Brazil: Chico Mendez & a 1,000 similar killings have occurred since 1988

Alves “Chico” Mendes was struck down by a single shotgun blast fired
by the son of a cattle rancher irked that he had been denied the right
to cut down a fresh tract.

More than a thousand similar murders had
gone unprosecuted on the Amazon frontier. But Mendes had built a
global network, from local labor organizers to American
environmentalists, and had personally pressed development banks in
Washington to restrict loans for Brazil’s road-building projects until
local peoples’ rights were considered. His killers were caught and
jailed. Mendes’s work and death both left big marks in Brazil and
beyond, reshaping forest and development policy and spurring some
efforts to bring justice to the forest frontier. Nonetheless, both
forests and their inhabitants are still falling. More than 1,000
similar killings have occurred since 1988, by some accounts. I never
met Mendes, but I came to comprehend him and the ongoing fight over
Brazil’s forests after spending three months in 1989 crisscrossing the
western Amazon interviewing more than 100 people who had shaped his
life, or been shaped by him, ranging from his widow to the father and
grandfather of the triggerman. The interview with the grandfather,
Sebastiao Alves, was about as chilling as any conversation I can
recall, particularly when he concluded flatly: “Chico Mendes spent too
much time alive.” The result was my first book, “The Burning Season.”
I haven’t been back to Mendes’s home state, Acre, since 1990 (when I
filed dispatches on the trial for Outside magazine and National Public
Radio). But I’ve kept track on what’s been happening there through
biologists like Doug Daly of the New York Botanical Garden, who I
wrote about two decades ago and who is still probing the region’s
flora. And then there’s Lou Gold, an occasional Dot Earth contributor
who lives in Capixaba, about 60 miles by road from Xapuri, Mendes’s
hometown, and who’s filled me in on changes there. His emails have
brought back heaps of memories.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/the-uncertain-legacy-of-chico-mendes/?hp

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