Brazil: Mendez assasinated 20 years ago today, his predecessors threatened even more!
Twenty years after the killing of Chico Mendes, one of the world’s
most prominent rainforest defenders, hundreds of human rights and
environmental activists still face the threat of assassination in
Brazil, a new study claims. The report, compiled by Brazil’s Catholic
Land Commission (CPT) and due to be released in full early next year,
reveals that at least 260 people, among them a Catholic bishop, live
under the threat of murder because of their fight against a coalition
of loggers, farmers and cattle ranchers.
The list names Frei Henri des
Rosiers, a French priest based in the Amazon town of Xinguara, as a
particular target. Police are investigating claims he has a £14,000
price on his head because of his fight against slave labour. Also
named are Maria José Dias da Costa, a union leader in the remote town
of Rondon do Pará, and an Austrian bishop, Dom Erwin Krautler, who has
been under 24-hour police guard for two years because of his battle
against developers and child prostitution in his Amazonian diocese. In
February this year, Francisco da Silva, a 51-year-old leader of the
landless movement in the Amazon, was killed with a single shot to the
head. He had been named in a previous CPT report about rural leaders
receiving death threats. On Monday night the Brazilian president, Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to address the country on television
to pay homage to the life of Mendes, a rubber tapper turned
environmentalist who was gunned down outside his home on 22 December
1988. Lula’s address is part of a wave of tributes across Brazil, from
marches on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to celebrations in his
hometown of Xapuri. But while his standing as a symbol of protest is
not in doubt 20 years on, environmentalists and human rights activists
are divided on Mendes’s practical legacy. In September this year
government figures showed that deforestation in the Amazon had risen
by 64% over the previous 12 months.
Earlier this month, members of
Ibama, Brazil’s environmental taskforce, discovered that nearly 3,000
hectares (7,410 acres) had been deforested, mostly illegally, inside a
reserve named after Mendes. “Each year on 22 December I ask myself if
he died in vain or not. And today, after all these years, the answer
is not yet clear to me,” said Alfredo Sirkis, a prominent member of
Brazil’s Green party and friend of Mendes. Sirkis said: “I won’t say
that nothing has improved,” but he added that the last 20 years had
seen a “continuation of this project of devastation”. Born in the
remote Amazon state of Acre on 15 December 1944, Francisco Alves
Mendes Filho followed in his parents’ footsteps early in life,
becoming a rubber tapper at the age of nine. By the mid-1980s he was
spearheading protests against local cattle ranchers and their gunmen,
who sought to tear down the forest and drive out the impoverished
rubber tappers. Renowned for visionary views on sustainable
development, Mendes quickly became a poster-boy for the international
green movement, travelling to the US to lobby against infrastructure
projects he believed would devastate the Amazon.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/22/brazil-activists-mendes
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