The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  But the purpose of this meeting was not simply to provide a showcase for a quaint, reclusive rural culture. When Mary Allegretti had returned from Washington in May, she immediately scrapped the original plan for the meeting—simply a narrow forum at which the rubber tappers could prove their existence and demand social justice. In discussions with Chico Mendes, she had described the looming problem posed by the paving of BR-364 and the new allies she had found in Washington. Until now, the struggle of the tappers had always been cast as one of justice and free labor and land rights. These talks marked the first time that Mendes understood that the environment itself—the extraordinary biological splendor of the Amazon—could help them win support and save their way of life. He recognized the possibility that with the environmental issue on their side, the rubber tappers might well be able to have a voice in the national debate over the Amazon.

  Allegretti had modified the project outline, changing the wording in a way that added enormously to the significance of the event: “The only way to launch a broader movement to defend the Amazon and its inhabitants and to show Brazilian society the conditions of slavery under which rubber tappers continue to live and work is to bring them from the forest to speak out in the political center of the country.” Allegretti had confronted Mendes with the question that had plagued her and Tony Gross, the question about the impact of bringing the tappers out of the forest. Mendes never hesitated; he made the final decision to go ahead with the meeting.

  Mendes and Allegretti had then spent five feverish months organizing the meeting on two fronts. Mendes’s union became the official sponsor. Allegretti canvassed more than twenty organizations and raised several thousand dollars to cover bus fares and a few plane tickets. Then she, Mendes, Raimundo de Barros, and some other members of the Xapuri union held planning sessions around Acre to recruit participants and explain the added significance of the tappers’ struggle. Allegretti told the other tappers that there were people as far away as Washington, D.C., who were concerned with the fate of the Amazon.

  At first, only tappers from Acre were going to attend. But word of the meeting spread around the Amazon through the union and church networks. When calls came into Xapuri from as far away as Manaus, Mendes and Allegretti decided that the meeting should involve all of the Amazon. They got calls from Amazonas, from tappers who were working with the church to establish schools. From Rondônia, they got a call from an association of soldiers of rubber, war veterans of sorts. Mendes traveled from state to state to coordinate plans.

  Finally, the tappers were actually at the meeting. Each day, the tappers and advisers, technocrats, and politicians filed into a brick and wood auditorium and participated in panel discussions. The sessions often began with the singing of ballads from the rubber war or hymns such as “Asa Branca” (“White Wing”), one of the most popular songs from the northeast. The topics ranged from the government pricing system for rubber to the road paving project that was flooding Rondônia with poor settlers. Tappers from eastern Acre complained about the ranchers who were toppling their Brazil nut and rubber trees. Tappers from the Juruá, in western Acre, spoke of the continuing conditions of debt slavery under which they labored and died.

  Government officials from environmental agencies promised that the new plan to pave BR-364 would be accompanied by environmental programs designed to mitigate the impact of the flow of settlers that was sure to follow. The tappers were not convinced, however, especially those from Rondônia, most of whom had long since been run off their land by the paving of the southern stretch of BR-364 and the settlers who followed. They railed at the officials for not consulting the people who lived in the forest before designing policies to develop the region.

  For two decades, the development of the Amazon had been planned and implemented from the top down. The basic premise had all the subtlety of an ax: first build a road, then find people to settle along it, even if you have to fly them in by jumbo jet. Now, at this meeting, these people claimed that their experience with the unique qualities of their environment justified their having a say in its fate. As one Acre tapper explained, “When we say we’re against deforestation, people say we’re against the development of Brazil. We’re not against development, but we are against the devastation of Amazonia. We want development that doesn’t only benefit the big companies and the powerful, but the people who work on the land.” For Brazil, this was a novel concept. Public hearings and the “not in my back yard” syndrome so common in America were not yet a part of its culture.

  Chico Mendes was not able to attend the first few days of the meeting. He had been politicking back in Acre in the weeks before the November elections, where he was waging a losing battle for the mayoralty of Xapuri. (He insisted on running as a representative of PT, even though it had little support in the conservative state, where even union members feared that PT could do nothing for them. Allegretti had discouraged him from running, saying that he could accomplish more by focusing on the union and the growing tappers’ movement, but Mendes stubbornly persisted.) In his absence, Osmarino Amâncio Rodrigues, a fiery, radical leader from Wilson Pinheiro’s town, was the most prominent representative from Acre. Acre had by far the largest bloc at the meeting: sixty tappers from Xapuri and Brasiléia. But even Rodrigues was upstaged by a wiry, almond-eyed loner from the tiny town of Novo Aripuanã, deep in Amazonas, who became the master of ceremonies and the first national voice of the tappers—Jaime da Silva Araújo.

  Araújo was a surprise to everyone. He had heard about the meeting at the last minute through an activist priest in his region and was barely able to round up another tapper to take advantage of two plane tickets that had been sent by the conference organizers. He took control of the meeting through sheer force of personality. A natural poet, he sang songs about the mother of the forest, who punished those who harvested the forest bounty too heavily. His tales had audiences rapt.

