The idea of using satellites to examine the situation in the Amazon and other ecologically fragile regions first arose in the early 1980s. People such as Tebaldi Tardin at the Brazilian space center, Compton Tucker at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and George Woodwell, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, had been refining ways to use the reams of data collected by American Landsat and NOAA satellites to assess changes in vegetation. Their pictures revealed the fishbone pattern of deforestation that showed where new roads had lured settlers into the forest.
But using the satellites to record fires was an innovation devised by Setzer. The idea sprung serendipitously from an unrelated project. In 1985, Setzer and Tucker began planning a study of the interaction between living forests and the atmosphere—the interchange of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and other gases—which was to be a joint project of the Brazilian space agency and NASA. It was part of a long-term global study of the lower atmosphere that included scientists from around the world. Other teams, for instance, were studying the connections between the oceans and the atmosphere.
Setzer and Tucker needed to find a relatively unpolluted region in which to collect data. They assumed that the Amazon had clean air and so, using the Brazilian space institute’s Bandeirante twin-engine aircraft, began collecting gas samples between Belém and Manaus. When they examined the samples, however, they found all sorts of contaminants. In some places, the air was as smoggy as that of Setzer’s home base, São José dos Campos, where a perpetual sooty pall hangs over the highways. But the Amazon had no traffic jams, and there was no heavy industry to speak of for hundreds of miles. So the men started looking at the satellite images taken on the days they had collected the samples, hoping to uncover some sign of the source of the pollutants. They found it: the images showed clouds of smoke emanating from big fires burning in southern Pará, hundreds of miles away, and drifting to the test area.
Setzer was startled by how much smoke was evident over the Amazon basin. The satellite data seemed to confirm anecdotal accounts of the raging fires in Rondônia and the rest of the southern rim of the rain forest. He decided to spend all of his time working out a system for using satellites and computers to detect fires in the Amazon. He received funding for a collaborative study with Brazil’s forestry agency and soon was regularly producing images such as the one taken on September 9, 1987. The results would not be published until February 1988, but in the meantime, Setzer showed the graphs and images to Fabio Feldmann, a São Paulo congressman who was the first Brazilian politician to build a career around the new environmental issue.
Feldmann presented Setzer’s data to the Brazilian Congress, charging that the big landowners of the Amazon were burning the forest at a frenzied pace because they feared that Brazil’s new Constitution, scheduled for ratification in 1988, would limit their ability to burn in the future. The landowners also feared that the financial incentives that had for so long encouraged deforestation were going to be suspended. The thinking was: burn now or lose your land.
Brazil’s agricultural elite was outraged by the study. Setzer, who had received his doctorate at Purdue University, was attacked variously as a stooge of the Brazilian communists or the American capitalists. Many critics simply dismissed the data as fiction. As one leading Amazonian businessman said, “The numbers are not real, and I will prove this to President Sarney. I state and I will prove to the National Security Council that the pictures are fake.” Another lumped Setzer with the environmentalist Green party, reviving the age-old argument employed by Brazil’s generals and businessmen: that those interested in preserving the Amazon must be after something else—either political advantage or selling the Amazon to foreign interests. The team at Brazil’s space center soon found their already meager budget under siege, forcing them to eliminate several important projects.
Undeterred by the attacks, Setzer and his colleagues continued to assess the data. They found that the Amazon fires were releasing a host of substances each year that could disrupt the chemistry of the atmosphere and cause human health problems: 44 million tons of carbon monoxide, 6 million tons of soot and other particles, 5 million tons of methane, and millions of tons of nitrogen oxides and ozone. (Ozone is only beneficial at very high altitudes, where it forms a shield against harmful radiation; down near the earth’s surface it is a component of smog and harms plant growth.) In addition, satellite photographs showed that the winds that swept southeast over the Amazon during the burning season were transporting much of this noxious cloud across São Paulo and the South Atlantic and on over the fragile Antarctic. An atom of carbon that had been locked up in a tree trunk for perhaps a century, once liberated as pure carbon soot, took just ten days to travel from the tropics to the South Pole. The impact of this material on the atmospheric chemistry there—including such phenomena as the hole in the ozone layer that had been only recently discovered over the pole—had yet to be measured.
