Chico's father, Francisco Mendes, arrived in the remote estate of Acre in 1926, in the wild and isolated occidental Amazon near Bolivia and Peru, to work in the development of rubber made from the heveas. He was escaping from the extreme poverty of the "sert?n" in the deserted state of Cear? -the other vertex of Brazil. Strangely the Mendes had fought there against a highway project which brought an avalanche of flagelados, another reason for them to emigrate.

Chico was lucky to meet Euclides Fern?ndez T?vora, a political refugee in the Amazon. When he was 14 years old he learned to read and write with him, making use of magazines and old newspapers, and finding out what was going on in the world, thanks to a short wave radio had brought by Euclides.

Towards 1970, the Brazilian president Medici decided to build a Transamazonian highway of 5,000 kilometers to offer a land without men to men without lands. However, neither the land was fertile nor was it empty: there were natives, riverside people, seringueiros, and people who lived from and took care of the forest. The highways impacted the lives of 96 tribes. The nambiqwara, admired by the anthropologist L?vi-Strauss, were reduced from 20,000 to 650, after the tracing of the BR-364. Father Turrini, a Rio Branco missionary, estimated that 838 children out of one thousand died before the first year of life in Acre.

Massive deforestation and intentional fires would increase during the next two decades encouraged by the fazendeiros and the garimpeiros. The ancient forests were replaced by farms and ranches of uncertain profitability and even more uncertain duration. In Amazon the agricultural expansion is unsustainable, the cattle are zebus imported from India -for the Mc Donald's hamburgers of Texas, for instance; and when it rains the unprotected, fragile land, erodes rapidly. In a few years the abandoned farms of Amazon, like the depleted fields of Mato Grosso, looked like a semi-desert. Meanwhile, the Indians and the rubber tappers emigrated to settle down in the ghettos of the chabolas and the favelas, uprooted and without jobs.

During the 70s title deeds were forged and adulterated, and documents were given no matter whether those were indigenous' lands or inhabited by families of rubber tappers for decades. The fazendeiros burned the forest to open up pasture, while obtaining the property over hundreds thousands of hectares and claimed state subventions. The fires started from sporadic to massive. In a paroxysm of destruction the airports are closed because of the clouds of smoke. Rondonia and Acre burned from all sides taking advantage of the dry season every year.

Chico Mendes
Chico Mendes in Who is Who.

www.chicomendes.org
Extensive and good site about Chico Mendes and the struggle to save the rainforest

www.chicomendes.com
Watch an American video about the struggle for the Amazon.