Exploring the life, assassination and legacy of Amazon forest defender Chico Mendes with radio legend Studs Terkel

As thousands of propaganda-inflamed supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro violently invaded the top offices of government in Brasilia today, I couldn’t help thinking back to the four months I spent in Brazil in 1989, the year the nation was in the midst of its first direct presidential elections since 1960.

Image from video tweeted by George Marques, a columnist for Diario 98, a news outlet in Maranhão, Brazil (posted with permission)

It was heartening to track reports tonight that this insurrectionist tide had been turned back by police. But no one who cares about democracy, Indigenous rights or environmental protection should rest easy.

Most of my time in Brazil 34 years ago was spent roaming the Amazon rain forest, researching the life, assassination and legacy of Chico Mendes for my first book, The Burning Season. Mendes, raised in the forest, was a rubber-tree tapper and union organizer who became an international figure leading efforts to stem a rising tide of deforestation and violence driven by largely-lawless cattle ranching and developers. He was killed on December 22, 1988, by a shotgun blast fired by the son of a rancher enraged by the success of the rubber tapers’ nonviolent blockades of chainsaw crews and court victories.

Mendes, like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,, was a socialist and the campaign to save the forest, then as now, was seen by patriotic “ruralistas” as an assault on the national imperative to develop roadless, resource-rich frontiers.

The murder of Chico Mendes made worldwide headlines. Rubber tappers blockaded chainsaw crews, sustaining his effort. The killers were imprisoned but their backers were never prosecuted.

The Mendes case 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.

Conflicting visions of the Amazon frontier

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. Bolsonaro’s “beef, Bible, bullet” appeal to rural Brazilians largely played on the latter sentiment.

In my book, I propsed that the Amazon is to most Brazilians what Alaska is to lower-48 Americans — a distant abstraction tuned to fit one’s personal politics.

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.”

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. That widespread appeal of cattle as a cash reserve was conveyed to me by one rancher this way during my reporting in 1989: “Scratch the skin of a rubber tapper and you’ll find a rancher.”

Brazil’s rich/poor, north/south divide remains stark. I took these two photographs in 1989 - one of a wealthy investment banker’s home in Sao Paulo, the other of one of 11 children of a a rubber tapper whose wife said she had lost six other children to early deaths.

When The Burning Season was published in 1990, I made the rounds of TV and radio shows. Here was my interview with Today Show host Deborah Norville. I brought along one of the rubber shoes tappers made from the latex they harvested. (Some residents of Acre, the state where Mendes lived and died, have built businesses making and selling modern lines of latex shoes.)

But one interview stood out – my hourlong conversation with the legendary historian, labor champion and radio host Studs Terkel. I won’t add a transcript of our chat becuase you really can’t appreciate these conversations without hearing Terkel’s melliflluous voice and feeling the intensity of his focus.

Chicago’s WFMT Radio Network and the Chicago History Museum have posted an archive of hundreds of Terkel’s four and a half decades of interviews. (The Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities supported the effort.)

The full archive is at studsterkel.org. Sift by theme. For the environment, you’ll find conservation leaders like Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough and the writers Barry Lopez and Alexander Cockburn (also on the Amazon). But you’ll also hear from workers unprotected by a union describing woeful conditions at a Hanes shirt factory.

I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did halfway back through my 66 years.

I also encourage you to listen to the magical converastion on life, faith and death that took place in 2004 when On Being host Krista Tippett turned the tables and interviewed Terkel near the end of his extraordinary life.