Rift Turns Brazil’s Ecology Movement Into an Endangered Species : Rain forest: Infighting and mismanagement splinter some conservation groups. While the once-powerful movement breaks down, the forces of destruction remain strong.

Five years after assassins made rubber tapper Chico Mendes an environmental martyr, the movement he led to protect Brazil’s rain forest is collapsing.

Infighting and mismanagement have splintered some conservation groups. Others are losing financial support and members because they have not developed ways to use the forest’s riches without destroying it.

An ideological rift has divided domestic environmentalists, who see the Amazon as a test region for agrarian reform, and international groups that view deforestation in purely ecological terms.

To the dismay of conservationists, some Indians have even begun illegally selling rights to gold and precious hardwoods on their Amazon reservations.

While the conservation movement breaks down, the forces of destruction remain strong: Ranchers, loggers and refugees from Brazil’s dry, overpopulated northeast continue eating away the 2 million square miles of wilderness.

Satellite photos indicate the deforestation rate has declined 63% since 1985, largely because Brazil’s recession crippled the lumber industry, but a swath of jungle twice the size of Delaware still vanished in 1993.

Gold prospectors continue to poison hundreds of miles of Amazon tributaries with mercury used to isolate gold particles in river dredging. Experts estimate that miners dumped 200 tons of mercury into Amazon waters last year alone.

“The symbolic talk of the ‘80s hasn’t been followed up with concrete, practical alternatives,” said Rep. Fabio Feldman, the leading environmentalist in the Brazilian Congress. “The destruction is only bound to get worse.”

A much different future seemed in store five years ago, when Mendes led a union of rubber tappers in the sleepy Amazon town of Xapuri in blocking the path of bulldozers sent to clear jungle for pasture.

Mendes also persuaded foreign lenders to scrap loans for ecologically destructive projects and lobbied for government-protected “extractivist” reserves where people could harvest forest produce without destroying the jungle.

His murder in December, 1988, by a rancher and his son drew world attention to the plight of the Amazon and raised preservationist sentiment in Brazil to an unprecedented level.

The outcry led the government to create a 2.4-million-acre reserve in Acre state and pledge to set aside another 55 million acres of jungle by 1993.

Aid poured in from the World Wildlife Federation, Ford Foundation and U.S. Agency for International Development. Hundreds of local environmental groups sprouted almost overnight. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank suspended financing of controversial road, dam and settlement projects in the Amazon.

Members of 40 Indian tribes and hundreds of ecologists gathered at Altamira to protest hydroelectric projects that would flood tribal lands. The World Bank withdrew financing for the dams.

In December, 1990, the rancher and his son were convicted of killing Mendes and given 19-year prison sentences. Ecologists saw the convictions as a first step toward bringing justice to the Amazon.

On the eve of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the government granted the primitive Yanomami Indians a jungle reservation the size of Indiana to protect them from gold hunters and loggers.

Then, at the Earth Summit, the movement ran into trouble.

Brazilian environmentalists accused foreign groups of using the Amazon cause for their own profit. The foreigners countered that Brazilian ecologists had become too radical in demanding land reform, and halted financial aid.

“The infighting was pretty depressing,” said Anthony Andersen, with the Ford Foundation in Rio. “No one was coming up with ideas to help, only finger-pointing.”

Then word got out that the Kayapo Indians in Para state were not only mining gold and felling huge tracts of endangered mahogany forest on their land, but were hiring outsiders to do it.

Reports of Kayapo chiefs squandering money on prostitutes, private planes and sports cars while their villages did not have doctors or teachers enraged people who had fought for protected Indian reserves.

In the union Mendes founded to defend natives of the Amazon who live by extracting produce from the rain forest, a feud developed between his 29-year-old widow, Ilzamar, and his closest aides.

Union leaders accuse Ilzamar Mendes of selling movie rights to Mendes’ life story without consulting them and of using the money to buy a new home, a restaurant, a pickup truck, a satellite dish--even a cattle ranch.

Rubber tappers accuse her of mismanaging the Chico Mendes Foundation established to promote the rubber tappers’ cause. A judge has frozen the foundation’s assets until lawsuits are settled.