Chico Mendes: Ten Years Before

Posted: 01-Jun-1999; Updated: 28-May-2009

by Mary Helena Allegretti, anthropologist, former President of the Institute for Amazon Studies and Secretary of Planning of the state of Amapa

On December 22 1998, ten years will have passed since the assassination of Chico Mendes. He made history in many important ways. His assassins were tried and jailed, unlike the murderers of thousands of other rural leaders and organizers before him. The struggle of the rubber tappers became known around the world. Extractive Reserves were created, resolving land conflicts and preventing deforestation in various parts of the Amazon, and resources were allocated to sustainable development.

The idea that improving the well-being of local populations should go with environmental protection has become unanimous. And principles that Chico defended as alternatives for the Amazon ? adequately valueing the forest and of the knowledge of its peoples ? are inscribed in international agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity.

All of these victories occurred after Chico?s assassination, but they were constructed at least ten years before. It was the attention that international scientists and media had already given these initiatives that caused the repercussions of his death in Brazil.

It is only possible to understand the Chico Mendes phenomenon, in my opinion, by examining three facets of Brazil?s reality that gave rise to his particular social identity? as a person seeking redress for injustices committed against his people; as a union leader defending rights to possession of land threatened by deforestation; and as a legitimate international defender of the interests of local Amazonian populations.

From slavery to non-violent resistance to deforestation

The impoverished northeastern Brazilians who migrated across the continent to the Amazon at the end of the last century and during World War II to work on the rubber estates imagined that, within a few years, they would make their fortunes and return to their home states. They instead became prisoners to what they came to call "captivity" ? the permanent indebtedness that resulted from the exchange of rubber for industrialized goods, in the oppressive "company store" system of the rubber estates.

In the 1960s, the landowners abandoned the rubber estates of the Acre river valley because rubber prices collapsed. Seemingly "free", the rubber tappers began to sell to the highest bidder. Chico lived through this process in his youth and adolescence and developed an acute sense of outrage against injustice, especially injustice against the defenseless, as were the rubber tappers. But the first years of the 1970?s dispelled this dream of liberty. The rubber estates were sold to ranchers from southern Brazil, with the rubber tappers still living on them and the conflicts began.

In 1973, the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (Contag) began union organizing in Acre and established new rules: the "free" rubber tappers were classified as posseiros (occupants without land title) , with rights to indemnification for the improvements made to their holdings when the estates were sold. The second phase of the conflicts was characterized by legal agreements, and some rubber tappers left the forest for the city with a little money.

The union leaders, Wilson Pinheiro (assassinated in 1980) and Chico Mendes, soon saw the dilemma: the rubber tappers who received compensation for their holdings could not survive in the urban slums. Worse, with forest clearing, they permanently lost their source of income, the stands of rubber and Brazil nut trees. They decided to resist and defined a strategy: to stop forest clearing and continue living in the forest.

In 1976, the rubber tappers tested the new tactics for the first time ? in the county of Brasileia, they carried out the first "empate against deforestation", bringing together about 100 workers and putting out the peons hired by the rancher. Nine years later, in 1985, with the first National Meeting of Rubber Tappers and the creation of the National Council of Rubber Tappers (CNS) in Brasília, this history of struggle became known outside of the state. The proposal for extractive reserves represented a new means of resolving conflicts over land and natural resources protection.

The rubber tappers and the forest

In spite of having very clear ideas about questions that, years later, came to be seen as "environmental", Chico had had no contact before 1985 with any environmental movement. His vision of the forest, like all of the rubber tappers, had been formed in a daily life of relying on forest extraction for survival. This was specialized knowledge they inherited from their fathers and grandfathers.

You have to see the rubber tappers! . . . they have a love for the rubber tree, the Brazil nut tree, since . . . that is what they and their families survived from for the last century . . . For them, to stop deforestation is to defend the rubber tree and the Brazil nut tree. They also consider that the only source of wealth of the state, in spite of all the destruction, is still rubber and Brazil nuts . . . When they go out to stop deforestation, really they are defending the life of the rubber tree and the Brazil nut tree, which for them is everything.

This is how Chico spoke about the relationship of the rubber tappers to the forest when I first interviewed him in April of 1981. For him, the defense of the forest was based in the rubber tappers? loss of their subsistence base, and the loss of resources for the state. The defense of the posseiros (untitled occupants) he saw as an issue of land rights they had historically conquered.

" . . . the previous governments said that Acre had abundant, cheap land . . . but they didn?t say that there were workers on it, who lived on that land, and that it was they who actually had conquered that land for Brazil. It was the north- easterners, the rubber tappers, who became soldiers overnight to take, to conquer this land, which belonged to the Bolivians. For this reason they consider themselves the owners of the land, because their ancestors fought for it.

". . . sometimes they would go to the courts . . . in the meanwhile, the forest went on being cleared anyway. So there was no advantage at all to this for the workers, because they were losing ground every day. So they thought about it in another way. Not in terms of wanting to be agitators, as they are frequently accused of being, of agitating and of being manipulated, never. But as being the only way out for them, to defend their rights, their very survival as far as they were concerned . . . Many workers, incredibly enough, don?t believe that . . . in this way they are supporting Brazil?s national security.

When they mobilized a demonstration and tried to stop the rubber and Brazil nut trees from being cut down, the rubber tappers were reacting against the breaking of a peculiar tie between a tree and the collector of its product, created and developed in the immensity and silent isolation of the forest, respect for which, and terror of, had been transmitted from one generation to another for one hundred years.

Chico Mendes in the local and international media

Starting with the National Meeting in October, 1985 Chico Mendes? life changed radically, because of the alliance he constructed with the international environmental movement and English documentarian Adrian Cowell?s decision to film his activities in Xapuri.

In an interview in the newspaper O Rio Branco in June of 1987, he affirmed that he wanted to distance himself from party politics, because he had found in the National Council of Rubber Tappers a base of support for the defense of the living and working conditions of the peoples of the forest (Indians and rubber tappers):

"I believe that the rubber tappers have advanced much farther with the issue of the extractive reserves, and this has had an impact in Brazil and abroad. I can affirm that what the unions have not done in 12 years, the National Council of Rubber Tappers has achieved in less than two." (O Rio Branco, 13.06.87:13)

But Chico received the greatest support for his ideas from international journalists and scientists. The first article on the rubber tappers? movement and the extractive reserves proposal was in the January/March edition of the IUCN Bulletin. The second appeared in the May issue of the Economist Development Report. On November 18th, an article by Erik Eckholm in the New York Times mentioned extractive reserves as a new mode of reconciling social and conservation objectives.

In 1987, some 25 articles were published in widely circulated periodicals around the world, half of which cited Chico Mendes as the leader of a movement in defense of the forest. Also that year one of the films in the Decade of Destruction series, about Chico, was released and seen by thousands of people in the US and Europe. In 1988, various journalists went to Xapuri and published stories on the threats to the rubber tappers, the destruction of forests of Acre and Rondonia states and interviews with Chico. In the last of these, in the Boston Globe, he stated:

"The Banks need a serious environmental policy and it appears that they are moving in that direction. But people like me need international support just to stay alive."

The truth is that Chico Mendes was the first phenomenon of a certain type of globalization: a simple rubber tapper, he came to be recognized by environmental and political leaders and development officials of the planet because of his ideas about the Amazon. His assassination took his own country by surprise. Might things have turned out differently, had he received more attention from the Brazilian press? We can only speculate. But this signals the importance of independent information in the consolidation of a democracy. How many Chico Mendeses are there, struggling for just causes in Brazil today, without anyone taking the trouble to know?