The days passed, and still nothing was done. The authorities’ one concession was to give Mendes bodyguards from the Military Police—but there was no new effort to round up the people who made the guards necessary. Mendes granted long, patient interviews now to any reporter who came through town. He wanted to make sure that his story, and the story of the century-long struggle of the seringueiros, was told.
The tension reached a new peak on election day, November 15. The town was full of soldiers; troops with heavy machine guns stood on street corners. Mendes went through his daily routine—drinking coffee at the stand of his good friend Dona Maria, urging people to vote—but he looked uncomfortable and wary as he was trailed everywhere by two Military Police officers toting submachine guns. Not surprisingly, the PT candidate for mayor, a former priest, lost to the PMDB candidate. But elsewhere in Brazil PT had its first major victories, winning mayoral seats in thirty-one cities, including São Paulo. And Lula, the durable leader of the party, was considered a strong prospect for the presidential race of 1989. Ironically, the PT victories may have added to the danger for Mendes; after the election, the ruling class of Acre considered him even more of a threat.
Mendes had further cause to be tense on election day: an uncle of his had had a chilling conversation with Sebastião Alves, the father of Darly and Alvarino. Mendes’s uncle, José Amaro da Silva, lived outside town and came in only occasionally to shop. On November 14, while walking to Xapuri, he was flagged down by Sebastião, who was sitting on the veranda of his house. Sebastião did not recognize Amaro as one of Mendes’s relatives; he saw only a potential vote for the PMDB. Sebastião had once been the local head of PMDB, and he still liked to play an active role in town politics.
“Oi, chefe, come here,” Sebastião said, and the men chatted for a while. “Who are you going to vote for?” Sebastião asked. They debated politics a bit before the talk turned to Chico Mendes. Sebastião scoffed at the attention being paid to Mendes and at his bodyguards. The old man thumped his chest with his fist and said that after the elections Mendes would die. “Chico may be in the company of policemen,” he said, “but we have professional companheiros who can take Chico’s life from a distance of a hundred meters even if he’s with three policemen.”
Amaro was horrified. He immediately passed the news to Mendes’s brother Zuza, and Zuza told Mendes. But Mendes seemed unperturbed: he took his uncle aside and told him not to worry. “I’m receiving many threats,” he said. “But uncle, I really believe in God, and I’m going to take hold of God and drive these bad people away.”
Returning from a brief trip to Rio de Janeiro in late November, Mendes went out to Cachoeira to try to relax a little. He recounted his latest adventures to his aunt Cecilia: he had jogged along the beach at Ipanema with celebrities, Indians, and local Green party politicians, demonstrating in defense of the Amazon in the shadow of luxury apartments and the looming slums that crept up the mountainsides of that troubled city. He had made more speeches and received more accolades and had even been given the key to the city by Rio’s mayor.
But his aunt knew that life in Xapuri was altogether different.. Here, Mendes walked quickly once darkness fell and always feared for his life. The two lives of Chico Mendes now seemed entirely split: there was the Mendes who was the darling of the Green party and Brazil’s labor organizations and the foreign press, and the Mendes who was an isolated local activist with a price on his head. Most dangerous for Mendes, while his enemies in Xapuri were aware of his broader fame, they did not begin to appreciate its significance.
One evening, Mendes, his aunt, and Fatima Mastub shared dinner on Cecilia’s veranda. Earlier, Mendes had sent a tapper out to hunt some game; he still preferred the meat from the forest. And he had picked some oranges from one of the trees the tappers had planted in the clearing. They all ate from the same plate, then sat silently, looking at the spot where the forest met the manioc fields and pasture, watching the changing light and the scudding clouds. At one point, Mendes looked at the two women and said, “I’m going to cut rubber again. I need to do it.” His aunt said, “No, you don’t need to do that anymore.” But Mendes insisted: “Yes, yes, I need it. I need it because I enjoy it. It makes me feel good. I want to spend a month in the forest. I miss the forest.”
