Chico Mendes: The Man Who Tried to Save the Amazon Rain Forest : Deforestation: Struggling to save homes, livelihoods and Brazil’s vast rain forest, Mendes made a lot of trouble for a lot of powerful people.

In the rain forest of the western Amazon, the threat of violent death hangs in the air like mist after a tropical rain. It is simply a part of the ecosystem, just like the scorpions and snakes cached in the leafy canopy that floats over the forest floor like a seamless green circus tent.

People from the Amazon say that the trouble always starts during the burning season, a period of two months or so between the two natural climatic seasons of the region--the dry and the wet. By then, the equatorial sun has baked the last moisture out of the brush, grass and felled trees, and the people of the Amazon--sometimes Indians and rubber tappers, but most often wealthy ranchers and small farmers--set their world on fire.

The fires clear the clogged fields or freshly deforested land and, in disintegrating vegetation, put a few of the nutrients essential for plant growth back in the impoverished soil. The burning season is the time before the return of the daily downpours that give the rain forest its name.

The trouble arises when one man’s fires threaten another man’s livelihood. Most often, that happens when one of the hundreds of ranchers or speculators who have been drawn to the region’s cheap land acquires the title to property that already is the home of people who have squatted there legally--sometimes for decades.

Often the new titles are acquired through fraud or coercion. And because the most efficient way to reinforce a claim to land in the Amazon is to cut down the forest and burn it, the new landlords do just that. Or they loose their cattle, which make quick work of the settlers’ crops. If that does not work, they send out their pistoleiros to burn the families out of their shacks or, if they resist, shoot them down.

The only thing that has prevented the Amazon river basin and its peoples from being totally overrun is its sheer size and daunting character. It is a shallow bowl covering 3.6 million square miles, twice the expanse of India. An average of eight feet of rain falls here each year, inundating great stretches of forest, turning roads into bogs, and providing vast breeding grounds for malaria mosquitoes.

The water drains eastward through a fanlike network of streams and rivers that together disgorge 170 billion gallons of water each hour into the Atlantic--eleven times the flow of the Mississippi. Besides producing this riverine sea, the deluge also nourishes the largest stretch of rain forest left on Earth.

One of the tens of thousands of plant species in the forest is a tree with a smooth trunk that produces a white fluid in a reticulation of tubules beneath its bark. Its local name is seringueira; botanists call it Hevea brasiliensis. Its common name is the rubber tree. The fluid is thought to protect the tree from invasions of boring pests by gumming up the insects’ mouth parts.

This same fluid, congealed and properly processed, has remarkable qualities of resilience, water resistance and insulation to the flow of electricity--all of which made it one of the most sought after raw materials of the Industrial Revolution.

It was this substance, called latex, that lured the grandfather of Chico Mendes and tens of thousands of other men to the Amazon rain forest in two waves over the past 120 years. Called seringueiros, these men settled in the forests around ports like Xapuri and worked in solitude, fighting to make a life from the living forest--and fighting to free themselves from bosses who saw to it that they remained enslaved by their debts.

Recently, as outsiders intent on destroying the forest began to invade the Amazon, the seringueiros had to fight once again. This time, they were fighting to save their homes, their livelihood and the rain forest around them.

In leading this struggle to preserve the Amazon, Chico Mendes had made a lot of trouble for a lot of powerful people. He was to the ranchers of the Amazon what Cesar Chavez was to the citrus kings of California, what Lech Walesa was to the shipyard managers of Gdansk. The Xapuri Rural Workers Union, which Mendes helped found in 1977, regularly sent swarms of demonstrators to thwart the ranchers’ chain-saw crews.

With his aggressive tactics and fable, plain-talking style, Mendes had then attracted the attention of American environmentalists, who invited him to Washington and Miami to help them convince the international development banks to suspend loans that were allowing Brazil to pave the roads leading into the Amazon. Mendes made friends abroad, but he made more enemies at home.

The Amazon was one of the last places where might still made right. In that sense, it differed little from the American West of the 19th Century as described in 1872 by Mark Twain in “Roughing It”: “The very paradise of outlaws and desperadoes.”