  When Mendes finally arrived, he avoided the spotlight, although as one of the primary organizers of the meeting he could have easily expected it. He did take the chair for one day at the end of the conference, but he did not give any impassioned speeches. Mendes recognized that his strong suit was not poetry or statesmanship. He was a politician and an activist in the most literal sense. His strength was in organizing and quiet diplomacy. He was the person who could round people up and get them talking; more important, he could get them to act. Everyone who worked with him said over and over that Mendes was not doing what he did for power, glory, or money—which some others among the leadership of the tapper movement were sometimes accused of—but simply because he felt so strongly that it had to be done.

  Allegretti and Mendes had arranged several levels of activities. Along with the public seminars and cultural events, there were closed-door meetings with advisers at which the tappers were urged to shift the focus of their strategy. Many still thought that their most significant bargaining chip was rubber. They had been raised to believe wholeheartedly that Brazil would someday laud them as long-lost heroes who harvested a valuable strategic material and who, during World War II, had saved the free world from Nazi domination. Thus they still sang the tired patriotic ballads. One anthropologist, Mauro Almeida, who had done a lot of work in the isolated Juruá River valley, discovered how difficult it was for some of the tappers to understand that Asian plantation rubber and synthetic rubber now dominated the market. One elderly soldier of rubber broke down and cried when he learned about synthetic rubber for the first time. Almeida, Allegretti, and the other advisers agreed that the tappers needed a sort of cold shower. Almeida had to sit with them and say, “Look, people just couldn’t care less about your rubber now. Forget about it.” The older tappers were stunned.

  As the importance of rubber was downplayed, the importance of the tappers’ role as defenders of the environment was emphasized. Allegretti and the others stressed that the future of the rain forest did not have to be bound to rubber. Mendes, who was already a convert to the
new approach, helped convey this idea to the other tappers. One goal of the movement thus became the promotion of research into other forest products, ranging from oils and nuts to crops such as cocoa, which grows naturally in the shade of the canopy. And Allegretti constantly reiterated the importance of the empates and how effective they had been at saving trees. After their initial shock, the tappers seemed to accept the situation and turned immediately to the new strategy—the idea that they could be the defenders of the forest. Said one, “If this is why people will support our struggle, this is how we will fight.”

  One of the most important results of the meeting was a call for the creation of a national organization of rubber tappers. This need arose after the tappers were spurned by the National Council on Rubber, a government agency that helped determine the price for Amazon rubber. The tappers had asked to meet with the bureaucrats but had been turned down. As a result, it was decided—with some intended irony—to create a national council of rubber tappers, the Conselho Nacional dos Seringueiros. The council would work to promote health, education, and cooperatives for the tappers and push for land rights that would allow them to live and work in the forest without fear of expulsion or deforestation. The other justification for such a council was that the existing unions represented all rural agricultural workers; the tappers wanted an organization that was theirs alone.

  Allegretti and Mendes had never intended that the meeting would produce a permanent entity. There had been no long-term plans. They had not even called it the first national meeting. But soon the National Council flourished and became the international voice of the movement that had begun, a decade earlier, on a few seringais in the forests of eastern Acre.

  The most significant proposal to emerge from the conference was the tappers’ call for a special system of agrarian reform to be established for the Amazon basin that would create areas reserved for “extractive” activities such as rubber and nut harvesting—extractive reserves.

  The term had been coined at one of the regional planning sessions before the national conference. The session brought together tappers from the forests around Ariquemes, a town in the heart of the destruction in Rondônia. These tappers had had a longstanding conflict with the Indians over the demarcation of an Indian reserve, so an anthropologist named Carlos Teixeira cited the Indian reserves as an example of what the tappers should ask for themselves. Mary Allegretti was at the meeting. As she recalled it, a tapper said, “Yes, but we are not Indians, we are extractivists,” whereupon Teixeira came up with “extractive reserve.” It took more than two years before Allegretti and other advisers could forge a detailed plan for extractive reserves that would fit the complexities of Brazilian law. But the basic meaning—and the importance—of the concept was clear to everyone. It was the same idea that Chico Mendes had proposed a year earlier when he talked of “special rural modules.”

  The national meeting succeeded in publicizing the plight of the rubber tappers, whose situation until then had been discussed only in the past tense. The newspapers in São Paulo and Rio ran articles about these desbravadores, tamers, of the rain forest. Rubber tappers went on talk shows. The rector of the university, an old friend of Allegretti’s, invited two tappers to teach a course there for six months. The Brazilian establishment had assumed that the aviamento system of debt slavery and the rubber battalions of World War II were already dusty history. And few people outside the Amazon and the activist community had been aware of the violent conflicts between the tappers and the encroaching ranchers. Suddenly, in the auditorium filled with people from the forest, federal congressmen and senators from Acre appeared and made strident speeches calling for benefits for the rubber veterans.

  Before the meeting adjourned, Mendes, Araújo, Rodrigues, and the other leaders drew up a sixty-two-point manifesto demanding, in part, that the peoples of the Amazon be given a say in its development, that they be provided with health care, education, fair pricing for rubber, and retirement benefits for the soldiers of rubber.

