Murder at the Margins of the World
Hecht, Susanna B.
IN THE AMAZON, WHEN TREES FALL PEOple die. Sometimes they die because their livelihood is destroyed. Other times because they put up a fight. Chico Mendes, the charismatic leader of rubber...
...The rubber barons were in deep financial trouble and some even began to abandon their estates, leaving tappers and their families to grow food and sell rubber on their own...
...Darly's son confessed to the crime but asked for protective custody...
...The lobbying efforts of such groups as the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlife Federation brought attention to Mendes and his union, and convinced multilateral development agencies to push for extractive reserves in Amazon project negotiations...
...For their part, the tappers decided not to wait for the blessing of the state and declared Cachoeira an extractive reserve...
...The head of the UDR chapter flew south in his private plane...
...Finally on the night of December 22, he rose from the dinner table with his wife, children and body guards, stepped onto his porch and into an assassin's bullet...
...Darly's deforestation crews were met with an empate of several hundred tappers...
...After two years of astute political lobbying-with the aid of an unusual non-governmental organization, the Institute for Amazon Studies-in July 1987 the minister of agrarian reform signed legislation to allow extractive reserves to be set aside in areas that had been expropriated under agrarian reform laws...
...Chico Mendes fought to free landless rubber tappers from the relentless savagery of Amazonian debt peonage and to assure that the tappers, once free, would be protected from the ravages of late twentieth century "development...
...While some North American conservationists might have been horrified at the idea of supporting radical union organizing, all recognized it as a good way to VOJLUMEI -11, INU...
...Two weeks after signing the law, the minister died in a suspicious plane accident over the eastern Amazon...
...After the war, the tappers of Acre went about their tasks much as they had for a half century...
...When the United Nations honored Chico Mendes in 1987 as one of the Global 500, the most significant crusaders for world environment, it caused some consternation in Brazil, as virtually no journalists or establishment scientists had any idea who he was...
...He had witnessed several typically vindictive murders of tappers who tried to sell small amounts of rubber, known as principios, to petty traders for goods unavailable at the company store, like medicine, or for cash...
...Tappers would go to areas that were being cut and, using a combination of intimidation and appeals to class solidarity, persuade the contract laborers to stop clearing...
...I N WHAT WAS PROBABLY THE MOST IMmense and rapid enclosure process in history, over 50 million hectares shifted from public to private hands in Amaz6nia in 20 years...
...But when the union's advisers discovered that Darly was wanted for murder in ParanA, he went into hiding on a remote part of his ranch, letting it be known that he would surrender to the police only after he had taken care of Chico Mendes...
...Chico Mendes was a debt slave when he began his career as an organizer...
...Chico Mendes estimated that between 1975 and 1985 more than 1.2 million hectares were saved...
...The same issue features an interview with Susanna Hecht by Alexander Cockburn...
...Darly Alves, his brother and his son, owners of Fazenda Parand and migrants from the state of Parand--which two decades earlier had also been the scene of bloody land conflicts--prepared to claim Cachoeira for their own...
...173 (Jan/Feb 1989...
...In February 1988, Governor Flaviano Melo of Acre announced the creation of the first extractive reserve at Sdo Luis de Remanso, a site that had already been expropriated and was not particularly well organized, but was well suited to the politicians' interest in keeping the political fallout to a minimum...
...A demonstration and a funeral will not save the Amazon...
...Protected by a private army, Darly's men proceeded to cut down the rubber forest...
...Murder at the Margins of the World 1. Another version of this article appeared in New Left Review (London), No...
...From 1972-76, some five million hectares-more than a third of the entire state-changed hands...
...Mendes had been given police protection but faced daily harassment...
...In this laborscarce part of Amaz6nia, compliance was enforced by personalized and capricious forms of brutality...
...In the early part of this century, the rubber economy generated spectacular wealth...
...In 1971, 75% of the state's area was publicly owned...
...When caught, they would be tied with strings of principios, doused in gasoline and set afire...
...V'Jl.II AAIII, Y~l L I flflJ...
...By 1967, synthetic rubber had all but taken over...
...z 33 U r r Ronaldo Caiado, presidential candidate of the Rural Democratic Union, a violent right-wing group of landowners As the conflict dragged on, Darly's men continued cutting...
...On December 5, an odd little notice appeared in the Acre newspaper O Rio Branco, owned by Jodo Branco, the head of the local UDR chapter...
...I want to live...
...Darly and his brother Alvorino dropped from sight...
...More than a third of the tappers in Cachoeira, near Xapuri, site of the union office, had fled violence elsewhere, many more than once...
...The Amazon became central to military geopolitical planning...
...In mid-January Darly turned himself in but Alvorino had fled to Bolivia...
...Through collective action, Mendes and the tappers fought for the right to sell when and where they chose, to farm for their subsistence if they chose, and not to pay rent to the seringalistas whose ownership rested more on coercion and market control than on legality...
...In July, the Governor expropriated Cachoeira as an extractive reserve...
...That same year the rubber tappers and Indians of Acre ended a century of conflict by forming the Forest Peoples Alliance to defend the forest and the land rights of those who live there...
...I(1/ I M1'AMAZON preserve the habitat of those overwintering birds and large felines they prize so highly...
...Indians and impoverished whites milked rubber trees for latex which they then had to sell to the local seringalista (owner or lessee of rubber forest) at a monopolistic price...
...unfortunately, another 3 million fell...
...The resource itself had to be secured...
...During World War II, when the Allies could not get Asian rubber, the United States financed the revitalization of Amazonian rubber estates to supply the airplane tires and condoms so necessary to the Allied effort...
