The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  The Amazon was a tragic example of how the bank’s flawed lending policy could lead to disaster. Most appalling was the situation in Rondônia. In the late 1970s, the Brazilian military government had finally acknowledged that the BR-364 highway and poorly planned settlement schemes had created a monster in Rondônia and northern Mato Grosso. Brazil began to revamp its program for the northwest Amazon in hopes of controlling the flood of peasants who were swarming into the marginally fertile, ecologically fragile region. The new plan, called Polonoroeste, or Northwest Pole, would send settlers only to areas identified as having good soil, would encourage the planting of sustainable tree crops such as cocoa and cashew (which produces both a nut and a fruit), and would build small access roads and pave 930 miles of BR-364, which remained an impassable swamp for half of the year. The paving of the road would ensure that the farmers could transport all these new crops to the markets.

  In December 1981 the World Bank—over the objections of its own consultants, who had surveyed the situation—paid Brazil the first installment of a $500 million loan to cover part of the $1.5 billion cost of Polonoroeste. The terms of the loan required that Brazil guarantee that reserves be set aside for Indians and that environmental safeguards be implemented. But the bank made little effort to check on Brazil’s compliance, and the result was chaos.

  As soon as the loan was announced, word quickly spread among the misplaced poor of the south that a huge new Amazon project was in the works. The resulting rush dwarfed the previous onslaught of settlers. Between 1981 and 1983, 65,000 settlers arrived yearly. An epidemic of drug-resistant malaria broke out, and the newcomers overwhelmed the shabby infrastructure of the state. Some 80 percent of the colonists failed and had to move on and cut new forest tracts. Many sold their abandoned tracts to cattle ranchers, who completed the process of destruction. After the choking haze of each burning season dispersed, another 5 percent of Rondônia’s forests had been incinerated. In 1984, the pace of the destruction quickened as 160,000 settlers arrived. Bus companies brought in extra vehicles and stuffed them full of the hopeful masses, who carried their belongings—if they had any—in cardboard boxes and shreds of cloth. Sometimes thirty busloads of migrants would arrive each night at checkpoints, overwhelming efforts to vaccinate the newcomers for yellow fever. It was said that mayors in the south rounded up drunks and prisoners, filled them with cachaça, and sent them north.

  The magnitude of the Polonoroeste disaster did not become clear for a few years. By 1985, both the Indians and the rain forests of Rondônia were on the verge of extinction. And Polonoroeste was just the worst example among many in which incautious lending by the banks had catastrophic consequences.

  In the Ivory Coast, stretches of unique rain forest fell to make room for rubber plantations funded by the banks. In Singrauli, India, the World Bank financed open-pit coal mines and power plants that displaced 300,000 people and covered the surrounding countryside with ash and coal dust. In Indonesia, the bank helped finance the government’s Transmigration Program, which moved 2 million people from the crowded islands of Java, Bali, Lombok, and Madura to sparsely inhabited regions of other islands, including Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of New Guinea. The program destroyed 5 million acres of forest before renegotiated terms substantially reduced the environmental impact.

  This negligence on the part of the development banks caused Bruce Rich and an informal network of environmental, Indian rights, and human rights lobbyists to wage war on the banks. The ten-story World Bank headquarters in Washington, covering six blocks, had a monolithic quality, and its six thousand bureaucrats were capable of warding off attacks by some very powerful interest groups. But Rich and his allies came to understand that the key to pressuring the banks—and, in turn, the nations receiving the banks’ largesse—was not to assault the monolith at all; the weak spot lay outside the walls. The banks were impotent without the participation—and the funds—of their biggest member nations. And there was no bigger contributor than the United States, which gave the banks $1.2 billion a year, three times as much as the next highest contribution. What was needed were a few well-staged, carefully targeted congressional hearings.

