Despite the annoyances, Allegretti was quickly won over. Any trip on an Amazon tributary develops a mesmerizing, intoxicating rhythm. At first, she struggled with the frustration of watching the boat make quick progress through the water but only pass the shore at the speed of a medium-paced walk. Eventually her mind accepted this fact. And as the spectacular world of the rain forest unfolded, the discomforts and concerns about disease faded away.
At each bend in the stream, pink-backed river porpoises, called boto, flashed and puffed as they drove schools of fish into the shallows. The branches of half-submerged tree trunks waved steadily back and forth in the current. Larger branches were invariably festooned with puffy gray protuberances that up close became a camouflaged flock of bapurau, a relative of the owl. Occasionally, a green flash on the riverbank signaled the departure of a basking lizard. And the daily cycle of weather was unvarying as clouds of water vapor built, then broke, releasing brief torrents and leaving a rainbow dangling in the invigorated air.
Allegretti had a hefty dose of macho—a character trait usually reserved for men in Brazil—so she did not admit that any of the hardships bothered her. Despite her small stature and friendly face, she almost never showed weakness. She refused to let Aquino know how scared she was when, five days upstream from the last connection with civilization, the boat pulled over to the shore and deposited her at a seringal called Alagoas. Aquino thought Allegretti might be able to conduct her research there without too much trouble because he knew the estate boss. Aquino himself was continuing upstream to the point where the river rose into rapids and a waterfall called Jordão, the pristine country that was the home of the two thousand remaining Kaxinawá. As the boat pulled away from the shore, Aquino waved good-bye and yelled, “I’ll be coming back downriver in one month. See you then.” He had not told Allegretti until then how long she would be in the forest; she had been expecting something like a ten-day stay. Nervously, she gritted her teeth, smiled, and waved back.
The tappers were very suspicious at first; there had never been a female stranger on that seringal before. They questioned her cautiously, probing to see what she was really up to. “Are you sure that you want to stay here?” asked one old man. “What do you really want?” asked another tapper. Allegretti found in them a strange mix of traits: suspicion and submission, aggression and caution. It was in Alagoas that she learned the cardinal rule of Acre: there was no middle ground between the rubber bosses and ranchers on one side and the rubber tappers on the other. Only when she started following them into the jungle did they begin to accept her.
After a month of recording interviews with tappers burdened by debts of as much as two tons of rubber (more than two years’ production) and after observing children racked by malarial fevers, Allegretti became consumed with the idea of improving conditions for this isolated, forgotten culture. One of the most pernicious problems was the enforced illiteracy. Allegretti hiked to one remote colocação where a tapper eagerly showed her a letter he had received six months earlier. In all that time, he had not seen one person who could read. When she took notes, the tappers would gather around and watch closely, asking, “How do you do this?” She was stunned and distressed. She thought of the privileged students she had taught back in Curitiba, and how their needs could not compare to the glaring problems she had found here, deep in the Amazon rain forest. For Allegretti, the Tarauacá River had become what she later called “a one-way street to activism.”
When thirty days had passed and Aquino came back downriver, Allegretti was in a slight state of shock. The month in the jungle felt like ten years. As the boat headed downstream, this time aided by the current, the only thing she was thinking about was a scribbled diary entry she had made back at the seringal: “I will come back and build a school.”
Before leaving Acre, she wanted to interview a few more people. Elson Martins had told her about the empates and the growing rural unions of Acre’s eastern fringe. He suggested that she talk to a rubber tapper who came in frequently from Xapuri to update the journalists on the war against the cutting crews; his name was Chico Mendes. Allegretti happened to be at the Varadouro office a few days later when a man with dark curly hair, a broad face, and big, friendly eyes walked in. Mendes was slightly amused by this gutsy, earnest young woman, but he gladly sat and told her about conditions in eastern Acre. He was still a town councilman for the MDB, and the Xapuri union was just one year old. They sat and talked for hours, with Allegretti’s tape recorder running.