In the Amazon, when you ask people about justica (justice), they simply chuckle in a sad kind of way; most of the men in the prison cells are sleeping off a drunk, having had several too many slugs of the blazing, strong sugar-cane rum called cachaca, which is sold for pennies a glass. In fact, more than 1,000 people have been murdered in land disputes in rural Brazil since 1980, and Amnesty International estimates that fewer than 10 of the killers have been convicted and sent to jail. And not one mandante (mastermind) of a murder has ever been tried.

In this anarchic atmosphere, the pistoleiros often assume the look of their imagined Wild West predecessors, strutting through town with a revolver stuck in the waist of tight jeans, boot heels raising red dust.

Thus it was that in the latter half of December, the threats against Mendes had been replaced with death pronouncements. “Threat” implies that death is only a possibility; in Mendes’ case, imminent death was a near inevitability. He was shot at close range with a .20 gauge shotgun when he stepped out his backdoor.

The funeral of Mendes was held on Christmas Day. Through what the tappers call radio cipo-- vine radio, the rain forest version of the grapevine--word of the murder spread quickly. Hundreds of rubber tappers hiked for many hours through the forest to attend the wake and funeral.

By Christmas morning, more than a thousand people had crowded around the church. The rains had returned in force, drenching the mourners who followed the casket to the cemetery on the road leading out of town. Along with the hundreds of rubber tappers and small farmers in the procession were dozens of Mendes’s friends from the other Brazil--celebrities, politicians and labor leaders. Surrounding the crowd were dozens of journalists, many from overseas. An international version of vine radio had efficiently disseminated the news of the killing.

The murder of Mendes might well have been an unremarkable event. He was the fifth rural union president murdered in Brazil that year, But over the previous three years, Mendes’ closer relationships with environmentalists, labor organizers, and human-rights advocates from Brazil, the United States and Europe had focused increased attention on the struggle of the rubber tappers.

As a result, this murder deep in the Amazon rain forest--where it once took three weeks for news to travel down the river--instantly became an international story, making the front page of newspapers around the world.

The significance of his murder was further amplified by the disturbing environmental anomalies of 1988. The scorching summer in the United States that year had motivated politicians and the media for the first time to pay serious attention to the greenhouse effect, the theory that billions of tons of gases released each year by the burning of fossil fuels and forests are trapping solar energy in the atmosphere and disastrously warming the planet.

And just as the heat was breaking records and fires were ravaging Yellowstone National Park, the television networks got detailed satellite photographs of the Amazon burning season--thousands of fires burning simultaneously. It almost felt as if the heat and smoke generated in the forests were being inhaled on the baking streets of Los Angeles, Washington and New York.

Then came the slaying of Mendes. In the months that followed, dozens of television crews, photographers and reporters from around the world would take the six-hour, four-stop flight from Sao Paulo to Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre, then bounce for four more hours along the rutted, dusty, partly paved road to Xapuri, the river town where Mendes lived. Visitors who stayed long enough to walk for a time in the surrounding forest discovered the bounty of the ecosystem that Mendes had died defending. It was a place of spectacular diversity and vitality. Turn over a log and find 50 species of beetle. Survey an acre and find 100 species of butterfly. In the Amazon, one type of rubber tree has exploding fruit that flings seeds 20 yards; three-toed sloths harbor dozens of species of insects and algae in their matted fur; river porpoises are cotton-candy pink.

It was a living pharmacy that scientists had only just begun to explore. A fourth of all prescription drugs contain ingredients derived from tropical plants--malaria drugs and anesthetics and antibiotics and more--and less than 1% of the Amazon’s plants had been studied.

It became clear to outsiders that the murder was a microcosm of the larger crime: the unbridled destruction of the last great reservoir of biological diversity on Earth. Just a few centuries ago, the planet had 15 million square miles of rain forest, an area five times that of the contiguous United States.

Now three Americas’ worth of forest were gone, with just 6.2 million square miles left. One-third of the remaining rain forest was in the Amazon basin, and over the past decade alone, chain saws and fires had consumed about 10% of it, an area twice the size of California.

The aggression against the forest was therefore a many-layered tragedy, causing human deaths, killing millions of trees and other organisms and resulting in the extinction of several species of plant and animal life each day--most of which had not even been noticed, let alone catalogued or studied. In some ways, Mendes and the rubber tappers were simply another endangered species, as much a part of the ecosystem as the trees they tapped, the birds in the branches, or the ants underfoot.

But the tappers were a species that was fighting back.