Chapter Four

Chico Mendes and the Brazilian Struggle for the Amazonian Forest

The Amazonian rainforest is a decisive component of the earth’s ecological equilibrium; it has not only the largest existing compound of biodiversity, but also a key factor in the absorption of carbon dioxide, slowing down the process of climate change. The resistance of Indigenous and peasant communities against its destruction has, therefore, a vital importance for humanity as a whole.

During the last years of the military dictatorship in Brazil a protest movement began to appear, first among small peasants living from the extraction of natural products, against the local or multinational capitalist forces of agribusiness interested in destroying the rainforest: cattle ranchers, soybean planters, wood merchants, and all sort of latifundistas (big landowners) who wanted to uproot or burn the trees and expel the people.

Chico Mendes was the leader of this resistance. He has since become a legendary figure, a hero of the Brazilian people. However, the mainstream narratives of his story tend to hide the radical character of his struggle or to ignore its double dimension: social-liberal ecologists forget his socialist commitment, while the productivist left leaves out the ecological one.

Born on December 15, 1944, in the town of Xapuri, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, Francisco Alves Mendes Filho—his full name—was educated at first by the Christian liberationist culture of the Brazilian Comunidades Eclesiais de Base (CEBs), or basic ecclesial communities. During the 1960s he would discover Marxism, with the help of an old Communist fighter, Euclides Fernandes Tavora, a former lieutenant who had followed Luís Carlos Prestes to take part in the “Red” armed uprising of 1935—an action for which he paid with years in prison and, later, exile in Bolivia. After clandestinely returning to Brazil, Tavora lived near the Bolivian border, in the Amazonian region. This Marxist apprenticeship had a decisive influence on the formation of Mendes’s political ideas: according to his own words, meeting Tavora “was a very great help and one of the reasons why I take part in this struggle. Not all comrades had, at that time, the privilege to receive such an important orientation for their future as I did.”

Chico Mendes worked as a seringueiro, one of the small-scale rubber-tappers who lived by collecting latex from Amazonian rubber trees. In 1975 he founded, together with Wilson Pinheiro, the Brasiléia Rural Workers’ Union and, soon afterward in 1977, the Xapuri Rural Workers’ Union, in the town where he was born. During those years that he began using, along with his union comrades, a form of nonviolent struggle without precedent elsewhere: the famous empates (standstills). Hundreds of seringueiros, with their wives and children, would hold hands and confront, without weapons, the bulldozers of the big companies interested in deforestation. Sometimes the rubber-tappers were defeated, but often they were able to stop, with their naked hands, the Caterpillars, bulldozers, and electric saws of the forest-killers, sometimes even winning the support of the laborers in charge of the deforestation. The enemies of the seringueiros and other people of the forest are the latifundistas, agribusiness, the wood-exporting companies, and the cattle ranchers—who also raise beef for export—who want to bring down the trees in order to sell the wood and/or replace the forest with pastures for cattle. The political branch of this powerful enemy is the so-called Democratic Rural Union (UDR) and its armed branch, the mercenary jagunços (hired gunmen), and there is collusion within the police, the justice system, and the governments (local, regional, and federal). During those years Chico Mendes received his first death threats; soon enough, in 1980, his comrade in struggle Wilson Pinheiro was murdered.

During the first years of his union activity, Mendes, a convinced socialist, joined the Communist Party of Brazil, which was a Maoist split from the old Brazilian Communist Party. He was soon disappointed with this party, which he said preferred, at the moment of struggle and confrontation with the landowners, “to hide behind the curtains.” In 1979 he joined the new Workers’ Party (PT), founded by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula, a future president of Brazil) and his comrades, where Mendes belonged to the left wing. In 1982 he ran for Parliament as the local PT candidate but was not elected, the party being, at that time, still in its beginnings.

