Chico Mendes

Chico Mendes (born December 15, 1944, Xapuri, Acre, Brazil—died December 22, 1988, Xapuri) was a Brazilian labour leader and conservationist who defended the interests of the seringueiros, or rubber tree tappers, in the Amazonian state of Acre, calling for land reform and preservation of the Amazon Rainforest. His activism won him recognition throughout Brazil and internationally but also provoked the enmity of local ranchers, who eventually arranged his murder.

Mendes received no formal education. As a boy, he worked in rubber tapping alongside his father, just before prices for natural rubber declined and working conditions for the seringueiros worsened. Tappers were expelled from land that was then sold, logged, and burned for cattle pasture. Defending the seringueiros’ rights, in the early 1970s he helped to organize the Xapuri Rural Workers Union, later becoming its president. The workers’ struggle soon united with resistance to widespread deforestation, as Mendes and other activists stood in front of tractors and chain saws to impede the destruction, a technique known as the empate, or standoff.

In 1985 Mendes and other leaders founded the National Council of Rubber Tappers in Brasília, and Mendes soon became the spokesperson for seringueiros throughout the country. He emphasized the need to establish forest reserves from which a variety of products could be sustainably extracted to benefit peasant and indigenous communities. In 1987 the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation invited Mendes to attend the annual conference of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C., where he spoke to members of Congress about an IDB-funded road project in Acre that threatened the rainforest and its inhabitants. Both the IDB and the World Bank subsequently endorsed the idea of establishing extractive reserves. Bowing to international pressure, the Brazilian government created the first extractive reserve in 1988.

Among many other honours, Mendes was the 1987 recipient of the Global 500 Award of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for environmental activism in the face of immense social, political, and logistical obstacles. In December 1988 he was shot and killed in front of his house in Xapuri. Fight for the Forest: Chico Mendes in His Own Words was first published posthumously, in 1989.