The ranchers were called paulistas, because many of them came from the state of Sao Paulo. The paulistas hung out at the restaurant at the Rio Branco airport, talking about cattle and women in the same crude terms, and carving the state up among themselves. Recent satellite photos reveal that they have denuded 6 to 10 percent of Acre, which isn't as much as in some parts of Amazonia: in Rondonia, for instance, the clearing and burning started only in this decade, and it is already 17 to 35 percent gone. That so much of Acre's forest is intact can be directly attributed to the energy and courage of Chico Mendes. 

By 1975 Chico was beginning to persuade the tappers that they could stand up to the ranchers. He devised a brilliant tactic known as the empate. An em pate in chess is a draw, so perhaps in this situation it could be translated as a standoff, but it really was a blockade. When Chico heard about a part of the forest that was about to be cleared, he would round up the two or three hundred families who lived there and get them to form a wall on the edge of it so the bulldozers and chain-saw crews couldn't enter. He would put the women and children in front so that the pistoleiros and the police the ranchers had hired wouldn't dare shoot, while he walked the line gently reassuring his companheiros-there is video footage of this-"Don't be afraid, nothing's going to happen." Chico came up with the em pate intuitively, completely on his own. He had never heard of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. He simply took the somnolent passivity of the tappers and turned it into a form of resistance. In thirteen years he organized forty-five empates and saved nearly three million acres of forest. 

Despite the village priest's denunciations of him, and intimidation by the police, Chico not only succeeded in setting up a local of the Rural Workers' Union in Xapuri but was elected town councilman. These victories did not ingratiate him with the ranchers. In December 1979 four hooded men bundled him into a car in Rio Branco, beat him nearly senseless, and dumped him on a back road. The following year Wilson Pinheiro was gunned down on the steps of his local. The two pistoleiros were identified and even how much they were paid was learned, but nothing was done. The only policeman who showed an interest in investigating the murder was fired. The tappers wanted blood, and even though Chico pleaded that that was not the way-one of his favorite sayings was "I don't believe in bodies' '-they took matters into their own hands and went out to Nilao de Oliveira's ranch, tried him, found him guilty, and executed him on the spot. 

This time the wheels of justice turned with amazing speed. Hundreds of tappers were imprisoned and tortured. Some had their fingernails yanked out with pliers. 

None of the devastation that Chico had tried to curtail was visible through the window on the plane from Cuiaba to Rio Branco. It was the wet season, and Acre was totally socked in. The clearing and burning wouldn't start again until May. There was nothing for the paulistas to do at this time of year except eliminate their enemies. It had been raining for twenty-four hours straight, the taximan who drove me into town from the airport said. We crossed a bridge over the swollen muddy Rio Acre, whose banks were lined with the open, flat-roofed, double-decker riverboats typical of Amazonia. The river was still the best way to bring goods from Manaus, a thousand extravagantly meandering miles downstream. Rio Branco seemed much smaller than its most recent population estimate of 250,000. It has a main plaza and a couple of neoclassical administrative buildings, but from there it degenerates into a squalid sprawl of shacks and concrete pillboxes. There was a floating population of rough frontier types, shooting snooker and brawling in the bars, eyeing the traffic. They all looked like killers, and I wondered whom I could trust. Not the police, clearly. I definitely didn't want to show too much curiosity about their death squad. Only a few days earlier a journalist who had been investigating the death squad in the Department of Public Safety in Manaus had turned up dead. It was also probably a good idea to distance myself from the environmental movement. Roberto Caiado, the president of the U.D.R. (the radical right-wing ranchers' organization), had accused Chico in a recent press conference of being a "tool of the ecologists," who were (this was a new one) "agents of North American leftist imperialism." I definitely didn't want to be taken for one of them. Being American was enough of a liability. As far as I could tell, there were only three good guys in Rio Branco: the bishop, Dom Moacyr Grechi; the president of the Tribunal of Justice, Eva Evangelista-both of whom had been anunciados shortly after Chico's murder-and Silvio Martinello, the editor of the Gazeta. one of the local papers. 

