The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  Through the terms of Vargas and his successor Juscelino Kubitschek, the philosophy of rapid development was unwavering. Only the slogans changed: from “March to the West” to “Fifty Years in Five.” Nothing epitomized this period better than the crowning symbol of twentieth-century Brazil—its capital of Brasilia. Kubitschek spent a billion dollars, mostly borrowed, to realize a long-held dream of Vargas’s: to promote the taming of Brazil’s interior by moving the capital from hedonistic Rio de Janeiro and its beaches to the dusty planalto, a high, windy, uninhabited plain filled with scrub forest near the geographical center of the country. Of course, such a move entailed building a city from scratch. Brazil has a penchant for big projects; sure enough, even though the materials and labor force had to be shipped in from the coast, Brasilia was built in a thousand days. The city was planned down to the smallest detail, with every element meant to herald the anticipated emergence of Brazil as the first superpower in the Southern Hemisphere. Brasilia’s space age architecture was streamlined, forward-looking, but ultimately sterile, not unlike the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Ironically, like all of Brazil’s cities, the gleaming capital soon became fringed with slums. Once the city was completed, there were few jobs for the workers who built it—mostly men of the same nordestino stock who, a century earlier, might have traveled to the Amazon in search of rubber. Once again, they found themselves exploited and then abandoned.

  Some time before Vargas’s island penal colony was shut down in 1948, Euclides Távora had escaped, aided by a wealthy aunt and his cousin Juarez, by then a colonel in the army despite his leftist stance. Távora later claimed to a tapper friend that he made his getaway disguised in women’s clothing and hid in the hold of a ship that sailed for Belém. It makes a fine story, and the Amazon is ripe terrain for the cultivation of such stories, but it is a bit difficult to believe that this burly, hirsute man got away with impersonating a female. One way or the other, Távora, now a wanted fugitive in a police state, made his way to Acre and then Bolivia.

  As Távora spun his tales of the class struggle—sprinkled with references to Lenin and Marx—Chico Mendes was mesmerized. Later he frequently referred to his time with Távora as a crucial lucky stroke. During those late sessions by the light of an oil lamp, deep in the western Amazon, a misplaced malcontent passed on to this young rubber tapper a spark that would not be extinguished.

  Through all his years in the rain forest, Távora cultivated a certain mysteriousness. Most of the people around Cachoeira and Xapuri remember him only as “a good man” or “a hard worker.” He distanced himself from the other people in the forest partly out of fear of capture but also out of scorn. As one tapper put it, “He only spent time with people he considered intelligent.” Despite his communist ideology, he was from a privileged, urban background and deep inside resented the fact that circumstances had forced him to hide out among an uneducated, ill-kempt culture. One man who did know Távora well was Francisco Siqueira de Aquino, an aging rubber tapper who taught this soldier how to slit the bark of the rubber tree and survive in the forest. It was Aquino who was later the link that brought Távora back to Cachoeira—and indirectly to his meeting with the young Chico Mendes.

  The two men had met in Bolivia in 1952. Távora was hiding from the Brazilian authorities, and Aquino had moved to Bolivia from Cachoeira, where he was born. Tappers from eastern Acre frequently crossed into Bolivia to harvest rubber. The price for rubber was sometimes better there than back in Brazil. The only drawback was that Bolivia collected a “foreigner’s tax” on the rubber harvested by Brazilians—if they were caught. The Bolivian rubber estates frequented by tappers from Xapuri were a ten-hour hike away, on the far side of the Xipamanu River.

  Aquino, now sixty-four and a grandfather, clearly remembered the afternoon during the dry season when Távora walked out of the forest surrounding his colocação in Bolivia and asked for work. Aquino, twenty-seven at the time, was nervous. The stranger was in his forties and very sharp—and very much out of place wandering about a seringal in search of a job. The man had never tapped rubber before but seemed eager. Aquino recalled that his hands had thin skin, no calluses; he seemed to be a city boy. When the man said he did not drink, Aquino agreed that he could become a meieiro. A meieiro is someone who is taken on by the tapper who controls a colocação and shares the work and the rubber production.

