The Burning Season Read online

  “Deserves the widest circulation.”

  —Isaac Asimov

  “An admirable work.”

  —Sunday New York Times

  “A clear, informative account of the clash in the dark heart of the rain forest.”

  —The New York Times

  “The definitive Mendes biography. . . . Revkin flies above the forest providing a hawk’s-eye view of the whole panorama, from the intricate fertility dance of bees and Brazil nut trees, to the powerful international forces that play a hand in the fate of the forest.”

  —Bloomsbury Review

  “Excellent. . . . Reads like a true-crime mystery.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A powerful work that reveals a great deal, not only about the rain forest, but about how it affects the environment in which we live.”

  —Studs Terkel

  “The Burning Season contains authentic voices of the Amazon’s inhabitants, villains as well as heroes, and sensible judgments about their actions.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Told with a lively narrative that reads like a murder mystery, The Burning Season is rich with natural history and a broad view of the politics of Brazil that put the story in its full context.”

  —Miami Herald

  “An eloquent and expert account of the Amazon rainforest.... with a harrowing compendium of the forces that are destroying it.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph

  “Transforms the drama of the forest into a reality both horrifying and hopeful.... Because of works like Revkin’s, there is hope for the rain forest.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Andrew Revkin’s account of the killing of Chico Mendes is much more than a tale of murder in the rain forest. . .. It is a parable for all the world.”

  —Morley Safer, CBS Sixty Minutes

  “A compelling story of global connections, the environmental imperative, and how one man made a difference.”

  —Thomas Lovejoy, president, The Heinz Center

  The Burning Season

  The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest

  Andrew Revkin

  A Shearwater Book

  Published by Island Press

  Copyright © 1990 Andrew Revkin

  Map on page 315 copyright © 1990 Linda Lieff and Joyce Weiner

  Previously published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in 1990

  Previously published in paperback by Penguin Plume in 1994

  First Island Press/Shearwater Books printing, October 2004

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Ave., Suite 300, NW, Washington, D.C. 20009.

  SHEARWATER BOOKS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data.

  Revkin, Andrew.

  The burning season: the murder of Chico Mendes and the fight for the Amazon rain forest / Andrew Revkin.

  p. cm.

  Previously published: New York : Plume Book, 1994.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  9781610913485

  1. Mendes, Chico, d. 1988. 2. Conservationists—Brazil—Biography. 3. Rain forest conservation—Brazil. 4. Rain forest conservation—Amazon River Region. 5. Deforestation—Brazil. 6. Deforestation—Amazon River Region. 7. Rain forests—Brazil. 8. Rain forests—Amazon River Region. I. Title.

  SD411.52.M46R48 2004

  333.75’16’092—dc22

  2004020449

  British Cataloguing-in-Publication data available.

  Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  This edition is dedicated to my parents

  and my grandmother, in her 99th year,

  who inspire me daily.

  “If a messenger came down from heaven and guaranteed that my death would strengthen our struggle, it would even be worth it. But experience teaches us the opposite. Public rallies and lots of funerals won’t save the Amazon. I want to live.”

  —CHICO MENDES, December 9, 1988

  “At first, the people talking about ecology were only defending the fishes, the animals, the forest, and the river. They didn’t realize that human beings were in the forest—and that these humans were the real ecologists, because they couldn’t live without the forest and the forest couldn’t be saved without them.”

  —OSMARINO AMNCIO RODRIGUES, Secretary,

  the National Council of Rubber Tappers

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Chapter I - The Burning Season

  Chapter 2 - Amazonia

  Chapter 3 - Weeping Wood

  Chapter 4 - Jungle Book

  Chapter 5 - Coming of Age in the Rain Forest

  Chapter 6 - Roads to Ruin

  Chapter 7 - The Fight for the Forest

  Chapter 8 - The Wild West

  Chapter 9 - Joining Forces

  Chapter 10 - The Greening of Chico Mendes

  Chapter 11 - An Innocent Abroad

  Chapter 12 - Into the Fire

  Chapter 13 - The Dying Season

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, I crisscrossed the western reaches of the Amazon River basin to chronicle the life and death of Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, better known as Chico Mendes. His murder a few months earlier, in December 1988, was a major international story, and I was hunting for any scrap of paper in a police file, any fading recollection of Mendes’s friends or enemies, any detail revealing how an all-but-invisible man extracting latex from rubber trees and organizing a union deep in the world’s biggest rain forest could wind up influencing global environmental policy and making headlines around the world after he was gunned down.

  The Amazon region itself was in the news. In the scorching summer that year, climatologists testifying before Senate committees said the unbridled burning of fossil fuels and forests was releasing an unprecedented torrent of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, that were trapping heat in the air and apparently turning up the global thermostat. Much attention focused on the Amazon. Although it held the world’s largest rain forest, cloaking an area as big as the United States east of the Rockies, it was largely unknown to the public, both in the North and in Brazil itself. It was one of the world’s few remaining frontiers, where developers, dreamers, con artists, fugitives, and peasants pushed into largely virgin wilderness.

