The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  The two men balanced the machines on their hips and watched the tappers approach. “You should put down your saws,” said Raimundo de Barros to the laborers, who were of the same slim, dark nordestino stock as the tappers. Most often, the men who are hired to do the cutting and burning have much more in common with the rubber tappers than with their employers. In fact, many of them were rubber tappers before they were forced off their seringais when the land was bought or grabbed by cattle interests. They then moved into the favelas around Rio Branco or the shanty communities that sprang up around Xapuri.

  With little resistance, the cutters agreed to stop. (Not having a great stake in their work, the cutting gangs almost invariably yield when confronted during an empate.) The tappers asked the cutters to show them their camp. The two men heaved the saws onto their shoulders and began the sweaty, half-hour march to their shacks, down where the ranch property met a bend in the Acre River. The camp consisted of three log huts with black plastic tarpaulin for the roofs and flimsy walls of thatched palm fronds. Each was a rough version of the typical forest house, with a kitchen at one end and hammocks strung at the other. One shack belonged to the gato, the labor contractor who had hired these men and was overseeing the cutting. He was in town buying some supplies, but his wife was there. Dogs and chickens scooted around, and several children splashed in the silty water that flowed over a white sand beach. Laundry was drying on cords strung between the trees. Two shotguns were propped against a log next to a battered guitar. A tapper cracked open the barrels of the guns; they were loaded.

  As was customary in the rain forest, little was said at first. Someone passed around a pack of cigarettes. A few of the tappers politely asked for water, and the gato’s wife proffered a shiny cooking oil tin that was used as a water jug. Then the talking began, and they all spoke as if reading a script. De Barros started to lecture the workers about the forest, the ranchers who employed them, and alternatives. “You should understand that when there are trees to cut, Junior pays you, but when the trees are gone, he’s going to fire you,” he said.

  One of the cutters, a man of about twenty, wearing jeans and a tattered, sleeveless T-shirt stained by oil from his saw, said, “We have to work here because we have to take care of our families. We have no other work.” He dug the toe of one boot into the instep of the other and drew on his cigarette. “Look,” he said, “I knew Chico Mendes. He was my cousin.”

  De Barros did not like that answer. His big eyes burned and his dark face, framed by muttonchop sideburns, twisted into an angry frown. “If you were close to Chico, I can’t understand why you’re helping these ranchers, who promoted Chico’s murder. With what you’re doing, you’re saying that the death of Chico is as significant as the death of a dog. You could raise your kids in the forest, so why are you doing this?” He had worked up a head of steam now. “In the forest you can make money not just cutting trees. The forest has many riches. But the big landowners are not interested. They just want to cut and plant pasture. When the seringalistas came in the past, they put seringueiros against Indians. Now the ranchers are putting their workers against the seringueiros We are actually brothers in this struggle.”

  Everyone knew what was coming next. After an awkward silence, Barbosa abruptly announced, “There is no permit for the cutting that is going on here. We are going to dismantle your camp. If we don’t, you’ll be back here tomorrow.”

  Without another word, the tappers began to lug all of the workers’ belongings out of the shacks. They stooped to stay clear of the beams supporting the five-foot-high roof. The wife of the gato complained, “You should at least wait until my husband returns!” But no one was listening.

  The tappers carried out two brand-new spare chain saws, their opened cartons lying nearby. They carried out the jerry cans of gasoline and all the cooking pots. Many of the implements had been advanced to the work crews on credit, just as the rubber tappers had been advanced the tools of their trade. Once again, the landless poor were working their way into debt.

  The tarpaulins were untied from the log framework of each hut. Someone took up a saw and pulled the starter cord; a shrill whine cut the air as the chain sang around the metal tongue. Another saw sputtered to life. “Dismantled” is too gentle a word for what happened next. The empate has repeatedly been characterized in the press as a peaceful sit-in, something that Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., might have conceived. But in fact it is frequently an aggressive showdown, a classic Brazilian confrontation in which bluff counts for a lot but must be backed up by a willingness to act.