  Távora said little about his past, explaining only that he had been arrested because he was a communist and then he escaped. A cousin and an aunt had helped him get to Acre.

  Aquino took the newcomer around the rubber trails and taught him the art of tapping. Távora learned the technique in one week, but it quickly became clear that he did not like any of the other aspects of a tapper’s life—particularly anything that involved heavy labor. The only manual labor he did was cutting kindling for the fires used to smoke the latex. And despite his military background and familiarity with weapons, Távora hated to hunt. The only time Aquino ever saw him hunt was when he stumbled on a wild pig and killed it with his knife. Távora preferred to tap rubber, which he did six days a week, twice the work hours of the average tapper. He relished the solitude and the silence.

  In 1954, Aquino returned to Brazil, where he planned to work on the colocação of his parents, back at Cachoeira. Távora stayed in Bolivia, and the two doubted they would meet again. But just a year later, Aquino was working one afternoon on his parents’ rubber trails when a man came walking out of the woods. In what must have been a rather comical replay of the events in Bolivia several years earlier, Távora again asked him for work. He had learned where Aquino had gone through the long-distance links of the rubber tappers’ network, radio cipó. Távora said that he had worked for another tapper for a while in Bolivia, then traveled to other parts of the country, where he had stirred up trouble trying to organize the tin miners into unions. Thus he was forced to return to Brazil.

  But this time there was no work; Távora would have to find a meieiro position elsewhere. Apparently he had saved some money or received help from his relatives, for he bought a colocação of his own. After a couple of years he sold it and moved to the abandoned one in Cachoeira, where he was living when he met Chico. (Tappers could buy and sell their user’s rights to a particular series of estradas; they could cost as little as $20, depending on the condition of the colocação).

  While Aquino knew something of Távora’s past, only one person in Acre really knew his character—Neuza Ramos Pereira, a woman who had been made strong by the jungle. Neuza met Távora in 1962, when she was thirty-four and recently widowed. Her first husband, who had been twenty years her elder, had suffered for a year and a half with intestinal bleeding. After she buried him, Neuza had to work their colocação herself, helped only by their four children. But she quickly realized that she would need a man around if she wanted to survive. Távora’s colocação was next to hers, so she made him an offer: she would help him with the work around his fields if he would return the favor.

  As the two started visiting each other’s homes, gossip quickly spread that the widow had found a new beau. They were indeed interested in each other, although it was not for love; it was more of a business arrangement. She needed a man’s help, and he needed someone to cook and help with the farming. Távora moved to her colocação and lived there until just before his death in 1966. They never married formally because he still feared that he would be discovered by the Federal Police.

  Their relationship was rocky from beginning to end. Távora used to describe Acre women as galinhas—“women who get close to you in two minutes,” as tappers say. He would stay out of the house as much as possible, harvesting rubber all day, six days a week. Once home, he would quickly eat dinner and then sit on the veranda, reading newspapers silently until late at night. He slept only a few hours, then got up before dawn to tap. The couple had tempestuous arguments.

  By the time Távora moved in with Neuza, Chico Mendes had stopped ma
king his weekly visits. The main reason was that Chico, at seventeen, had to work overtime now at harvesting rubber. He and his family had been rocked by tragedy the year before. Chico’s mother was pregnant for the nineteenth time in her forty-two years —with only eight children to show for it. Neighbors say that she had not lost her beauty, despite the harrowing conditions and hard life she endured. When she finally went into labor one night, something went terribly wrong with the birth and she began to bleed. The closest thing to medical help was the comfort provided by a woman from a neighboring colocação.

  Chico spent the night running along the trails, trying to gather some men to help carry his mother out of the forest in a hammock, the stretcher of the Amazon. When he returned, just before dawn, his mother was already dead. The men who had come to help carry her ended up helping Chico and his father bury her.