The bishop sometimes criticized Chico for going too far, but he was basically a friend. He conducted the funeral mass. "Happy are those persecuted for the cause of justice, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven," he had said, and then the coffin was sealed and taken down the steps through a crowd with placards saying "Justice" and "Death to the U.D.R." The next day Dom Moacyr got a call from a man who said that he had been hired with the pistoleiro Luis Garimpeiro to kill Chico Mendes and him. A notorious car thief and drug smuggler, Garimpeiro is the kid brother of Darli and Alvarino Alves, and is believed to be a member of the Public Safety department's death squad. Apparently the caller had reservations about knocking off a man of God. "You'd better watch out or you won't get through '89," he warned. 

I asked a young girl cutting through the churchyard where I might find Dom Moacyr, but she quickly broke into a run. A woman standing nearby shrugged and explained, "She doesn't want to get involved," then suggested I try the rectory, now the headquarters of the local chapter of the Pastoral Commission for the Land (the C.P.T.). The commission was created by the church in 1975 to rectify Brazil's landowning pattern, which is one of the most regressive in Latin America: 1 percent of the population owns 46 percent of the arable land, while there are 12 million landless peasants. I knocked on the door, but no one came. Remembering that in 1985 Padre J6simo Tavares was shot in the back while climbing the steps of the C.P.T. in Imperatriz, a city on the eastern edge of Amazonia, I tried the door, but it was locked. Then I began to pound on it. At last it was opened by a bearded man with long hair, dressed in white, his neck and wrists dripping with Indian beads and animal charms. He looked like one of the apostles, but turned out to be Xapuri' s priest, Luis Ceppi. "Come in," he said, and explained in Portuguese with an Italian accent, "Dom Moacyr went to visit his mother in the South. He hasn't seen her since his father died, and she was very worried about him after she read in the paper about his being anunciado."

We sat in a meeting room and Padre Luis, lighting up a cigarillo, told me how he had come to Brazil from Milan to practice the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez and the Boff brothers. "The living faith must be linked to the reality of man," he explained, "and the reality of man in Brazil, in both the country and the city, is that most of the people are wretchedly deprived and exploited." In 1984 he met Chico. What was he like? I asked. "He wasn't a great speechmaker; he was just very clear and firm about what he believed in, and he was a born negotiator. He forged an alliance between the tappers and the Indians, for instance, who had been fighting each other for years the Alliance of the People of the Forest. . Nobody else could have done that." 

The Tribunal of Justice was just down the road. I went up its steps and through its Greek columns to the office of the president, Eva Evangelista. On the third of January the phone had rung at Evangelista's home. She was working late, and her daughter answered it. A man's voice said, "Tell your mother not to go to the tribunal tomorrow, because when she walks up the steps her head will roll down them just as Chico Mendes's did." Her daughter was taken to the hospital and treated for nervous collapse, but Evangelista, the first female judge in Acre and a granddaughter of tappers, was not intimidated. "It wasn't a simple pistoleiro who killed Chico Mendes," she told reporters the next day. "There are more people behind this who have to be investigated. I'm convinced there is an organizedcrime syndicate behind Chico's murder and the threats to the bishop and myself." But of the twelve prosecutors in Acre, half were on vacation and only one was working in the interior. It was Evangelista's unprecedented appointment of a special prosecutor and a special judge to make sure justice was done in the Chico Mendes case that led to her anuncio.

Evangelista is a tiny woman who looks like the actress Elizabeth Ashley and has the same throaty voice and gutsy manner. She got up to greet me in front of a huge desk with a Bible open on a stand and the Brazilian flag in the background, and then we talked about the anuncio. In a few days twelve tribunal presidents were coming from all over the country to demonstrate their solidarity with her, she said. "I have four children and a loving husband, but I also have a job to do. We have to discover the authors not only of this murder but of all the murders related to problems with the big landowners. I believe very much in signs from God, and I think Chico died to usher in a new era of justice, to make us think about these problems and act." She and her distraught husband escorted me to the steps of the tribunal and, with nervous glances at the street below, went quickly back inside. 

