Volume 38, Number 6 · March 28, 1991
The Mystery of Chico Mendes
By Kenneth Maxwell
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Into the Amazon: The Struggle for the Rain Forest
by Augusta Dwyer
Sierra Club Books, 250 pp., $10.00 (paper)
The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest
by Andrew Revkin
Houghton Mifflin, 317 pp., $19.95
Fight for the Forest: Chico Mendes in His Own Words
additional material by Tony Gross
Monthly Review Press, 96 pp., $6.00 (paper)
The World Is Burning
by Alex Shoumatoff
Little, Brown, 377 pp., $19.95
The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon
by Susanna Hecht, by Alexander Cockburn
Verso, 266 pp., $24.95
The Decade of Destruction: The Crusade to Save the Amazon Rainforest
by Adrian Cowell
Holt, 215 pp., $19.95
O Empate contra Chico Mendes
by Márcio Souza
Marco Zero, 168 pp., 1,150.00 CR
Rural Violence in Brazil: February 1991 An Americas Watch Report
Human Rights Watch, 122 pp., $11.00 (paper)
On December 22, 1988, Francisco 'Chico' Mendes, a Brazilian union organizer, was murdered at his modest house in Xapuri, a remote rubbertrading outpost of five thousand people in the Brazilian border state of Acre. Mendes was a plump, agreeable, talkative activist who had tried to protect the livelihood of his fellow rubber tappers, which was threatened by the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest and the encroaching cattle ranches. To do so he had allied himself with prominent members of the international environmental movement. He spoke the lingua franca of visiting anthropologists from Berkeley and Paris, European TV producers, and Washington environmental lobbyists. Mendes's aim had been to protect the forest, by persuasion if possible, by force if need be. He wanted the Brazilian government to promote 'extractive reserves,' a policy by which ecologically desirable activities such as rubber tapping and nut collecting could continue, but environmentally destructive forest clearance would be prevented.
Review, 9557 words
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