  Barbosa grabbed a foice, a hooked machete blade on the end of a long handle, and began to whack at the smaller roof spars. The cutting crew and the women and children stood back, out of the way, watching silently with their hands folded across their chests. Now the chain saws went to work, chewing into the exposed skeleton of the first shack. The tappers wielded them with agility and skill; this time the machines were turned against the invaders instead of the forest. Soon, amid a spray of sawdust, the three huts disintegrated into scrap.

  From start to finish, the “dismantling” took three minutes. A soccer ball lay amid the fallen framework of one house. A puppy barked confusedly. The chain saw crew stood silent, slightly dazed. Someone asked a laborer how he felt. “They destroyed everything,” he said flatly. “Now we have to leave. We cannot stay. We’ll go to Xapuri, where we live. I think we’ll stay in Xapuri, out of all this mess.”

  The tappers left as they had come, marching single file across the stubbly field that had once been a thicket and before that a tall, rich forest. There was a splattering of rain just a few hundred yards away, but it passed them by. A faint sickle of rainbow hung in the drifting drops, almost near enough to touch.

  One tapper, José Targino, walked with a new bounce in his step. “It is twelve years now that I’ve been doing empates,” he said to a visitor as he marched along. “I never tire of this.” Targino had the frame and face of a seasoned featherweight boxer. He was wiry and tough, with a flattened, broken nose that gave his voice a perpetual nasal twang. He had told the cutting crew to take whatever food they could when they left the camp. “After an empate, the rancher won’t always pay the workers their salary. They have to take what they can get.” He said the tappers always talked with the workers first and never took anything, not even a machete—although it was sometimes hard to resist. After all, the ranchers had burned or driven hundreds of tapper families out of their homes. It was especially difficult during the bigger empates, Targino said. “When you have one or two hundred people, there are times when someone gets a little hot. Once, a seringueiro saw some cattle. He said, ‘Let’s kill one of these cattle, because we are hungry and need to eat.’ But we couldn’t do that.”

  De Barros, who had absorbed some of Chico Mendes’s skills at public relations, swooped in when he heard Targino’s rambling. He emphasized that tappers never stole or destroyed anything, other than the temporary shacks. The empate was defensive, not offensive. “The whole idea for the empate is that tappers have the right to defend their homes and their estradas,” he said. “Tappers and Brazil nut gatherers live from the trees. The only way they found to stop the cutting was to get in a group.” As he talked, the column of tappers neared the forest and soon were retracing their steps along an abandoned rubber trail, passing trees whose scarred bark was burled and overgrown.

  The tappers returned to where they had parked their truck, piled into the back, and headed down the dirt road toward Xapuri. Here it had rained, and the pasture grass was actually green. The dry season’s dust had been pummeled to the earth by raindrops. The sky took on a peculiar glow common in the Amazon—a glow that comes around dusk, when the low rays of the sun catch the high tufts of cloud, and the white light from the glowing mist casts everything in shadowless brilliance. Along the road, they ran into the gato; he would have to break the news of the empate to Junior. After Barbosa told him what had happened, the gato was not a happy
man. Barbosa said, “We’re not here to play. Your workers cut one whole estrada of rubber. Maybe next time you’ll learn to do something else besides cut trees.” The truck drove on.

  “This empate went well,” Targino said to Aquino. “If that rancher wants to continue cutting, he’ll have to hire new people. Those workers aren’t coming back.”

  Although Chico Mendes has frequently been credited with creating the empate, this form of protest was really more of a spontaneous reaction from Acre’s rubber tapper community—a communal response to a shared threat. Mendes and the other leaders of the rubber tappers, with the help of their new allies from the Catholic church and Brazil’s burgeoning union movement, simply took a crude action and honed it into a powerful weapon. Empates began in the mid-1970s as an effort to thwart the growing number of ranchers who had run out of room in Rondônia and Pará and had begun acquiring land in eastern Acre—heading north along that notorious road, BR-364. Between then and 1988, Acre’s tappers staged more than forty major empates, saving some 2 million acres from the saws and fires.