On the first of December, Mendes abandoned all caution and took his fight to the Gazeta do Acre, the only newspaper not controlled by the ranchers. He gave the editor, his old friend Silvio Martinello, a copy of a letter he had just sent to Mauro Spósito a few days earlier. In it he charged that Spósito, the UDR, and a secret esquadrão da morte—death squad—in Acre had all entered into a compact to murder him and other leaders of the rural workers’ movement. The paper published the letter the next day under a large headline: “Chico Mendes Charges That the PF [Federal Police] Is Helping Pistoleiros Hide.” By taking on the Federal Police, Mendes began playing a very rough game. And any mention of a death squad made people nervous in Brazil. Especially during the military dictatorship, police departments had often been linked to death squads—a melodramatic term for moonlighting officers who would gladly kill for a price.
Spósito was incensed. He saw himself as an honest, professional policeman, and believed that Mendes was jeopardizing his career. Rather than trade accusations, Spósito decided to attack using documents. He went into his files on Mendes and dropped off some material at the office of O Rio Branco, the ranchers’ newspaper. The next day, the paper published the material as well as a letter from Spósito. The police chief said that Mendes’s charges were absurd and that, in fact, Mendes had previously collaborated with the Federal Police—a terrible embarrassment for the tapper, who vociferously denied the assertion. (Spósito said that Mendes regularly briefed the police on the situation of tappers who had been pushed into Bolivia as the ranchers invaded Acre; no one had evidence to the contrary.) Spósito had also dredged up a copy of a letter to Mendes from the banned Revolutionary Communist party, a splinter group that saw him as a traitor because he stayed in PT. Spósito claimed that Mendes had sent him the letter because he felt just as threatened from the far left as the far right. Finally, Spósito announced that he had canceled Mendes’s permit for his revolver, citing as a flimsy rationale a lawsuit that Darly and the owners of Seringal Equador had filed against the tappers.
Through early December, charges and countercharges flew. Mendes sent off telegrams and telexes to everyone from President Sarney down through the federal and state justice systems. But no one seemed to be listening. He got only one response, a polite note from Romeu Tuma, the national head of the Federal Police. Then came a different sort of reply: two anonymous noticiazinhas—little articles—in the December 6 edition of O Rio Branco. It was classic journalism, Amazon style. Said the first: “Chico Mendes is a really courageous man to try to dirty the image of the superintendent of Federal Police and now, cautiously, to want to apologize. The truth: a man who has a tail of thatch shouldn’t get too close to a fire.” The second notice read: “Soon, a 200-megaton bomb will explode and there will be nationwide repercussions. Important people may be harmed when this is done. Wait and see, because the source of this information is trustworthy.”
On December 7, Mendes flew south to take part in a debate at the agricultural campus of the University of São Paulo, in the satellite city of Piracicaba. He noticed a couple of ranchers on the same flight and was startled to see them again on the bus from the São Paulo airport to the university. He made a quick telephone call, and the police agreed to meet him at the bus station and provide an escort to the lecture hall.
While in the south, he got a call from Mary Allegretti. She was passing through the United States on her way home from a forestry conference in Japan and had gotten word that Mendes was in increasing danger. She tried to convince him to stay away from Xapuri, but he refused, saying, “I’m a nordestino. Don’t expect me to act as you would.”
Ilzamar and Mendes’s friends put together a forty-fourth birth
day party for him on December 15. Through the night they danced and sang and tried to be merry. Ilzamar had been very sick, much of it ascribed to tension. Someone gave Mendes a blue towel decorated with a rainbow and musical notes. But the celebration screeched to a halt when Darci Alves appeared briefly in the crowd. He left without causing any trouble, but the partygoers were spooked. Later that night, as Mendes sat talking with Fatima Mastub, he said, “I don’t think I’m going to live until Christmas.” She pushed at him and laughed, hiding her fear. “What a bad joke,” she said. “Come on, Chico, we’re still going to do a lot of things, we’re still going to be around a long time.”
