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

By Andrew Revkin

"In the rain forests of the western Amazon," writes author Andrew Revkin, "the threat of violent death hangs in the air like mist after a tropical rain. It is simply a part of the ecosystem, just like the scorpions and snakes cached in the leafy canopy that floats over the forest floor like a seamless green circus tent."

Violent death came to Chico Mendes in the Amazon rain forest on December 22, 1988. A labor and environmental activist, Mendes was gunned down by powerful ranchers for organizing resistance to the wholesale burning of the forest. He was a target because he had convinced the government to take back land ranchers had stolen at gunpoint or through graft and then to transform it into "extractive reserves," set aside for the sustainable production of rubber, nuts, and other goods harvested from the living forest.

This was not just a local land battle on a remote frontier. Mendes had invented a kind of reverse globalization, creating alliances between his grassroots campaign and the global environmental movement. Some 500 similar killings had gone unprosecuted, but this case would be different. Under international pressure, for the first time Brazilian officials were forced to seek, capture, and try not only an Amazon gunman but the person who ordered the killing.

In this reissue of the environmental classic The Burning Season, with a new introduction by the author, Andrew Revkin artfully interweaves the moving story of Mendes's struggle with the broader natural and human history of the world's largest tropical rain forest. "It became clear," writes Revkin, acclaimed science reporter for The New York Times, "that the murder was a microcosm of the larger crime: the unbridled destruction of the last great reservoir of biological diversity on Earth." In his life and untimely death, Mendes forever altered the course of development in the Amazon, and he has since become a model for environmental campaigners everywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781610913485

Book preview

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Chapter I

The Burning Season

AT SIX-THIRTY ON A THURSDAY EVENING in the Amazon town of Xapuri, the bell in the spire of the yellow stucco church on the town square began to ring. It was three days before Christmas, 1988, and the bell was the first call to a special mass for the children who were graduating from elementary school. The cicadas began their nightly drone, enfolding the town and the surrounding rain forest in a blanket of sound that resembled an orchestra of sitar players tuning their instruments. Although it was well into the rainy season, the regular torrential downpours had held off for a day. Bicycles and pickup trucks rattled along the uneven, cobbled brick lanes. In the darkness, bats began to feast around the streetlights, swooping in time and again, sending out shrill, curt chirps of sonar and snatching moths and winged ants from the whirling clouds drawn to the bulbs. An occasional dugout canoe passed the shabby bars and shops that overhung the muddy, crumbling embankment of the Acre River. The staccato popping of the boats’ single-cylinder diesel motors echoed against the steep sandstone cliff on the opposite shore.

Until the night of December 22, there was little to distinguish Xapuri from many of the other river towns of the Amazon. Xapuri (pronounced shah-poo-ree) is a sleepy rubber trading outpost of five thousand people in the state of Acre (ah-cray), the westernmost part of Brazil, deep in the tropical belly of the South American continent. The town perches at the spot where the Xapuri River makes its small contribution to the Acre River, which pours into the Purus, which in turn empties into the milky Solimões, one of the two great arms of the Amazon River. Some 2,000 miles downstream, the effluent from the Xapuri, combined with that of the rest of the ten thousand tributaries that lace the Amazon basin, flows into the Atlantic Ocean.

The town is quiet and orderly, the kind of place where the elderly streetsweepers come out every morning at dawn to clear leaves and litter from the shady lanes, where no one cares that the newspaper does not arrive until the noon bus pulls in from the state capital, raising a cloud of orange dust. The town is much quieter now than it was when the brick paving was laid at the turn of the century. (A curious geological fact about the Amazon is that there is no usable stone in most of the region—thus the bricks.) Back then, Acre was the center of a rich rubber boom that flourished as the industrial world’s appetite for rubber exploded and thousands of men were lured into the jungle to tap latex from the rubber trees. Seven decades have passed since the rubber boom went bust, but the market for natural rubber persists—albeit subsidized by the government—so hunched laborers still haul hundred-pound slabs and balls of cured latex up the steep riverbank to the dark warehouses of the wealthy merchants who control the rubber trade.

