The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

  But Mendes knew they would return. He was convinced that Darly was trying to provoke a confrontation with the help of other ranchers and the ranchers’ league, the UDR. Its president, Ronaldo Caiado, had just flown up to Rio Branco for the first time earlier in March, delivering a planeload of flood-relief supplies. The tappers claimed that the UDR planes were ferrying weapons into the state just as the organization was about to open a headquarters for its Acre chapter.

  To Mendes, this attempt to take Cachoeira—the source of his strongest support—was a direct assault on his personal heritage and the core of the movement. Mendes spent days hiking from house to house in the seringais around Xapuri, mobilizing several hundred people to converge on Cachoeira. The plan was to camp there indefinitely—or as long as it took to get Darly to give up. At a meeting in the central clearing, the tappers voted that they would refuse to let anyone pass, no matter what any judge or police officer said. Some were tired of nonviolent tactics and demanded that an armed militia be formed; a number of the tappers had brought firearms with them. Mendes disagreed, saying that they would risk losing political support and would surely give the Military Police an excuse to crack down. Another vote was held, and more than three quarters of the tappers sided with Mendes.

  Everyone settled in for a long stay, slinging hammocks in nearby homes and in the schoolhouse. Mendes’s aunt Cecilia, whose house was at the entrance to the seringal, cooked around the clock, keeping big aluminum pots brimming with rice and beans. Mendes used a pickup truck, which had been given to the union by the Canadian Embassy, to bring in supplies—milk, butter, crackers, rice, beans, meat, eggs, tobacco, and lighters. As Cecilia recalled, “He didn’t need guns. Food was his ammunition.” Despite the downpours that continued through March and into April, the tappers remained at Cachoeira. When Darly’s workers tried coming in from the far side of the seringal, they were rebuffed once again.

  At the same time, Mendes started to make things difficult for Darly. He began feeding stories to his contacts at the Acre newspapers, including allegations about the murders at the Paraná ranch. The stories said that the local police did not try to solve the crimes because Darly had a brother working in the Xapuri police station and was a good friend of the sheriff’s. Exasperated, Darly went to the Military Police, but a major told him that it was useless to try to expel the tappers from Cachoeira—with or without a court order. They were too firmly entrenched. There would be deaths on both sides, and Darly could be held responsible.

  Fed up with all the trouble, Darly met with officials from the federal agrarian reform office, INCRA, who tried to work out an agreement acceptable to both sides. At a meeting in the courthouse, Darly tried to make a deal with Mendes directly and even extended his hand. But Mendes refused, saying he would never shake a dishonest hand. Eventually, INCRA and Darly agreed that the government would disappropriate the land and compensate him. Mendes charged that INCRA should not compensate Darly because he had never had a legitimate right to the land. But the governor and land reform officials were anxious to ease the tense situation, so the plans for the disappropriation went ahead. In April the papers were signed, and Darly never returned to Cachoeira.

  In public, Darly called the fight even. “It was a good deal for everybody,” he said. And one day, when he met up with Mendes in Xapuri, Darly told him, “Chico, what you wanted was done, and what I wanted also I managed to get. I sold the seringal for a good value. And you will have your extractive reserve.” In private, however, Darly was still furious.

  As more land was disappropriated by the government, Acre’s ranchers began to worry that the extractive reserves might pose a risk to their investment. Tappers and squatters throughout the eastern part of the state were now refusing to budge from the forested parts of ranches, demanding compensation, at the very least, or disappropriation of the land. More and more, Mendes found himself invited to sit down at a table with a few ranchers. They would have a quiet cafezinho, the thick black espresso of Brazil, then get down to business. The persistent characteristic of Mendes that set him apart from his peers was this willingness to talk with everyone—even the devil himself.