Finally, the scientists had the proof they needed to capture the world’s attention. The burning of the Amazon was no longer a regional but a global problem. Even for those who doubted the value of preserving a great reservoir of genetic wealth, there was something startling about fires so vast that they emitted more pollutants than the industrial complexes of West Germany and Poland combined. Setzer had another way of putting it: “El Chichón, a huge volcano in Mexico, emitted only twice as much as this. So it was as if we had found a volcano in Brazil that was not known before. The only difference is that it doesn’t erupt in one or two days. It takes a couple of months. But it erupts every year.”
Setzer saw the ensuing reaction as the result of an instinctive fascination. As he said many times, “Fire has a strange effect on people’s minds. It attracts their attention.” And the world did take notice. The satellite photographs and the disturbing data galvanized environmentalists and the media. Drawn by the flames, the international press made one of its rare forays south of the equator and focused on the rain forest. In 1988, reporters began to fly out to the Amazon from the United States and Europe—even from the distant cities of Brazil itself, which had ignored the wilderness for so long—to catch film footage and photographs of the conflagration. And this in turn helped bring more attention to the fight waged by the rubber tappers.
Chico Mendes liked to tell stories to his visitors. He would take them for a walk along an estrada and point to the flanks of the rubber trees and the scars from cuts that he had made two decades earlier. He would name the birds that cooed and whistled high above in the mottled light of the canopy and point out the bulbous termite nests that could be boiled into a tea for a cough. Then he would chip a bit of the bark off a copaíba tree. When he ignited it, the bark sputtered and flared because of its kerosene-like sap. He once told Mary Allegretti a story he had heard as a child, about a seringueiro who hears the trees talking and talks back to them. When you are alone and quiet, Mendes said, that is when all the mysteries of the forest come to you. The trees will speak to you of forces that protect men who treat the forest well, and other forces that threaten those who are careless or greedy.
One of his favorite stories was about how Xapuri got its name. He said that xapuri was an Indian word that meant “before the storm.” Indian legend had it that the Xapuri River was created in a single night when an earthquake split the ground and water flowed forth. Perhaps the story held a germ of truth, since Acre is in fact the most seismically active region in Brazil. And, as 1988 began, it quickly became evident that the town’s name was eerily appropriate.
First came the floods. Just a few months after the most intense burning season in the history of the Amazon, Acre was hit with one of the rainiest wet seasons in memory. In late January, much of the eastern part of the state was submerged as the Acre and Purus rivers and their tributaries overflowed their banks and kept on rising. A third of the state’s crops was destroyed. When relief supplies were airlifted to Rio Branco, 100 tons of food ended up being stashed in a warehouse by corrupt officials—to be hand
ed out in return for votes in the next election.
In Xapuri, many of the natives attributed the flood to a battle that had been waged in 1987 over the statue of São Sebastião in the little park along the river where the batelões unloaded their cargo of rubber. The statue—painted in lifelike flesh tones, dripping in blood where arrows pierced the torso—stood with its back to the river. Surrounded by neatly trimmed grass and blue picket fences, the patron saint of Xapuri stood on a pedestal stained by clumps of melted wax where votive candles had been burned. When it had been installed decades earlier, the statue had faced the river. The hope was that it would ward off floods and bless the steady boat traffic that had been Xapuri’s only lifeline to markets.
Early in 1987, an activist priest and the mayor, a right-wing friend of the ranchers’, fought over who was going to sponsor the upcoming São Sebastião festival that took place every January 20. (It was one of those typical disputes in which the underlying clash of egos was far more important than the surface quarrel.) The new mayor believed that since the river no longer represented the future of Xapuri, the statue should face the road and bless the passing trucks. One day, he sent out a work crew to rotate the statue; immediately thereafter, the heavens opened and the river rose. Perhaps it was coincidence—but no one in Xapuri believed in coincidence.