  But the frontier was retreating, in a twentieth-century hurry. During the September burning season, satellites recorded more than eight thousand places across Amazonia where fires glowed, marking the progress of this fast-moving invasion. On September 29, 1988, George “Pinky” Nelson, an astronaut on the first space shuttle flight following the explosion of Challenger, photographed a smoke cloud the size of India stretching unbroken from the Andes to the Atlantic. With the Amazon burning, with record-setting heat year after year, the notion was finally beginning to emerge that humans around the world, from those driving cars in Detroit to those burning trees in Brazil, were wedded through their shared ability to alter the dynamics of the atmosphere and climate.

  The global issues were riveting but lacked a human face until the world learned the story of Mendes, with his sad owlish eyes, wide moustache, and plain-thinking ability to cut to the root of a problem and do whatever
needed to be done to solve it. He had been to the United States several times to press international development banks and lawmakers to halt loans for road-building projects in the Amazon until they incorporated the goals of the people living in the forests in front of the bulldozers. His demands were for schools and jobs and health care, hardly a green agenda. But his goal was to sustain communities of rubber tappers and indigenous peoples who knew how to live in a living forest without wrecking it.

  This overlap with environmental preservation brought the union man to the attention of conservationists who shared his goal of preserving the rain forest, but for far different reasons. He would chuckle sometimes about these head-in-the-clouds types, with their talk of biodiversity and atmospheric circulation. But he knew an ally when he saw one.

  He remained an obscure figure outside a small circle of human-rights and conservation campaigners, but his work had been chronicled by a sufficient number of American and European journalists that, when he was gunned down one week after his forty-fourth birthday, everything crystallized: the burning of the forests, the global link created by those rising plumes of greenhouse gases, and the compelling story of a man who had a rare, and crucial, skill set with which to confront ungoverned violence against man and nature.

  Mendes’s life is studied now in some business schools, which might seem odd at first, until one examines his character and tactics more carefully. He was the consummate achiever, starting with a clear goal but never getting locked into one strategy to achieve it. As a youth, he embraced Communism, learning of its power from a fugitive revolutionary who settled in the jungle near his family’s home. He followed that route as a labor organizer, but moderated politically when he saw the limits of a rigid worldview. He tried politics but shifted again when corruption and his own limits as a speaker led to a string of defeats. As he switched tracks, one thing he never abandoned was a core focus on nonviolence. He put a tropical spin on the tactics of Gandhi and King, organizing downtrodden rubber tappers into a determined but peaceful resistance force that stood between the forest and the chainsaws of land-grabbing cattle ranchers. Like his predecessors, Mendes chose peace in part out of pragmatism, knowing that any other stance would be brutally crushed.

  The tappers’ goal in this resistance was twofold: to protect their rights to the land they had utilized for generations without title and to protect the rubber and Brazil nut trees that, while an impediment to a rancher, represented a renewable source of income to people willing to live within the standing forest.

  The tools and tactics Mendes devised to deal with road builders, ranchers, and the government still influence efforts to both develop and preserve the Amazon—and the planet itself. Particularly enduring is the concept of the extractive reserve, an area of land held in trust and exploited in a way that does not diminish its bounty. While the number of reserves remains small, they stand as microcosm of the bigger models for sustainable development now being promoted to help enable the growing human population to prosper without diminishing Earth’s gifts.

  Mendes’s insistence on nonviolence also helped bring some semblance of justice to the frontier. Indeed, after a string of 982 killings of union and land-rights organizers from 1964 to 1988, pressure for change was so intensified by his murder that prosecutors for the first time were not only able to convict the gunman, but also the person who ordered the trigger pulled.

  Mendes’s saga has moved from news to history, but instead of fading, his legacy has broadened. He is increasingly recognized for his pursuit of a pragmatic strain of environmentalism in which the goal is reasoned exploitation of a living resource. While forging partnerships with green groups, he insisted that humans should not be held separate from nature but instead considered as an integral component of the natural landscape. He was a pioneer in what is now called environmental and social justice, as well, promoting the rights of communities to help shape their destinies from the ground up.

  More significant, perhaps, with allies from the North he invented a reverse form of globalization a decade before the word became part of the buzz of international development debates. This labor organizer in Brazil’s least-developed state realized that the most likely way to accomplish what mattered most to him—giving forest residents control over the forests around them—was not just to stand in front of cutting crews, but to touch pressure points thousands of miles away. To do so, he up-linked his homegrown land-rights movement with international forces like environmental groups, development banks, and the media.