  But the activism of Acre’s tappers began much earlier. Indeed, the roots of the fight to save the Amazon stem from the early days of the rubber boom, the mid- 1800s. As the state’s first outsiders, the tappers had fought the Indians for the right to live on the land and harvest its bounty of rubber and nuts. Later, they fought the Bolivians for Acre. A ragtag army of rubber tappers, recruited by a seringalista named Plácido de Castro, drove the Bolivian tax collectors from the area. On August 2, 1902, de Castro took over the Bolivian custom house in Xapuri and later made the town the provisional state capital. There are reminders of this conflict throughout Acre. One of the last vestiges of the Bolivian presence, the custom house, stands in a corner of the grid of the old section of Xapuri. The tattered two-story building overlooks the Acre River at a point where it was convenient to stop the boats carrying the rubber downstream.

  The rubber tappers’ next battle was in the late 1960s, before the ranchers arrived and long before the first empate. After a century of exploitation, the tappers started to fight back against the bosses who had used debt bondage to control every aspect of their lives. Ironically, it was the demise of Amazonian rubber as a significant commodity that led to the fall of the powerful seringalistas and the independence of the rubber tappers. And it was this newfound independence that sparked the feelings of self-worth and self-determination that motivated the tappers to fight for their livelihood and their forest.

  The seringalistas were in trouble because the profit margin on rubber had dropped to the point where it simply made no sense to continue the business. The bosses had already shaved their costs by dropping the mateiros, the woodsmen who opened the trails between trees, leaving it up to the tappers themselves to do much of the maintenance of the seringais The only reason Amazonian rubber survived at all was that the government taxed imported rubber, which was less than half the price of the native product. The last year Brazil exported any significant quantity of natural rubber was 1947. By 1970, it was importing more than 26,000 tons a year of natural and synthetic rubber—more than its own trees produced —to feed its booming industry. In this situation, the seringalistas could reap more by selling their land than by harvesting rubber and Brazil nuts. In addition, many seringalistas were bankrupt. Their land had to be sold to compensate the government banks that had financed them during World War II. By the late 1960s, Acre’s rubber barons were bailing out by the dozen.

  During this unstable period, Chico Mendes saw an opportunity to change things. For the first time, he began to use the lessons he had learned from Euclides Távora. Just two years after his death in 1966, when Mendes was twenty-two, he began to agitate for better conditions as he sensed the growing weakness of the rubber bosses. He innocently began to write letters to President (and General) Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, describing the suffering of the seringueiro and his relationship to the estate boss. The daughter of a family friend showed him how to address the letters. Mendes wrote letter after letter, sometimes one a week, describing how the seringueiros were forbidden to have schools and how their illiteracy allowed the bosses to rob their accounts at the end of each month. He listed the inflated prices for soap, sugar, and other goods to show how these charges compared to the real cost. He received some polite but useless replies.

  Mendes moved to Seringal Cachoeira after meeting and marrying the daughter of neighbors, a quiet sixteen-year-old girl with dark skin and streaked hair named Maria Eunice Feitosa. They were married on February 7, 1969, at the central clearing of Cachoeira, along with several other couples. (The priest used to make the rounds of the seringais and perform several marriages at once.) The couple settled on the shore of a small lake in Cachoeira, but it soon became apparent that this relationship was not destined to last. Mendes had little time to spend at home. When he was not tapping rubber trees, he was walking the rubber trails, trying to organize the tappers. And Eunice was widely perceived as a disappointing choice. Francisco Mendes did not like her or her family and complained that Chico’s house was never clean. Raimundo de Barros told his cousin, “You got married, but she doesn’t take care of the house, she doesn’t cook. If she was beautiful that would be okay, but she’s not even beautiful.”

