Amazon killings go on despite Mendes' legacy

updated 3:30 p.m. ET Dec. 21, 2008

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - The shotgun blast that tore through the chest of Chico Mendes made the Brazilian rubber tapper an environmental icon and his fight to save the Amazon a global crusade.

But the battle against clear-cutting in remote jungles hasn't gotten any safer in the 20 years since two gunmen hid in Mendes' backyard and patiently awaited their target.

More than 1,100 activists, small farmers, judges, priests and other rural workers have been killed in disputes over preserving land since Mendes' murder, according to the Catholic Land Pastoral, a watchdog group known as CPT.

Of those killings, fewer than 100 cases have gone to court. About 80 of the convicted were merely hired guns for powerful ranchers and loggers seeking to remove obstacles to expanding their lands, according to federal prosecutors and the CPT, founded by the Catholic church to fight violence and unequal land distribution.

None serving a sentence
About 15 of the masterminds were found guilty, but none is serving a sentence today.

"In the Amazon, deep in the forest, far away from the state, cities and institutions, you don't have anything," said Andre Muggiati, an Amazon campaigner for Greenpeace, who is based in the jungle city of Manaus. "Sometimes all you have is the power of a gun."

Mendes, who died on Dec. 22, 1988, was not the first rain forest defender murdered. But in death, he became the most famous.

An uneducated man who learned rubber tapping as a boy, he first organized a union to stop the destruction of rubber trees near his home in Xapuri, deep in jungle state of Acre. His crusade then expanded to Amazon preservation, working with U.S. environmental groups and then his own government to create reserves where people could make a living from the forest without destroying it.

His death made front-page news around the world and inspired a television movie in the U.S.

Local rancher Darly Alves da Silva and his son, Darci, who pulled the trigger, were sentenced to prison for killing Mendes, who tried to stop them from clearing forest land to graze cattle. They are now free after serving a third of their 19-year sentences.

At his capture, Darly Alves da Silva told a Brazilian newspaper: "There was no mystery about killing Chico Mendes. One day I told him that if I wanted to kill him, I'd kill him in the middle of the street. 'You're an easy man to kill,' I told him."

Lawlessness continues
The lawlessness continues, environmental activists say, illustrated in the 2005 murder of Dorothy Stang, a Catholic nun and Dayton, Ohio, native gunned down while fighting to protect land in Para state.

The gunman in her case is in prison. But the ranchers accused of ordering the act are free.

The conflict between developing and preserving the vast rain forest is constant as Brazil struggles to balance the health of the planet with its need to raise millions of its own people from poverty.

But the standoffs between environmentalists and farmers or loggers seeking to illegally clear land are very local affairs, and attempts to mete out justice get tangled in bureaucratic detail.

"Police are reluctant to investigate, reluctant to protect defenders when they are threatened. So the story continues," said Patrick Wilcken, a Brazil researcher for Amnesty International.

Felicio Pontes, a federal prosecutor in Para state for 12 years, noted that Brazil's legal system lets defendants appeal cases five times. Trials are delayed for years. Witnesses die. Evidence is lost.

"You never get a final judgment in Brazil," Pontes said. "At its quickest, each one of these appeals can take three years. The only people judged quickly and sent to prison are the poor; they don't have the money for lawyers."

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