Category: Brazil

The guy who runs the library of the forest was an IVLP; we made a good choice. He is clearly a local leader.  The library is more than a collection of books; it is a community center. Kids come to learn about their history and the local environment.  Researchers come to study sciences and history.  They have a theater where they show movies and have presentations.  The library is home to a variety of discussion groups.

Rio Branco is a small city where people know each other and Macros is even more connected than most.  It slowed us down when we went to a local restaurant, as he stopped to talk to patrons and people on the street.  This is the kind of place where one person can make a difference. 

I got to thinking about outreach and engagement.  We make an effort to reach out to young audiences on the theory that we can have influence because they have not yet made up their minds about a lot of things.  Does the analogy work for communities?  A place like Acre is young. Lots of things are new, still inchoate, like the school in Nova Eperança I mentioned earlier. The initial condition sets the pattern for the future.  Inputs have bigger influences here than any time.  

It is also probably because it is so far from most of the rest of the country. There was a lot of violence in the forests of Acre a few years ago and there still is some. Most of the conflict was between cattle ranchers and rubber tappers.  Cattle and rubber don’t mix. 

Rubber tappers depend on the forest for survival.  Most of their job consists of walking between widely spaced robber trees, cutting slits in the bark and then collecting the latex.  The trees grow wild and must be widely spaced because of a persistent blight that spreads among trees that are close together.  Rubber in the Amazon used to be a very lucrative business and there were many millions made in the rubber trade until an English adventurer smuggled seeds of the rubber trees to England. The English grew some trees in Kew Gardens and planted them in what was then British Malaya, mostly in Borneo. The climate was similar to the Amazon, but there was a big difference – there was no blight in Malaya, so the Brits were able to plant the trees close together in easily tended rows.  The Brazilian rubber tapper needed to walk all day to tap a few trees.  In Malaya the same work could be done in minutes. There was no way that the Brazilian rubber tappers could compete with the Malayan plantations, so about thirty years after the seeds were smuggled from Brazil, the Brazilian rubber industry collapsed. 

Some people still tapped rubber, mostly because they had no other options, but life was harder. Not that life was ever easy. Even in the boom years, rubber tappers made little money.  They were part of a company system. They worked for a landowner and usually had to buy their necessities on credit in the company store.  They were extended credit there, but prices were high.  After a year of hard work tapping rubber, they usually owed money to the company.  It was impossible for most to get out from under this debt load.  Few of the rubber tappers could even read or write. They lacked to tools to figure out how to improve their conditions, even if it would have been possible.

People were still tapping rubber in the 1970s when there was a push to develop cattle ranching in the Amazon, encouraged by the development dreams of the military government.  Outsiders bought thousands of acres of land for almost nothing.  They often didn’t bother to mark the boundaries. Instead they just flew over the land looking for general features or even just counting the kilometers.  From the height, they could probably see the houses of the rubber tappers, but that was of no consequence since these guys didn’t have title to the land.

In the Amazon in Acre, it takes around 300 hectares to support one rubber tapper. This is because the trees are widely spaced and they cannot be over tapped or they die. Each tapper needs three trails and makes looks alternatively. A cattle ranching doesn’t really need any trees at all. In fact, trees get in the way of ranching. They shade out the grass that the cattle eat.  Furthermore, the new landowners had several incentives to clear the forests beyond the cattle.  For one thing, the wood was valuable. You could more than recover that price of the land by cutting trees and selling timber.  In fact, the timber was essentially free and the only costs involved were those of cutting and moving the product. Also important was land title. Land title was a question. One way you proved that you were the owner was to “improve” the land.  This usually meant clearing off the trees and producing pasture for cattle or fields from crops. So after you bought the land, it was in your best interests to get to work sawing as fast as you could. More likely, you would hire some former rubber tappers to run the chain saws. 

Rubber tappers seemed to be outclassed. Besides their lack of basic education, it was very difficult for them to organize for any kind of cooperative effort.  Their work was solitary and kept them busy and spread out over vast acreages. They were also in competition to sell their latex and often distrustful of each other because of the possibility that they could encroach on each other’s territories. This latter problem was exacerbated by the fact that some were on the payroll of landowners to keep an eye on others to prevent encroachment. They all recognized the threat that deforestation posed to their lifestyles, but didn’t know what to do. 

There is some disagreement about whether or not to call rubber tappers by the term ecologists. They wanted to save the forests, but not for any of abstract reasons. They wanted to save the forest for the practical reason that is where they lived and worked.  On the other hand, you could argue that they were so deeply ecologists that the term was made for them.  The word ecology comes from a Greek work – “οἶκος” – which means household.  Ecology really means the study of our home. For the rubber tappers, the forest was their home on the very basic level.  At first, the rubber tapper leaders rejected the connection with ecologists, but soon learned that their goals coincided with those of the environmentalists and that they could be allies. 

Perhaps the resident of Acre best known in the wider world is Chico Mendez. He was a leader of the rubber tappers.  He tried to organize them, but his initial motivation was not ecology. He was more on the order of a labor organizer trying to organize farm workers.  But in this case, the farm was the forest and the workers wanted to preserve it and thus also preserve their way of life. Chico Mendez was murdered in 1988.  His death was part of a too-common occurrence in the woods, but because of his wider-world reputation, his death was noticed more than the hundreds of others. He became a symbol and a martyr for the cause of forest preservation, so much so that many people outside Brazil – and lots of them inside too – are unaware of his connection with organizing rubber tappers.  His death had meaning that resonated and it proved a catalyst for greater forest protection in Acre and in Brazil.   