  But these ranchers did not want to negotiate; they wanted to buy Mendes off. He was offered money, cattle—he could even pick the finest animals himself—if he would tone down his union’s actions. He would not be the first union president to become a pelego. (A pelego is a blanket or sheepskin placed on a saddle. In Brazil, it refers to union leaders who are bought off by the local power brokers and no longer represent the interests of the workers; they exist only to cushion someone else’s rear end.) But Mendes refused. The ranchers said, “We have all the money and all the guns. Your movement is like mosquitoes against a jaguar.” Mendes responded, “But you don’t have the people.”

  Finally, after the longest, wettest rainy season in decades, the western Amazon began to dry out. Tendrils of thick mist rose from the dank green canopy. Wasps swarmed in the brightening sun. Butterflies lapped at the last moist stains where puddles had evaporated along the rubber trails. And around Xapuri, there was a remarkable silence. The chain saws had nearly all been stopped. The relentless pressure from Mendes and his union had forced the ranchers to go elsewhere. Cachoeira had served as an effective warning that the ranchers would have a hard time finding pasture in Xapuri. (At the end of the year, it was estimated that only 125 acres of forest had been cut in Xapuri in 1988.) Mendes had won the battle, but he knew very well that the war was just beginning.

  The situation at Cachoeira seemed stable now that the government was going to pay Darly for his land. But in Xapuri, quiet did not mean safe. Here, you worried when your enemies left town. They were usually off to find a convenient alibi while their hired guns did the dirty work. Even though the heat of the dry season was settling onto the forest, Mendes and the other tapper leaders began to sleep with the wooden shutters of their houses closed and latched.

  One night, weeks after the tappers at Cachoeira had disbanded and returned to their homes, Mendes sat with his aunt Cecília on her veranda, looked out over the small clearing that he had known for four decades, and talked of the future. In many ways, Cecília had become the mother Mendes had lost back in 1962. “Now everyone is calm,” he told her. “Everyone is in his own colocação, thank God. But there is one thing I know. The Cachoeira empate is going to cost blood.”

  The dry season of 1988 brought a mixture of good and bad tidings. The good tidings included the prospect of more financial support for the tappers from the Canadian Embassy and the Ford Foundation. The Gaia Foundation grant that José Lutzenberger had arranged for Mendes had come through, allowing him to move his wife and children into Xapuri. They rented the small cottage on Dr. Batista de Moraes Street, and when it looked as if the owner wanted the house back, Mary Allegretti and Adrian Cowell chipped in a total of about $1,000 and bought it outright for Mendes. His marriage improved somewhat, although Ilzamar still felt neglected.

  More good news came in late April, with the arrival of a delegation from the IDB, which was finally getting serious about enforcing the environmental and Indian rights provisions of its loan to Brazil. The team sent up to Acre planned to do something unprecedented: they would include rubber tappers and Indians in their negotiations over the new design for the BR-364 paving project. Mendes went to Rio Branco, along with Indian representatives and advisers such as Allegretti. Also “present were officials from the military, which still played a leading role when it came to developing the Amazon; almost a third of the region was considered under military control. The old officers were barely able to tolerate the presence of the tappers and their liberal allies. When Allegretti introduced herself, one colonel snorted, stood up, and left the room. Ever since military intelligence had put together a dossier on her, she had been considered a traitorous rebel by many in the establishment.

  At this meeting, Mendes proved that the alliance he had begun to forge between the Indians and the tappers was not mere show. The
government was eager to separate the discussion about Indian reserves from that over extractive reserves. Officials figured that if they satisfied the tappers’ demands, no one would worry about the Indians; after all, the tappers were getting all the press. But Mendes knew that the government wanted to shift the Indians to planned colonies—the small farm plots that would effectively erase their culture and cultivation methods—and he would have none of it.

  Mendes demanded a private session with the two chief bank officials to discuss the Indian issue. He met with them by the pool at the Pineiro Palace, the only hotel with a pool in Rio Branco. There, Mendes displayed the straightforward style that had taken him so far so fast. He looked Gerard Johnson, the environmental officer, in the eye and asked, “Will the bank play ball with Brazil even if Brazil cheats the Indians?” Johnson knew that what Mendes suspected was true—the bank was planning to reactivate the loan even if the Indians were not given their reserves—and told Mendes as much. At that, Mendes stood up and left the hotel. The bank officials knew that without the tappers’ support, the negotiations for resuming the loan would fall apart. In the end, the bank and Brazil were forced to give the Indians the right to reject unacceptable projects.

