Chico Mendes

📍Xapuri, Acre, Brazil

“I was born in Xapuri in the state of Acre in the Brazilian Amazon in 1944, the son of rubber tappers, and I grew up learning the forest the way my father had learned it — as a home, a livelihood, a living system that sustained us and that we sustained in return. When the ranchers began arriving in the 1970s with their chainsaws and their title deeds and their hired gunmen, burning the forest to create cattle pasture, I organised the rubber tappers to resist through empates — non-violent stand-offs where we would place our bodies in front of the chainsaws. We won some, we lost many, and our forest continued to burn. I was shot dead on the doorstep of my house in Xapuri on the 22nd of December 1988 by a rancher's son. I had known it was coming — I had received many death threats — but I stayed because the forest was mine and I was the forest's, and leaving would have meant the same death, only slower.”

Sources: Revkin, A. The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest (1990), Houghton Mifflin; Shoumatoff, A. The World Is Burning: Murder in the Rain Forest (1990), Little, Brown