...A CRE'S WHITE HISTORY BEGAN IN THE 1860s, when the industrial demand for natural rubber sent prices skyrocketing...
...The rubber tappers had called for the protection of areas under immediate threat of deforestation, such as Seringal Cachoeira, where bloodshed was likely to occur in the summer when the clearing season began...
...Since most of Acre is held under titles of extraordinarily tenuous legal status, the potential for massive expropriation and real change in the dynamic of Amazonian development-one that would favor the poor and conserve the resource base-was now more than a dream...
...Darly, who had made his fortune through violent land grabs, was certainly prepared to take on the rubber tappers...
...Efficient British and Dutch plantations soon eclipsed Amazonian production, which did little more than supply the protected national market...
...Meanwhile, another 400 tappers invaded the forest service office in Xapuri, demanding that the agency block this flagrant violation of the law...
...By asserting the rights of labor and human dignity over the claims of property, he drew battle lines that assured the enmity of landowners and ultimately his own violent death...
...Violent disputes broke out between the new latifundistas who held fraudulent titles to estates the size of kingdoms and the people who had occupied these sites for generations or, in the case of Indians, millennia...
...In May, the sit-in was attacked and two tappers were wounded...
...IYoY) ,1 tappers union...
...As summer approached, contracts for land clearing were signed, the gunslingers hired...
...It said that a 200megaton bomb would soon explode with national and international repercussions...
...What was profoundly radical about the proposal was its negation of private ownership in favor of state leases-a means of controlling any tendency toward speculation on the part of the tappers, and a way of assuring sustainable management...
...Once tenure was assured, the extractive reserves would also incorporate a healthcare and educational system, small-scale rubber processing factories and eventually even some manufacturing...
...At the margins of the world, Acre has produced its share of revolutionaries...
...As debt peons they were forbidden to grow food and forced to buy their subsistence from the seringalistas who thus made profits on all sides...
...Acre is a classic case...
...Since virtually all land titles were open to contest, the strategies of empate and legal harassment could not assure the tappers' survival...
...Chico Mendes and other union members developed a technique, known as the empate, or standoff...
...Empates were one thing, expropriation another...
...But history teaches us otherwise...
...From their ranch at Seringal Cachoeira, Sr...
...Then a new threat came from Brasilia, where the generals had seized power in 1964...
...The export and sale of rubber became a government monopoly and modem credit structures were introduced but funds were not invested to any great degree in improving production...
...Of these, only 7,700 hectares-81 titles-were formally regulated by the state land agency...
...Sometimes unarmed women and children challenged gunslingers "riding shotgun" at deforestation sites...
...While debt peonage was in no way new to the region--along with slavery, it had been the primary means by which agricultural and extractive items such as dyes, quinine and rosewood oil were produced-the bondage of rubber was particularly violent...
...If my death would advance our struggle," Mendes once said, "it would be worth it to die...
...four years later, 80% of Acre was in private hands...
...Impoverished migrants from southern Brazil, attracted by the dream of land, found themselves embroiled in these conflicts as they too attempted to claim land through the only means available: clearing the forest...
...The empates will continue this summer...
...After the first national meeting of the rubber tappers union in 1985, the union formed an alliance with environmental activists to lobby for the creation of extractive reserves: areas where the use rights of the local population would be guaranteed through long-term leases from the state...
...E XTRACTIVE RESERVES SOON CAUGHT THE imagination of environmentalists around the world...
...Mendes organized the households on the rubber estate where he was enslaved to sell princ[pios en masse so that such individual reprisals would be impossible...
...He was the 90th rural worker to fall in 1988, according to the bloody calculus of the Catholic Church...
...The Acre river valley went from being a refuge for naturalists to the center of one of the most coercive forms of labor deployment imaginable...
...With this turn of events, a socially and ecologically viable land use began to emerge from the ruins of debt peonage, particularly near the village of Xapuri, where in the early 1970s the rural workers union began organizing the dispersed tapper population...
...The Rural Democratic Union (UDR), a right-wing vigilante group of large landowners, which has been responsible for numerous assassinations in Amaz6nia, recognized the seriousness of the matter...
...it became the target of a vast project of "national integration"--infrastructure development, fiscal incentives, colonization programs...
...These evictions and the terror that accompanied them were a critical factor in the formation of the rubber Raimundo Mendes de Barros represented the rubber tappers at his cousin's memorial in Washington...
...But the boom was followed by an equally impressive bust when pilfered seeds 306 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 'r"O "rIl' IV'#"l'1 Ir%were transported to England and thence to Malaysia where the disease that limited dense planting in the Amazon was unknown...
...Ranchers evicted the rubber tappers by burning their houses and crops or employing a more legalistic tactic: Individual tappers would be invited into the rubber seringalista's rooms, convivially greeted by a lawyer, a rancher and of course the boss himself each with gun in hand, and encouraged to sign documents renouncing any claim to the lands they had worked all their lives...
...Chico Mendes, the charismatic leader of rubber tappers, Brazil-nut gatherers and traders who live in the forests of the state of Acre, on Brazil's border with Peru and Bolivia, was assassinated on December 22, shot point blank in the head and heart.' Who he was, and why he ended his days the way he did, tells us a great deal about what deforestation means for the people of the Amazon...
...Mendes challenged more than debt peonage...
...In addition, the union has pressed the Brazilian forest service to enforce laws that prohibit unlicensed clearing and the cutting of Brazil-nut and rubber trees...
Vol. 23 • May 1989 • No. 1
