Chico Mendes, Brazilian rubber worker activist, socialist, environmentalist and Indigenous rights advocate, and symbol of the global environment movement, was assassinated on 22 December 1988 for challenging those who were destroying the Amazon rain forest by slashing and burning.
For a man who didn't learn how to read or write until he was about 20 years old, Chico Mendes accomplished more in 44 years of life than many of us will in a full lifetime.His struggle went beyond simply protecting the Amazon rain forest. He also fought to defend the rights of rubber tappers and to end their oppression and save their homes.
Chico Mendes was a man who loved life, his community and the place where he lived and worked. Francisco “Chico” Alves Mendes Filho was born on December 15, 1944 in Xapuri, Acre, in northwest Brazil. Chico had 17 siblings but poor health care allowed only 6 to survive; he was the oldest. As a child, Chico could not go to school since they were forbidden on Amazon rubber estates until 1970.
Rubber estate owners were afraid that tappers who went to school would learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic, and discover they were being exploited.
Rubber became increasingly important in the world economy from the end of the 19th century, especially after the invention of the pneumatic tyre, and Brazilian rubber manufacturers began to import labour into the Amazon basin to collect it.
The rubber tappers are an exploited group of workers, whose job is to “tap” liquid rubber from the “seringueira” trees in the Amazon rainforest. Rubber tapping or gathering the latex from a plant is a sustainable form of exploiting the wealth of the Amazon without harming the trees or environment. Nearly all of the world's natural rubber comes from Pará rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis.
Rubber tappers worked all year long, hoping to come out ahead, but of course they always remained in debt. Since they couldn't count, they couldn't tell whether they were being cheated. For example, when the tappers brought in the rubber to be weighed, the bosses would say it weighed less than it actually did.
When eventually confronted by the tappers about this, the bosses would answer that they were merely subtracting for the water and insects trapped in the rubber. Chico was descended from a rubber tapper family, including his grandfather and father.
By the age of eleven, Chico was as good as any other adult rubber tapper; he assumed this would be his job for life. But when he was 12 years old, he met a man who would change his life. This man was the communist Euclides Tavora “a cultivated, well‐educated soldier from a prominent family.who was in refuge in the rainforest on the border with Brazil and Bolivia. Tavora taught Chico how to read and writeand how to think.These first lessons were useful 10 years later.
The greatest lesson Tavora taught Chico was that rubber tappers could improve their lives by working together for change. He once told Chico, “You must get involved, you must join a union and use it to spread your ideas. Who knows, you might overthrow the system.”
With that and his newfound knowledgef socialism from his teacher, Chico Mendes began the union movement in Acre, and the leader of the local union of rubber tappers, active member of the growing Workers’ Party, and an advocate of “socialist ecology”,
Mendes was the sworn enemy of the landowners against whom he had fought and organised for workers’ rights all his life. What Chico learned with Távora has been decisive to the future not only to the rubber tappers, but of the “environmentalism of the poor” worldwide. The kind of environmentalism that seeks to defend a form of existence that requires the environment it depends upon.
Between 1964 and 1985, Brazil’s military government enacted policies that posed an existential threat both to the Amazon and to indigenous and rubber tapping communities, like Chico’s. Seeking to use the Amazon forest for economic development, the government opened the Amazon to purchase and destruction by cattle ranchers and international investors. Massive deforestation followed.
In response, Chico played a leading role in uniting rural rubber tapping unions, including in his home community of Xapuri, in campaigns to protect the rainforest and their way of life. As he said “At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.”
Together with his fellow rubber-tappers, he founded the Rural Workers’ Union and the Xapuri Rubber Tappers Union.The organising of rubber tappers in Acre inspired others across Brazil, to begin organising nationally to defend the Amazon.
They advocated for peaceful resistance against deforestation, which involved union members putting their lives on the line through direct action. One of the rubber tappers’ most famous strategies were the ‘empates’ or barricades, in which rubber tappers and their allies would physically block the path of bulldozers and loggers at the frontiers of deforestation. A national council created in 1985 attracted rubber-tappers from across Brazil and brought their issues into the spotlight.