Mendes continued to tell friends that he would not live past December, yet would then hasten to say that he would never stop fighting. His latest plan was to found a local branch of the Green party. Although earlier in the year he had become impatient with the environmentalists, he now resolved to focus on that aspect of the movement to save the forest. He had lately realized that virtually all of his support had come from those concerned with the environment. The Ford Foundation grants, the truck from Canada, the prospect of a new grant for a large truck and several boats—all had been the result of his work on the environment. Through this issue, therefore, he could deliver the most for his people.
But his enemies had little concern about the environment, and their efforts to stop him were unrelenting. Plans were well under way to “end the confusion in Acre,” as Darci Alves told friends at the Paraná ranch. The office of the secretary for public safety, which oversees local police departments, had quietly issued Darci a license for a handgun on December 5, despite his violent behavior and his father’s troubles. Darci and several other pistoleiros from the ranch had begun staking out Mendes’s neighborhood. For most of December, someone camped in the brush by the river behind Mendes’s house. A sportswriter named Albertino Chaves later wrote a note to Silvio Martinello, saying that there had been a meeting at a real estate office in Rio Branco at which the ranchers raised a pot of money—some estimates ranged as high as $10,000—to reward the killers of Chico Mendes.
Although it was never proved, João Branco of the UDR was later accused by the tappers of being one of the mandantes, masterminds, of the money-raising effort. Others speculated that he and the other power brokers of Acre simply told Darly that, given the lack of response to the previous killings, he could probably kill Mendes with impunity. But Branco just laughed at his accusers. Later, he said that in Acre, it had become “fashionable to call a loud fart a death threat.”
On December 17, at a weekly card game in Rio Branco, Efraim Mendoza, an aging doctor from Bolivia who juggled three practices in the city, overheard a conversation that suggested just how concrete plans for Mendes’s killing had become. The game was held in a back room of the Rio Branco Soccer Club, a dance hall and social club next door to the dank, rundown movie house. The players sat at several octagonal card tables covered with green felt. That evening, Mendoza noted that they included Adalberto Aragão, the former mayor of Rio Branco and a political foe of Mendes, and a few ranchers. Nearby sat two of Aragão’s bodyguards; many of the ranching elite always had someone nearby to protect them from possible assaults by rubber tappers.
During the game, Gaston Mota arrived. A heavyset, dark man with small but penetrating eyes, he had once been the rubber boss of the estate where Raimundo de Barros had grown up; now he was a close associate of Xapuri’s ranchers. Mota, who liked to show off a bullet scar he had received when an enemy shot him through a window, was suspected by the police of more than one murder, and he was loathed by the tappers. Mota chatted with Aragão’s bodyguards for a few minutes, then left. Soon one of the bodyguards came over to the card table and said quietly, in what was becoming an eerie refrain in Acre, “Chico Mendes will be dead before Christmas.”
Meanwhile, Mendes kept his promise to continue fighting for the rubber tappers. On December 20, he flew to Sena Madureira, in the center of Acre, to try and recruit new members for the National Council of Rubber Tappers. He was escorted to the airport by his police guards, and they met him on his return. In Rio Branco, he triumphantly took possession of a heavy-duty Mercedes flatbed truck that the tappers’ cooperative had purchased with a grant from a bank that encouraged community development projects. With one of his police guards at the wheel—Mendes himself was famous for his bad driving—they took the truck to Xapuri. Mendes was greeted warmly. Ironically, now that he had forsaken politics, his political stock was rising.
The only thing remarkable about December 22 was that it did not rain. Mendes’s routine was unbroken. He got his coffee from Dona Maria’s little blue shack. He worked at the union hall and the cooperative office. That afternoon, he told his two guards that he wanted to take the new truck for a spin. One of the guards, Roldão Lucas da Cruz, later recalled that Mendes was the happiest he had been in weeks. He simply wanted to circle the town and visit friends —as if he were saying good-bye. Mendes sat in the front with his two children and the driver. Sandino was now a miniature of his father, with the same dimple and curls; Elenira was approaching school age. Mendes paid a few bills and shopped for groceries. They picked up a refrigerator for a neighbor and dropped it off for her.
