In the town of Xapuri in Brazilian Amazonia, the death of Caliane Soares, a young doctor-to-be, novice politician and chanteuse brought back attention to a story that was fading with time but the impact of which can be felt today around the world—the assassination of Chico Mendez, union leader, protector of the Amazon rainforest, and human rights activist for Brazil’s indigenous people, who was killed 32 years ago this month.
If Xapuri is known for anything, it is the name Chico Mendes. It is the town where he lived, where he got the global attention of the climate warming crowd, where his protection of the Amazon made him environmentalists’ global darling (and also made him powerful enemies).
It is the place where he died, ambushed in his front door. It is also the town where this past weekend a 29-year-old beauty with a clear-skin smile, a rising career as a singer in two countries with a long list of sponsors, a politician with a losing bid in city council elections but a new role as substitute councilwoman—a young woman earning a medical degree in neighbouring Bolivia—appeared dead in her home this past weekend. Causes, unknown.
Xapuri is as backwater as towns come, even in backwater sub-Amazonas western Brazil. Down a lonely and pothole-filled, dusty stretch of Acre State Highway 485 — 13 kilometres off the main road between the state capital Rio Branco and the Bolivian border city of Cobija — Xapuri is a town of 19,000, big for the oft-flooded savannahs of the Acre River valley.
There was a time when it was the symbol of the Global Environmentalist Movement, the lifetime home of Chico Mendes, the place where the Amazon was defended. This past weekend it was the place where Caliane Soares, a music sensation in Brazil and lounge singer in Bolivia was found dead Sunday morning in downtown Xapuri after an Instagram post-Saturday evening that indicated she was headed to an aunt’s birthday party.
The death has been news throughout Brazil, not so much in Bolivia, where she was as recently as 3 weeks before her death. Reports in national Brazilian media relate that she sang at the birthday party until 2 a.m. before going home alone; less than an hour later she left WhatsApp groups and turned off the app. She did post a picture of the party on Instagram before going completely offline. That was about 3 a.m. Later that morning, she was dead.
As the city woke up to the news, sadness was again visiting the town in a manner that it puts the eyes of the world outside upon them, and people said they felt the same sorrow and impotence as when Mendes was murdered, though perhaps some of them were not even alive then. Some things outwit time.
The mystery and attention the young celebrity’s death brought to the town highlighted the third death in Xapuri—the town’s mantle as ground zero of the environmental movement.
Mendes brought worldwide recognition to the area for his fight to protect the Amazon and the rights of the “siringueros,” the rubber tappers who lived in the area and were being pushed out by cattle ranchers. His death, to stop his effort to block ranchers from invading the forest, brought international outrage and renown to the town where he lived and died.
His humble home, the doorstep where he died, the things inside were carefully preserved in a lovingly curated museum in his honour. It was an internationally recognized exhibit, a historical treasure, a shrine and a promise to continue his work, to teach new generations, to keep the fight alive. It became a place of pilgrimage, the most visited place in Xapuri, the state of Acre’s most famous attraction.
But that too is dead.
Lost in far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s zeal to undermine environmental laws he says hurt economic development, this dying part of the Amazon rainforest in western Brazil is now an afterthought as deforestation takes place even in protected areas named after Mendes.
But the one thing that illustrates the story is Mendes’s house-museum as a metaphor for the way things are today in Brazil’s conservancy movement.
For months before the pandemic, the museum and former home of the man cut down at 44 to silence his protection for the Amazon, has been totally abandoned, boarded up, its vibrant blue paint dim, electricity cut off; the unpainted picket fence chained up, the grass overgrown. There is trash around it, the sign identifying it as Mendes’s house is tilted, the way things go when uncared for. Today, the entire compound of historical shacks around it is parched, withered, and fading.
When it was open, the museum showed period items perfectly preserved and curated, one could get the feeling of those days in ’88 when anti-global warming fame came face-to-face with the hate and greed from those intent on moving on and clearing the Amazon forest. A shot. Blood. Death.
Silence.
Advance.
Today, there is real silence. Gone are the dreams of keeping his love for the forest and its people alive, of keeping the light on in Mendes’s house to light the world with the story of his struggle. The street outside is caked with dried mud and tropical sand over the potholed pavers, the type of thing that happens in the absence of traffic, or care, giving the entire area the feel of a desolate place. A place the importance of which has passed.
Even the Brasilia-based Chico Mendes Institute for the Conservation of Biodiversity has forgotten about conservancy and biodiversity says an employee of the Institute in Rio Branco who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals. There are reprisals. People are afraid to speak up.
There entire months over the past two years, the Chico Mendes Institute did not at all to monitor deforestation in Brazil. Figures published by Brazil’s National Institute of Spatial Research (INPE) shows Amazon deforestation increasing over the same periods in previous years and the highest-ever levels per month. Bolsonaro has called the institute’s data “fake news” and lies and has named a military official to run the institute. The Brazilian president is a former military captain who yearns for the days of the country’s military dictatorship.
Bolsonaro has banked political capital on the resentment that some Brazilians have felt asked the country to preserve its environmental richness for the benefit of the rest of the world. “Brazil is ours, not yours,” he famously told European journalists asserting his decision to open the Amazon for exploration and development.
Illegal ranchers and loggers got the message.
INPE now reports that in 2020 Brazil deforested at a pace unseen in a dozen years, with over 2.7 million acres cut down, nearly a 10% increase since Bolsonaro took office.
Vast amounts of the global-warming causing air carbon are literally sucked in by trees in the forest, transpiration from their leaves account for as much as 10% of the global atmospheric moisture, governing seasonal rainfall patterns all over the world. These trees make their own rain. One thing can stop it all: Deforestation.
Yet that is the policy of the Bolsonaro administration — to champion agribusiness and the opening of more forest to produce the beef, rice and soy and other economic pursuits. The president himself encourages the incursion into protected indigenous lands with different versions of a comment he made when he was a candidate vowing to leave not-one centimetre of land to indigenous peoples: “Where there is indigenous land, there is wealth beneath it.”
Global temperatures are rising while the trees that would reduce the atmospheric carbon load that traps the heat are being cut down, complain conservationists and the signators to the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Scientists say a full one-third of global climate change effects can be stopped by halting forest degradation.
People used to say that the forest in these parts exists because Chico Mendes defended it. When he was murdered in ’88 many songs were written in honour of the “great activist of the rainforests.”
They were the kind of songs Soares, the young singer of left-political leanings could have written in a different time. She died this past weekend, another promise of Xapuri cut short.
Now the only song in these devastated lands is the sad sound of silence.
