The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  As it turned out, the tappers’ original plan for revenge could not be carried out. Word had leaked to the ranchers, and many had fled to Bolivia or Rio Branco. But de Oliveira stayed. On the day of the rally, he was driving along BR-317 in his Chevrolet pickup, leading a couple of larger trucks taking cattle to the slaughterhouse. He came upon a convoy of several dozen armed tappers who had headed straight to his ranch after the rally. He was a tall, muscular man, and he struggled and tried to put up a brave front as they dragged him from the truck. He probably died from the first shot, but thirty or forty more were pumped into his body for good measure. The tappers made it clear that from now on, a killing would be answered with a killing.

  The police, who had been conspicuously lax in investigating the Pinheiro murder, showed an extraordinary level of energy and alacrity as they rounded up more than a hundred rubber tappers and stuffed them in jail, pressing to find out who had killed de Oliveira. Teams of Military Police scoured the seringais and confiscated every sort of weapon, from kitchen knives to shotguns used for hunting. Many union members were forced to stand all day in water up to their knees, until their skin cracked and bled. A few had their fingernails yanked out. And some became familiar with a piece of equipment that is still standard issue in almost every police station in rural Brazil, the pau de arara. It is a simple device—actually a horizontal wooden pole something like a gymnast’s high bar. Its effectiveness for torture only becomes apparent when a man is suspended in an upside-down crouch, with the pole cutting into the backs of his knees and his hands tied to his feet.

  Despite the many forms of torture, the investigators got nowhere. Murder charges were filed against twenty-eight people, but the case never went to trial. Within a month, the last tappers were released. But in a separate case, all of the people who had delivered speeches at the PT rally were charged by the military tribunal with fomenting violence and breaking national security laws. Lula, Maia, Mendes, and the two other speakers were all tried in the military court in Manaus. (The case dragged on until March 1984, when the five men were finally absolved. It was the first time that Chico Mendes made national headlines.)

  In Acre, the government tried to defuse the tension by taking possession of several large tracts of forested land in Brasiléia and doling out deeds to hundreds of tappers—a tactic that was already well established. From 1976 to 1980, twenty-four seringais in Acre had been disappropriated and transformed into “directed settlement projects”—a grid of small plots. But the government land agencies were giving deeds on the order of 120 to 250 acres, whereas a typical colocação was 700 acres. The plots did not have enough rubber trees to provide a family’s living, so many tappers were forced to sell their holdings and move to the city. In a sad irony, many of these “settlement projects” ultimately became deforested and unusable.

  The Pinheiro killing was never actively investigated, and police interest in solving the murder of de Oliveira faded as well. But the two deaths left behind a climate of festering hatred between the tappers and ranchers that still permeates the air of Acre, especially in Brasiléia. Two of the tappers who were charged with de Oliveira’s murder were later gunned down; those murders were also never solved.

  Pinheiro’s death had shocked the community. Before, most of the violence in Acre had occurred face to face; everything came down to a macho showdown not unlike the heralded confrontations of the Wild West. As one rubber tapper put it, “There would be a kind of body-to-body fight and one would kill the other, and everyone would know who and how.” The climate of fear that lingered after Pinheiro’s killing was founded on the realization that now death could come at any time and in any form. The cycle of violence that began in the hot dry days of July 1980 swirled in rising currents around Acre in the months and years ahead.

  Of all the pistoleiros who had settled in Acre, none was more feared than a family named Alves. Many rubber tappers remarked that the arrival of this family had coincided with a rise in the number of killings and the change from confrontation to ambush.

  Four generations of the Alves family lived on several small ranches along BR-317. Ostensibly ranchers, they did not seem to be making much of a living from cattle. Their herds were small, and they had little productive pasture. It was thought that the brothers, Darly and Alvarino, and their many sons and aging father and hired cowboys derived most of their income from doing the dirty work of other ranchers.

