Chico Mendes

This week, twenty years ago, one of the Amazon's protectors and a leader of epic proportions, was murdered in the state of Acre, Brazil. I have translated the article by Marina Silva, brazil's former Minister of the Environment, who grew up in the same state as Chico Mendes.

Twenty years without Chico Mendes, assassinated in Xapuri on December 22, 1988, at 44. The country, still excited about the recently-signed Constitution, the first to recognize the protection of the environment as a responsibility of the State and a right and duty of citizens, would reverberate with the news of the death of the rubbertapper who dared to lead a movement to avoid the destruction of the Amazon.

In these twenty years, the space given to environmental concerns has expanded greatly. Today, Chico Mendes would be one among many to confront the resistance of those who stubbornly refuse to make the necessary changes to the still-dominant predatory style of development. And why was Chico so special? Because he was ahead of his time and gave directions, with clarity and simplicity, in the hope of an era a greater convergence between economic growth, social justice and respect for the limits in the use of natural resources. Because he was a profoundly commited leader with values and originality in action.

There are those who are so far ahead, by intuition, through wisdom, through skill in seeing themselves in many, who sweep through time and reach the future in the present. And those that are ahead of the times never do things without paying for it. Mandela, Ghandi, Luther King paid the price. Chico Mendes also paid it. It seems as if this skill of prescience always has a ripple effect, from provoking incomprehension to pricking consciences, or even to shortening the life of those who transform themselves into an antenna of the world and humanity.

Chico lived all that his circumstances permitted and his ideals asked for. He had a horizontal vision, inclusive and almost feminine, of politics. He preferred negotiation to dispute, conversation to conflict, alliances to exclusivist protagonism, but he radically assumed every confrontation necessary, until the end, with his so famous death. And he won, surviving it.

As Lacan said, the meaning only arrives later. In Chico's case, it appeared plainly after his death, because prescience can only be perceived after. People like him are makers of dereams, of hope, catalyzers of new processes. If "all that is solid breaks up in the air," they say to us that all that is solid sustains our dreams.

When he was alive, they accused him of being against the development of Amazonia, of playing "the American game." Today, his words are the sustenance for all, sincere and insincere, who try to folllow a political career, make investments or implant projects in the region.