  That same year saw the death of one of Chico’s sisters and his remaining older brother, Raimundo, the only other sibling regularly gathering latex. Raimundo tripped while hiking in the forest, and his shotgun discharged. The shot hit him in the ear, killing him instantly. To keep the family going, Chico’s father had to turn all his attention to tending the crops—corn, beans, manioc, and rice. That left Chico to manage the tapping and to care for his five younger siblings. Chico harvested rubber six days a week; often he would be out until after dark. The next oldest brother, Zuza—who was nine at the time—started tapping, too. Chico became more familiar with the aviamento system, which made it so difficult for the tappers to save any money. At every turn, the tappers lost.

  Chico’s political apprenticeship with Távora continued, although now it was the teacher who came to visit the student. Távora frequently showed up at the Mendes house, sometimes late in the evening; it was a way to avoid his wife. He and the boy would stay up talking long after everyone else was asleep. With almost missionary zeal, Távora recited to Chico time and again the basic tenets of Marxism and the struggle that was needed to free the Brazilian underclass. As Neuza recalled it, Távora saw himself as performing a service by educating Chico; he felt it was a waste to have such an intelligent boy lost in the forest.

  Távora dwelled on the deep roots of the divisions in Brazilian society. From its colonial beginnings, Brazil had been split between a profiteering class of merchants and landowners, originally from Europe, and an exploited class that varied over time but included Indian slaves, African slaves, peasants of mixed blood, and poor immigrants. (As the supply of Indian slaves dwindled early in Brazil’s history, four million African slaves were imported.) With the abolition of slavery in 1888, the owners of Brazil’s coffee, sugar, and tobacco plantations simply shifted to the virtual slavery of European immigrants. At the turn of the century, Brazil’s reputation for barbaric work conditions spread across the Atlantic to Europe. For a time, Italy forbade its emigrants to go to Brazil.

  On Saturday nights, Távora and Chico frequently met at the barracão of Seringal Cachoeira, where the boss, Francisco Camelo, owned something that Távora craved—a radio. Távora used to race through the forest after a day of tapping to get to the central compound in time to catch foreign broadcasts of the news, which usually started at around five o’clock in the evening. The radio was also a refuge for Távora as his domestic battles with Neuza became more intense. He taught Chico how to tune in the Portuguese broadcasts of Radio Moscow, the British Broadcasting Service, and the Voice of America. Radio Moscow came on first, followed by the other two on different frequencies. By comparing various accounts of world events, Távora infused in Chico a crude awareness of geopolitics and Brazil’s place in the tug of war between communism and capitalism, which came to a head in the early 1960s as the Cold War raged. Chico preferred the BBC broadcasts, which, Távora pointed out, gave the broadest, least biased coverage. They would stay overnight, hanging their hammocks on the veranda.

  From the radio, Chico also learned about national developments. In the wake of Vargas and Kubitschek, Brazilian industry was booming—although the concept of industry itself must have been hard to grasp for a young rubber tapper who had never been beyond the Amazon forest. Shipbuilding, automobile and appliance manufacturing, and other industries thrived as multinational corporations were induced to set up shop in this land of plentiful raw materials and labor that was so cheap it might as well be free. Brazil also became consumed by the allure of mechanized, chemical-intensive agriculture. What better way to pay off the ballooning foreign debt than to export agricultural production? Generous incentives encouraged the planting of great tracts of wheat, citrus, and soybeans, leaving little land for domestic food crops. Thus, although the holds of freighters leaving Brazil bulged, the piles of produce at local markets dwindled. Brazil eventually represented a glaring contradiction: it became second only to the United States in total food exports—even as more than half of its own population was undernourished.

  As income and land became concentrated in fewer hands into the 1960s, more and more small farmers and squatters in the settled south were driven out, and a million people a year flooded into the swelling slums around Brazil’s cities. Others followed dirt roads and cattle trails north and began to slash and burn their way into the delicate fabric of the Amazon as they scraped to find a plot of their own. It was from 1958 to 1960, under Kubitschek, that the first major road was carved into the heart of the Amazon—the Belém-Brasília Highway, the Highway of the Jaguar—heading almost due north from the sparkling new capital toward Belém, one of the old centers of the rubber boom, at the mouth of the Amazon. Quickly, the trees began to fall. This road was the forerunner of the destructive network of dirt tracks that soon filled the air of the Amazon with smoke.