I took a cab to the offices of the Gazeta. The lead story in that morning's paper was that Darli had come out of the forest, barefoot and armed with a .38, and had surrendered to the police. Chiquinha, the youngest of the four women he had installed on his ranch, had confessed that he was hiding on another of his properties, the Fazenda Mineira, and they had sent his seventeen-year-old son, Darlizinho, into the forest to tell him that he might as well give up. The life-style of the menage on the ranch was getting a lot of play in the Gazeta. "You can't imagine what it's like with Darli in bed," one of his harem, Natalina, raved to a reporter. "He's like a wild bull." She attributed his stamina to an aphrodisiac whose complicated recipe-the eggs of a certain bird prepared with numerous herbs -the Gazeta promised to reveal in its next edition, and did. 

The editor of the paper, Silvio Martinello, a salt-and-pepper-bearded man of about forty, had his feet up on his desk and was listening to the tape of an interview with Darli in jail. "What I don't understand is why they didn't go in and get Alvarino and the Mineirinhos," he complained. "They had dogs. But I guess we shouldn't expect too much from our local police. Considering Acre's history of impunity, this arrest is impressive." 

Darli had denied any involvement and claimed that his son had murdered Chico entirely on his own initiative. But the police were saying that he was the mandante, and still others claimed that the big ranchers were ultimately responsible. What's his connection with the U.D.R.? I asked Martinello. "Close," he replied. "We know from Darli's photo album that Joao Branco, the local president of the U.D.R., was at his ranch for a barbecue." And Gaston Mota, an arms smuggler who was DarIi's partner and helped him massacre the family of rubber tappers in 1977, purportedly heads up the U.D.R.'s "executive committee" in Acre, which decides who has to go. Mota was picked up immediately after Chico's murder, but released, lamentably, twenty-four hours later for lack of evidence-perhaps with the collusion of friends in the police. 

"The U.D.R. owns the other newspaper in town, the Jornal do Rio Branco," Martinello told me. "And a few days before Chico was murdered there was a strange announcement, a kind of oblique anuncio in the Jornal that said a two-hundred-megaton bomb is about to explode in Acre that will have international repercussions. And their reporters were on the scene half an hour after the murder. It takes three hours to get there from Rio Branco, so they must have been tipped off." 

The U.D.R., which came into being in 1985 when Brazil's most recent agrarian-reform plan was going through Its many drafts, is sort of like the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan. Now there are 230,000 members with two hundred chapters in nineteen states. It's capable of marshaling 40,000 people to march on Brasilia. It's run by the rural oligarchy, the two thousand who own 96 million head of cattle and are the force behind Amazonia's incredibly distorted development policies, and the beneficiaries of the billions of dollars of government incentives. In fact, the U.D.R. has succeeded in its goal ofsabotaging the land-reform program. Only 5 percent of the land targeted for appropriation actually changed hands before the program ground to a halt. It appeals to the autocratic, macho part of the Brazilian psyche: you are the master of your land and nobody can tell you what you can do. 

The president of the U .D.R. in Goiania boasts that the organization has 70,000 arms, one for each man in it. Since the U.D.R. was founded, there has been a tremendous increase in rural violence: seven hundred killings in the last four years as opposed to nine hundred during the previous twenty-one. The killings in Acre are nothing compared with what goes on to the east, in Para, Goias, Maranhao. In Goiania, the capital of Goias, there are agencies masquerading as real-estate or law offices where anyone can walk in and explain his problem to the agent, who keeps 60 percent of the fee, studies the routine and habits of the person to be killed, plans the hit, and contracts the pistoleiro. There is even a table of prices: a union leader costs $500 to $1,200; a town councilman or a lawyer $1,500; a priest $3,500 to $4,000; a judge, state deputy, or bishop twenty-five grand.
 

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