  Rich and his allies began the fight in 1983. One of his most valuable supporters was an anthropologist named Stephan Schwartzman. Schwartzman was living in Washington and free-lancing for London’s Survival International, which publicized the plight of imperiled indigenous cultures. Because of a lingering case of hepatitis he had picked up in the Amazon, he had taken time off from working on his doctoral dissertation for the University of Chicago. His subject was the Amazon’s elusive Krenakore tribe, which was pushed near extinction by road projects and myriad imported diseases. Schwartzman had the slim frame and pasty complexion of someone who had spent years in the tropics and harbored his share of parasites. Although he was an American, his English had acquired the sliding, lilting inflection of Brazilian Portuguese. Because he had seen the impact of big projects on the Indians, he was eager to help Bruce Rich battle the banks.

  By the time Allegretti and Gross arrived in Washington, the walls of the World Bank were indeed beginning to crumble. Through Rich, Schwartzman had heard of the Brazilians’ arrival, and he invited them to his small house in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. They sat in his living room all night, speaking in Portuguese, and each became familiar with the others’ frame of reference. Schwartzman told Allegretti about the situation with the banks. Detailed dossiers about the Polonoroeste disaster had been distributed on Capitol Hill. Congressman David R. Obey and Senator Robert W. Kasten, Jr., both of Wisconsin, were among those who had taken up the issue and threatened to cut off funding for the World Bank if assessments of environmental impact did not become an acid test of any proposed project. A hearing had been held in the fall of 1984 at which the Brazilian agronomist José Lutzenberger unleashed a potent attack on Polonoroeste and the global consequences of the decimation of the rain forest. That was something Allegretti already knew about. Lutzenberger’s testimony had been televised back in Brazil and resulted in the first national debate there about the Amazon.

  As Schwartzman described it, the hearings had no immediate effect on the bank. Late in 1984, forty environmental and anthropological groups from Brazil, Europe, and the United States sent a large package of evidence of problems with the Polonoroeste project to the World Bank’s president, A. W. Clausen. A month later, a curt response had come back from a low-level functionary: the bank would recommend that Brazil make modifications of the project “if and when needed.” In desperation, Rich, Schwartzman, and their friends had approached Senator Kasten. He was a conservative, and the environmentalists were not sure what to expect. But Kasten was outraged. He sent a blistering letter to Clausen, saying that the coalition “had raised a number of legitimate concerns and suggested some reasonable approaches to alleviate those concerns. The response from the World Bank was at best a brush-off, but frankly more correctly described as an insult.” As chairman of the Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, Kasten was in a position to do more than just chair hearings. He could easily cancel the annual billion-dollar contribution to the bank from the United States.

  Kasten demanded that the bank review the Rondônia project. On April 8, 1985, shortly after Brazil had returned to civilian rule, the bank announced that it had halted all funding for the road project until a detailed review of the situation could be completed. To qualify for the support, the Brazilian government eventually agreed to implement environmental protection programs and establish a 4.4-million-acre reserve for Rondônia’s besieged Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indians.

  This was the first victory in the long battle to force the multilateral banks to create internal environmental sections and invite environmentalists to their meetings. In the meantime, Bruce Rich and other lawyers were drafting legislation that Kasten and Obey would later push through Congress. Schwartzman explained to Allegretti and Gross that the legislation could change the way the banks administe
red loans and would require the U.S. Agency for International Development to devise an “early warning system” to eliminate bad projects.

  Allegretti was overwhelmed by what she heard that night. She found it astonishing that a few environmentalists could successfully force policy changes in an institution the size of the World Bank. The tactics of these North American activists were completely foreign to her. In Brazil, political action was always fighting against something—nothing more. Two opponents could meet for several days and in the end come away with nothing. She was electrified by the concrete results possible in the United States.

  Allegretti then told Schwartzman about the national meeting of rubber tappers and how they had devised a strategy for saving the forest. She talked about Chico Mendes’s union and the schools and the empates. But she had to backtrack. Despite his years of experience with the Amazonian Indians, Schwartzman hardly knew what a rubber tapper was, let alone that tens of thousands of them were still living in the Amazon. Allegretti described the debt slavery and brutality, the long history of the tappers’ struggle, and the tragic irony of the soldados da borracha, many of whom had died trying to produce rubber for the war effort under a program backed by the United States.

