years when he bought it, so he had to “clean” it—tapper parlance for opening up the trails between the rubber trees. He had stacks of old newspapers, some books, a locked suitcase, and
not much else. He was not adept at keeping house and hardly knew how to cook. Often, he would head out in the morning after eating a breakfast consisting only of large lumps of açúcar negro, the brown sugar that is considered a special treat on the seringal. Sometimes he would eat sugar for dinner, too. Despite his athletic build, he disliked heavy work, preferring to spend his days tapping the trees and his nights reading.

  Chico convinced his father to let him spend each weekend with this man to take more reading lessons. In those days, not one seringal had a school. The seringalistas feared that if the tappers knew how to read and do arithmetic, they would not be so easy to cheat. And few tappers could afford the luxury of sending their children to school in Xapuri; the extra hands were needed for tending fields and hauling water.

  Chico made the trek to the man’s colocação every Saturday and generally returned in the darkness early on Monday morning, in time to start his chores along an estrada. He became fascinated with this stranger and hovered around him, eager to learn about the outside world. Although the man was clearly a loner, something in Chico’s attitude—and possibly his being one of the few youngsters who had already learned the rudiments of reading—convinced him to work with this youth. None of the other children on the seringal interested the man, and he interested none of them.

  Over the course of their first year together, the man gradually opened up to Chico and told him something of his life. Every Saturday night, they would sit and read newspapers and talk late into the evening. Only after many months did the man tell Chico his name, Euclides Fernandes Távora. Like most of the tappers of Acre, Távora was from the northeast—but not from the drought-ravaged countryside. He came from a relatively well-to-do family in the coastal city of Fortaleza. In the early 1930s, after completing a university degree and five years of military training, he attained the rank of first lieutenant in the army.

  The 1930s were a tumultuous time in Brazil’s history, one of the many peaks in a cycle of military rebellions and coups d’état that began with the overthrow of Brazil’s emperor in 1889, marking the birth of the republic, and only ended in 1985. The rise and fall of various governments was caused as much by regional and class rivalries and power struggles between the branches of the armed forces as by any real need for change. In its first years, the republic was ruled by a coalition of wealthy Portuguese industrialists and coffee barons from the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais—the same clique that had ruled the empire of Brazil. In contrast, the army drew its leadership from a broad range of classes and ethnic groups, including men of mixed race from the northeast—men like Távora. As a result, the army deeply resented the power of the ruling class.

  Even as the republic began to mature through the turn of the century, the economy benefited only the ruling class. Almost as soon as it became a republic, Brazil began to borrow heavily from European banks, mostly British, to pay for new roads, harbors, warships, and railroads. The growing debt forced the government to expand its exports, such as coffee (Brazil already dominated the world market), so that foreign earnings could pay the interest on the loans. The result was economic growth that benefited lenders and the industrial and landowning elite and eluded most of Brazilian society. Fueled by this inequity, Brazil’s first Communist party was founded in 1922 (today there are two Communist parties). The army became closely aligned with the political left and, in 1924, a column of rebellious officers rose up in the south and began a three-year, 10,000-mile march—often compared to Mao’s Long March in China—that crisscrossed the countryside, encouraging revolt.

  A charismatic leader of the rebellion was “the Horseman of Hope,” Captain Luís Carlos Prestes. One officer closely aligned with him was Juarez Távora, a cousin of Euclides’s. This legendary guerrilla force, later called the Prestes Column, fought fifty-six battles with government forces, organized “shadow” states, and befriended Indian tribes as it cut through the wilderness to avoid the enemy. Prestes’s band made it to Belém, then headed up the Amazon to the Bolivian border. The rebels failed to overthrow the government but gained an enormous public following. After fleeing into Bolivia and then Argentina, in 1931 Prestes went to Moscow, where he became a communist.

  In 1930, a military coup had put Getúlio Vargas in power. Vargas was the governor of the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, where broad, fertile plains were covered with cattle ranches. He was a charismatic gaucho, southern cowboy, whose supporters were driven by the desire to expel the paulistas Just before the coup, Vargas sought the cooperation of Prestes, whom he saw as an ally. Prestes refused to cooperate. Although several members of his guerrilla band (including Juarez Távora) had returned to positions in the military establishment, Prestes was not impressed by the change in leadership and was still determined to make trouble. In 1935, using a false passport, he returned to Brazil to coordinate an uprising that had been planned in Moscow.