  While the fight for the forest progressed on the international front, it became clear that the struggle at the local level was not so simple. As the Xapuri tappers’ union prepared to celebrate May Day, they could sense that the dry months would be dangerous. In April, the UDR had officially opened its Acre chapter, with a lawyer and rancher named João Branco as the provisional president and one hundred and twenty active members. April was also the month that things heated up. One night, during a large meeting at a seringal near Xapuri, a tapper noticed an unfamiliar face in the crowd. He turned out to be one Ronilson Martins Nogueira, a pistoleiro for Darly Alves. When confronted, he said he had just run away from the Paraná ranch because he did not want to obey Darly’s order for him to meet two other gunmen, go to Cachoeira, and shoot Chico Mendes. He had learned that many employees of Darly’s had been murdered, and he wanted none of it.

  In the early morning darkness of April 29, one of the tappers staying at Mendes’s house—there were always a few men there now as bodyguards—got up to relieve himself and heard some noise in the back yard. Mendes had risen as well, and he started to open the shutters on the back window. One of his friends pulled him away from the window and began to yell: “We have guns! You’d better get lost!” Crashing in the underbrush followed. On May Day itself, leaflets were found at the union hall and elsewhere in town, threatening Mendes, Gomercindo Rodrigues, Raimundo de Barros, and the other union leaders and their friends.

  Just as the threats were increasing, Mendes gained a new and influential ally. Lucélia Santos, one of Brazil’s most popular soap opera stars, had flown to Acre for the May Day celebration and the First Meeting of Women of the Seringais—the first organized effort to imbue the women of the Amazon with a sense of their rights. Santos was almost as well known for her sizzling left-wing political activities as she was for her steamy screen roles. She had recently become a leading voice of Brazil’s young Green party, which promoted a respect for ecology and human rights. Her T-shirts never lacked a slogan, and her garish horn-rimmed glasses studded with rhinestones could not hide the beauty of her face. When she heard about the threats against Mendes and the ambush attempt, she demanded—and got—an audience with Governor Melo. And she convinced him, aided by the bevy of journalists accompanying her, to provide two police guards for Mendes.

  But the guards were only temporary, and soon the threats were replaced by action. Groups of pistoleiros from the Paraná ranch began to parade openly through Xapuri, resting their palms on the butts of the revolvers stuck in their belts. They taunted the tappers and playfully pulled out their weapons, aping gunfighters from the Old West. And in what the tappers claimed was a case of harassment, the owner of Seringal Equador applied in May for a permit to cut down 125 acres of forest near the entrance to Cachoeira, an area rich in Brazil nut trees. Mendes charged that the ranchers really planned to deforest almost six times as much acreage. Despite the prohibition on cutting Brazil nut and rubber trees, the permit was issued.

  Mendes quickly arranged an empate to block the chain saws one more time, marshaling several hundred men, women, and children. But the owner had called in the Military Police, and one hundred soldiers were deployed to protect the crews as they revved up their machines and attacked the trees. Mendes confronted the sergeant in charge of the police units. “All we want is peace,” he said. “We are only here to stop the deforestation. We want to make this empate without a right.” But orders were orders. This time, the tappers could only stand and watch as the green tops of the trees shivered and then slowly toppled, ripping through the canopy and sending up clouds of insects and dust as the trunks crashed to the ground.

  Mendes led some eighty tappers to the Xapuri office of the forestry service—a small house with a shingle roof and a wraparound veranda near the central plaza. Their plan was to occupy the office peacefully until the permit was revoked. Mendes also telephoned his friends at the Green party office in Rio de Janeiro, and they staged a simultaneous sit-in at Rio’s forestry service office, 2,000 miles away.

