When I flew up to Acre from Rio de Janeiro, we passed through three time zones. One could not help but be impressed by the enormity and the emptiness of the Brazilian interior. Culturally, climatically, and ecologically the North and South of Brazil are two different worlds. The South is modern, European, and temperate. The North is torrid, Neolithic. Only 7 percent of the population lives in Amazonia, which makes up 58 percent of the national territory. 

We stopped in Brasilia, the capital built from scratch in the late fifties in the middle of nowhere, and then proceeded to Cuiaba, the capital of Mato Grosso, a famous ex-Nazi stronghold. I remembered the last time I'd been in Cuiaba, in 1982. The state chief of protocol, who met me at the airport, had a toothbrush mustache and had served in the SS. He kept clicking his heels. I had come to see the Pantanal do Mato Grosso, the world's biggest swamp, bigger than England, with an incredible profusion of wildlife, millions of caimans floating in the water, monumental log jams of caimans as far as the eye could see. Poaching the caimans is a big business. Planes fly in from Bolivia with cocaine and fly out with caiman skins, which are said to provide an important part of the Bolivian G.N.P. No money changes hands. 

The Amazon rain forest starts north of Cuiaba, and though it is being cut back farther and farther and huge patches of it are being gouged out and incinerated, it is still the world's largest and most biologically diverse wilderness, blanketing an area two-thirds the size of the continental United States, with a tenth of the world's species, most of them still unidentified, new trees being discovered all the time, more kinds of fish than there are in the Atlantic, the world's largest catfish, the largest cockroach, finch-eating spiders, and no fewer than 319 kinds of hummingbird. 

The great forest remained more or less intact until 1969, when the government, in an effort to tame and take possession of that vast teeming terra incognita to the north and to secure the national borders, enacted its National Integration Program-an ambitious and expensive road-building and colonization scheme whose centerpiece was the 3,500-mile Trans-Amazon Highway. The idea was to get some of the 30 million dirt-poor nordestinos to settle along the road, and to persuade large investors to clear the forest and produce beef for the First World. 

The government offered tremendous incentives to anyone who was willing to come up to the Amazon and raise cattle: loans at interest rates below the rate of inflation, tax holidays, land concessions. Ranchers from the South and even multinational corporations lured by the promise of big profits moved in. Gangs of chain saws and bulldozers started leveling the forest, and some of the largest fires in recorded history were set. In the fall of 1976, when I arrived in the Amazon to spend eight months collecting material for a Sierra Club book, a fire as big as Rhode Island was raging out of control on the Volkswagen AG ranch in Pará, in eastern Amazonia. I visited a subsidiary of the King Ranch of Texas, also in Para, where the heat from the tremendous walls of flame was so in tense that it created local fire storms, complete with thunder, lightning, and mini-tornadoes. I saw huge trees that had been blasted into the air and had landed upside down with their root buttresses sticking up like the fins of crashed rocket ships. The same thing happened in Acre. S Ranchers from the South began pouring in as early as 1970, after the completion of a road linking Rio Branco with Cuiaba and Porto Velho, the capital of Rondonia, the next territory to the east. The plan of Governor Wanderley Dantas, who invited them, was to convert the state's economic base from rubber to cattle. The tappers, who constituted virtually the entire rural population, and the forest they depended on were just going to have to make way for progress. The methods that were used to move the tappers out were the same ones used in North America to remove the Indians from 1818 on-fraud and violenceand similar arguments about eminent domain and Manifest Destiny were used to justify rolling over this defenseless subculture. No one except Chico had tried to explain to the tappers that they had rights like other people, and most of them just left the forest as they were told. Twelve thousand families went over to Bolivia and started tapping rubber in an area that has become, with Bolivian campesinos beginning to pour in, another time bomb of social conflict. Others headed for Rio Branco, doubling and tripling its population and ringing it with slums. 

By 1976 the ranchers controlled twothirds of Acre. Many had expanded their original government grants by a practice known as grilagem, or land fraud, notoriously widespread in Brazil, where town clerks, if the price is right, are often willing to make out a false title to any piece of property your heart desires. Under Brazilian law anyone who occupies and cultivates a piece of land for a year and a day has squatter's rights to it; he becomes what is known as a posseiro, a "possessor." After five years he can gain clear title if he registers his claim at the town clerk's, but few posseiros have the funds or the know-how to do so. Theoretically a posseiro can't be evicted from his land unless he is compensated for the improvements he has made, but in practice posseiros are evicted all the time all over Brazil by pistoleiros in the employ of new owners whose titles have been obtained by grilagem. Once he has been physically evicted, the posseiro loses his rights 

The tragedy of what is happening in the Amazon might be more understandable if significant amounts of beef were being produced on the cleared land, but that is not the case. The Amazon in fact imports more beef than it exports. The real reason the forest is being destroyed is so that the ranchers can get the billions of dollars of government incentives. They can do so by showing "productive use" of the land, and the cheapest way to do that is to clear and burn it and turn a few head of cattle loose on it. A lot of the land is held in speculation. If the government puts a road near or through the land, it can be sold for hundreds of times the original purchase price. This is one of the most criminal land scams, one of the most unconscionable hit-and-run operations, of all time, because in five or ten years the pasture turns into a barren, brickhard wasteland that may take centuries to recover. The soils of Amazonia, contrary to what you'd expect, are very thin. The lushness of the rain forest is the result of a delicate balancing act, a frenetic recycling of nutrients and rainwater from the forest floor back up into the trees. Once the trees are taken down, the whole system collapses. The soil soon shrivels up in the sun and blows away or is washed away by the rain. 

Page four of Murder in Brazil, The Rain-Forest Martyr Chico Mendes