One of Chico Mendes’ most important achievements was the idea of extractive reserves.Mendes’s activism was characterized by his innovative approach to conservation, which intertwined human rights with environmental protection. One of Chico Mendes’ most important achievements was that he pioneered the concept of “extractive reserves,” areas where local communities could sustainably harvest forest products without damaging the ecosystem. This idea was revolutionary, suggesting that conservation did not mean excluding humans but rather working with them. In these areas, local people could sustainably harvest natural resources including rubber without fear of exploitation.
In 1980 he helped create the Forest Peoples Alliance, which called for the creation of these reserves as well as inclusive land use policies to benefit indigenous peoples and the wider ecosystem.
Chico married Ilzamar G. Bezerra Mendes and they had two children, Elenira was four and Sandino was two when their father died
Mendes’ radical activism made him a spokesperson for environmentalists all over Brazil. Chico Mendez received several international awards during his lifetime including a United Nations Environmental Program award in 1987 and a National Conservation Achievement Award in 1988.
Although celebrated by various environmental organisations for his efforts, Mendes’ activism made him many enemies among landowners. He constantly received death threats, but despite this he continued his work.
In1980, his comrade of struggles, Wilson Pinheiro, is murdered. To build a larger force, Chico Mendes took the initiative to unite the seringueiros and other workers who lived from the forest by extracting nuts and other products, with the indigenous communities and various peasant groups, founding the Peoples of the Forest Alliance.
For the first time, rubber-tappers and indigenous people, who so many times have fought each other in the past, united their forces against the common enemy. Chico Mendes defined with the following words the foundations of this alliance : “never again one of our comrades will spill the blood of the others, together we can protect the nature, the forest, which is where we all learned to live, to raise our children and to develop our capacities, in a way of thinking in harmony with nature, with the environment, and with all beings which live here.”
Chico Mendes was perfectly conscious of the ecological dimension of this struggle, which interested not only the peoples of the Amazon, but all the world population, which depends on the tropical forest, the green lung of the planet.
A pragmatic man of action, organizer and fighter, concerned with practical and concrete issues, literacy, the constitution of cooperatives, the search for viable economic alternatives, Chico was also a dreamer and an utopian, in the most noble and revolutionary meaning of the word.,
Trgically though, he was shot in 1988 in his home by a cattle rancher called Darly Alves Da Silva and became a martyr for the environmental cause. His death was a tragedy, but his life was an inspiration and his murder sparked international outrage and shone a light on the struggles faced by environmental activists around the world.
Since 1988, the year Chico was murdered, over a thousand land activists have been murdered in Brazil, alone. A Global Witness investigation https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/15/surge-deaths-environmental-activists-global-witness-report found that there has been a major surge in deaths tied to environmental activism within the past decade, worldwide.
In 2012, environmental activists’ deaths around the world tripled, compared to 10 years before. In the past 10 years, over 900 environmental activists were killed around the world. As Franco Viteri, the president of the governing organization of the Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, said: “I want to say Chico Mendes’ fight is being waged everywhere. There are many Chico Mendeses in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Unfortunately for the world, Chico Mendes only became well-known internationally after his assassination. But his contributions to the protection of the Amazon live on.
Chico Mendes legacy influenced the creation of extractive reserves across Brazil, which now cover over 24 million acres of rainforest. Mendes is remembered not only for his environmental contributions but also for his belief in the power of community-based conservation.
After his death the the Alliance of Forest Peoples was created to protect rubber tappers, rural workers, and indigenous peoples from encroachment on traditional lands.
The Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve was created in the forest around Xapuri and Chico Mendez was officially recognised as Patron of the Brazilian Environment and the Chico Mendes Institute for Conservation of Biodiversity (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade), is named in his honour.
Thanks to Mendes’ committed lobbying work, the World Bank moved from endorsing rainforest exploitation to financing the reserves. Sadly, climate-change-denying President Jair Bolsonaro’s government from 2019 to 2023.undermined Mendes’ achievements by weakening protective legislation. They also encouraged cattle ranching, responsible for most deforestation in Brazil, undercutting the ban on subsidising operations which followed the murder.
As of 2019, the Chico Mendes Extraction Reserve had lost 7.5% of its forested area, and deforestation increased by over 200% in the first year of Bolsonaro’s presidency. Locals were also moving away from rubber tapping into the better-paid livestock industry, weakening worker’s unions.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected on 30 October 2022 and like Chico Mendes is a socialist and among his first acts in his new term in office, Lula issued decrees aimed at curbing mining in Indigenous reserves and deforestation in Amazonia and the Cerrado region. As Mongabay reported, he also created a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples as one step to fulfill a campaign plege “to combat 500 years of inequality.”