  In the early 1960s, Brazil’s fragile political system began to unravel. President João Goulart, a Labor party politician, floundered in office and then drifted toward socialism as the economy worsened. Growth slowed, and inflation rose above 100 percent a year. The industrial trade unions, which had always been controlled by the state, began to chafe for independence. Activists and the Catholic church began pushing for education and the rights of rural workers. Landless peasants in the northeast began to organize and press for the redistribution of land, and—most disturbing to the military and Brazil’s elite—Goulart himself began to talk of agrarian reform and splitting up latifundia, vast but unused tracts of privately owned land. All of these developments were intolerable to Brazil’s generals, and on April 1, 1964, they deposed the Goulart government. The coup was enthusiastically supported by the United States; in the wake of Castro’s ascendancy in Cuba, the U.S. administration was petrified of any move toward the left in Latin America. One day after Goulart fled from Brasilia, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a congratulatory telegram to the new leadership installed by the military.

  The coup resulted in a broad crackdown on leftist activity and increased the pressure on fugitives like Távora. He became more agitated, paranoid, and violent. Often, when someone came out of the forest and walked toward his house, Távora would flee to some hiding place. One day, he returned from Cachoeira with a letter from his family that made him tremble and blanch and cry. He never shared the news with Neuza but became even more obsessed with staying in touch with the outside world, whether through radio, letters, or newspapers. The isolation of the forest ate at him like a disease.

  His relationship with Neuza reached its low point one night in 1965, when Távora refused to pray with Neuza’s son. She screamed at him in rage. He took his revolver and pointed it at her head, but she did not blink. She said, “If you were really a man, you would kill me.” Távora then ran outside and was soon followed by all of his belongings. Neuza cut his hammock cords with a machete, broke the lock on his suitcase—which he had always assiduously guarded—and threw everything out the windows. Távora went storming back to his own hut, but two months later came walking out of the woods again, nearly in tears, begging her to take him back. She gave him a second chance.

  They lived together for
one last year. In 1966, Távora said he was going to move to a small farm; he had had enough of the forest. He took all of his things, including ten head of cattle. Neuza said she was staying. Three months later, he became racked with stomach pains and began to lose weight. He withered from his former burly self and seemed to age before people’s eyes. Some say the illness started after Távora ate some spoiled deer meat. Others say it was an ulcer or stomach cancer, brought on by his horrendous diet and tobacco chewing.

  When Távora first became sick, he wrote to his relatives in the south. They came up to Acre to try to convince him to get treatment, but he refused. He only agreed later, when he was in critical condition. Francisco Siqueira de Aquino saw his old friend for the last time while drinking a soda in a Xapuri bar. Távora, who was on the way to Rio Branco for an operation, seemed on the verge of death. He never came back.

  Chico Mendes saw Távora for the last time two months before his teacher left Xapuri. Mendes was now twenty-two and eager to fight against the increasingly harsh military crackdown. Távora told him to slow down, that he could look forward to fifteen or twenty years of military rule in Brazil. Távora said that the young man could only help the rubber tappers effectively by joining a union; in isolation, he would never accomplish anything. Around that time, Távora gave Mendes a small battery-powered radio that he had recently bought.

  Even though Távora had spent the final thirteen years of his life hiding in the rain forests of the Amazon, he still found a way to foment the revolution that brewed inside him. The leftist indoctrination he gave Mendes molded the young man’s mind, just as a tapper molds a shoe or a sack out of congealing latex. Távora did not just teach Mendes how to read, he taught him how to think. Through an improbable conjunction of two disparate lives, a mysterious chemistry had formed between a cultivated, well-educated soldier from a prominent family and a rubber tapper who had never seen a school. Távora gave Mendes a mastery of the vocabulary of socialism and communism that primed him for the arrival of the union movement in Acre, a movement that ultimately evolved into the fight for the rain forest.