The Amazon has taken up a lot of my writing time this past week. The Monitor published my article on what the big Brazil election means for future destruction of the Amazon, while Americas Quarterly and Zócalo Public Square both gave me generous space for a long story about traveling to a remote Amazon town to research the legacy of the environmental activist Chico Mendes.
Chico’s name has become somewhat synonymous with Brazil’s environmentalist movement, as he inspired a generation of “green” leaders from two-time governor Jorge Viana to former environment minister Marina Silva, who is now running for president. Atop is a photo of Silva beside a poster of Mendes.
Below is a photo of me at Mendes’ old house, which is where the activist was blasted by a twenty-gauge shotgun in front of his wife and children days before Christmas in 1988. The man in the other photo is his cousin, Nilson Teixeira Mendes, who still lives in the forest where Mendes used to wake early every morning to tap latex from the natural rubber trees.
Nilson showed me some of the trails and trees where Mendes once walked in a now-protected area called Seringal Cachoeira, Ground Zero in the fight for the Amazon. It was the fight to preserve this tract that led to Mendes’ killing at the hands of a local cattle rancher who said he owned the title to clear the land. The area is still preserved for Nilson and other rubber tapper families, and it’s now also home to relaxing eco-hostel called Pousada Ecológica Seringal Cachoeira.
The pousada has built a decent-sized ropes course, allowing you to get above the dirt and into the trees for a few hours. The eco-resort is reliant on tourism dollars from the hodgepodge of mostly foreigners with extra time and cash, but it’s still an example of economically sustainable forest activity. Other sustainable work, such as tapping rubber and collecting Brazil nuts, are also encouraged and supported by the state government.
Whether such initiatives start getting more support from the federal government depends in part on what happens Oct. 5 when Brazilians go to the polls. With the election on many minds, now seemed like an appropriate time to check up on presidential candidate Marina Silva’s late mentor, as I wrote in Americas Quarterly:
How Brazil treated the memory Mendes—and his assassins, who have brazenly returned to their nearby ranch like characters from an old cowboy film—might provide a glimpse into the nation’s concern for environmentalism and activism, and maybe also into the candidacy of Silva.
…I had expected a statue of Mendes in the town center, a street named after him, a modest tourism industry built up around the memory of a man whose martyrdom triggered a best-selling book, an Emmy-winning film, a song by Paul McCartney, and another by Maná.
But what I found in Xapuri was very different, if you read the full story.
I also got to try some new foods while in Acre. The woman at left is pouring a scoop of sweet banana milk into a bowl of mingao, a Portuguese-style cornmeal pudding served warm off the stove and topped with cinnamon. The next photo is of three glasses of popular juice made from Amazon super-fruits. From left to right is cupuaçu, graviola, and taperebá.
And here’s a typical Acrean lunch of fried fish, beef, rice, beans, and pasta. There’s a sense of guilt in eating a meal like this, as the beef, rice, and pasta is either imported from hundreds of miles away or is being produced locally on former forest land, a result of the deforestation that Chico Mendes died trying to stop.