The Mendes case has led to changes in Brazilian law and rain forest governance that cut the murder rate on the country’s farflung resource frontiers and reduced what had been a far more dramatic surge in forest destruction that anything in recent years.
The Brazilian Amazon experienced its smallest amount of yearly deforestation in nearly a decade, President Lula's government reported in November, in line with its promise to combat forest loss. Deforestation fell by 30.6 percent in the year-to-year period beginning in August 2023, according to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
During that time, 6,288 square kilometers (2,427 square miles) of forest were destroyed, which INPE Director Gilvan Oliveira said was "the lowest result in the last nine years."
Over the last century, the Amazon rainforest., which covers nearly 40 percent of South America has lost about 20 percent of its area to deforestation, due to the spread of agriculture and cattle ranching, logging and mining, and urban sprawl.
Lula has pledged to put a stop to illegal deforestation of the Amazon by 2030 but faces a string of vested interests. In addition to the Amazon, destruction of the Cerrado, the most species-rich savanna in the world, which is located in central Brazil, was reduced by 25.7 percent or 8,174 square kilometers, INPE reported. The two different biomes were recently hit by historic drought and the subsequent spread of wildfires.
Environment Minister Marina Silva welcomed the "significant drop" as a part of Brazil's push to reduce carbon emissions, just days before participating in the COP29 UN climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
But Brazilians still have two starkly different visions of what the vast Amazon region should be,with forest dwellers and environmentally-attuned urbanites siding with international conservationists, but many others seeing an undeveloped territory needing taming and exploitation.
But gains won long ago through peaceful resistance and blood, and now through Lula’s acts, remain fragile. As André Schröder reported for Mongabay in November, “Bolsonaro won in the majority of the 256 municipalities in the Arc of Deforestation, which accounts for about 75 percent of the deforestation in the Amazon, as well as in Novo Progresso, in Pará, where ranchers, loggers and land-grabbers orchestrated a significant burning of deforested areas in 2019.”
Economic realities in the Amazon still favor ranching over rubber, as a recent Associated Press story datelined in Mendes’s home town attests. The story charts the allure of livestock even within the protected reserve named for Mendes. https://apnews.com/article/technology-world-news-forests-brazil-plants-e65f887c18e82ce1a0dd07ae491b5497
Although the current state of environmental protection in Brazil has improved, it is still rather dire,but this does not take away from Chico Mendes’ legacy. He brought global attention to the plight of the rainforest and its communities, and his tireless campaigning set a precedent for future environmental activism and legislation.
Chico Mendes, name remains synonymous with environmental activism and the struggle for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest,and he remains a beacon of inspiration decades after his tragic assassination.
Today, Chico Mendes is celebrated as a hero who fought valiantly against the exploitation of the Amazon.Murdered for his efforts, he embodies the struggles of the many people who fight to protect their homelands from exploitation. His life reminds us of the profound impact one individual can have on the world.
Mendes’s story is a call to action, urging current and future generations to continue the fight for a just and sustainable planet. However as in other areas of the world the environment remains under pressure and his legacy is under threat.
But because of his combination of socialism and ecology, agrarian reform and defense of the Amazonian forest, peasant and indigenous struggles, Chico Mendes’s fight continues to inspire new struggles, not only in Brazil, but in many other countries and continents.
In 1989, shortly after Chico Mendes’ death, the National Council of Rubber Tappers in Rio Branco issued this “declaration of the peoples of the forest”, which can serve as Mendes’ epitaph:
“The traditional peoples who today trace on the Amazonian sky the rainbow of the Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest declare their wish to see their regions preserved. They know that the development of the potential of their people and of the regions they inhabit is to be found in the future economy of their communities, and must be preserved for the whole Brazilian nation as part of its identity and self-esteem. This Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest, bringing together Indians, rubber tappers, and riverbank communities, and founded here in Acre, embraces all efforts to protect and preserve this immense but fragile life-system that involves out forests, lakes, rivers and springs, the source of our wealth and the basis of our cultures and traditions.”
The best way to learn more about Chico is to listen to Chico himself. Here is Voice of the Amazon, a great documentary from Miranda Smith, that can be watched in English and with Spanish subtitles.