  Perhaps it was coincidence, but Mendes’s relationships with women came to resemble those of his tutor, Távora. Mendes began the pattern of putting his political career and activism ahead of his personal life. Less than a year after their marriage, Eunice gave birth to a daughter, Angela. But by then the couple was bickering most of the time. After an argument, Mendes and Eunice would often retreat to relatives’ houses—she to her parents’ and Chico to his aunt Cecilia’s.

  Mendes stayed away from home, tapping and organizing. His first action on behalf of the tappers was to confront the boss at Cachoeira and demand changes in the exploitative financial relationship that persisted on the seringal. He knew that the deteriorating economic conditions in the rubber trade gave him some bargaining power. Accompanied by a burly, older tapper named Mario, Mendes said that the “milk,” the latex, was very clean and did not deserve the 10 percent penalty on its weight. He also said that the tappers were no longer willing to pay a rent in rubber for the use of the trails. “There is no more mateiro cleaning the trails for us,” Mendes said. “So why should we have to pay rent?” Within a year, the estate boss caved in.

  At Seringal Santa Fé, Mendes tried to convince a group of tappers to bypass the estate bosses and sell their rubber openly to independent regatões. For many years, the tappers had secretly traded a little rubber on the side—small 5- to 20-pound balls of smoked rubber, principio da borracha, the beginning of the rubber. These were offered to passing merchants in exchange for needed goods or cash. The problem was that the regatões often cheated the tappers just as badly as the estate bosses did. Mendes wanted the tappers to sell their rubber to a merchant collectively, thereby reducing the risk of being cheated and getting a better price in the bargain. It was the right idea, but at the wrong time. Most rubber tappers, loners at heart, were reluctant to act as a group.

  At around this time, Mendes’s marriage finally collapsed. One year after Angela was born, Eunice became pregnant again, hoping that another child might bring Mendes back. But when she was in her seventh month, the couple separated. Eunice went back to her parents’ colocação for the last time. She could not afford to raise Angela alone, so the child was adopted by her sister. Mendes never saw his second daughter, Roseangela; she died at the age of eleven months. Eunice later remarried and raised a family; she now lives on a small farm outside Xapuri.

  In 1971, Mendes left the seringal and began to teach adults in a small government school on the road west of Xapuri. This marked an important change in his life. He would never again work full time as a tapper, although the seringal served as a haven for him until he was killed. And he always spent any free time as a meieiro, harvesting rubber for other tappers to raise some cash.


  One of these tappers, at Seringal Santa Fé, was the father of a young, bright-eyed girl named Ilzamar. When Mendes first started working on that colocação, he used to take the nine-year-old aside and give her lessons in reading and writing. He taught her how to spell her name and recite the alphabet; a decade later, he would marry her.

  Mendes continued to visit seringais where he had relatives and persisted in his attempts to effect change. But the military rulers of Brazil were at their strongest and repression was most severe during those years; change was not on their minds. In 1968, President (and General) Artur da Costa e Silva had closed down Congress, and the army began to strike against the smallest signs of leftist activity. Student groups in the cities began to wage sporadic guerrilla warfare. The American ambassador was kidnapped to force the release of political prisoners. In 1970, the junta sent ten thousand troops to southern Pará and Goiás to root out a communist insurgency that later turned out to involve a mere sixty individuals (including Elenira, the sharpshooting guerrilla whose name Mendes later gave to his second daughter). Mendes had to bide his time until there was a more pressing reason for the tappers to unite.

  He did not have to wait long.

  The same year that Mendes moved off the seringal, the stretch of BR-364 connecting Acre to Rondônia was completed. Even though it remained a dirt track, passable only a few months of the year, ranchers began making the trip west from Pôrto Velho to examine this next frontier. Along with the incentives offered by the generals for investment in the Amazon—Acre was made one of the poles of the Polamazonia program—there were similar inducements dangled by the governor, Wanderley Dantas, who had been elected in 1970. Dantas saw no future in the rubber and nut harvesting that were the mainstay of the state’s economy (and remain so today). Although two thirds of Acre’s population was involved to some extent in these activities, the extraction of forest products was hardly big business. Even with this base, the economy of Acre was by far the worst in Brazil.