The Burning Season by Andrew Revkin

Author:Andrew Revkin [Revkin, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610913485
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2012-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

In Acre, the union leadership in Brasiléia and Xapuri began to live in constant fear. One of the most important and vulnerable targets was Wilson de Souza Pinheiro, who had been a rubber tapper in Amazonas. He moved to Rondônia and then to Acre, where he was recruited by the church in 1973; two years later, he became one of João Maia’s most enthusiastic students of union tactics. Some of the first planning sessions for the Brasiléia union were held in his house. (His daughters recalled peeking around the corner and listening as the tappers and organizers met late into the night.) Pinheiro was elected president of the union in 1977.

He was a lanky man, a head taller than most of his fellow tappers, with a broad smile, long muscular arms, and large hands. He was a powerful speaker and talented organizer, and it was he who first honed the empate into a potent defensive weapon. (He had organized the successful empate at Bôca do Acre in 1979.) Pinheiro was the first tapper from the region to travel beyond the Amazon. In about 1977, he met with national CONTAG officials in Brasilia, where he widened his awareness of politics.

In the early days of the Brasiléia union, Wilson Pinheiro and Chico Mendes became close friends. Sometimes they would retreat together to the rain forest, where they would shed their worries and tease each other and see who could collect more rubber in a given time. Although they were physical opposites—one tall and lean, the other an ectomorph of average height—the two leaders shared qualities that their colleagues saw in no one else: quiet authority and incorruptibility. Moreover, they were the only leaders who developed the crucial ability to convince rubber tappers in one part of Acre to support other tappers wherever they were—in Xapuri or even in another border state, such as Amazonas. Pinheiro and Mendes were able to broaden the perspective of these isolated forest workers, whose concerns had for generations been myopically limited to little more than their own trails.

When Mendes moved back to Xapuri in 1977, much of the momentum in Brasiléia was sustained only by Pinheiro. In a way, he was too critical a figure; when he was not around, nothing got done. If Pinheiro had a fault, it was that he tried to maintain too much control over the business of the union, making him a vulnerable target.

As Pinheiro organized more and larger empates, the tension in the region rose. The tappers kept up the pressure throughout each burning season, knowing that the return of the rains in November would stall any cutting and burning until the following year. Pinheiro made a long list of enemies, one of whom was a ranch manager named Nilo Sérgio de Oliveira. In 1979, de Oliveira had begun to deforest a large tract, rich in rubber trees, on the 500,000-acre New Promise Ranch, once Seringal Sacado. Naturally, he planned to drive out the squatting tappers. Pinheiro organized an empate in which ninety-four tappers blocked the cutting crews.

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