The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  His prospects remained bleak. The gubernatorial candidate for the conservative PMDB, Rio Branco’s mayor Flaviano Melo, had received enormous contributions from the ranchers and businessmen and was certain to carry most of the state deputy seats on his coattails. Melo was a dynamic young man who had craftily designed a campaign that blared progress but recognized the growing environmental issue. He promised that Acre would be developed with respect for the forest, but at the same time he took up the old call of Wanderley Dantas: to build a road to the Pacific, to make Acre Brazil’s gateway to the economic boom in Asia. (He later dubbed Acre “the Green State with New Ideas.”)

  However, despite the odds, Mendes never gave up hope as he doggedly stumped the seringais and small farms. His waistline began to grow despite all the exercise; he was obliged to sit and politely eat a meal at every stop. Cowell took him aside several times during the campaign to film interviews. Cowell would ask, “Chico, there’s so much strength on the government side. Do you think you can win?” Chico would respond stubbornly, “Yes, yes, I’ve never had so much support. I think the country is ready to change.”

  During the campaign, Mendes claimed that a private plane had landed at the Xapuri airport full of cash to buy votes for PMDB. Cowell’s documentary later confirmed that rampant vote selling had taken place. It showed a boy on election day sidling up to Mendes as he crossed the plaza in Xapuri. The boy said, “Oi chefe, give me a thousand. At least you could be sure of my mother’s vote.” Votes were being traded for kitchen implements, such as a pressure cooker. A family with many voters could be bought with a small chain saw. In addition, the return of civilian government in Brazil had resurrected old-fashioned patronage. In 1982, Acre had 7,800 government employees. By 1986, the bureaucracy had grown to 20,000. It was estimated that 70 percent of the workers in Xapuri were employed by the local, state, or federal government.

  Clearly, Mendes did not have a chance. First, he was almost compulsively honest, a trait that was evident in Cowell’s footage of election day. Early that morning, as Cowell filmed from a distance, Mendes stopped at the tiny blue stall of his friend Dona Maria to get his daily breakfast of a glass of thick espresso. A woman asked him to buy her something to drink and he said, “Look, it’s prohibited for me [as a candidate] to give money.” Further, Mendes’s poverty meant that he could not have bought a vote even if he had wanted to. At this stage, he was desperately broke, often lacking money even for bus fare. Financial support from PT was minimal. He hitched rides and ate meals with Cowell whenever he could.

  When the ballots were tallied, Mendes and PT had indeed lost. Nationally, Melo’s party, PMDB, won 96 percent of the governors’ seats and 55 percent of the Congress. In Acre, the PT candidates got only 3 percent of the vote. Even though Mendes’s union had 2,000 members, he received only 800 votes—half of the 1,500 he needed to win. Once again, although he was highly regarded within the union and liked by almost everyone except the ranchers, Mendes had come up empty as a politician. His chronic lack of support may have stemmed from fears that his staunch opposition to many policies of the federal government would ensure his inability to get money for programs in the state—and 87 percent of Acre’s budget was paid by federal largesse.

  In public, Mendes rarely allowed himself to show any emotions except happiness and hopefulness. But this night he was despondent. Cowell took him out for a drink and tried to cheer him up, but there was no breaking his black mood. His eyes looked tired; he looked almost broken. But by the next day he had bounced back so strongly that Cowell was startled. He seemed to have gone through a catharsis, perhaps finally washing politics out of his system. As he had planned with Allegretti and Cowell, it was time to take this fight out of the forest and north of the equator, to the one place that had the power to stanch the smoke and flames. It was time to go to the United States.

  Mendes began preparing for his new career in international relations with the help of Cowell, who enticed some people from the United Nations to visit Xapuri. Among them was Robert Lamb, another Briton who had become curious about the rubber tappers’ movement. Lamb worked at Central Independent Television, the London network that financed Cowell’s documentaries, and also did public relations work for the head of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Kenya.