  Euclides Távora told Chico that this was when he became involved. He had grown up detesting the enormous, persistent gulf between the haves and have-nots that had always characterized Brazilian society. So, along with many army officers of his generation, he was drawn to the political left and eventually to communism. In November, Távora and other young officers in the northeast and in Rio de Janeiro joined Prestes in a violent revolt. Within weeks, the rebels were defeated in bloody street fighting that claimed the lives of dozens of civilians. Vargas personally led his troops against the rebels. A state of siege was declared, and hundreds of suspected communists were rounded up, jailed, and tortured. Along with Prestes, Távora was among those arrested.

  As the crackdown on communists continued, Vargas canceled the long-awaited presidential election of 1937 that would have returned Brazil to democratic rule. Instead, he proclaimed a new constitution and made himself head of a regime—the Estado Novo, New State—in which he was granted dictatorial powers. Vargas abolished all political parties, and the repression of radical elements was intensified; police raided bookstores and confiscated materials ranging from the novels of Jorge Amado to a translation of Tarzan the Invincible, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Nevertheless, he was popular with a broad segment of Brazilian society. His Constitution did grant some labor reforms, although they were modeled after labor codes established by Mussolini in Italy. (One indication of his force of character is that on his birthday, despite his flirtation with fascism, labor groups today still lay wreaths at some Vargas monuments in the south of Brazil.)

  Brazil became swept up in Vargas’s call for national unification. The goal was the rapid development and consolidation of the country’s far-flung, independent-minded states, especially those in the Amazon. In a public display, Vargas made a bonfire of Brazil’s state flags. In ten years, he doubled the country’s network of roads and increased the number of airports from 31 to 512. This expansion was no accident, for Vargas was an avid amateur pilot. By 1940, he had logged some 80,000 miles, flying to every corner of the country, including all of the Amazon except Acre. Perhaps it was his aerial view of the forested frontier that gave impetus to his call for a “March to the West.” In a speech delivered in Manaus in 1940, he described what he called the highest task of civilized man: “to conquer and dominate the valleys of the great equatorial torrents, transforming their blind force and their extraordinary fertility into disciplined energy.”

  As he consolidated his dictatorship, Vargas had to deal with the burgeoning population of political prisoners. In 1938, the government created an agricultural penal colony on Fernando de Noronha Island, a dot on the chart in the Atlantic 300 miles off the coast of the northeastern hump of Brazil. The rocky, mountainous island is studded with seventeen forts dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the legacy of its role as a jumping-off point for Dutch and French attacks on the Portuguese mainland. Soon, the new colony filled with hundreds of political prisoners from both the communist left and the fascist right, which had grown in Brazil as the Nazi and fascist movements grew in Germany and I
taly.

  Távora was among those who made the eight-day sea voyage from Rio to the island prison. The prisoners were stripped and forced to march 12 miles in the broiling sun to the distribution point for uniforms. The communists were kept apart from their fascist foes and spent their time raising chickens, farming, and making salt. It appears that the prison warden, himself a veteran of the Prestes Column, made life relatively easy for the communists. Indeed, quite a few of them made a decent living when, after impressing the warden by renovating a baroque church, they were hired to build new barracks (this capitalist act dismayed the more radical communists). The health of many of the prisoners flourished there as it never had back on the mainland, nurtured by sunbathing and frequent swims. (Because of its beaches and rich coral reefs, most of Fernando de Noronha and the surrounding twenty other islets was made into a national marine park in 1988.)

  After World War II, Vargas got the same treatment he had given the paulistas. In 1945, he was deposed by his generals, who feared his excessive nationalism and wanted to return to democracy. Unlike most deposed dictators, Vargas did not disappear, nor was he reviled. In 1947, he campaigned against local candidates of the new government—next to his old nemesis, Luís Carlos Prestes. Showing incredible resilience, Vargas was elected president of Brazil in 1950. But in 1954, under intense pressure from the military, he shot himself in the heart, ending one of the most remarkable political careers of the century. (There remains a debate about the authenticity of a supposed suicide note that was left behind—and of the nature of his death.) But Vargas’s death did not sway Brazil from the course it had embarked on: modernization, industrialization, and the development of the Amazon.