Reflections on the Killing of Chico Mendes 25 Years Ago
December 22, 2013, 12:00 pm
Reflections on the Killing of Chico Mendes 25 Years Ago
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been 25 years since a cattle rancher ordered his son to shoot Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and unionist who had become an effective international campaigner for sustainable use of the Amazon rain forest. I spent the year following Mendes’s assassination piecing together “The Burning Season,” my book on his life, death and influence. But I haven’t been back to that corner of the Amazon since the trial of his murderers in 1990. The Guardian has published an excellent article assessing his legacy. Linda Rabben, an anthropologist and activist focused on human rights and the environment, is the lead organizer of a conference on Mendes and grassroots environmentalism next spring. She sent this short “Your Dot” contribution on Mendes:
Chico Mendes, known internationally as an environmental campaigner, is being honored this afternoon in Washington, D.C., with a memorial service on the 25th anniversary of his assassination in Xapuri, Acre, deep in the Amazon rain forest he had fought to conserve.
About six months before his death I went with the American filmmaker Miranda Smith and the Brazilian anthropologist Mary Allegretti to visit Mendes in and around his home town. We walked along the forest paths where he had gathered latex as a boy. We ate lunch and supper at his humble home, where Miranda took this picture, which shows him as a pensive man and a loving father.
But he was also a jokester who loved to play pranks. His comrade, Gomercindo Rodrigues, called Chico “an ordinary man.” Of course he wasn’t. He had a rare vision, of poor rural workers and indigenous people uniting to protect the forests from which they gained their subsistence. This was the vision he died for.
Cont'd
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/reflecting-on-the-killing-of-chico-mendes-25-years-ago/?_r=0