  The Alveses had had plenty of training for such work. Through three decades of what the authorities once described as “elaborate perversity and cowardice,” the family carved a criminal record across the southern states of Minas Gerais and Paraná, then north to the Amazon. The list of laborers and peasants and enemies alleged to have been killed by the Alveses was well into double digits. All rumors aside, even the documented court cases painted a dark picture. As one of their friends described them, “They don’t bake anything; they fry everything.”

  The patriarch of the family was Sebastião Alves da Silva. He was a Mineiro from the rough, tumbling, deforested hill country of Minas Gerais, inland from the Atlantic coast north of Rio de Janeiro. He came from the Vale do Rio Doce, the Sweet River valley. There he and his sons established a pattern that was repeated wherever the family went—a pattern of using violence to resolve the slightest conflict. In February of 1958, Sebastião and three sons—Darly, Alvarino, and another—allegedly waited along a road and ambushed a cattle drover named Manuel Alves Pinto, who had been trying to get the attention of one of Sebastião’s women. They left little room for error. Along with a pistoleiro nicknamed Mata Quatro (Four Kills), the Alveses obliterated Pinto with sixteen shots. His fifteen-year-old son, Pedro, was killed with six shots. Not even the boy’s horse was spared; the animal died screaming.

  Typically, five years passed before the murders were investigated. When detectives visited the Alves’s hometown of Conselheiro Pena, it was not hard to build a case; the family had openly boasted of the killings. Charges were filed in September 1963, but by then the family had moved on, eventually settling in the state of Paraná. The Alveses lived in a village called New Jerusalem, near the town of Umuarama in a rural corner of the state. Paraná is one of Brazil’s richest agricultural regions, a loamy plain that is now covered by vast tracts of soybeans and wheat. The buildings of Umuarama always have a waist-high coat of red dust that has blown in from the fertile fields. The region was once thickly forested with a distinctive type of tall pine, its trunk topped by an awkward knot of branches. (Today, those trees survive only in parks.) The trees began to fall in the 1930s, when Paraná joined the coffee boom that made Brazil the world’s leading exporter. Coffee was a labor-intensive crop, so the state developed a vital economy that employed thousands of peasants. When government incentives—and a severe cold snap—pushed the farmers to switch to highly mechanized soybean farming in the 1970s, the peasants were driven off the land; many of them fled to the next frontier—Rondônia, then Acre. With land conflicts all around, this was fertile territory for the Alves family to continue its violent tradition.

  In May of 1973, another member of the Alves clan, Isaque, allegedly killed a peasant named Dirceu Dias dos Santos. That June, Darly and three pistoleiros invited a neighbor, Acir Urizzi, for a night on the town in the red-light district of Umuarama. Sebastião had lost some land to Urizzi and his father in a court battle. Urizzi never went home.

  The police surrounded the Alves ranch in New Jerusalem looking for Darly; it was only a 40-acre spread, a good indication that ranching was not their means of support. The police found Alvarino instead. He had always affected something of an outlaw air, with a taste for large cowboy hats and at various times a long black beard or drooping mustache. He lived up to his looks by greeting them with a blast from a .12-gauge shotgun, wounding one officer. After Alvarino was captured, the police learned that there was an outstanding warrant for him on the double murder that had been committed back in Minas in 1958, so he was sent east to stand trial. The situat
ion had grown too hot for Darly, and he decided to get out of the state. He headed north to the Amazon.

  On January 17, 1974, Darly bought Fazenda Paraná, a small ranch of about 10,000 acres at kilometer 132 on the BR-317 highway. The next year he was joined by Alvarino, who had been acquitted for lack of evidence in Minas Gerais. Soon their father followed. Almost immediately the killings continued, starting with two of their ranch workers. And the Alveses were alleged to have been involved in the massacre of nine posseiros on the Twelve Apostles Ranch. At last, the family figured, here was a region where the law could not touch them.