On this night, in the fifteen minutes after the call to mass, Xapuri would forever change, all because of a man who now sat in the kitchen of his four-room cottage, playing dominoes. The small house was nestled in a row of similar shacks along Dr. Batista de Moraes Street, a five-minute walk from the bars and warehouses along the waterfront, across the treeless square that was always 10 degrees hotter in the daytime than the surrounding forest. The cottage was little bigger than a single-car garage, raised on stilts 2 feet off the tamped, grassless soil. It had a steeply pitched roof covered in terra cotta tile, baked of the same red earth as the bricks of the streets. The siding was painted pale blue with pink trim. As with most of the houses in town, the only running water was in the outhouse in the back yard.

The man sitting on one of the five small stools around the kitchen table was Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, known to everyone as Chico Mendes. He was a rubber tapper and the president of the local rural workers’ union, which was fighting to save the rain forest for the thousands of rubber tappers and Indians who lived and worked in it. Mendes had just returned home after a busy month that included visits to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, two of the great cities in the south of Brazil—rich, industrial cities that are separated from the impoverished Amazon by much more than distance. There he had stayed in the plush apartments of environmental activists who were helping the rubber tappers with their struggle. In recent years, he had traveled increasingly between these two different Brazils. But now, with Christmas approaching, Mendes planned to stop and relax at home with his family for a few days.

Relaxing did not come easy to him. That was clear from Mendes’s face, a round face dominated by puffy, owlish eyes. It was a face that usually smiled but had recently begun to show signs of stress. He had turned forty-four one week earlier, but only this year had he started to look his age. A graying mustache broadened his grin and a deep dimple appeared in his right cheek every time he smiled. His perpetually tousled black and silver curls gave him a distracted look. His thin legs sprouted beneath a firm potbelly that he displayed with a certain sense of pride. Mendes was playing dominoes with two bodyguards provided by the Military Police. Although they were not in uniform and both were neighbors—one had done typing for the union when he was a teenager—they were nonetheless an unnerving presence. Mendes had resolved to ask the police to withdraw the security.

Now that it was dark, one of the guards got up from the game and, despite the muggy heat, closed the wooden shutters over the glassless windows and slid home the bolts. The guards had been assigned to Mendes because persistent death threats had been made against him. Xapuri was peaceful on the surface, but the underlying tension was palpable and had been rising steadily all year. Mendes’s union, consisting of rubber tappers and small farmers, had scored a series of victories in its war against encroaching cattle ranchers, who were incinerating the rain forest to create pasture and to profit from tax breaks and booming real estate prices.

Starting in March, the tappers had staged a series of empates (em-pah-tays), forceful demonstrations in which chain saw crews were confronted and driven from the forest. And, in October, they had convinced the government to declare a 61,000-acre tract of traditional rubber tapper territory near Xapuri, called Seringal Cachoeira, an extractive reserve. Cachoeira was where Mendes had grown up and first worked as a tapper; the forest there had been his only school. The new designation meant that the forest could not be cut and must be used only in sustainable ways—for the harvest of rubber, Brazil nuts, and the like. The concept of the extractive reserve had been invented by Mendes and the tappers, then refined with some help from environmentalists and anthropologists. With the establishment of this and three other extractive reserves, Mendes had pulled off one of the most significant feats in the history of grass-roots environmental activism—and he had only known the word environment for three years.

His wife, Ilzamar, told the domino players to stop so that she could set the table for dinner. There was fresh fish waiting to be fried. Ilzamar, twenty years younger than Mendes, had a classic Amazonian beauty that hinted at both Indian and European features. The overall effect was remarkably Polynesian: full lips and huge black eyes framed by a long, thick mane of black hair.

In a few minutes, Mendes said. Let us finish this game. He was competitive and very good, and he liked to play the game to the end. Mendes and the guards were playing a difficult version, called domino pontó, which involved some mental arithmetic. He liked to make a point of triumphantly slapping his tile down when he had finished contemplating a move. The clacking of the bone tiles on the Formica tabletop carried through the thin walls of the house and into the darkness.

Mendes’s five-year marriage to Ilzamar had faltered recently, as he traveled more and more and earned less and less. (A previous brief marriage had failed as well.) In 1986, he had crisscrossed Acre in a futile campaign for the state legislature. He had been a candidate of the leftist Workers party, PT, in a state that never swayed from center-right. In 1987 and 1988, he continued to hike through the forest, seeking rubber tappers for his union, and traveled to the south, recruiting allies from Brazil’s burgeoning environmental movement. In 1986, Ilzamar almost died giving birth to twins, one of whom was stillborn. Mendes could not pay the hospital bill. Ilzamar was never allowed to go with her husband on his trips. My work is not play, he would say, as their arguments echoed through the neighbors’ yards. This is business and you can’t keep a secret. It was only in March that they had moved into a house of their own—and only because Mendes’s environmentalist friends had chipped in to buy it for him. Ilzamar once said that she had not spent more than eight days with Mendes from 1986 to 1988.

