THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF CHICO MENDES
Antonio AlvesLet us suppose, for a few moments, that we could divide reality into three levels and that we wanted to position the life and death of Chico Mendes in each one of them. The level immediately accessible to our understanding would be described by the word "material" and its rational expression, to all walks of life, is economic-social-political.
At this level, Chico Mendes made a contribution towards an attempt to establish a new pattern of subsistence activities. Following travels, debates, political actions and meetings with countless people, Chico developed an understanding of the Amazon and defended what we call "a new development model." The main proposal is the Extraction reservation, a basic module of the regional sustainable development model. The great virtue of Chico’s understanding is comprehensiveness. He started from a restricted field: the defense of social rights and the struggle for the land. He might have been an outstanding rural union activist, who in a democratic environment would obtain partial victories for the workers categories he represented. But the unique social situation of the rubber-tappers, different in many aspects from that of the historical peasant, prompted the need to overcome this restricted political pattern. The immediate disappointment came with INCRA’s land reform model, more than enough for any peasant in the world, but scantly so for an extraction family.
At some time Chico Mendes envisioned within the socialist ideology the comprehensiveness of a general proposal, in which the situation of the rubber-tappers, included as "working class," would be included. However, economic models and political actions enabled by the socialist ideology were not enough. First because they did not pinpoint the immediate economic alternatives that the rubber-tappers demanded – and wouldn’t, because socialism never knew what to do with the forests. Second because it proposed a suicidal "revolution." Chico Mendes did not seek adventure, and wasn’t about to isolate himself in some political party ghetto. He found the ecologists and joined hands with "greens" of all types. He joined hands with scientists and technicians, and called upon them to prepare and execute projects. He made an alliance with the Indians and began to talk not only about the rubber-tappers but also about the "peoples of the forest." His action created venues of confluence for diverse lines of thought from which he intended to derive practical results.
The model that ensued from this meeting, as expressed by the proposal of extraction reservations, can be summed up in three functions: environmental conservation, forestry-based cooperative economy (including research for new forestry products) and the assurance of social rights (especially education and health). Even without waiving – and even demanding – the presence of the state, there was a willingness to achieve self-management. The order of the day was: with or without the State, find non-governmental partners and outside financing.
THE MIDDLE ROAD
The death of Chico Mendes did not disrupt the attempt to establish this model. Quite on the contrary, solidarity increased and projects multiplied. However, the "meeting point" that was Chico Mendes ceased to exist. In the internal dispute which ensued, CUT-orientation of sectarian origin flooded the movement and drove partnerships away. Some organizations bordered bankruptcy. Except that recovery now seems slow and difficult.
The ideas that gained momentum in Chico Mendes’s life spread and influenced several sectors, feeding the today generalized adhesion to the concept of "sustainable development." There is a dozen practical experiences in progress, some of which with encouraging results. However the main obstacles against the generalization of this model still remain to be overcome: large properties, cattle ranchers and loggers expanded their control over the state apparatus; today we live under the aegis of exploratory debauchery.
The next level could be called "cultural." We have a wall ahead of us: the Amazon within the horizon of industrial society, as a symbol of the limits and possibilities of human civilization. The content of this symbolism has its roots within the fears and desires of each human being, but can only be rationally perceived by those whose material needs are satisfied and are minimally informed. It is within this range that the consensus of collective awareness which organizes the world is established.
Behind the wall is the deadlock of the species. The broad and deep deadlock between civilization and nature which was raised over millennia and driven to maximum radicality in modern times. The Amazon, "the last frontier on earth," challenges at the same time the desire for total domination over nature and the fear of the scourging from this final victory. There are other frontiers: the creation of life in laboratories, the atomic bomb, the discovery of life in other planets, and domination of the world by computers, etc. All of them expressed the desire and fear of the end, of leaping over the abyss which separates man from the superman envisioned by Nietzsche. Chico Mendes expressed the possibility of the "middle road," overcoming the deadlock, the recovery of an understanding with nature without waiving civilization. The control by human beings over their own power offers another safety besides the prevention of catastrophes: the certainty of the permanence of anthropocentrism. We are still the gods of this world.