  Chapter 9

  Joining Forces

  AS TENSIONS ROSE in Acre, Chico Mendes countered the increased threat by drawing closer to a new circle of friends from the national union movement and PT, mostly people from outside the rain forest. Some, like João Maia, had moved to the Amazon frontier on a mission: to end the exploitation of rural workers. Others had fled to Acre after the military government cracked down on the left in São Paulo and Rio during the darkest days of the military dictatorship. These political fugitives, some of whom were members of Brazil’s illegal Communist party, sought refuge on the frontier, just like the region’s more violent breed of outlaw. Acre made an excellent hiding place because it was only a short dash to the Bolivian border and safety. The state also attracted increasing attention from young social scientists, who were drawn to the Amazon to study its imperiled Indian and tapper cultures.

  Together, the activists and scientists formed a tightly knit group that worked together, drank together, and, in many cases, lived communally in houses in the quickly growing city of Rio Branco. These were the people who would help to transform the isolated battle of Acre’s rubber tappers into an Amazon-wide movement.

  When Mendes took the bus to Rio Branco on union business, his first stop was almost always the office of a weekly newspaper called Varadouro. “Varadouro” is the word for the paths rubber tappers cut between adjacent river valleys to connect otherwise isolated communities. The newspaper was founded in 1977 by a pair of liberal journalists who wanted to chronicle the destructive impact of the Acre land rush. Mendes was one of the paper’s valued sources, updating the editors on new deforestation and brewing land conflicts; even then, at the very beginning of the movement, Mendes recognized the importance of the media in getting the message across. One of the paper’s founders was Elson Martins, who had been born on an Acre Seringal, went to school in Belém, then became a journalist. Rather than moving to the civilized south, as most university-educated people did, he chose to stay in Acre and report for local papers and one of Brazil’s big newspapers, O Estado do São Paulo. Martins started Varadouro with Silvio Martinello, who had fled from the crackdown on student leaders in São Paulo. Much of the funding and the office space came from the church. Martinello doubled as a stringer for Rio de Janeiro’s biggest newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, and he and Martins were occasionally able to convince uninterested editors in the south to publish small items about the growing violence on the Amazon frontier.

  Varadouro soon became the voice of Acre’s rubber tappers and Indians, describing the empate, the arrival of the unions, and the spread of violence as the ranchers flooded the state. At its peak around 1980, the paper was selling seven thousand copies a week—an enormous number in a state where the two daily newspapers rarely sold more than three thousand copies of any edition. Each week, when the latest edition was carried out to seringais in the forest, dozens of tappers would gather around and listen as someone who could read recited the news. Mendes himself was often enlisted to do such readings. He enjoyed playing town crier, but at the same time he lamented the lack of literacy that persisted in the forest.

  Late each day when he was in Rio Branco, Mendes usually stopped by the Hotel Chui, which had the only reasonably respectable bar in town. It was an odd gathering spot, almost a neutral zone where all the warring parties in Acre staked out their tables and drank and chatted just a few yards from each other. At one table there would be young representatives of the Indian agency, FUNAI, and activists such as Elson Martins and João Maia. At another would be some of the rubber barons of Acre’s old elite, and down the way would be a table of the newcomers: the wealthy paulista ranchers and their gunmen. At the bar, Mendes met with his new friends and made plans for the next step in the movement: bringing schools and economic independence to the seringais.

  Economic independence would come if the tappers could just break free of the limitation of selling their rubber and nuts only to one or two merchants. What they needed was a cooperative—where the tappers would be their own boss, where they could get a fair price for their rubber, where the profits would be invested in health posts and schools, not drained by some wealthy rubber baron. But it was the prospect of schools that most excited Mendes, who had long ago learned the value of understanding the written word and the manipulation of numbers. The government had still made no effort to make schools accessible to the rubber tappers’ children—or adult education to the tappers themselves. A cooperative would not be much good if the tappers could not manage it themselves. Mendes’s union in Xapuri had drawn up plans for both schools and a cooperative but lacked the necessary funding.