  As she spoke, Schwartzman grasped the significance of what she was telling him. During the campaign against the banks, he had come to appreciate the power of the press, having fed reams of information to reporters such as Jack Anderson. The soldiers of rubber were a natural for the American media, Schwartzman thought. American dollars had been put up for a pension for these rubber soldiers, and Brazil had never given it to them. Moreover, the existence of these tappers would strengthen the American environmentalists’ hand by giving them people to fight for—not just birds and trees.

  As he listened to this conversation, Tony Gross saw a dramatic turning point developing in the fight for the forest, a meshing of disparate experiences and tactics—each complementing the other. The Washington lobbyists were fighting the destructive lending policies of the big banks but lacked an alternate development policy that would do a better job of preserving the environment. The rubber tappers and their empates, schools, and cooperatives might be able to provide that crucial sustainable alternative, but they lacked support. If the two initiatives could be linked, each would gain strength. Not only were the tappers an effective defense against deforestation, but, if their cooperatives could be made to work, they could provide an alternative to the old-fashioned, from-the-top-down development of the Amazon.

  As the evening wore on, they recognized that common ground was shared by the big Washington environmental lobbies, budding environmental organizations in Brazil, the trade union movement in the Amazon, and development agencies such as Oxfam: they all wanted to preserve the Amazon in a sustainable way for the people who lived there. As the Briton, the American, and the Brazilian talked, disparate threads of motivation and meaning were woven into a unified course of action.

  Schwartzman told the others that this meeting had come about at the ideal time. The Washington environmentalists were particularly interested in getting the help of Allegretti and Acre’s rubber tappers because of the threat posed by a new road project that had just been announced by the World Bank’s smaller sister, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The road was once again BR-364, but this time the plan was to complete the stretch connecting Rondônia to Acre. Just as the World Bank was getting its environmental programs in order, the IDB was announcing a $58.5 million loan to Brazil to pave the 310 miles between Pôrto Velho and Rio Branco. But once again, insufficient attention was being paid to the environmental consequences of the asfaltamento, which had already laid waste the heart of Rondônia.

  Allegretti guaranteed Schwartzman that she and the tappers would help him and his allies force the bank to add environmental safeguards or cancel the loan. (That promise was later fulfilled. Under pressure from the Brazilian contingent, the American lobbies, and the U.S. Congress, the bank agreed to add a $10 million package of programs to protect the Indians, rubber tappers, and their homes.) In return, Allegretti asked Schwartzman to be the Washington contact for the Institute for Economical and Social Analysis; he immediately agreed.

  When the meeting finally ended, it was clear that an alliance had been created between the battlefronts of Washington and the western Amazon. This alliance brought new significance to the forthcoming national meeting of rubber tappers. As Allegretti flew back to Brazil with Gross, they began to refine their plans for the meeting: if the tappers broadened their goals to include the fight for the environment, the movement could gain enormous strength. There was just one nagging concern in the minds of these two social scientists, based on one of the old taboos of anthropology: when scientists lose the distance between themselves and their subjects, they risk affecting their subjects’ behavior. Allegretti and Gross agreed that there would be unpredictable consequences for the rubber tappers if they were exposed so abruptly to the outside world. At the same time, they knew that if the tappers did not come out of the forest, they might soon have no forest and no culture left.

  No one thought it would be easy to sustain this new bond between the rural unionists and the environmentalists. After all, the environmental organizations outside Brazil would have to acknowledge that people lived in the pristine forests. And the hard-line labor groups in Brazil would have to recognize that environmental questions were not just superficial issues for the idle middle class; Brazilian labor unions and political parties such as PT had usually spurned environmental causes for that very reason. It would take the resilient mind and determination of Chico Mendes to make that alliance stick.

