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had made their meager living collecting the white, milky latex from the rubber trees
( Hevea spp) in the Amazon forest. When their son, “Chico”, was 9 years old, illiter-
ate and poor like his father, he started working as a rubber tapper too. At the time,
landowners did not allow their workers to build or attend schools, so his education
was entirely informal. A political refugee, Euclides Fernandez Tavora, taught him
how to read and write, using old magazines and a shortwave radio. Chico and his
family lived in the seringal Cachoeira region, and in the 1970s, he became a leader
in a non-violent resistance movement to defend their homes from cattle ranchers,
who demanded that they leave. Along the western border, shared with Peru and
Bolivia, the Brazilian government began its National Integration Program, which
was intended to promote the colonization of the region with cattle ranchers and
force the native people, mostly Amerindians, to relocate. Over the next 15 years, the
ancient forests were set on fi re to make way for farms and ranches, thus resulting in
massive land erosion and loss of jobs.
Traditionally rubber tappers and their families were at the mercy of a system of
debt bondage, but during the 1960s and 1970s this system faced collapse in Xapuri.
Ranchers from southern Brazil began buying up rubber estates and clearing vast
areas of the forest for cattle grazing. Many tappers and their families were forcibly,
often brutally, evicted. Ruthless exploitation of the rainforest became the dominant
policy and practice; and resistance to that exploitation was the focus of Mendes's
life. From his endeavors emerged the concept of “extractive reserves,” which are
legally protected forest areas held in trust for people who live and work on the land
in a sustainable manner. Mendes and his movement were recognized as a force not
only for social justice, but also against environmental destruction. The rubber tap-
pers were able to propose a socially equitable and environmentally sustainable
development policy for the region, based on securing and improving their way of
life, rather than on offi cial investments in ranching and colonization projects that
would have led both them and the forest to disaster (Gross 1989 , p. 2).
Mendes gathered his fellow workers together to protest the relocation schemes,
organizing blockades against bulldozers. This was the starting point for the trade
union he founded in the state of Acre in 1975. Later, in 1985, he created the
National Council of Rubber Tappers, which represented an expansion of the union.
In cooperation with Brazilian anthropologist Mary Helena Allegretti, he organized
the fi rst national meeting of rubber tappers in Brasilia, the capital of the country. In
order to secure rubber tree preserves, Mendes sought aid from environmental
groups in the United States. His idea was to provide the local people with a source
of income by practicing sustainable agriculture. The international environmental
community recognized his work and the United Nations Environment Program
awarded him the Global 500 prize in 1987. He also received the Ted Turner Better
World Society Environment Award. Nevertheless, the Brazilian government and
media continued to ignore him. His major success, however, was a winning effort
to stop ranchers from cutting down a forest that the rubber tappers wanted to keep
as a protected reserve area. Due to a coalition he built uniting the rubber tapers and
leaders of the indigenous Yanomami tribe, his leadership and power became a
threat to local ranchers.
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