  Mendes took Lamb into the rain forest to attend a two-day meeting of several hundred rubber tappers. From Xapuri, they drove for two hours, then cut off the road and hiked for what seemed like what Brazilians call toda vida, all of your life. As they walked beneath the arching green canopy, which partially shielded them from the steady rain of the wet season, Mendes stopped every few minutes to pick up some nut or fruit or scrap of wood and explain what it was used for. When they finally reached the clearing of a seringal, Lamb came to understand the significance of having people living in the forest. Here he had walked for a day through what appeared to be pristine jungle, and suddenly he was face to face with two hundred people who were happily living in the depths of the untrammeled ecosystem. Nothing could go on there without someone’s knowing about it; at the same time, the people were not harming the forest.

  Mendes explained to the gathering how the designation of extractive reserves would mean that the land would be held by the government or communal title and protected from the fires. Lamb was struck by Mendes’s magnetism, which had drawn so many people to the meeting. He returned to London determined to bring Mendes to the attention of UNEP.

  Adrian Cowell and Mary Allegretti realized that before Mendes went abroad, he had to be seen as a leader of the tappers by officials in Brasilia; after all, he had had little exposure during the 1985 meeting. In December 1986, Allegretti, Cowell, Mendes, and the other tapper leaders met in Acre to complete plans for a new series of meetings in the capital. Cowell gave Mendes a dramatic photograph, taken by an American weather satellite, that showed the fishbone pattern of devastation that had eroded as much as a fourth of the forest in Rondônia. Cowell had gotten the image from NASA scientists who, with some Brazilian colleagues, were for the first time turning their sensitive probes on the burning in the Amazon. Mendes could use the pictures to illustrate what they were fighting.

  In January, Mendes and Osmarino Rodrigues met in Brasilia with officials from the Ministry of Commerce and outlined the extractive reserve idea. For the first time, the head of the agrarian reform ministry supported the concept, as did Brazil’s chief environmental official.

  While visiting the capital, the tappers were joined by a delegation of Indians; together they made the rounds of the ministries as the first joint committee of Indians and tappers. In meetings with Ailton Krenak, the head of the Union of Indigenous Nations, Mendes had led the effort to develop an Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest. As Mendes later recalled to Miranda Smith, a filmmaker, “People became amazed at the time, saying, ‘Indians and rubber tappers together? Didn’t you fight before? Weren’t you enemies?’ ... And we responded, ‘We understand today that our fight is the same one. The struggle of the Indian should be the same as that of the rubber tappers.... We should be together today to fight to defend our Amazonia.’” This new alliance presented the first prospect of an end to a century of animosity and violence between the two groups.

  With the involvement of Allegretti and Cowell, Stephan Schwartzman had been working out a plan for Mendes’s trip to the United States. He had spent the previous year laying the groundwork: spreading the word about the rubber tappers, writing articles for American, British, and Brazilian magazines, and pushing reporters to cover the story. With a grant from the World Wildlife Fund, Schwartzman and Allegretti did a study comparing the economic potential of extractive reserves with that of other land uses, such as ranching. They calculated that, in twenty years, an acre of land in Acre would produce only $15.05 if converted to cattle pasture, but would produce $72.79 if kept as standing forest for extraction of rubber, Brazil nuts, and other forest products. (And, of course, the cattle pasture would be useless after the f
irst ten years, while the forest would continue to be productive.) Mendes needed hard numbers such as these to fortify his assault on the banks.

  Meanwhile, more agronomists and forest ecologists from Brazil and abroad were making the trip to Acre and other parts of the Amazon to study the tappers and the economic potential of the standing forest. One study showed that a rubber tapper family—in areas where the tappers were free of rent and other obligations to the rubber bosses—earned more than $1,250 in cash in an average year from the sale of rubber and nuts, and that did not include the value they gleaned from the forest by hunting, raising manioc and other crops, gathering fruits and building materials, and the like. The total income was estimated at $2,400, more than double what a family in the slums of Rio Branco scraped together. And the quality of life among free tappers was uniformly considered far superior to the life of those who moved into town. If research were undertaken to boost the rubber harvest and develop markets for other tropical products, the extractive reserve could prove to be a positive component in the Brazilian economy.