From then on, tensions in the town mounted steadily. Whatever protection the martyred saint had offered seemed to evaporate. Across Acre, tempers were short and were stretched further because the loan for the paving of BR-364 had just been suspended by the IDB; Senator Kasten had finally convinced the Subcommittee on Foreign Appropriations to cut U.S. support for the bank by $200 million, thereby forcing the bank’s hand.
The governor of Acre, Flaviano Melo, was eager to satisfy the conditions imposed by the IDB for the resumption of the loan. Having recently visited Japan, he felt more strongly than ever that the future of Acre lay to the west. As usual in the rainy season, BR-364 was already a swamp of mud. In February, Melo’s team of forestry engineers and land rights specialists began meeting with federal officials, with Chico Mendes and other tappers, and with consultants who had been hired by the tappers—thanks to small grants from the Ford Foundation—to help firm up plans for the first extractive reserves. Officials from the bank had decided that such reserves would help protect Acre’s forests.
After a week of rancorous debate, the governor announced that the first such reserve would be at Seringal São Luis de Remanso, a two-hour hike from the road linking Rio Branco and Xapuri. But São Luis de Remanso was already on government land, so it was not an area of contention between the ranchers and rubber tappers. Mendes and the other unionized tappers were frustrated because the officials had conveniently ignored other seringais where there was imminent danger of deforestation and violence in the coming dry season.
One of them was Seringal Cachoeira, where Mendes had grown up. By this time, Cachoeira was one of the last large tracts of virgin rain forest left in the county of Xapuri. It was surrounded by ranches or partly deforested seringais on three sides; the fourth side was the Xipamanu River, the border with Bolivia. The tappers of Cachoeira knew they were in for trouble: they had heard that Darly Alves da Silva, the violent owner of the Paraná ranch, had made a deal with the four São Paulo businessmen who owned the seringal. The owners were apparently frustrated that the tappers were impeding their efforts to develop the land. Late in 1987, Júlio Maia, one of the owners, had sent in workers to cut some timber, but tappers had gathered at the ravine where the road ended and forced the crew to turn back. The fofoca, gossip, around Xapuri was that the paulistas had agreed to sell Darly 14,000 acres of the 60,000-acre tract at a bargain rate. In return, Darly would do what he did best: “clean” the area, using guile or firepower.
There was little doubt that Darly could handle the task. The Paraná ranch had developed a reputation as a den of perversity and pistoleiros. More than ten families lived there in a cluster of pink ranch houses and outbuildings. There were far more wives than husbands, and Darly’s teenage children were having children of their own. The Federal Police in Rio Branco considered the ranch a probable way station for cocaine shipments from Bolivia to the south and thence on to American and European markets. One officer estimated that a third of the cocaine being smuggled into Brazil from the Andean nations to the west was being funneled down BR-364, which the police had already nicknamed the “Trans-coca highway,” a reference to the failed Transamazon highway. When the bodies of two young Bolivians were found near the entrance to the Paraná ranch later in the year—and when witnesses later testified that the men had been carrying bags of white powder —few in Xapuri were surprised.
Darly had passed on his penchant for violence to his many sons. Oloci and Darci were especially known for their hot tempers. Oloci was twenty-one, with smooth olive skin and tight curly hair, and often carried a revolver in his belt. He was one of the five children of Natalina, who was Darly’s only legal wife. Oloci was the most trusted of the children and managed the ranch when his father was away. Darci was also twenty-one, but he had never finished primary school and generally did manual labor around the ranch, building fences, cutting trees, working with the cattle. He had loosely curled dark hair, a strong brow that shaded his piercing eyes, and a small, tightly muscled frame. He hated it when people joked about his boiadeiro legs—which looked as if he had spent a lifetime in the saddle. The cowboy image was reinforced by his taste for pointed boots and tight black jeans. The one thing that did not fit was his small, shy voice, which was a lot like his father’s. And his quiet air only reinforced the sense that, like his father, he was someone to handle carefully.
