Chico Mendes--A Crusader's Legacy Blurs in Brazil's Bitter Politics
12/27/98
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Title: A Crusader's Legacy Blurs in Brazil's Bitter Politics
Source: New York Times
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: 12/27/98
Byline: DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
Handwritten signs hang from the ceiling in the simple shack where
Chico Mendes lived and died. ''These were the clothes he wore the day
he was killed,'' says one sign, swaying over a pair of shorts and a
checkered shirt that his widow, Ilzamar, has laid out on their bed.
''In the hall, I held my children and Ilzamar in my arms,'' said
another. ''I fell here. I realized that I didn't belong to this world
any more.''
In his life, Francisco (Chico) Mendes, the outspoken defender of
rubber tappers and the Amazon rain forest, cut a larger figure around
the globe than he did around the corner. In his final days, he told
his family and friends about unrelenting death threats from local
ranchers. Despite his international contacts, he knew that police
officials in his home state of Acre would do little to protect him.
His murder at the age of 44 ten years ago this month brought even more
international attention to his cause. A decade later, Mr.
Mendes's Workers' Party has won control of City Hall and of the
governor's palace in the state capital. Both of the senators who
represent the state in the nation's capital are from the Workers'
Party, and millions of acres of rain forest have been reserved for the
rubber tappers and nut gatherers whom Chico Mendes defended.
''Ten years after his death, Chico Mendes has come to power,'' said
Antonio Alves, a local journalist who followed his career.
The genius of Chico Mendes, say those he left behind, was his decision
to reach out to the environmental movement abroad for support for his
rural labor movement. While land reform remains a violent battle
between ranchers and rural workers, the environmental ideals advanced
by Mr. Mendes have become common currency, at least rhetorically,
among Government officials. And the reserves he envisioned to extract
products from the land without destroying it now exist for other
products, from hearts of palm to timber.
Still, all is not well. The lives of the tappers are as wretched as
ever, with the price of rubber and other commodities, dragged down by
the deep recession in Asia, lower today than when Mr.
Mendes was buried. His widow, Ilzamar Gadelha Mendes, now 34, is in
open warfare with his party, and the two sides hurl bitter accusations
about exploiting, and betraying, Mr. Mendes's name.
And the men in jail for his murder remain bitter and blame the rubber
tapper for inviting his own death.
On Jan. 1, the new political leadership of Xapuri and Acre will be
sworn into office. Many of them had stood together with Mr.
Mendes when he organized his famous ''empates,'' or stalemates, of
rubber tappers -- who formed human walls in the jungle to block the
tractors, chain saws and fires of deforestation.
''Everything that's going on, it's all happening in his spirit,'' said
Francisco Ramalho de Souza, who holds Mr. Mendes's old job as
president of the Rural Workers' Union of Xapuri.
Senator Marina Silva, the daughter of a rubber tapper, said the
centrist parties have been discredited with assertions of corruption
and mismanagement. The Workers' Party had been building a political
base in Acre for more than two decades, but it appears to have come in
from the political margins only after Mr. Mendes's killing.
With the death of Mr. Mendes, his story turned into a legend.
Swarms of foreign writers and filmmakers descended on Xapuri to
chronicle his fate and that of the rubber tappers.
Some of the tappers came here at the turn of the century and others
during World War II, to supply a United States war effort deprived of
Malaysian rubber. The tappers hike through the forest, slitting rubber
tree trunks and fixing small rubber buckets to collect the dripping
latex.
The Governor-elect, Jorge Viana, and the new Mayor of Xapuri, Julio
Barbosa Aquinor, have not issued concrete plans, but they said they
would build their administrations around the needs of the tappers, a
first for the region. Unlike ranchers, for example, tappers have never
had access to Government credit and other forms of assistance, they
said.
Rubber tapping generally provides income of less than half the minimum
wage of about $104 a month. The only future for the workers, the new
leaders contend, lies in broadening the range of products gathered by
those workers and building markets for fruits and other products that
can be found only in the rain forest.
The new leaders are inheriting a state with $13 million in debt, a 34
percent illiteracy rate -- the highest in the country -- and 20
percent unemployment, said Mr. Viana, who worked on Mr.
Mendes's unsuccessful campaign for state assemblyman in 1982.
The Governor-elect said he preferred not to dwell on the problems, and
he does not doubt the wisdom of Mr. Mendes's ideas despite the
desperation of forest dwellers today. The problem, he said, is not
their way of life. Rather, he said, it is the lack of Government
programs to make their forest economy viable.
''We don't want to use adversity as a reason for doing nothing,'' said
Senator Silva. ''It just means we have to work that much harder.''
But Mr. Mendes's widow was notably absent from memorial services this
month marking the 10th anniversary of his death. Though she never had
an active role in her husband's political activism, the Workers' Party
had called on her to lead the Chico Mendes Foundation. But Mr.
Mendes's political heirs soon parted company with her, bickering over
leadership of the foundation and the use of royalties and other
proceeds from the activist's death.
She joined forces with the party in power at the time of her husband's
death, and she now says that her husband's crusade was little more
than a pipe dream.
''It was not realistic at all,'' she said, and blamed environmental
laws for preventing tappers from cutting down trees to grow rice,
beans and other subsistence crops to supplement their incomes. ''Even
though there is an extractive reserve named for Chico,'' she said,
''what's the point of having a reserve if the tappers have to abandon
it to struggle as peddlers in the city?''
Some 1,400 miles away, at a prison in Brasilia, the anniversary only
deepened the bitterness of the father and son jailed for killing Mr.
Mendes, and their families. Darci Alves admits to having killed Mr.
Mendes, but he denies that his father, Darli, 62, had anything to do
with it. At the time, environmentalists insisted that other local
ranchers paid the family to kill Mr.
Mendes.
Darci Alves contends that he received such pressure over Mr.
Mendes's complaints that he could not stand it, leading to the
killing. ''You want to know if I regret it?'' Darci Alves said.
''Perhaps not.''
Despite his denial that he was involved in the crime, Darli Alves,
too, blames Mr. Mendes for fueling the confrontation. ''If he would
have accepted peace, I would have called for it,'' Darli Alves said.
''If he would have accepted it, everything would have been fine.''