Violence in the Amazon: Why Protecting the Rainforest is Still a Fight

TEXT ON SCREEN: December 27, 1988

ARCHIVAL (CBS, EVENING NEWS, 12-27-88):
BOB SHIEFFER: The victim was devoted to preserving Brazil’s irreplaceable rainforest and he paid for that apparently with his life.

NARRATION: Francisco “Chico” Mendes was an environmental leader little-known outside of the Brazilian Amazon.

But his assassination by local cattle ranchers had international repercussions.

STEVE SCHWARTZMAN: They thought, if they killed Chico and got him out of the way, nothing was going to happen. But it became a massive story in Brazil and internationally.

NARRATION: Almost overnight, the inhabitants of the forest and an environmental movement struggling for wider recognition dominated headlines.

ARCHIVAL (GEOFFREY O’CONNOR, 1989):
STING: By saving the Indians, you save the forest. They’re the gardeners of the forest.

NARRATION: And within a few years the idea of saving the rainforest became part of popular culture.

ARCHIVAL (MOVIE CLIP FROM “AVATAR,” 2009):
AVATAR CHARACTER: This is our land!

ARCHIVAL (ABC, 1991):
ANNOUNCER: A special evening dedicated to the rainforest with Grateful Dead.

NARRATION: Decades later, what kind of an impact did this movement have and what lessons can we learn from it?

THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE AMAZON

ARCHIVAL (ABC, 3-10-82):
NEWS REPORT: It is called deforestation.

ARCHIVAL (ABC, 10-19-88):
PETER JENNINGS: One of the world’s most important environmental resources is vanishing day by day.

NARRATION: In the 1980s the Amazon rainforest was burning at an unprecedented rate.

The fires were set to clear the land as part of a government project to bring new settlers, including many cattle ranchers, to the region.

STEVE SCHWARTZMAN (DIRECTOR, TROPICAL FORESTS, ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND): The idea was, “it will be progress.” That’s not really the way it turned out. At the beginning of the ’80s, there was not a whole lot of attention to deforestation in the Amazon. When it began to kind of attract more attention was precisely when remote-sensing scientists began using satellite images to show what was going on from space.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, 10-19-88):
SCIENTIST: We can locate about 7,000 fires every day.

STEVE SCHWARTZMAN: The images were dramatic. You looked at that and you had to think, how long can this go on before the people who depend on this ecosystem are destroyed?

NARRATION: But the burning of the forest was not the only problem for inhabitants like the Kayapó, known for their distinctive lip plates.

RAONI METUKTIRE (KAYAPÓ LEADER): A long time ago, when I was a boy, there were no whites. When the whites came, there came the flu and other sickness and many people died.

NARRATION: Conflicts between the Kayapó and those encroaching on their ancestral land, led to the killing of some fifty settlers over two decades.

And the tribes weren’t the only ones in armed conflicts. Throughout the Amazon, cattle ranchers were fighting over land with small farmers and rubber tappers, who had survived in the jungle since the 1930s by tapping latex from trees.

Francisco “Chico” Mendes came from a family of rubber tappers. As the head of a local union, Mendes helped to improve conditions for his fellow workers while protecting their livelihood – the Amazon’s trees.

But his campaign to save tropical forests made him the enemy of cattle ranchers. After a series of assassination attempts, the governor of Mendes’s home state stepped in and assigned him two armed guards.

ARCHIVAL (GEOFFREY O’CONNOR, 1989):
CHICO MENDES: I have already escaped six attempts against my life from the enemy. Still, I have a moral commitment to myself. I cannot abandon the struggle even if one day I am struck by an assassin’s bullet.

NARRATION: But on December 22, 1988 the seventh attempt against Mendes’s life was fatal, triggering a media storm that spread like wildfire.

ARCHIVAL (NPR, 12-23-88):
NPR REPORTER: The presence of body guards failed to protect him from gunmen police believe were working for a wealthy cattle rancher.

NARRATION: The murder galvanized the international environmental movement, which was working to increase awareness that the burning of the rainforest was contributing to heating up the planet.

STEVE SCHWARTZMAN: Chico’s assassination really brought about fundamental changes in the way people around the world thought about the process of deforestation. Increasing numbers of people began to see that, in fact, people like Chico Mendes, and indigenous peoples, could continue to be increasingly protagonists of forest conservation.

NARRATION: As news of the Mendes assassination faded from the headlines, a new Amazon tragedy was unfolding: an estimated 35,000 gold miners had invaded the lands of 9,000 Yanomami Indians, triggering reports of spreading infectious diseases and the deaths of hundreds of indigenous people.

Angered by widespread death and destruction along Brazil’s frontier, rainforest inhabitants and environmentalists convened in a small Amazon town for a five-day conference called the Altamira Gathering.

ARCHIVAL (GEOFFREY O’CONNOR, 1989):
Kayapó chant

LARRY COX (EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, RAINFOREST FOUNDATION, 1990-95): What was at stake was not only the future of the people in the Amazon. Westerners were convinced that their future was also invested. That’s what was fueling the environmental movement at that time.

NARRATION: This alliance to save the forest was confronting what it believed was the Amazon’s newest threat: a proposed hydroelectric dam complex that would flood 480 square miles of rainforest, displacing 9,000 Indians. And the Kayapó showed up in full warrior regalia.

