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Author’sand Editor’s Notes Foreword 1.Wilson Pinheiro was a comrade of Chico Mendes and the head of the Brasiléia, Acre, RuralWorkers’ Union; he was assassinated in 1980. Ivair Higino was a twenty- five-year-old union activist when he was killed in June 1988; he is buried next to Chico Mendes in Xapuri. [LR] 2.The RubberTapper Project,sponsored by the National Council of RubberTappers with support from Oxfam, Brazilian NGOs, and the Brazilian education ministry , assisted Acre’s rubber tappers in establishing sustainable development initiatives such as marketing cooperatives and schools. [LR] 3.The poronga, for which the bulletin is named, is a tin hat with a candle or other light that rubber tappers wear when they work in the rubber groves in the hours before dawn. [LR] 4. Empate: a nonviolent demonstration during which rubber tappers and their families try to prevent hired workers from cutting down trees in the rainforest on rubber estates. [LR] 5. Cachoeira: a rubber estate outside Xapuri. Chico Mendes’s killer, Darli Alves da Silva, claimed the estate in 1988 and tried to deforest it and drive out its rubber tapper inhabitants in the months before Mendes’s death. It is now part of the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve. [LR] 6. Bordon:A large Brazilian meat packing company that tried to deforest rubber estates in Acre in the 1980s. [LR] 7. Bishop Moacyr Grechi was Catholic bishop of Rio Branco,Acre, from 1986 to 1998; he is now archbishop of PortoVelho, Rondônia. [LR] 8. CONTAG, or the National Confederation of AgriculturalWorkers, founded in 1963,represents thousands of union locals and six regional labor federations throughout Brazil. [LR] Chapter 1 1. Amazon Workers’ Center (CTA): A small nongovernmental organization founded in 1980; collaborated with the RubberTapper Project on literacy and other projects. [GR] 2. Darli Alves da Silva and his son Darci were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms for the murder of Chico Mendes. They escaped from prison in Rio A Genocidal Occupation 165 Branco, fled to Bolivia, and were eventually captured and imprisoned in Brasília, Brazil’s capital. [LR] In 2006 Darli was on parole and living in Rio Branco and Xapuri; Darci was living near Brasília, also on parole but still under indictment for crimes committed in 1988. [GR] 3. In an attempt to stop the widespread use of firearms by criminals, the Brazilian Congress passed a strict gun control law in 2003.A national referendum to ban sale of firearms to civilians failed in 2005. [LR] 4.Amazon winter:the rainy season from November or December toApril or May. In this region there are only two seasons:dry (summer) and wet (winter).It has nothing to do with lower temperatures common in the winter in other parts of the country or the world. On the contrary, the “frosts,” short periods when the temperature drops the most in the region, occur in the Amazon summer, between June and September . [GR] 5. Construction of a highway linking Brazil to the Pacific Ocean is a long-term development priority of the Brazilian government. During the military regime, in the mid-1980s, the government borrowed funds from the Inter-American Development Bank to pave the road between Cuiabá and Rio Branco, triggering a land rush in the state of Rondônia that led to widespread deforestation, human rights violations against traditional inhabitants, and environmental devastation. [LR] 6.Reintegration of possession:a judicial order permitting a land claimant to expel squatters from his or her property with police assistance. [LR] 7.Delta Group:a construction company that purchased and sought to deforest the Ecuador rubber estate in May 1988. [GR] 8.IBDF,the Brazilian Institute of Reforestation,became the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) in 1989. A federal agency under the secretary of the environment, it has regulatory and police powers. [LR] 9. National Rubber Tappers’ Council: a nonprofit organization representing rubber tappers in the Amazon region, founded in 1985; Chico Mendes was its first president . [LR] 10. Institute of Amazon Studies: a nongovernmental organization founded by Mary Allegretti. [LR] 11.While researching her master’s thesis on the traditional rubber estates in the mid-1980s, Mary Allegretti taught for some time at the project’s primary school on the Nazaré estate. Since her first involvement in the early 1980s, she has never completely left the movement. Later she founded the Institute of Amazon and Environmental Studies with its headquarters in...

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