The Legacy of Brazil’s Eco-Martyr : Environment: The death of Chico Mendes sparked global interest in deforestation. But a year later, little has changed.

On Dec. 2, 1988, Chico Mendes opened the back door of his little house in the Amazon town of Xapuri and was cut down by a blast of buckshot.

Outside Brazil, much was made of this murder. It was a remarkable story: A rubber-tree tapper had led a grass-roots struggle to stop destruction of Earth’s largest rain forest, then was killed by ranchers who felt threatened by his success.

A little more than a year later, despite all the attention, the future of the unique ecosystem Mendes fought to preserve remains uncertain. The reaction to his death prompted some reforms, but the news is mixed. And momentum may not be sustained as the memory of Mendes fades and Brazil’s next president, Fernando Collor de Mello--whose campaign platform put development far ahead of the environment--takes office in March.

Mendes’ death created a flood of interest in Amazonia, a fan-shaped river valley twice the size of India that may harbor half the earth’s species. A burst of road paving, land speculation, gold prospecting and dam building has destroyed 328,485 square miles of forest (an area twice the size of California) in 10 years, according to World Bank data.

There was such a rush of journalists to Xapuri after Mendes’ death that the local rubber tappers union, which Mendes founded, began charging $200 to truck reporters to the forest where he grew up. In the United States and Europe, he was dubbed an “eco-martyr.”

Sens. Albert Gore Jr. and Timothy E. Wirth were among those who quickly flew down to Acre, Mendes’ home state, and railed at Brazil for its damaging development policies (even though much of it was funded by international lenders such as the World Bank).

They were followed by entrepreneurs with a conscience, such as ice cream maker Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc. He was seeking Brazil nuts and other forest products that can be harvested in a nondestructive way. Flocks of filmmakers courted Mendes’ widow, Ilzamar. Xapuri quickly sprouted “Batman” baseball caps sent down by movie producer Peter Guber.

A year later, the impact of all this is becoming clear:

--The film wars tore apart Xapuri; it was bound to happen when hundreds of thousands of dollars were dangled over a community with annual household incomes in the hundreds of dollars. The widow broke with rubber tappers’ groups and signed a lucrative deal. Then a former wife of Mendes sued her and won.

--The senators’ trip stirred up latent Brazilian nationalism and stiffened the country’s resolve to pave a road across the virgin forests of Acre and through Peru to the Pacific.

--Last April, Brazil unveiled an ambitious environmental program called “Our Nature,” which included helicopter patrols, seeking signs of illegal deforestation. Fines totaling $10 million were imposed the first month. But the five helicopters that were fielded were only leased--hardly a concrete commitment--and tended to fly only where journalists were on hand. Meanwhile, on the Jurua River in remote Acre, one forestry official didn’t have the $40 he needed to charter a canoe to investigate a report of illegal deforestation.

--The ice-cream initiative is one development that is showing promise; profits in 1990 from the sale of Rainforest Crunch and nut brittle will finance the purchase of a Brazil-nut processing machine for the tappers of Xapuri.

--Finally, there is the Mendes murder case. An intensive manhunt quickly flushed out two of the three principal suspects, a father and son who had a longstanding feud with Mendes.

But the case against the father is flimsy, based entirely on hearsay. The investigation has been hampered as three different prosecutors have come and gone. No trial is expected until February--assuming that the defendants are still around. They are in a penitentiary where several holding rooms have unbarred windows and where 21 prisoners escaped last August while guards watched a soccer match. One guard says that the going rate to arrange an escape is about $800.

And there are persistent hints that the imprisoned defendants are simply taking the fall. One such hint: One of Acre’s two daily newspapers had reporters at the scene 90 minutes after the murder, even though the rutted road from their office in the state capital makes anything less than a three-hour trip a miracle. It is widely thought that they were tipped off in advance. The paper is owned by three outspoken right-wing ranchers, one of whom, Narcisco Mendes, is in Brazil’s Congress.

Another hint: Two weeks before the murder, the same paper, O Rio Branco, ran this anonymous little item. “Soon, a 200-megaton bomb will explode and there will be national repercussions. Important people may be harmed when this is done. Wait and see, because the source of this information is trustworthy.” It certainly was.