  The grassy campus of the University of Brasilia meanders along the shores of Lake Paranoá, just below the east wing of the capital. The lake was created by damming a river in an effort to add a little humidity to the dry, hot air of the high plains around the city. The lake is pretty to look at but too polluted for swimming. The residents of Brasilia swim in a vast outdoor pool in a public park. The pool, a concession to the bureaucrats who once could enjoy the beaches of the old capital of Rio de Janeiro, has artificial surf created by heavy paddles, the only surf for 600 miles. There is a persistent feeling of resentment among most people forced by their careers to live here. The only people who seem to like Brasília are the candangos, the people who created the city and have now raised the first generation born there. They feel uncomfortable in any other Brazilian city. As one young native put it, “Here things are clean and organized. Other cities are chaotic and filthy.”

  Between October 11 and 17, 1985, one hundred and twenty rubber tappers gathered at the University of Brasilia for the National Meeting of the Rubber Tappers of Amazonia. Many of them had never before been more than a one-day hike or boat ride from their seringais. But they had happily spent days traveling by bus caravan down from Rio Branco and Pôrto Velho and Manaus to the edge of the Amazon and beyond. The buses left the forests behind and passed the scorched, abandoned plots and tin-shack towns of Rondônia. As the miles went by, the fine orange dust that always hung over BR-364 and the other Amazonian roads permeated the travelers’ every piece of clothing and every pore. The buses climbed into the dry highlands of Mato Grosso and then across the planalto, the windswept plateau of Goiás.

  The tappers passed the time by chattering and smoking and singing songs; many had brought battered guitars or leaky accordions. They shared a sense of excitement and destiny that some of the oldest among them had not felt since their ships left the coast of the northeast, bound for the Amazon to fight the Nazis by harvesting rubber. They sang the old ballads from the glory days of the War for Rubber:

  Let’s go to bring glory to seringueiros, let’s go to bring glory to this nation.

  Together with the efforts of the people who make car tires and tires for airplanes....

  When the tappers finally arrived in the capital—a clamorous collection of people with nordestino looks and ill-fitting shoes and trousers—they
were regarded with curiosity and some amusement by the conservative citizens of the capital. Clearly, they belonged in the slums on the outskirts of town, not in the sleek auditorium of the Technology Department of one of the best universities in the country. After all, the slums were filled mostly with people of the same stock—nordestinos who had been enticed to Brasilia to build the shining city, then abandoned once the job was done.

  But there was something in the way these visitors held themselves, something in their simple speech and straightforward style, that lured hundreds of politicians and students to a series of lectures and discussions and cultural events throughout that week. Some were fascinated by the diagonal slashes, the “flag” cuts, that a tapper made in a decorative tree on the lawn—one of the few trees in the city—to demonstrate how latex was coaxed from the rubber trees. Others were drawn by the lilting sound of Hélio Melo’s fiddle. This rubber tapper from Rio Branco was something of a Renaissance man. He was a skilled musician and talented painter whose whimsical, often surrealistic canvases depicted such things as a hybrid between a rubber tree and a cow, with a tapper collecting his milk from this “second mother” (as tappers often referred to the trees). Melo, who displayed dozens of paintings at the meeting, explained that he had learned to love drawing out on the seringal when his mother once drew a mermaid who had a body that looked like a guitar. Melo had started to experiment, smearing green leaves and flowers on paper to create colors.

  And then there were the stories, told by people who had never left the forest and who loved nothing better than to tell stories: about the horselike being that occasionally came out of the Juruá River in the moonlight; about porpoises who took on human form and made love to women. One old soldier of rubber from Rondônia recounted to anthropologists his memories of the day the news came that the war was over. “I woke up in my boss’s hut,” he said. “I heard a shoot-out. I thought the Germans were in the seringais. Then someone said the radio was broadcasting news of peace. People were shooting their guns in the sky. We were so anxious for peace, for the opportunity to see our families again. I cried from happiness. We spent the rest of the evening drinking and singing and celebrating.” Of course, he never did get back to his home in the northeast—his debts to the estate boss prevented his leaving.