Mendes described the long history of the resistance in eastern Acre to first the bosses and now the ranchers. It presented a strong contrast to the situation she had just left behind in central Acre, where the tappers could not imagine resistance because they had been beaten down for so long. Mendes also talked about the importance of education; as a town councilman, he was pushing for the establishment of schools and health posts in Xapuri. They shook hands and Mendes left. Neither realized that a partnership would later develop that would forever change both of their lives.
Allegretti headed back to Brasilia, where she raced to type out her notes, spewing four hundred pages in one month—a stream of descriptions of debt slavery, disease, illiteracy, and profiles of individual tappers that had her thesis advisers scratching their heads. But the thesis had become secondary. The spark that Aquino had fanned was burning. The only thing she wanted now was to get back to the Amazon.
Allegretti returned to Acre late in 1980 and immediately went out to Xapuri to look up Chico Mendes. It had been tense in eastern Acre for months. After the killing of the ranch manager de Oliveira, Mendes had been forced into hiding for two months, moving from house to house to avoid the jagunços who were out to avenge the death. He was also dodging the Military and Federal Police, who had begun conducting a surveillance of tapper leaders, including Mendes, and examining possible links to the illegal Communist party of Brazil. (In 1979, Mendes had in fact briefly joined the Communist party. He switched to PT after the support from the communists, most of whom were from Rio Branco or the south, wore thin.) In September 1980, Mendes was hauled in by the Federal Police and interrogated for most of a day about his communist connections.
By the time Allegretti arrived in Xapuri, life had returned to something approaching normalcy, thanks in part to the regular rains, which slowed everything down. Mendes had resumed his routine, albeit cautiously. He, Allegretti, and other outside advisers polished up a proposal for what they called Projeto Seringueiro, incorporating both schools and a cooperative. Mendes’s Xapuri union would be in charge.
The theory behind the cooperative was to keep some of the value of the rubber and nuts on the seringal by allowing the tappers to be their own middleman. Instead of taking their rubber to the barracão of an estate boss or selling it to passing merchants, the tappers would take it to a warehouse owned by the cooperative. There it could be exchanged for goods offered at a fair price, not the inflated prices of the old system. When the rubber was sold in bulk at the end of the season, a share of the profits would be returned to the participating tappers, based on their productivity. The theory behind the schools was simple. For such a cooperative to have long-term viability, it would eventually have to be run by the tappers without the help of advisers. For that to happen, they would have to be literate and numerate.
Another activist from Rio Branco, Tony Gross, brought some good news toward the end of 1980. Gross was a British political scientist who, like Allegretti, had been lured to the Amazon by Aquino. At first glance, no one appeared more out of place in the Amazon than this Briton, with pale skin and a blond pageboy that endlessly threatened to close over his blue eyes like a swaying bead curtain. But Gross was fluent in Portuguese and knew his way around a Seringal, and he also knew how to get the funding to build the schools and give the cooperative the initial infusion of capital required for it to stock up on goods. In 1980 he had started working for Oxfam, the international relief and human rights agency based in Oxford, Engl
and. His good news was a pledge of several thousand dollars from Oxfam for the union’s proposal.
Allegretti and a team of educators from CEDI, an organization that supported grass-roots development projects in Brazil, began designing a textbook for the rubber tappers. It incorporated the philosophy of Paulo Freire, who believed in teaching literacy and numeracy to the poor with lessons drawn from daily life. For example, he had suggested that signs be hung along an estrada with the written word for each object placed on that object. The book was called Poronga, after the metal headlamp that the tappers used on the rubber trails.
By the time the dry season of 1981 arrived, Projeto Seringueiro was ready to go. For Mendes, it was shaping up to be an important year. He was elected president of the Xapuri rural workers’ union, a position he held until his death. For the first time since the dictatorship, unions were organizing at the national level, and Mendes became involved in the establishment of a national federation of workers.