Deforestation didn’t stop, but Chico Mendez became a focus for otherwise unfocused efforts to slow it down.  This is one of his legacies, to recognize the value of traditional and overall sustainable forms of use of nature. He broadened the definition. Before Chico Mendez’s death, people like rubber tappers of traditional fishermen or hunters were often not included in the “traditional” category if they were not indigenous people. After, the category of traditional producers began to be applied to people like them too. 

This is not ancient history, although it seems a long time ago. Many of the people who knew and worked with Chico Mendez are still active today. I had breakfast with one of his associates, who wrote a book about Chico Mendez.  It was from him that I got much of the information I used above. 

Today Acre is one of Brazil’s leaders in forest preservation, natural restoration and valuing traditional lifestyles.  Kids learn about the environment as part of their school work.  The State of Acre is trying hard to portray itself as the state that most values the environment. Whether or not this would have happened anyway is an open question, but I think not or at least not as quickly.  You cannot miss the homage to Chico Mendez all around Acre. Defenders of nature have embraced him as a symbol.  It is clear to me that he did with his death help save the forests that he loved. 

There is a kind of coda to this story.  The price of latex was low, which was driving many rubber tappers out of business and encouraging forest clearance. In order to encourage the rubber industry, the Brazilian government opened a condom factory in Xapuri.  They use local latex and the Brazilian government buys all the condoms the place can produce for its public health program. In Portuguese condoms are called “preservatios”.  This always causes some embarrassment in Portuguese language classes, since most English speakers think this means some kind of canned products. But it is fitting the preservativos help preserve the forest.  I guess the slogan now is safe sex saves the rainforest.  There is also a similar rubber factory near Manaus, which I wrote about before.

Acre is as far away as you can get and still be in Brazil.  The flight takes about 3 ½ hours from Brasília and there is a one-hour time change.  You cannot get lost at the airport.  There are two gates and the flight I left on at 2:55 am left from both.  There are not many options.  The Gol flight leaves at 2:55am; Tam goes at 2:15.  If you miss that you have to wait twelve hours.  The airport has no self-check in, so you get to wait in the lines.  I was in Rio Branco to participate in visits related to the U.S.-Brazil school principal program and to meet people in general.  We don’t get to Acre very often and people are interested to see us.  I was interviewed by two television stations, the local newspaper and the major radio station.

Acre’s capital, Rio Branco, is medium sized city with about 400,000 inhabitants; this is half the total population of Acre.  There are no very tall buildings. It has a generally open and suburban feel.  The parallel is not perfect, but it reminded me of Montgomery, Alabama in the way it was spread out. I think the reason I thought of Montgomery, however, was the old governor’s residence.  It has that southern feeling.  Look at the picture above and tell me that it doesn’t remind you of the U.S. Deep South.  The people of Acre also have a kind of rebel heritage.  They broke free from Bolivia a little more than a century ago.  The border was finally settled by the Treaty of Petropolis. The great Brazilian diplomat, the Baron of Rio Branco negotiated the agreement, which is how the capital of Acre got its name. The city spreads out over some low hills more or less along the Acre River.  I was there during the dry season, so it is hot but not very humid.  During the wet season it is a bit cooler but more humid. It almost never gets cool.  They told me that occasionally a front moves in from Antarctica and it can get as cold as about 50 degrees F or about 10 C.  This doesn’t happen often.  
On the flight in, I looked out over the forests and fields.  The forest here is semi-deciduous tropical forest, i.e. lots of the trees lose their leaves during the dry season.  Acre is part of the Amazon forest, but it is not covered by rain forests in the true sense, since there is not much rain for much of the year.   It is not an unbroken forest as you notice when you fly over the Amazon going toward Manaus. Especially near the city, there are lots of farm fields with cattle.  They look funny from the height of the airplane as you come in for a landing.  They are mostly off white.  You cannot really make out their shapes but you see clusters of elongated white dots.

There are water shortages during the dry season, streams run dry and rivers get low. They turn off fountains and are generally careful to conserve water.  This is different from Brasília, which has a unique relationship with water. Although Brasília has a dry season too, water shortages never develop. I think Lake Paranoá has a lot to do with that.

I stayed in the Inacio Palace Hotel.  It was simple but not bad and they had free Internet.   It is evidently owned by the same guy who owns the Pinheiro Palace Hotel across the street, because you have to go there to get breakfast.  In the same building as the Inacio Palace, however, there is a good churrascaria.

According to what I was told, most of the people living in Acre came from the Northeast of Brazil, especially Ceará, but there is a significant mixture of Arabs of Lebanese extraction and native Indians.  The place used to belong to Bolivia, but they weren’t really using it and lots of Brazilians moved in to tap rubber in the late 19^th Century.  Since almost nobody else lived here at the time, even a relatively small influx of Brazilians immigrants was enough to tip the balance and soon Brazilians were the most numerous.  When the Bolivians tried to reassert their authority over Acre, the Brazilian population rose up in armed rebellion, defeated the Bolivians and declared themselves an independent state.  That didn’t last very long. But they tried it again.  This time the Brazilians asserted sovereignty and Acre became a territory of Brazil.  It was not until fifty years later that it became a state.

The 100^th Anniversary of Acre independence declaration in August 7, 2012, so if you are reading this on that day, raise a toast.  This period of independence, no matter how brief and inchoate, seems to have shaped Acre’s attitude.  At our meeting, they placed the Acre anthem instead of the Brazilian one and they refer to things that happen “in Brazil” as if there is an important distinction. I was told that was because the people of Acre won their own independence at the cost of their own blood, sweat, toil and tears and only later did the choose to become part of Brazil.

My pictures: Up top is the Governor’s palace, now a museum.  That and the picture below made me think the city had an Alabama feel. Below that is the public library. They get a good crowd.  The little girl reading at the library was iconic. The bottom picture is an election program.  They have car, motorcycles and even bikes circulating on the streets with boom boxes with political advertisements and catchy songs.