In 1985, with the end of the dictatorship, the rubber-tappers were able to organize a National Council of Seringueiros, which received the support of the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission, the PT, and the newly formed Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST). To build a larger force, Mendes took the initiative to unite the seringueiros and other workers who lived from the forest by extracting nuts and other products with the Indigenous communities and various peasant groups, founding the Forest Peoples Alliance. For the first time, rubber-tappers and Indigenous people, who had fought each other so many times in the past, united their forces against the common enemy. Chico Mendes defined the foundations of this Alliance: “Never again will one of our comrades spill the blood of the others; together we can protect nature, the forest, which is where we all learned to live, to raise our children, and to develop our capacities in harmony with nature, with the environment, and with all beings which live here.”26

A pragmatic man of action, an organizer and fighter, concerned with practical and concrete issues—launching literacy campaigns, founding cooperatives, searching for viable economic alternatives—Chico was also a dreamer and a utopian, in the noble and revolutionary sense of the word. It is impossible to read without emotion his socialist and internationalist testament, devoted to future generations and published soon after his death by the Xapuri union:

Attention, young people of the future: September 6 of the year 2120, anniversary of the first centennial of the world socialist revolution, which unified all the peoples of the planet around one ideal and one thought of socialist unity, and which put an end to all enemies of the new society. Here remains only the remembrance of a sad past of pain, suffering, and death. Forgive me. I was only dreaming when I described these events, which I won’t be able to see. But I had the pleasure of having a dream.27

The Alliance proposed a sort of agrarian reform adapted to the conditions of the Amazonian rainforest, with both ecological and socialist characteristics: the land would become public property, while the peasants and Indigenous communities would have the free use of it (usufruct).

Chico Mendes was perfectly conscious of the ecological dimension of this struggle, which interested not only the peoples of the Amazon but the entire world population, which depends on the tropical forest—the green “lungs” of the planet. As he wrote in his autobiography, “We discovered that in order to assure the future of the Amazon forest, one had to create a reserve where only small-scale extraction would be permitted. . . . We, the seringueiros, understand that it is urgent to stop the deforestation that threatens the Amazon and therefore the life of all the peoples in the planet.”28

In 1987, some US ecological organizations invited Chico Mendes to come speak as a witness before a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank. In the name of his Alliance he denounced the projects the international banks financed, which were destroying sections of the Amazonian rainforest. From this moment on, he became widely known and that year he received the United Nations Environmental Program Global 500 Roll of Honor Award. The struggle of the Forest Peoples Alliance became a symbol of the planetary mobilization to save the last great rainforest of the world.

In 1988 the National Conference of the CUT, the Brazilian Workers’ Trade Union Confederation, approved a thesis Mendes presented in the name of the National Council of Seringueiros under the title Defense of Nature and of the Forest Peoples. Its main demand was both ecological and social:

the immediate expropriation of the seringais (latex plantations) in conflict, which should be given to the peasant communities who live from the extraction; this way nature and the culture of the rainforest peoples will not be aggressed and a sustainable use of the natural resources will be possible, thanks to technologies developed centuries ago by the people who live from the extraction of natural products from the Amazonian forest.29

The Forest Peoples Alliance obtained at this time two important victories: establishing the first protected rainforest areas reserved for small-scale extraction activities (reservas extrativistas) in the state of Acre, and expropriating a seringal at Cachoeira, near Xapuri, belonging to the latifundista Darly Alves da Silva.

Chico Mendes considered this to be a significant achievement of the movement:

The most important thing to stimulate the continuity of this movement was the victory of the rubber-tappers of Cachoeira. This victory had a positive impact on the whole region, because the rubber-tappers knew they were fighting against the most powerful enemy and his gangs of bloodthirsty killers. They knew that they were struggling against a death squad, and even so they were not afraid. Some days we had as many as 400 rubber-tappers assembled in a picket line in the middle of the forest.30

For the rural oligarchy, which for centuries had been used to “getting rid” of “troublemakers” (that is, those who dare to organize the rural laborers to fight against the latifundium) with complete impunity, this was unbearable. In December 1988 Chico Mendes was assassinated by a killer paid by the Alves da Silva landowners.

After the murder of Chico Mendes, the Forest Peoples Alliance continued, with ups and downs, and is still present several decades later. Even though it was not able to stop the disastrous process of destruction on a general scale, its combination of socialism and ecology, agrarian reform and defense of the Amazonian forest, peasant and Indigenous struggles, the survival of humble local populations and the protection of a heritage of humanity—the last great tropical forest not yet destroyed by capitalist “progress”—made Chico Mendes’s movement an example that will continue to inspire new struggles, not only in Brazil but in many other countries and continents. Chico Mendes’s most amazing feat is that he very quickly became aware of the ecological dimension of his struggle and succeeded, with others, in shaping a convergence between ecological arguments and landownership demands. The Forest Peoples Alliance soon found itself at the forefront of promoting alternative models of development, symbolized by models of socio-environmentalism that combine sustainable management of natural resources with the valorization of local practices and knowledge.