His work so dominated his life that it was even reflected in the names he chose for his children. As the men finished their game, the two children played on the floor in the front room of the house, where Ilzamar had returned to watch the soap opera Anything Goes, which both lampooned and glorified the lives of Brazil’s rich. The surviving twin, now a beautiful two-year-old boy, was named Sandino, after Augusto Cesar Sandino, the leader of the 1927 guerrilla war against American marines in the mountains of Nicaragua (and the man for whom the Sandinistas were named). Mendes had named his four-year-old daughter Elenira, after a legendary female guerrilla who stalked both police and soldiers in the Amazon state of Pará in the early 1970s, at the height of the military dictatorship. Elenira was famous for her marksmanship; she invariably killed her target with a rifle shot between the eyes. Mendes had always been attracted to radical social history, although his own activism was generally less extreme than that of his idols. As one of Brazil’s leaders in the fight to save the rain forest, he insisted on a nonviolent approach.

But his opponents were not so civil. In May of 1988, two teenage rubber tappers participating in a peaceful demonstration were shot by a pair of hired gunmen. In June, Ivair Higino de Almeida, a member of Mendes’s union and fellow PT politician, was shot dead. In September, another tapper fell. And now, as Mendes sat slapping dominoes on the table with his guards—he was winning, as usual—two men were slowly creeping into the flimsily fenced back yard. They had slipped through the thick underbrush behind the house, following an eroded gully cut by a small stream. They wore dark jeans and, because of the sticky heat, had tied their shirts at their waists. One had a white handkerchief covering his mouth and nose; the cloth fluttered in and out with his breathing. They had heard the church bell; now they heard the laughter and the domino game and the sound of the soap opera, which echoed eerily from television sets up and down the street. It was one of Brazil’s most popular shows, and everyone was watching to find out who had murdered a key character.

This was not their first visit to that yard. Hidden in the bushes near where the river curled around this side of town, two small areas of grass had been crushed where they had been camping on and off for days, patiently watching. Cigarette butts and spilled farinha—a baked flour of ground manioc root that is a staple starch in the Amazon—littered the tocaia, ambush. Five moldy tins of Bordon sausage lay in the grass, swamped with ants, and two wine bottles with water in them lay nearby. Now the men settled down to wait once more, crouching on a pile of bricks behind a palm tree 30 feet from Mendes’s back door. They were adept at being quiet, perhaps from their experience stalking game in the forest. No chickens clucked, and the many dogs in the neighborhood did not so much as growl.

In the rain forests of the western Amazon, the threat of violent death hangs in the air like mist after a tropical rain. It is simply a part of the ecosystem, just like the scorpions and snakes cached in the leafy canopy that floats over the forest floor like a seamless green circus tent. People from the Amazon say that the trouble always starts during the burning season, a period of two months or so between the two natural climatic seasons of the region—the dry and the wet. By then, the equatorial sun has baked the last moisture out of the brush, grass, and felled trees, and the people of the Amazon—sometimes Indians and rubber tappers, but most often wealthy ranchers and small farmers—set their world on fire. The fires clear the clogged fields or freshly deforested land and, in disintegrating vegetation, put a few of the nutrients essential for plant growth back into the impoverished soil. The burning season is the time before the return of the daily downpours that give the rain forest its name.

The trouble arises when one man’s fires threaten another man’s livelihood. Most often, that happens when one of the hundreds of ranchers or speculators who have been drawn to the region’s cheap land acquires the title to property that already is the home of people who have squatted there legally—sometimes for decades. Often the new titles are acquired through fraud or coercion. And because the most efficient way to reinforce a claim to land in the Amazon is to cut down the forest and burn it, the new landlords do just that. Or they loose their cattle, which make quick work of the settlers’ crops. If that does not work, they send out their pistoleiros to burn the families out of their shacks or, if they resist, to shoot them