Then, at around four-thirty in the afternoon, they stopped at the hospital to pick up drugs and medical supplies for the health posts on the seringais. Mendes talked for a while with Sister Zelia. Among other bits of news, she told him that Wanderley Viana, the mayor and a malicious enemy of Mendes’s, had come to the hospital early that morning in the throes of an anxiety attack, requesting a sedative. She thought it unusual and had no idea what had caused the breakdown. Later, a friend at the mayor’s office told Sister Zelia that she had overheard Viana on the telephone that morning, saying, “Everything is going to be fine.”
Chico only wanted to talk about the truck. It had been one of his dreams; with their own transportation, the tappers were freer than ever. He said, “Now we have this truck, and soon we’ll have a boat. Now we can ship the rubber ourselves, with no more middlemen. We can now do effective work.” Finally, Mendes did talk again of the Alves family and the fear that lurked constantly in his mind. “If I don’t end up in the cemetery, I’m going to put these guys in jail,” he said as he left.
At 5:00 P.M., Mendes went home to relax with Ilzamar and the children. It had been a gray day, and the light was already fading. His unofficial bodyguard, Gomercindo Rodrigues, was there, and they played dominoes, watched a little television, and talked a bit. At six o’clock, Rodrigues told Mendes that he was going to check things out around the town. He stopped by the cooperative office, then climbed on his motorcycle and drove by the bars where the pistoleiros did their drinking. It was quiet—too quiet, he thought. Everyone seemed to have cleared out of town. In the Amazon, this was a bad sign. The same thing had happened in Brasiléia when Wilson Pinheiro was killed.
The six-thirty bell for the special mass for Xapuri’s schoolchildren rang. The clacking of the dominoes on Mendes’s kitchen table halted so that Ilzamar could set out dinner. Mendes, grumbling about the heat, grabbed his bright new towel to take a shower and lamented the lack of light in the back yard. He picked up the flashlight that Mary Allegretti had given to him long before. And he opened his back door.
That night, Allegretti was far away, attending the opera in New York City, where she was visiting her brother. Adrian Cowell was in London, working feverishly on his film. Stephan Schwartzman was at home in Washington, putting his five-month-old son to bed.
And in Rio Branco, Bishop Grechi was walking to the radio station to broadcast the Christmas novena; three hundred groups of worshipers were gathered by their tinny radios on the seringais around Acre. Just before he reached the building, a church worker ran up and said that Rodrigues had phoned from Xapuri in tears. Controlling his emotions, Grechi entered the station. After making a quick call to confirm the awful news, he spoke into the microphone.
As his steady voice echoed thr
oughout the rain forest, hundreds of rubber tappers began to pray for Chico Mendes.
Epilogue
HALFWAY BETWEEN the blue and pink cottage of Chico Mendes and the Xapuri cemetery sits a yellow, two-story house. Just about every other building has only one story, giving this one a top-heavy feel, like the cabin of an old riverboat. On most afternoons, its owner, Sebastião Alves da Silva, can be found on the veranda, chatting with passersby and the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are always coming and going. At the age of eighty-six, Sebastião has finally been slowed down a step or two by prostate surgery. Because he can no longer ride a horse, he sold his two ranches, Good Find and Edge of the Forest, and moved into town.
The placement of the house seems fitting, for it is Sebastião’s son Darly and grandson Darci, along with a hired hand, who stand accused of sending Mendes to that cemetery. And few people in town doubt that the old man approved heartily of the killing.
Late one day eight months after Mendes died, Sebastião sat with two visitors and reflected on all the turmoil that had enveloped the town and the Alves family. The sky was filled with roiling thunderheads that glowed like burnished pewter in the fading light of dusk. A violent windstorm had swept the area the day before, and most of Xapuri still lacked electricity because the power lines from the town’s diesel generators had been toppled. The wind had peeled back the tin roofs on the church and dozens of homes as if they were the tops of sardine cans. Sebastião was joined by one of his youngest sons, who at sixteen could easily have been his great-grandson. The boy, shirtless and wearing a beret, curled his lithe brown body on a windowsill like a ferret and enfolded his two-year-old daughter in his long arms.
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