  Environmentalists had often sought local allies to help make their global points, but such partners frequently ended up employed more as props than vital players. The pitch would go something like this: “Save the Amazon—home to exotic birds, photogenic Indian tribes and rubber tappers, and a vine that can cure what ails you.” In the arena of politics and public opinion, every campaign needed a symbol, and there was not much to distinguish an Amazonian Indian from a wolf or spouting whale. They were all, in the end, charismatic megafauna, useful tools for capturing public opinion.

  But Mendes was not satisfied with being a sentimental icon. He demanded a true partnership with the Northern Hemisphere activists who met him and saw mutual interests. He was radical in the word’s purest sense, with the ability to cut to the deep root of an issue and the source of solutions. When he saw a road advancing into the forests, he insisted on finding out where the money was coming from to pay for the saws and bulldozers. He pushed out along those connecting lines of support and followed them back to their source—the halls of Congress and the purses of bankers.

  That was his triumph. His tragedy was that he was not just a human being, but a Brazilian man. As he moved ahead in his effort to reverse illegal takings of rain forest lands and curtail funding for destructive road projects, he was confronted not only with the threat of violence, but the pronouncement of his certain death. Everyone he knew, from his closest friends and neighbors to his environmentalist allies 4,000 miles to the north, urged him to leave his home for awhile in December 1988—to head south to São Paulo or north to the United States, anywhere just to get away from the venomous men who were taking pot shots at the union headquarters.

  Yet he stood his ground, refusing to leave the Amazon for safer terrain. And so his life was cut short by a single shotgun blast as he opened the back door of his shanty to take a shower in the outhouse before a fish dinner with his wife, two children, and a couple of police bodyguards.

  His killers were caught and then escaped after serving a short span in an Acre prison without window screens, let alone bars. Darly Alves da Silva, the man who ordered the shooting, and his son Darci, who pulled the trigger, were later recaptured and sit in federal prison today.

  Mendes’s compatriots have risen to prominence throughout Brazil. As the new millennium began, the daughter of a rubber tapper from Acre, Marina Silva, became the federal minister of the environment. A forest engineer and former political advisor of Mendes’s, Jorge Viana, was elected Acre’s governor. The mayor of Xapuri, Mendes’s home town, was Julio Barbosa de Aquino, a rubber tapper who stood shoulder to shoulder with Mendes in the confrontations with ranchers. And although Brazil’s first working-class president, Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, was criticized early in his administration by environmental groups inside and outside of Brazil for allowing deforestation rates to climb, his presidency clearly signaled a great transition. Lula once stood trial in military court alongside Chico Mendes for their union activities.

  Stephan Schwartzman, an anthropologist for the American nonprofit Environmental Defense and one of Mendes’s early contacts outside Brazil, says the friction points leading to violence have shifted to where the conflict over land use and development is most intense, the sprawling state of Para, which spreads south of the mouth of the vast Amazon river system. In that region, Mendes’s philosophy has been adopted by rural Amazonian communities of small farmers and settlers, including those lured up the spreading road system i
n the 1960s by offers of free land dangled by the military dictatorship. Some of these farmers, seeing the limits of the old methods of cut, burn, plant, and move on, have embraced new forms of agriculture that can be sustained on fragile Amazonian soils.

  More than one hundred grassroots groups and unions have formed a coalition—the Movement for the Development of the Transamazon and the Xingu—devoted to advancing education, nondestructive agriculture techniques revolving around tree-grown crops, and small-scale development projects, Schwartzman told me recently. The groups have proposed a conservation strategy for the region that could create an intact corridor of different kinds of reserves spanning 62 million acres, he said. Together with existing reserves and Indian lands, this could preserve a swath of ecosystems ranging from the drier savanna to the depths of the still-undisturbed rain forests of the deepest Amazon. The corridor could serve as a shield against development that still spreads apace along the Transamazon Highway, the original spearhead for destruction.

  The effort has the support of the federal and state governments but has run up against the same barriers Mendes faced: corruption and fraud in land transactions, illegal logging, real-estate speculation, and the threat of violence. Overall, following Mendes’s death the pace of killings on the Amazon frontier dropped sharply, but important leaders are still targeted and picked off, as needed. In August 2001, for example, the leader of this new-style land reform movement, Ademir “Dema” Federicci, was assassinated. Another organizer in the movement, Bartolomeu Morais da Silva, was killed in July 2002.

  And the pace of deforestation, which had also dropped for a few years after Brazil became the focus of international attention, has sharply accelerated. Brazil is promoting road-building projects, including one, Avança Brasil, that biologists say could open the long-shielded heart of the rain forest to development. If development happens as planned, 40 percent of the Brazilian portion of the Amazon forest could be gone in two decades, with only 5 percent left that can be said to be pristine. In November 2003, the government seemed to recognize how untenable this was, concluding in one report that projects in the region generally still “reproduce the model of development which has predominated in Amazonia over the last twenty years, based on the expansion of new frontiers.”