ARCHIVAL (GEOFFREY O’CONNOR, 1989):
RAONI METUKTIRE: We don’t want the dam. Our future generations need a place to live and hunt?

STEVE SCHWARTZMAN: I think one of the things that really impressed the outsiders, who came to Altamira was this is a people that has never been conquered. And transmitting that is something that I think has a real charisma to it and a real power.

NARRATION: And at Altamira these warriors revealed a new weapon in their arsenal – the rock star Sting.

ARCHIVAL (GEOFFREY O’CONNOR, 1989):
STING: I spent a day yesterday with some Kayapó in the jungle and realized that I was in paradise. Realized I was in the Garden of Eden.

NARRATION: Sting used Altamira to launch the Rainforest Foundation, whose mission would be to help demarcate, or establish legal boundaries, around the traditional lands of the Kayapó.

ARCHIVAL: (GEOFFREY O’CONNOR, 1989):
STING: If the rainforest dies, then my country is in danger. We are in as much trouble as the Kayapó or the other Indians of the Amazon. We want to save the rainforest with Raoni’s help.

NARRATION: Within weeks of Altamira, World Bank funding for Brazil’s dam scheme was cancelled, putting the dam on hold and giving the save-the-rainforest movement it’s first major victory.

Sting and Raoni seized the momentum of the forest gathering to set off on a global concert tour, raising money for their foundation and helping to make the rainforest a household name.

ARCHIVAL (NBC, THE PHIL DONAHUE SHOW, 5-12-89):
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We take so much for granted. We live in like a society where, we, we, like New York City, there’s no vegetation. These tribes people are living, their life is a vegetation. I commend you I think it’s great what you are doing.

NARRATION The green messaging spawned by Sting and other environmentalists struck a nerve in public consciousness, inspiring a wave of rainforest marketing and movies.

ARCHIVAL (CLIPS FROM MOVIES ‘MEDICINE MAN (1992), AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD (1991)

NARRATION: Internationally and within Brazil, this growing awareness of the plight of the forest and its people helped to pave the way for an unprecedented wave of over 200 indigenous land demarcations in the 1990s.

STEVE SCHWARTZMAN: Today, about half of the Amazon is indigenous territory and protected areas. It’s a huge gain. All you have to do is look at the satellite images, and you can see that these territories are really effective buffers against deforestation.

NARRATION: In the new millennium Brazil stepped up public efforts at environmental enforcement in the Amazon.

ARCHIVAL (BBC, 1-5-12):
REPORTER: The officers captured five loggers and their vehicles.

NARRATION: And reduced the rate of deforestation by 76%. By 2014 these efforts had made Brazil the world leader in the reduction of greenhouse gases.

But just as Brazil began to stem the tide of deforestation, the country slipped into recession, then was rocked by the impeachment of its president.

Some experts believe recent budget cutbacks are in part responsible for an uptick in the illegal clearing of the forests.

But environmental groups like Greenpeace have been strengthening the impact of the conservation movement by leveraging consumers to pressure major brands to stop deforestation.

HOLLY GIBBS, PH.D. (GEOGRAPHER, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN): Consumer-facing companies are those that have to face consumers and manage consumer expectations about the environment, and climate change so these companies are now very sensitive to the idea of consumer disdain.

NARRATION: Take what happened after a 2009 Greenpeace report exposed the links between major brands buying leather and meat in the Amazon and the deforestation practices of their suppliers – cattle ranchers.

HOLLY GIBBS: Retailers such as Nike, Adidas, and Timberland, as well as Walmart, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, responded to this pressure resulting from those reports.

NARRATION: Today many of the leading companies in Brazil supplying products to global brands use satellite surveillance of individual ranchers to certify that cattle suppliers are adhering to Brazil’s environmental laws.

FRANCISCO DE SALES MANZI (CEO, CATTLE BREEDERS ASSOCIATION OF MATO GROSSO): Everything has changed. The cattle rancher is more savvy in terms of conservation, and today, we know that to maintain a share in the international market, we have to be environmentally friendly.

NARRATION: While some ranchers try to evade these new restrictions, research conducted by Holly Gibbs and others has revealed that almost half of the cattle ranchers in the Amazon have adopted sustainable practices, reducing deforestation.

STEVE SCHWARTZMAN: That basic insight, which goes back to Chico Mendes, has become commonplace – to make standing forests a real economic asset that benefits the people that are living in it and that creates real growth without environmental destruction. But the current dilemma in Brazil is there’s a significant segment of Brazil’s political leaders who think that development is all that matters.

NARRATION: Under pressure to bolster the nation’s energy output, Brazil revived the dam project shelved after Altamira in 1989. Rebranded as Belo Monte, it went online in 2016. It is one of more than 60 proposed dams for the Amazon.

Today conflicts over development in the rainforest can still trigger violence.

ARCHIVAL (AL JAZEERA AMERICA, 4-15-14):
A growing number of activists have been killed trying to stop the destruction of the environment over the past 10 years.

NARRATION: Just last month, a government official in a frontier town, who had fought illegal logging, was gunned down.

Decades after Chico Mendes’s assassination, the fight to save the rainforest continues.

(END)