  On the second night of the sit-in in Xapuri, several dozen tappers were camped out at the office. Most of them were inside, but nine people were curled up under a black plastic tarpaulin on the veranda. Everyone was on edge. Several times that evening, Darci Alves and a cousin had buzzed by on Oloci’s Honda 250 motorcycle, trying to provoke a fight. On one pass, they knocked down a woman who had come in from a seringal to participate in the protest. Although the tappers called the police, no one appeared. At 2:00 A.M., a motorcycle buzzed by once more. This time, it stopped briefly. A passenger jumped off and ran around the side of the office. Then he and the driver both opened fire. One shot a 7.65-mm pistol, emptying the clip at the forms huddled under the tarp (pistols of this caliber are banned in Brazil for all but military use). Seven of the bullets hit a fifteen-year-old boy from Cachoeira. The other gunman wounded a seventeen-year-old tapper with two slugs from a .38. The assailants roared away into the night.

  Remarkably, both boys survived. But the attack seriously damaged the rubber tappers’ movement as fear and rage drove a wedge through the community, with violence demanding more violence. The next day, one hundred and fifty tappers met in the church, and many called for vengeance. Everyone knew who had been on that motorcycle. Mendes refused to give in to violence and instead threatened to begin a hunger strike. Faced with mounting pressure and publicity, both in Acre and Rio, the government finally canceled the permit to cut on Seringal Equador. Some 700 acres of forest were saved from the saws. Mendes’s allies far to the south now put intense pressure on Governor Melo and the federal officials to investigate the incident.

  In early June, Mendes briefly escaped the tension that had enveloped Acre. Lucélia Santos helped him arrange a trip to Rio de Janeiro for a series of speaking engagements, dinners, radio talk shows, and other interviews with the media. Largely ignored when he won the awards overseas in 1987, now Mendes was featured in some of Brazil’s leading newspapers. Other tappers, too, began to gain recognition. On June 6, Raimundo de Barros became the second rubber tapper from Acre to venture overseas when he was invited to West Germany to address a meeting of environmental organizations. In his suitcase were the bloodstained clothes of the two teenage victims of the shooting at the forestry office—a graphic visual aid.

  But the attention was coming too late. Matters in Xapuri were following a course independent of the perceptions of the outside world. Even as reporters converged on the town to tell the story of the tappers’ fight to save the Amazon and consultants for the Ford Foundation wrote checks to support the movement, Darly Alves’s pistoleiros began a reign of terror. The Alveses may have been spurred on by other ranchers, or even paid by the UDR, but it is likely that their thirst for the blood of Mendes and his allies would
have driven them to act with or without encouragement. Sometimes fifteen or twenty gunmen at a time wandered the streets of Xapuri, looking for trouble, pulling out revolvers and pointing them at Mendes, his wife, his brother, or other tappers. Tappers sleeping in the union hall heard someone prying at the shutters on two different nights and the next morning found footprints outside the windows. On June II, Darci had an unlicensed revolver confiscated by the Military Police after he pulled it and began shooting during an argument in Boate Eldorado, a bar on the waterfront. But there were plenty of other weapons back at the ranch.

  Upon his return from Germany, de Barros met in Rio Branco with Genesio de Natividade, a young lawyer who had been hired by Mary Allegretti to help the union, and they drafted a letter to Governor Melo, the state secretary for public safety, and the newspapers. The letter was signed by representatives of six human rights and union groups (Mendes was still traveling in the south and so could not sign the letter). It described the recent escalation of violence and the brazen display of weaponry by Darly’s gunmen and lamented the lack of a serious investigation of the forestry office shooting. In conclusion, it placed the full responsibility for any further violence directly in the lap of the governor.

  The letter was printed in the June 18 edition of the Gazeta do Acre, but seven hours before the first stack of newspapers arrived in Xapuri on the midday bus from Rio Branco, fresh blood had already been spilled.