Mendes and the other tappers had decided that the first school should be established on a seringal called Nazaré, a two-day hike from the center of Xapuri. It was chosen because its tappers had already been mobilized by Chico Mendes and the Xapuri union and because they were at the heart of the fight against the ranchers. Nazaré had been acquired in the mid-1970s by Geraldo Moacir Bordon, one of the most powerful paulistas who had been lured to the Acre land rush. His Bordon meat-packing company in São Paulo exported hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of frozen and canned beef annually—most of it from the stockyards of southern Brazil—to the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Bordon had acquired a total of 114,000 acres running inland from the banks of the Acre River, including Nazaré. He never intended to harvest rubber. He wanted the land “cleaned” and the tappers gone.
The trouble had started in 1978, when Bordon’s manager offered a deal to some of the tappers on his land: he would give each one 135 acres of land in a different part of the forest and the right to tap the rubber trees and collect Brazil nuts on their old estradas for two more years. Most of the tappers refused, knowing full well that they could not live on the production from so small a tract. A few accepted, but a year later, Bordon reneged on the deal. Hundreds of rubber and Brazil nut trees were cut in the area that the tappers had been promised would go unscathed. The work crews did nothing with the deforested areas, leading the tappers to conclude that the trees were being felled simply to drive them off the land.
Mendes and his cousin Raimundo de Barros had responded by organizing empates. Mendes would take the two-cent ride across the Acre River in Xapuri’s one-paddle ferry, then hike to his cousin’s house, which was on the way to the Bordon ranch. There, they would relax and listen to overseas broadcasts on a short-wave set—Radio Havana was a favorite—then walk from house to house, gathering tappers to confront the crews.
Now, even as the fight with the rancher continued, Mendes and his cousin, along with Allegretti and other colleagues, began to hike along the trails of Nazaré again, this time to enlist tappers to help build the school and, more important, to recruit them as students. The first classes would be for adults. Soon the simple building was complete—raised in tapper style, with big open windows to let the breeze through and with the first blackboards ever seen in the rain forest. The first teacher was Allegretti herself. She lived on Seringal Nazaré for two months; the classes were then taken over by a woman from the Rio Branco group.
Bordon and many other ranchers charged that the schools were a communist effort to subvert the tappers and destabilize Acre, which, with its long borders, was primed for guerrilla warfare. Their claims were clearly exaggerated, although it was also clear that some of the activists involved were quite radical. Ronaldo de Oliveira, for example, was an earthy intellectual who worked closely with Mendes and Allegretti. One of the most radical people in Acre, he had a deep desire to sow the seeds of a backlands rebellion against the military and landowning classes. Nonetheless, state and federal officials were not eager to stir up the situation in Acre again so soon after the murder of Wilson Pinheiro, and the schools were not opposed.
During this period, Chico Mendes developed a great respect for Allegretti, who had become a tough Amazon veteran, as comfortable in a hammock as a hotel bed. They stayed close friends even after Allegretti left Projeto Seringueiro at the end of 1982 to take a job with an urban planning project for the new mayor of Rio Branco, a young engineer named Flaviano Melo. In the same election that put Melo into office, Mendes had again run for town council in Xapuri. This time, as a PT candidate, he did not have the support of his old friend Guilherme Zaire and never had a chance. Mendes devoted all his time now to his union work.
By 1983, the education project had nearly become self-sustaining. The school at Nazaré had begun to train teachers, and that year, literate women from the seringais took over the teaching jobs. Several more schools were built on other seringais around Xapuri, and their focus shifted from adults to children. Part of the money generated by the rubber cooperatives paid for school maintenance, lunches, and stipends for the teachers.
Prodded by angry ranchers, in 1983 the military police raided several of the schools, ostensibly searching for evidence of guerrilla activity and subversive literature. (By this time, Allegretti was the subject of an extensive file at the National Information Service; when she had a chance for a higher position in the Rio Branco government, she was rejected as a national security risk.) When nothing objectionable was uncovered, the police left the tappers alone. And one year later, the project gained supporters in the federal government. A branch of the education and culture ministry called Pró Memória, which is dedicated to preserving Brazil’s cultural heritage, began funding the schools. Within a year, another six schools had been built around the county of Xapuri. More than two dozen would follow elsewhere in Acre.
