Fight for the Forest: Chico Mendes in his Own Words
(Chico Mendes, the charismatic founder of the Brazilian ru...)
Chico Mendes, the charismatic founder of the Brazilian rubber tappers union, was murdered by a hired assassin on 22 December 1988. As a trade union leader, he won international acclaim for his role in the non-violent campaign to protect the Amazon rainforest, on which the rubber tappers depend for their livelihood. In Fight for the Forest, Chico Mendes talks of his life's work in his last major interview conducted just weeks before his death. He recalls the rubber tappers' campaign against forest clearances and their struggle to develop sustainable alternatives for the Amazon.
Chico Mendes was a Brazilian labor leader and conservationist who defended the interests of the seringueiros, or rubber tree tappers, in the Amazonian state of Acre, calling for land reform and preservation of the Amazon Rainforest. His activism won him recognition throughout Brazil and internationally but also provoked the enmity of local ranchers, who eventually arranged his murder.
Background
Chico Mendes was born Francisco Alves Mendes Filho on December 15, 1944, in a rubber reserve called Seringal Bom Futuro near Xapuri, Acre, Brazil to the family of a second-generation rubber tapper, Francisco Mendes, and his wife, Iracê. Mendes was the eldest of 17 siblings of whom only six survived into adulthood. The Mendes family lived in the state of Acre in Amazonia, the forest surrounding the Amazon River. They earned their living as rubber tappers, workers who extract latex from rubber trees and cure the substance for sale in the production of rubber. The Mendes family lived in extreme poverty; both parents and children worked to contribute to the support of the family. His father suffered from clubbed feet, a painful ailment that caused serious discomfort.
Education
In the rainforest, there were no schools, and Mendes harvested latex full time by the time he was eleven years old. Mendes received no formal education. The rubber barons who owned the plantations feared an uprising over the inhumane working conditions and prohibited the workers from learning to read, in order to perpetuate ignorance. Mendes's father was among the few tappers who could read, and he passed the knowledge on to his son. When Mendes was 12 years old he made the acquaintance of an escaped political prisoner, a communist revolutionary named Euclides Fernandes Tavora. Mendes frequented Tavora's residence for five years and learned about the teachings of Marx and Lenin, and the political history of Brazil. Before Tavora left the jungle he gave Mendes a radio, so that the boy could listen to Radio Moscow, and advised Mendes that the tappers should organize a labor union.
Career
By the age of eight, Chico Mendes accompanied his father into the forest every day to assist in the latex tapping. The pair regularly left home before sunrise. During a typical day, they walked 8 to 11 miles of trail. Along the path, they made incisions in the bark of the rubber trees and attached cups to the trunks to collect the oozing latex (rubber sap). Deep in the forest, the pair hunted tapir, peccary, armadillo, rat porcupine, and monkey to feed the family. In the afternoon they retraced their steps and collected the latex. After the harvest, they collected nuts to subsidize their income, and between the nut and rubber harvests, they grew subsistence crops. Mendes was 17 when his mother died in childbirth. In order to survive, his father tended the family crops, while Mendes cared for the children and harvested rubber six days a week.
Life in the rainforest was both difficult and dangerous. Health services were non-existent. Although the natives treated themselves with healing plants from the forest, the tappers habitually contracted lung diseases from the irritating fumes of the fires used to cure the latex. The wildlife and the terrain were equally treacherous-deadly plants and animals lurked in the foliage.
Mendes worked in rubber tapping as seringueiro until prices for natural rubber declined and working conditions for the seringueiros worsened. Tappers were expelled from land that was then sold, logged, and burned for cattle pasture. Defending the seringueiros' rights, in the early 1970s, he helped to organize the Xapuri Rural Workers Union, later becoming its president. The workers' struggle soon united with resistance to widespread deforestation, as Mendes and other activists stood in front of tractors and chain saws to impede the destruction, a technique known as the empate, or standoff.
In 1985 Mendes and other leaders founded the National Council of Rubber Tappers in Brasília, and Mendes soon became the spokesperson for seringueiros throughout the country. He emphasized the need to establish forest reserves from which a variety of products could be sustainably extracted to benefit peasant and indigenous communities. In 1987 the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation invited Mendes to attend the annual conference of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C., where he spoke to members of Congress about an IDB-funded road project in Acre that threatened the rainforest and its inhabitants. Both the IDB and the World Bank subsequently endorsed the idea of establishing extractive reserves. Bowing to international pressure, the Brazilian government created the first extractive reserve in 1988.
In December 1988 he was shot and killed in front of his house in Xapuri. Fight for the Forest: Chico Mendes in His Own Words was first published posthumously, in 1989.
Among many other honors, Mendes was the 1987 recipient of the Global 500 Award of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for environmental activism in the face of immense social, political, and logistical obstacles. His untimely death served to focus greater attention on the plight of the rainforest and, in 1989, a contingency of United States senators flew to Acre to discuss the issue. Brazil passed laws to protect the rainforest and approved a plan to replant 2.5 million acres of forest that had been destroyed. The government further agreed to create extractive reserves in the Amazon region. The first was named the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve and served as a home and refuge to 3,000 families of tappers and farmers.
(Chico Mendes, the charismatic founder of the Brazilian ru...)
1989
Religion
Chico Mendes was Roman Catholic and his trade union was organized in conjunction with the Catholic Church.
