Walking the Forest with Chico Mendes: Struggle for Justice in the Amazon (review)

This book is a welcome addition to the literature that explores the rubber tappers' movement in Acre, a Brazilian state in the southwest Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s and their struggle to maintain rights to their lands and extractive livelihoods against well-armed ranchers and their hired gunmen, intent on expulsing them through whatever means necessary. Within this context, Rodrigues examines the critical role of Francisco "Chico" Mendes in the rural labor movement in the municipality of Xapuri. Mendes was a rubber tapper and union organizer that was murdered in 1988. The book's principal focus is the period from Rodrigues's first meeting with the rubber tapper leaders in January 1986 up to the death of Chico Mendes on December 22, 1988. Arguably this is the most critical period in recent rubber tapper history and Rodrigues's first-hand account provides a new perspective through an engaging narrative.

Chapter 1 is entitled, "I Was There!" and this captures the book's approach. Later in Chapter 6 Rodrigues explains his purpose: "I've made this record to tell Chico Mendes's true story, which has been told in so many ways, depending on who's talking. As a witness, I'm telling it from my point of view, recovering what I think is necessary to recover, without any pretense of knowing everything. I tell it as I understood and learned it" (142). Rodrigues, or "Goma," as Chico Mendes called him, does this by taking the reader into rubber tapper meetings, confrontations with hired gunmen, union organizing trips to the forest, and not least, participation in the empates, or standoffs the rubber tappers employed in their attempts to stop the deforesting of their landholdings. By bringing in his recollections from these experiences, mining government records, depositions and testimonies, and presenting a personal interview with Chico Mendes, he provides unique insight into the rubber tapper movement and their organizing tactics amid the violence that permeated the region.

The book opens with Rodrigues relating the final moments of Chico Mendes' life, and it is here that the reader is introduced to his "I was there" perspective. Turning down a game of checkers with Mendes but invited to stay for dinner, Rodrigues decides to take a quick ride around Xapuri on his motorcycle in attempt to locate the gunmen that regularly intimidated Mendes and other union leaders (and Rodrigues as well). Rodrigues is concerned that gunmen have not been seen recently, and their absence is suspicious. His intuition tells him that something is wrong. Unable to locate them, Rodrigues returns to Mendes's home, only to find that Mendes was shot and killed as he stepped out his back door to a separate shower area. Thus, it is not just Rodrigues's close friendship with Chico Mendes that makes the book relevant and interesting, but it his personal experiences within this tense political and social environment and how the movement, led by Wilson Pinheiro, Chico Mendes, Raimundo "Raimundão" Barros and others, carved out spaces for resistance and change.

Rodrigues weaves together his story by connecting his own experiences within the rubber tapper's struggle. He discusses his work as a researcher and organizer in the forest, placing considerable emphasis on the long distances and days he traveled from landholding to landholding as part of his work evaluating the Rubber Tapper Project and organizing with the Xapuri Rural Workers Union. This is not to suggest the hardships he endured, but the difficulties the rubber tapper movement confronted in informing and mobilizing households spread over vast forest areas. And distance was not the only challenge. Mistrust of outsiders was widespread in the forest; however, Rodrigues notes that mistrust was not directed solely at ranchers, but found within the movement itself. Initially sewn by rubber bosses pre-1970 and fueled in the 1970s and 1980s by misinformation disseminated by ranchers, mistrust among rubber tappers was a...