  Among the activists in Rio Branco, one person in particular helped Mendes fulfill these dreams. Mary Helena Allegretti was from a place far from the Amazon, in both distance and culture, but no one more fervently supported Mendes’s efforts to improve the tappers’ conditions and to protect the forest.

  In 1976, Allegretti was an anthropologist who had left her college teaching job in her hometown of Curitiba—the clean, prosperous capital of the southern state of Paraná—and had gone to get a master’s degree at the University of Brasilia. She was small and energetic, with disarmingly large eyes the color of pale jade. She had tired of the middle-class culture of the south and wanted a change. Allegretti got more of a change than she had ever expected when she met an obsessive anthropologist from Acre. This scrawny, ageless, chain-smoking field scientist, Terri Vale de Aquino, was finishing his thesis on the rubber-tapping Kaxinawá Indian tribe of central Acre.

  Aquino, an Acreano, was passionately committed to improving the lot of the Indians in the state. He believed in hands-on anthropology and cultivated that same philosophy in many of his peers. Clearly, if they did not help out the cultures they were studying, there would soon be none left. Aquino had founded the Acre chapter of the Pro-Indian Commission, to push for the establishment of reserves, and since 1975 he had been helping the Kaxinawá set up cooperatives to sell their rubber. These efforts later provided the template for the seringueiros’ cooperatives and extractive reserves.

  Allegretti knew almost nothing of Acre—or the Amazon, for that matter—so Aquino spent many hours telling her about the region and its peoples. When he showed her a map of the state, she commented on the lack of towns. He explained that most of the Amazon’s people lived in the forest. Aquino reeled off stories of the Indians’ rich forest lore, stories about rubber tapper communities living a century behind the times in their isolated seringais, stories about the unspoiled forests of Acre. Then he returned home, predicting that she would soon follow.

  Allegretti found Aquino’s stories tantalizing. Like most of her peers in academia and the government, she had assumed that the seringueiro was extinct—a quaint fossil from the days when the journalist Euclides da Cunha had traveled the rivers of Acre to document the rubber tappers’ revolt against Bolivia. Even words such as Seringal were meaningless. Fascinated, she resolved to head north to see if she could find a thesis topic in all of this.

  In February 1978, Allegretti, then twenty-seven years old, flew to Rio Branco, and Aquino introduced her to the activist community, people such as the bishop Moacyr Grechi and the journalist Elson Martins. She quickly became attuned to the tension that was beginning to boil as the forests were being destroyed. Allegretti found Varadouro particularly significant. The paper was reporting on the growing c
risis facing the forest cultures as events unfolded; she was more accustomed to the detached, unhurried, academic approach to social studies.

  Soon Allegretti and Aquino headed out to the Tarauacá River, which cut through the left wing of the butterfly shape of Acre. There she received her indoctrination into rubber tapper life. They boarded a batelão and made the slog upriver, with the boat creeping against the current. On the river, Allegretti began to understand the differences between the Amazon and the rest of Brazil. Here, distance was not measured in kilometers or miles, but in beaches. Tappers talked of the next seringal’s being four beaches upriver. The sandy, curving beaches formed only at sharp bends in the river and thus made convenient landmarks.

  The trip, like any Amazon voyage, was stultifyingly slow. As Allegretti progressed farther upstream, toward the south (in Acre, most of the rivers drain across the state from south to north), she would find the bow of the boat heading at one time east, then south, west, then south, sometimes even swinging north again before curling back around to the south, following the random loops of the channel. Every ten minutes, the wind that had just been blowing pleasantly in her face would become a near flat calm at her back, and that is when the voracious pium would pounce. These tiny black flies disperse in the slightest breeze but descend onto human skin like drops of mist whenever the wind stops. Each finds a spot and takes a tiny chunk of flesh, leaving behind a scabbed wound with an itch that is incomparably irritating.