Chico’s death potentialized the Amazonian symbolism. It gave the deadlock visibility. At the same time, it positioned human being at the dead center of events. It showed the universality existing in each individual attitudes. It gave a world importance to each local drama: if Xapuri is the navel of the world, any other place can be still more important. At the same time, it provided for the penitence of guilt and the feeling of accountability. Each person had the opportunity of remaining on the right side: the side of justice against the murderers, on the side of nature against the devastators, on the side of life against death.
But at the same time that was the side of civilization against barbarity. And it was not sufficiently clear that barbarity was civilization itself. The deadlock, not overcome, was replicated in the interior of the good awareness that the world achieved. The chance of reviewing the civilization pattern was lost. The incapability of reaching the full depth of the symbol was expressed in the many framings of the Chico Mendes fact, of the Amazon fact. Political, ecological and economic approaches did not support the ensemble of meanings which had been open. Gringos wrote books, others made films, a few smart jocks made money. Chico Mendes died several times.
We’ll now proceed to the last level, on the way up or down, depending on each one’s starting point. We will not name it, and refuse the attempts at calling it "the imaginary," the "collective unconscious" and even "spiritual." We will just try, away from rational intentions, to envision more distant regions. Let us imagine the contribution that the Amazon and Amazonian peoples are giving mankind.
Perhaps there is some place where all experiences of all peoples are pooled together. Coast and mountain peoples, peoples from the deserts and from the islands, from the fields and the cities, from the ice and from the forest. Humanity stems from these experiences, perhaps much more than from others. Don’t nationalities, for example, seem much more superficial? Wouldn’t the differences between a Tokyo dweller from a New Yorker be smaller than the differences between them and the peasants of their own countries?
Is it possible to accept the fact that the Inca, Mayan and Aztec experiences have been lost forever without having ever been assimilated, at least partially by the remainder of mankind? Truer may be the ideas of the mystical who say they still receive messages from the Atlanteans, the dwellers of a continent which supposedly submerged during an immemorial catastrophe, leaving us with narratives of a deluge contained in the genesis myths of many peoples.
Chico Mendes called the world’s attention to the experience of the forest peoples. He revealed to collective conscience the fact that from it emanates a collective "unconscious" experience: tree-tapping, long treks for venison, long hours waiting for fish, canoeing in the rivers, fear of jaguars and magic beings, harvesting the bountiful gifts of nature, shedding blood in the struggle for territory, the solitude of the varadouros, the reflection of the sun on the muddy waters, the wick light in the dark nights, the shining of the starts, the moonlight in the dewy straw of the huts, the contemplations of ayahuasca, the miraculous cure by medical herbs and the noise of children swimming in the igarapé.
The death of Chico Mendes indicated how much this human treasure is threatened. How it is being swept as debris to the periphery of cities. How short a century is for the establishment of their tradition and translation to other languages. How dangerous it is to interrupt, at time, the existential experience that mankind is undertaking in the forest.
WHO IS ANTONIO ALVES
Born in Brasiléia, Acre, journalist Antonio Alves, 42, joined the political group which pooled around the struggle of the rubber-tappers against agricultural and livestock projects taken to the Amazon by the federal government in the late 70s. Between his childhood in Acre and his involvement with the peoples of the forest, he ventured into state capitals in this country and joined the revolutionary organization Libelu (an acronym in Portuguese for Freedom and Struggle). He returned to his homeland in the early 80s, already a member of the PT. "From Trotskyism all that was left was a tendency toward orthodoxy, which I channeled towards religion, says he. Toinho, as he is called by his friends, is today an "orthodox practitioner of the Santo Daime," and a media coordinator in Jorge Viana’s (PT) campaign for the Acre government.