  Plans for Mendes’s trip were finally set. The annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank was scheduled for March 23–25, 1987, in Miami. Representatives from the ministries of finance or treasury departments of the forty-four member nations would be there—borrowers and lenders alike. Mendes’s target was the contingent of lenders; many, including the United States, were ready to pull out of the IDB, considering it the worst of the multilaterals. The borrowing member nations had too much power and could often give themselves money at will, with few controls on how it was spent. The Latin-American borrowers, led by Brazil, constantly battled with the Northern Hemisphere lenders, led by the United States. The U.S. Treasury Department under the Reagan administration considered the IDB little more than a Third World pork barrel operation and was looking for “a bludgeon with which to beat the bank,” as Schwartzman put it. The environmental issue could be the perfect weapon.

  Schwartzman flew out to Acre to brief Mendes before his journey. Mendes began to memorize facts about the BR-364 project, facts about the economic value of the standing forest and how it could outproduce cattle pasture. Allegretti and Schwartzman quizzed him and helped him polish his delivery. And they gave him his itinerary: Mendes would fly alone and be met in Miami by Schwartzman, a couple of other lobbyists, and Cowell, who planned to film the entire visit.

  As Mendes went around Xapuri and Rio Branco before the trip, he tried to stay calm, but this time he could not hide his anxiety and excitement. He often stopped to visit one of his closest friends, Sister Zelia, a quiet nun who was a nurse at the Xapuri hospital. They would sit in the garden behind the house she shared with two other nuns, down the street from the public market. Mendes had girded himself mentally for the trip, but as he sat talking with Zelia one night, he panicked about something simple, his wardrobe. He had nothing to wear—and no money with which to buy something. Zelia had an idea. One of the other nuns had received a shipment of donated clothing from Italy. They went over to the church and fished around until they found a gray suit. It was a little small, but Mendes did not care.

  Just a week before the meeting, Allegretti finally rounded up the money for Mendes’s ticket from friends in the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. (If other branches of the Sarney government had known of it, heads would have rolled in Brasilia.) Mendes took the interminable, multistop flight out of the Amazon, gliding over the dark green canopy, the brown swathes of pasture, orange ribbons of muddy roads, and the sediment-laden rivers of the rainy season. Then he boarded a jumbo jet and left his country for the first time.

  Schwartzman and Cowell met him as planned and took him to the Intercontinental Hotel, one of those sprawling, soaring, post-modern complexes that have sprouted throughout the United States. Mendes was astounded by the indoor world of the hotel: there were enough attractions inside that conventioneers never need step outside and face the gritty reality of the street. A forest of flags greeted the arriving officials, who pulled up in a fleet of Cadillacs. Now the only problem the environmentalists faced was getting Mendes inside. He was not a government official, and the only people allowed at the meeting were government representatives, their guests, and the press. Cowell managed to spirit him in the back door by getting him a press pass.

  Once inside, Schwartzman worked the hall feverishly, introducing Mendes to just about anyone who did not look busy. Cowell and his camera trailed behind. At a series of elegant cocktail receptions, ministers in their chalk-stripe suits found themselves confronted at every turn by a tieless, tousled man who quickly rattled off his spiel. “We are not against the road,” Mendes would quickly say, with Schwartzman translating when necessary. “We are against the devastation caused by the bad planning that has taken place without the participation of the people living in the Amazon.” Cowell, as he often did during his filming, took Mendes aside and asked him to tell the camera how the Amazon could benefit from his visit to Miami. “Cattle ranching . . . has economically brought nothing to the region,” Mendes said, staring into the lens. “The only thing it’s been good for is concentrating land in a few hands. My hope is that the governments of the people who give money to the Inter-American Development Bank will listen to the seringueiros’ complaints. Otherwise, the forest will certainly be destroyed.”