Many of the ten ranch employees were from the same mold. The two most feared were Amadeus and Sérgio Pereira, who had moved to the ranch from Minas Gerais with their mother, who was related to Darly. The brothers, called the Mineirinhos after their home state, were rumored to have killed more than half a dozen people, some over trifles, in their four years at the Paraná ranch. (Late in the year, a third Mineirinho, Jardeir, joined them.) A teenager at the ranch, Genézio Barbosa da Silva, later testified about a string of killings purportedly committed by Darci, Oloci, Sérgio, and Amadeus. Genézio, whose sister was Oloci’s lover, said that the four young men often boasted openly of their kills. He alleged that they had killed one ranch worker, Celso, because he had tried to steal some horses from a neighbor. Darly had ordered the killing, the boy testified, simply because “this was not the kind of man they wanted at the ranch.” When a friend of Celso’s, Edilson, swore revenge, “Darly offered a cow each to Sérgio and Amadeus and asked them together with Darci and Oloci to kill Edilson.” One prosecutor later observed: “The Alves da Silvas are not a common family. For them, violence is their emblem. They kill for nothing. They are responsible for a rosary of crimes”—so many that they were like beads on a string.
Darly’s purchase of the portion of Cachoeira was completed in early 1988. But when Alvarino heard about the deal, he said, “Brother, you have bought yourself a problem.” There were a dozen rubber tapper families on this property, and the tappers of Cachoeira, many of whom had already been displaced from other seringais, were not going to be moved easily.
To solve his problem, Darly first tried persuasion. He offered to give each family 500 acres and build them a chapel on land that he would not touch; he knew they were devout Catholics, he said. The valuable hardwood on the remaining 8,000 acres would fetch enough money to pay for the land. Then he would hire a couple of rubber tappers to harvest latex and Brazil nuts from the trees that were left standing. The tappers refused to make a deal. Said one, “We were not stupid. We knew that Darly only wanted to live along the Xipamanu River and had no plans for a church—only plans to kill us.”
Then Darly tried intimidation. Early in the morning of March 18,1988, he and a small group of workers and pistoleiros headed out along the rough road to the seringal. The road was awash at this time of year, and progress w
as slow. When the men finally reached the seringal, they faced forty rubber tappers, who refused to let them through. One of them, Manduca Custódio da Silva, had heard about Darly’s plans in Xapuri the day before. Chico Mendes happened to be away, so Custódio had rushed back to Cachoeira and hastily organized an empate. Wearing his thick glasses and carrying two pistols in his belt, Darly cut an odd figure—something akin to Groucho Marx playing Long John Silver. As he stood there in the mud face to face with the tappers, Darly burned with anger. But he got no farther that day.
Next he tried guile. Rather than confronting the union head-on, he would come in through the back door. One tapper, José Britto, was eager to sell his colocação, which was toward the back of the Seringal. He had been having a running fight with a neighbor, Agripino; the police had been called more than once to settle the dispute. Britto wanted out. He was not tapping anymore and needed money. Besides, he concluded, what better way to avenge himself on his neighbor than to let Darly in. With his added tract, Darly could build a new access road into Cachoeira that avoided the main entrance, which the tappers controlled. Although Britto had previously agreed to sell his holding to the union, without telling anyone he sold it to Darly for the equivalent of about $100 (not an unusual price).
The tappers of Cachoeira organized a meeting; when they found out what Britto had done, they were shocked: he had been a good man. Mendes had always stressed how important it was that no tapper sell his holding to anyone except another tapper. Britto had broken an essential trust. Some of the tappers wanted to kill him. But Mendes, who had returned to find Cachoeira in turmoil, settled them down.
Darly hired two lawyers to help him strengthen his hold on Cachoeira. One was João Tezza, the rancher and state legislator who had so sharply attacked Mendes after his trips abroad. A judge confirmed Darly’s title and issued a court order allowing Darly to pass through to his property. So empowered, Darly sent two of his workers out to Cachoeira, this time accompanied by the police and a court-appointed official. The workers had hammocks, chickens, pigs, and everything else they would need to set up camp. But the tappers had had plenty of warning. Mendes had gathered more than seventy men, and they quickly convinced the would-be settlers to leave.
The Burning Season Page 28