Politics
Chico Mendes was a socialist and a member of the Brazilian Workers' Party.
Views
Initially, Mendes attempted to bring about change through a direct appeal. He sent a series of letters to the president of Brazil, describing the subhuman conditions imposed upon the rubber tappers. He denounced the bosses, who robbed the workers and charged inflated prices for goods-a practice that kept the workers in debt. Mendes complained that tappers were forbidden from attending school. Although his letters were largely ignored, Mendes was able to bring an end to the rent assessments paid by tappers for the use of forest trails among the rubber trees.
The 1970s and late 1980s were characterized by sporadic union violence in the regions of the rainforest, a situation that developed as the popularity of synthetic rubber surged and world demand for latex decreased. Consequently, the latex industry failed and the economy declined. In an effort to invigorate the economy the regional government offered incentives to cattle ranchers, to take over the rainforest lands previously allocated to the cultivation of rubber trees. Cattle ranchers responded and purchased the rainforest land from the rubber barons. The ranchers cleared the terrain for grazing. They cut and burned rainforest land and displaced rubber workers and other natives. Local priests responded by attempting to organize the displaced natives. They created "base communities" to provide education and political indoctrination. Mendes became involved in an effort to educate adults at a school near Xapuri in 1971. In his free time, he harvested rubber for other tappers to earn extra money.
By the mid-1970s, the concepts of unionism began to take hold and an organized movement pervaded the area. Mendes abandoned his job as a teacher and moved to the city of Xapuri, where he worked as a clerk and devoted more of his time to organizing the unions. He also ran for and won a seat on the city council. In 1978, the unions of several towns in the state of Acre successfully formed an alliance and created an association of unions. In time the association's enrollment grew to 30,000 members.
As the unions gained strength, the workers sought to prevent the destruction of the rainforest. To accomplish this they embraced a tactic called empate, or blockade. Empate was a system devised by martyred union organizer Wilson Pinheiro, to prevent the destruction of the trees. It involved large bands of tappers who traveled to the forest areas that were scheduled for imminent destruction. They occupied the forest, wrecked the shacks of the cutting crews, and forced the crews out of the area. The ranchers retaliated and hired police to strong-arm the tappers. In one of his last interviews, Mendes said: "We organized 45 empates. About 400 of us were arrested and about 40 tortured, and a few were killed, but we succeeded in keeping more than three million hectares of the forest from being destroyed. Thirty of our blockades failed and 15 worked, but it was worth it." Although few were killed during the empates, the ranchers singled out activist priests, lawyers, union presidents, and certain squatters, who were murdered by hired gunmen. In 1980, Mendes' lost his good friend and fellow union organizer, empate originator Wilson Pinheiro, who was slain in the turmoil. Mendes cautioned the protesters to remain nonviolent, but some tappers sought vengeance and murdered a rancher in retaliation for the death of Pinheiro. In response, the police rounded up and tortured over 100 tappers.
In 1981, Mendes became president of the rural workers' union in Xapuri. He persuaded the tappers to form cooperative businesses, to sell the latex direct, and eliminate the bosses and other middlemen who kept most of the profit. This system proved to be quite successful. Mendes established the Nazare School on a rubber plantation to train teachers who, in turn, started other schools. In 1984, at the national rural workers' organization convention in Brasilia, Mendes proposed a land system that would create rural land modules for the tappers, but the proposals were rejected. In 1985, Mendes and a colleague, Maria Allegretti, spent five months organizing a national meeting of the Rubber Tappers of Amazonia, which included seminars, cultural events, and strategy meetings. One hundred and twenty rubber tappers attended the affair in Brasilia, many of whom had never been more than a few miles from their homes. Mendes, Allegretti, and the tappers embraced a new approach that focused world attention on their plight. Mendes influenced the rubber workers to position themselves as defenders of the rainforest: to forego the issue of declining rubber production-to politicize instead for the preservation of the rainforest environment; and to stress to the world the value of other forest products including oils, nuts, and cocoa. At the Brasilia meeting, the tappers established a national council and called for a system of land reform based on Mendes's earlier proposal of rural land modules. The system created extractive reserves, and allocated areas of the rainforest for rubber and nut harvesting.
Membership
Chico Mendes was one of the founders of the Rural Workers’ Union and the more localized Xapuri Rubber Tappers Union.
Rural Workers’ Union
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Brazil
Xapuri Rubber Tappers Union
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Brazil
Personality
Chico Mendes was characterized as a tough, charismatic, and effective leader.
Connections
Chico Mendes' first marriage to Maria Eunice Feitosa in 1969 ended in divorce. The couple had two daughters of whom only Angela, the eldest, survived past infancy. This marriage lasted a brief two years because his devotion to the cause of the tappers kept Mendes away from his family. In the 1980s, Mendes married a woman named Ilzamar, whom he had taught as a young girl on one of the rubber plantations. They had two children: Elenira, and Sandino.
Father:
Francisco Alves Mendes
Mother:
Iracê Mendes
ex-wife:
Maria Eunice Feitosa
Daughter:
Angela Mendes
Wife:
Ilzamar Gadelha
Daughter:
Elenira Mendes
Son:
Sandino Mendes
Friend:
Mary Helena Allegretti Zanoni
Mary Allegretti has made it her life's work to continue the efforts of the late Chico Mendes to fight for the rights of rubber tappers against those who would destroy the rainforest that serves as their source of income.