  The manifesto concluded with a simple demand that hinted at the dramatic change in their orientation: “We demand to be recognized as [the] genuine defenders of the forest.” Although the tappers continued to voice their old calls for social justice, workers’ rights, and agrarian reform—standard issues of the political left—at the urging of Chico Mendes and Mary Allegretti, they modified their message in a subtle but important way. For the first time, they made a simple, uncluttered call for the preservation of Amazonia —not only for the sake of its peoples, but for its own sake as well.

  The Brazilian government was clearly beginning to wake up to the need to change its policies in the Amazon. In Belém, just as the tappers were preparing to leave for their homes, the minister of the interior addressed a meeting on the Amazon and said, “The predatory use of Amazonia must be forgone. The wealth of the region must be used, but in a selective and intelligent way.” At a closing session of the meeting, Ulysses Guimarães, the president of the Congress, shook hands with the tapper leaders and accepted a copy of their manifesto, which he promised to give to President Sarney.

  Over the next few months, as small follow-up meetings were held, the environment became a more prominent fixture in the tappers’ argument for forest preservation. This was the moment when a new term entered the lexicon of the seringueiro. Along with seringal, colocação, and borracha could now be heard ecologia— ecology.

  The national meeting brought together for the first time four people with remarkable and complementary abilities: Chico Mendes, Mary Allegretti, Stephan Schwartzman, and the filmmaker Adrian Cowell. Over the next three years, each played a key role in the fight to save the Amazon.

  While Mendes and Allegretti had been planning the meeting, Cowell had been frantically filming the raging destruction in Rondônia. He had first met Allegretti on a visit to the capital earlier in the year; over lunch, he heard a bit about the situation in Acre, where he had never filmed. She had mentioned the upcoming meeting, but only briefly. Just one week before the meeting, Cowell returned to Rondônia from an editing session in London. He called Allegretti and asked if she thought the meeting was important and whether he should come down to film it. She told him about the tappers’ coming from four Amazon states and their plan to propose extractive reserves.

  Cowell immediately decided to attend. He was halfway into his Decade of Destruction epic, filming a segment called “Banking on Disaster,” which reported on the destructive effects of the World Bank’s loan for Polonoroeste. Hoping to find something positive amid all the ashes and blood, he thought the tappers and their movement might be just the thing. He later recalled how he and his cameraman, Vicente Rios, had had to scramble to get to the capital in time. They had a pickup truck full of gear, so had no alternative but to drive from Rondônia—at the peak of the burning season. As Cowell recalled, “Everything was burning. A road had been cut all the way through to the Guapore Valley”—a pristine forested region—“and the result was appalling. We passed through this gauntlet of fire and smoke. We had to drive for three days without stopping.”

  Cowell filmed most of the meeting, even though he knew that the rather bland footage would not make it into his film. He felt it was nevertheless important to document what was happening for history’s sake. Especially impressive to Cowell was the tappers’ decision to create a national council. In the past, he had seen too many individual Indian tribes fight for their small tract of forest, to no end. He had been aware of the developments in Acre and had been encouraged to see the tappers fighting, defending their land. But only when they decided to become a national movement did Cowell drop everything else and give them top priority. He was convinced that his instincts had been right and that these rubber tappers, along with their advisers, had come up with a proposal that truly had the potential to preserve large tracts of the rain forest.

  Stephan Schwartzman, too, had heard about the meeting from Mary Allegretti. He had managed to fly down to Brazil for
the meeting and a fact-finding trip up the Amazon. After the meeting had officially ended, the tappers and their advisers gathered at the national headquarters of CONTAG to discuss their next move. Schwartzman was introduced to Chico Mendes and some of the other leaders. He addressed the tappers and tried to explain in more detail the connection between their battles against the ranchers and rubber bosses and his work in Washington. He felt that his audience only partially understood what he was saying, and at that time, he did not understand everything about what the tappers were doing. More important, however, was that he could see now that the tappers would indeed constitute a valuable ally in the fight against the banks.

  The same kind of pragmatic acceptance typified some of the rubber tappers’ reactions to the environmentalists. One of the more politically minded tappers, Osmarino Rodrigues, initially saw the environmental issue as a bit bourgeois, something of a luxury. Even after he became convinced that this strategy would help the tappers, his persistent impression was that the alliance “joined the útil and the agradável”—the useful and the pleasant. On both sides, the motives did not matter; what mattered was that each partner strengthened the other.

  Just as the tappers were about to head home, Cowell heard that the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development was going to São Paulo on October 25 for several days of hearings. Headed by the Norwegian prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the commission was preparing a book-length report on prospects for promoting economic growth that did not harm the environment. (The Brazilian government had tried to keep news of the visit from spreading to environmental groups.) Cowell rounded up a couple of plane tickets and arranged for Allegretti, Jaime da Silva Araújo, and another tapper to fly south. Chico Mendes could not go; because of the pending elections, he had already returned to Xapuri to finish his campaign.