  Some officials were taken aback by the sight of this motley crew, described later by Schwartzman as “several foaming environmentalists and a seringueiro.” Particularly nonplused were the Japanese representative and a World Bank representative from Brazil, who were introduced to Mendes at a lavish reception for more than a thousand guests. Japan was already on the environmentalists’ blacklist for buying up and destroying vast tracts of the Asian rain forest. The Brazilian official just barely maintained his decorum as this earnest rubber tapper reeled off his demands.

  But Mendes made a favorable impression where it counted most —on the delegation from the United States. One of those attending was Jim Bond, Senator Kasten’s specialist on multilateral banks. Bond later recalled, “Here we were at one of these classic meetings where everyone is saying, ‘Let’s have fresh raspberries, sip champagne, and talk about the poor.’ And here was Chico Mendes.” Bond felt uncomfortable because Mendes seemed so out of place, but he was also impressed with this man’s straightforward approach. Bond discussed with Schwartzman the idea of flying Mendes to Washington. Richard Collins, who was representing Senator Daniel K. Inouye, also met Mendes and immediately saw a new and potent weapon. And it was the right moment for a new weapon. On February 20, Brazil had unilaterally announced that it was suspending interest payments on its commercial bank loans, and the United States and other creditors were outraged.

  After the meeting, Mendes, Schwartzman, and Cowell flew up to Washington. March 27 was one of those sunny, early spring days when most Washingtonians brave the breeze without overcoats. Still wearing his ill-fitting suit, Mendes pulled his arms in tight to keep warm as he walked over to one of the Senate office buildings. He was led into an office and sat with Schwartzman on one side of a broad walnut table as Kasten rushed in from a meeting of his Subcommittee on Foreign Appropriations. With Schwartzman translating, Mendes explained his hopes for extractive reserves and his fears about the impact of the paving of BR-364 without environmental safeguards. He nervously fumbled with a stack of papers as Kasten thanked him for his help. “I can promise you that our subcommittee is going to continue to put pressure on the [Inter-American Development Bank] to withhold funds—to cut off all funds, possibly—if they are not more cooperative,” he said. Before he returned to his meeting, Kasten shook Mendes’s hand, sealing the unlikeliest of alliances—between a staunch conservative from a state of rolling, treeless pasture that based its economy on cows and a Marxist forest dweller whose worst enemies were cattlemen.

  A few days later, Kasten and the subcommittee’s chairman, Inouye, sent a threatening letter to the president of the bank, Antonia Ortiz Mena. It said: “The Se
nate Foreign Operations Subcommittee insists that the environmental components of the loan be implemented before further work on road construction is allowed.... We cannot allow a repeat of the devastation which occurred in Rondônia.” According to Bond, that letter was a direct result of the meeting between Mendes and Kasten. By setting these powerful senators in motion, Mendes had accomplished as much in a few days in the United States as he had in years back in the Amazon.

  Mendes flew back to Acre and took the dusty, four-hour bus ride to Xapuri. Just a week after nibbling on shrimp in paneled reception rooms at a luxury hotel, he found himself again living from handouts and under other people’s roofs. And he still found himself under siege. A reporter for the Gazeta Mercantil, the Brazilian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, had filed a small story from Miami about Mendes’s visit. The article caused a minor explosion back in Acre. Its state legislators and representatives in Brasilia lashed out at this presumptuous activist who threatened Brazil’s future by opposing the bank loans. (The story was by the same journalist who produced the same homecoming greeting for Mary Allegretti after her Washington trip in 1986.)

  João Tezza, a state legislator and a lawyer who often represented the ranchers in actions against the rubber tappers, gave a speech in which he charged that Mendes was much too naive and poorly educated to comprehend such things as international development loans; he was obviously being used by Americans who wanted to gain control of mineral rights in the Amazon. In Xapuri, the conservative mayor and town councilors also blasted Mendes; if the paving of the road were delayed, it would put a damper on the land boom and building spree that were enriching the local elite.