The cooperatives established under Projeto Seringueiro did not fare as well. Things went smoothly from 1981 to 1983; studies showed that a rubber tapper and his family could maintain themselves during the tapping season and, when the profits were distributed at the end of the year, could make up to twice the minimum wage set by the government—an excellent income by rural Brazilian standards. But in 1984 the bottom fell out. Just as the cooperatives were being turned over to local control, the national economy began to unravel. After two decades of heavy borrowing by the military government, the foreign debt had ballooned to $102. billion. The International Monetary Fund demanded a draconian reining in of growth. The first years of the 1980s had seen a severe recession; now came inflation, which jumped from 100 percent in 1982 to more than 200 percent a year later. Unemployed workers rioted in São Paulo.
As inflation soared, the value of rubber and Brazil nuts in the Amazon did not keep up with the cost of goods. In 1984 the cooperatives, which had distributed lots of goods but accumulated insufficient stores of rubber, failed. Indeed, all over the Amazon, the rubber tappers were failing to boost their production to keep up with inflation. Twenty years earlier, a tapper who produced 1,200 pounds of rubber in a year would have been considered special; now tappers were harvesting 2,200 pounds a year and not covering their expenses. Undeterred—and buoyed by the success of the schools—Chico Mendes and his friends, both inside and outside the forest, were determined to try again.
Spirits were high despite the economy because Brazil appeared to be on the brink of returning to civilian rule for the first time since 1964. Almost half of the state governors were now from parties that opposed the military dictatorship. In 1984, millions of demonstrators poured into the streets to demand drastic economic reforms and a return to civilian rule. A growing array of opposition parties in Brazil’s Congress posed a threat to the dominance of the military’s party. Faced with an economy they could not control and a rebellious Congress and population, the aging generals decided to let go.
The left was invigorated by the prospect of an end to political repression. For the first time, there was talk of real agrarian ref
orm and free unions. The national rural workers’ organization, CONTAG, planned a meeting in the capital. It marked an important change for the rubber tappers’ fight for the rain forest. From now on, it would take place not only on the front lines—in the forest —but also in a national, and eventually international, arena.
More than four thousand delegates gathered in Brasilia, most of them small farmers. Two of the representatives from Acre were Chico Mendes and his cousin Raimundo de Barros; it was Mendes’s first trip outside the Amazon. The meeting’s goal was to forge a comprehensive proposal for agrarian reform—involving the distribution of undeveloped property to landless farmers and peasants —that would be put before the government.
At the conference, Mendes pushed for a special plan for rain forest regions, where the standard 120- or 250-nacre plot established by the land reform agency, INCRA, was too small to support a family. Mendes promoted the creation of a 700-acre “special rural module” for the Amazon. This idea soon became the basis for the extractive reserves through which the tappers hoped to preserve their forest. But at the time Mendes’s proposal was rejected as too radical. Once again, he would have to wait.
Later that year, Allegretti was eager to be in a position to influence the new government that would be elected by a special vote in 1985. She moved to Brasilia to take a job as an Indian rights specialist for the Institute for Economic and Social Studies, an organization that undertook research to help Congress create legislation. This was one of the first so-called nongovernmental organizations in Brazil, and was loosely based on groups elsewhere in the world, especially in Washington, D.C., where special interests created lobbies to influence legislators. Both the right and the left were now feverishly jockeying for position, hoping to determine the shape of the new democratic government and the new Constitution that would follow.
In January, the presidential vote was taken. The opposition par- . ties built an unlikely coalition and, in a stunning defeat for the entrenched party, their candidate, Tancredo Neves, pulled off a surprise victory. Euphoria swept the country, then turned to shock: one month after the new government took power and before his inauguration, Neves died of an infection after abdominal surgery. His successor was José Sarney, who was closely aligned with the old military guard. Nevertheless, he recognized that without significant political reforms and some kind of land reform, there would soon be an urban and rural explosion. The favelas around Brazil’s major cities were swelling to the bursting point as the peasants fled from the countryside.
The Burning Season Page 21
