CHICO MENDES SHOUTED INTO THE EAR OF THE WORLD. DID ANYBODY HEAR?

Elson Martins

The above title was suggested by Acre journalist Antônio Alves, a friend of the rubber-tapper leader and ecologist Chico Mendes, who was murdered 10 years ago in Xapuri, in Acre, a man who best translates in text and speech the beauty, magic, conflicts and hopes of the continent called Amazon. Those who coexisted with Chico Mendes know he was a very special person, the kind of person who sees and acts with the soul. He was born and raised in the deep of the forest. And evolved with the smells and the colors, the mysteries and dangers of nature. At the age of 10 he began tapping for latex and produced rubber with his father. At 18, he was politicized as a left-wing man.

In the forest things happen and we don’t know how, Chico himself would say about his political learning. The fact is that in 1962 a stranger who could read and write came to his hut and taught him about the social injustice of the world. That stranger was Euclides Távora, the nephew of general Juarez Távora and a member of the Prestes Column, who escaped from the Fernando de Noronha prison, went deep into Bolivia, became a rubber-tapper just like Chico and lived in a settlement three hours’ walk into the forest.

In the seventies, the National Confederation of Agriculture Workers (Contag) began the organization of rural workers’ unions in Acre, and found Chico ready to head the movement. By that time, the fiscal incentives of the military government spurred the farmers from the Center and South of the country to occupy the Amazon. They came willing to drive the rubber-tappers from land, to deforestate and set fire to the forest. Seeing his fellow rubber-tappers in anguish, Chico organized the empates, to check the advances of the agricultural and cattle-raising from installed in the region.

 

Mendes and his children in Acre
Carlos Ruggi/AE

Along the 13 years of the movement, he became the main target for successful farmers and entrepreneurs, corrupt police officers, lawyers, judges and politicians, who perceived him as a hurdle against the "progress" of Acre. For this reason, on December 22 1988, right after his 44th birthday, Chico Mendes fell to a shotgun blast in the chest. Murderer Darcy Alves, commissioned by his farmer father Darly Alves da Silva - both sentenced to 30 years of incarceration - bushwhacked him in his own backyard, firing the shot which resounded throughout the planet.

CROSSING

Until his death on that tragic Christmas, Chico painfully crossed academic theories and ideologies; coexisted with myriad political trends and mediated disputes of intellectuals and environmentalists, striving to keep his allies in the defense of the rubber-tappers and the forest. Sometimes he ran risks by trusting whom he shouldn’t. That was the case of the Federal Police Superintendent in Acre, Mauro Spósito, who in 1997 gave an interview to Veja magazine and accused Chico Mendes of being a stoolpigeon. Dead, Chico cannot defend himself.

The rubber-tapper: working close to nature
Carlos Ruggi/AE

The superintendent did not know the man Chico Mendes, which in itself is no demerit for a police officer. Many union brothers and activists from the rubber-tapper movement did not know him either and did not understand him. His ideas were beyond the reach of those who lived away from simplicity and universality.

Acre journalist Antônio Alves is accurate in this issue: "The general incapability of reaching the full depth of this symbol was expressed in the many descriptions of Chico Mendes as a fact, of the Amazon as a fact. Political, ecological, economic approaches did not provide support to the ensemble of meaning which had been opened. Some gringos wrote books, others made movies, some smart fellows made money. Chico Mendes died many times.

CELEBRITY

Francisco Mendes Alves Filho was president of the National Council of Rubber-tappers (CNS) when he was killed. He was also a consultant for the World Bank and for the Inter-American Development Bank. He had been granted the UN’s Global 500 Award and a medal from the Society for a Better World, headquartered in New York. With the help of anthropologist Mary Allegretti, he formulated and translated for academicians, politicians and technobureaucrats good proposals for the preservation and development of the Amazon: he created the Extraction Reservations and gathered Indians and rubber-tappers around the denomination of "peoples of the forest."

The world was heartened by his death, and joined the rubber-tapper movement in grief. Projects, cooperatives and extraction reservations in the Amazon and outside it multiplied, but the progress lasted less than two years. Soon those who were supposed to provide continuity to the movement were lost in trips abroad and in vanity. The radical left (which he kept at bay) won the direction of the CNS and changed its language, which was more oriented towards the Green Party rather than towards the Workers’ Party. The ecologists were kicked out. The base of rubber-tappers and Indians no longer knows what is happening in the backstage of the CNS, presently under the direction of a former prospector from the state of Pará.

In the political field, Chico’s legacy can still be seen: rubber-tapper Júlio Barbosa, the vice-president of the CNS and a brother in struggle of Chico in Xapuri, was elected mayor of the municipality in 1996. Marina Silva, also a former rubber-tapper, is a senator of the Republic. And Jorge Vianna, his trusty advisor, was the mayor of Rio Branco (1992 through 1996) and can be elected governor of Acre in October 1988. But all those who defend nature against the barbarity of the development model which now dominates the world concur that it would be better if Chico Mendes were alive.

THE DEAN OF AMAZONIAN JOURNALISM Next-to-last child of a progeny of 12, all born in the seringal Nova Olinda, in upper Iaco river, state of Acre, journalist Elson Martins, 59, built his history as editor of the paper Varadouro, created in 1978 to be the voice and ears of the rubber-tapper mobilization against the installation of agricultural and cattle-raising projects in Acre. Before that, the crossed the country and was involved in the armed struggled (he was a collaborator of the Aliança Libertadora Nacional) until he became a correspondent for the O Estado de São Paulo newspaper at the time that military government-subsided development fronts encroached upon the forest. As a reporter for O Estado, he returned to the Acrean rubber-tapping plots - which he had left at the age of 10 - precisely to cover the conflicts among Indians, rubber-tappers and farmers. He met Chico Mendes in December 1975, in one of the meetings which preceded the creation of the Rural Workers’ Union in Brasiléia, one of the initial cores of the present National Council of Rubber-tappers. He ended up engaging in the struggle of the peoples of the forest, creating the newspaper called Varadouro. Despite having lived in the Southeast and circulated among academicians, Elson was never enchanted by anything other than the Amazon and its people. Today he lives in Amapá, collaborating with present governor João Capiberibe, and is linked to the things of his native state as staff director of the newspaper O Acre. (MAG) Elson Martins