Essay

Quest for freedom in Amazonia

by Osmarino Amancio Rodrigues

It is probable that at present there are more than 1.5 million people in the Amazon forest who depend on its products for survival. This is without taking into account the numerous families expelled from the forest, who live in the cities sustained by the work of their family members who remain in the forest, planting and harvesting some of its riches: obtaining dried fruit; hunting without affecting the sustainability of the animals; extracting latex from the rubber trees while respecting their production capacities; planting, and fishing. Indians, seringueiros (rubber tree tappers) and other forest workers represent a lifestyle that cannot be destroyed, but to the contrary, must be developed.

There are more than two million different species of trees, ten times the number found in temperate forests, 50,000 plant varieties, 2,500 fish species, more than a thousand distinct birds, and much more. What is for certain is the understanding of the people of the forest that the gigantic Amazon forest is not brutal, but rather a sensitive and delicate beast.

We the seringueiros and the Brazil nut crackers united with the Indians and all other peoples from the Amazon because, as with the bees and orchids, we are part of this biodiversity of the forest. We are therefore decidedly against the ranchers and the capitalists, whether Brazilian or foreign who are interested in setting up operations that destroy the forest. The people of the forest need the forest to live, and the forest needs us to defend it against capitalist barbarism.

The forests of great biodiversity are still found in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, The Congo, and Indonesia, exactly the regions where imperialism leads to devastating and destructive action without any masks. The peoples of the Amazon forest have knowledge of the millions of plant species there because we use them in our everyday lives as part of our daily food or because we know their properties for providing us with products such as oils, waxes, aromas, latex, and remedies. Brazil has an immense wealth for humanity in this sense, where 10 to 20% of the total number of the planet's species is found.

We do not have an overall knowledge of the wealth of our biodiversity, but we know that capitalism is not interested in developing it for the use of humanity, but wants to destroy it for profit. And this is exactly why there is a war taking place in that large forest, a true war between the peoples of the forest and capitalism, whether national or international. In this war, many revolutionary comrades have died, others avoided the struggle, and others prostituted themselves when they saw the possibility of earning money by changing sides. That is what we call the law of money.

SERINGUEIROS SELF-ORGANIZATION

I come from a country that has continental dimensions and the region known as the Amazon corresponds to more than 57% of its national territory. It is evident that a country with these dimensions presents us with a very diversified rural reality. We have the extracting section (including rubber tree tappers-seringueiros-and other people who live in the forests), the rural wage workers (permanent and temporary), poor small rural property owners, and the landless (made up of small property owners who lost their land, rural wage workers with nowhere to work, and urban unemployed with rural origins).

Until 1972 there was no organized movement in the Amazon. The seringueiros and the indigenous people, known in Brazil as "Indians," and all other Brazilians faced a military dictatorship which, fearing the increasing and entrenched guerrilla activity, resorted to a policy that aimed at genocide of the populations that lived in the forest and at the destruction of the forest itself. No one presented any form of collective struggle. We had no idea of the policy that capitalism intended to apply to our region and even less of that intended for the country as a whole.

It started with the intensive process of expulsion from the forest of the Indians and other peoples. The Catholic Church initiated a project of ecclesiastic grassroots communities, but they had limitations. In 1975 we then launched the first trade union of rural workers in the state of Acre. This was the beginning of the process of the formation of rural workers' trade unions in several municipalities in the region. During this period the unions allowed by the government were multi-class while from the start our intervention was for organizing the working class.

In 1976 the first collective action against the latafundia (large estates) system, the large land owners, and the government's policy was organized. It was a hard struggle which made us understand the importance of collective action, fraternity, and solidarity since it was a fight against the army and the state police. It was a confrontation that made history. It was when for the first time we emerged victorious on the first empate. Empate is a form of collective action against forest clearance where the seringueiros unite to prevent the land owners from destroying the woodlands. Men, women, and children participate in these confrontations. It is a struggle where sides are clear, and where solidarity and trust are what we most need. They are our strongest weapons.

At the end of the decade of the '70s, the conflicts became more intense in almost all of the regions of the Amazon, and at the beginning of the '80s we founded, together with urban workers, the Central Unica de Trabalhadores (CUT), a working-class entity that centralized all trade union activities and became the largest of its kind in the whole of Latin America. The majority of the unions of the region affiliated with CUT, but from the beginning we understood that CUT did not have a major concern with elaborating a policy with us for the Amazon. They emphatically characterized our struggle as merely ecological, did not agree that our movement was a movement for agrarian reform, and confused our struggle with that of ecologists and environmentalists. Amongst the majority of the Brazilian left vanguard it wasn't clear that the struggle against the destruction of the Amazon is a struggle for the survival of approximately two million people, that it is a struggle that confronts the capitalist system.

We cannot deny that the ecologists were great allies, sometimes more than the traditional left which, through its policies, ended up collaborating in maintaining the isolation that the system intended for us. However we managed to understand this and decided to act to end this isolation. In 1985 we created the National Council of Seringueiros, aimed at developing a policy around the peoples of the forests.

At the same time, the Movement of Landless Rural Workers was created, or rather reactivated, as well as the Movement of Those Affected by Dams. Sectors of rural workers managed to find ways of organizing that strengthened them and of ending the isolation in which they lived. However, we had to do this by our own initiative since neither the traditional left nor CUT had a policy for rural workers in Brazil. Although we had comrades in the national executive of CUT who tried to develop work and policy in that direction, they did not find support.

SELF-DETERMINATION AND SOLIDARITY

The National Council of Seringueiros and the Alliance of the Peoples of the Forest developed a policy in which the question around large estates and economic, political, and social questions were considered together with the ecological question. Several associations, cooperatives, and schools were founded and we started work on preventative health care.

These movements had the objectives of strengthening the trade union movement, breaking away from the state, and fighting for socialism. One of our first stands was not accepting any land ownership documents, in other words, fighting for the right to use the land taken away from farm owners and other enterprises. At the time and until the present, we think that our attitude was the most politically correct. We have faced several difficulties since the majority of the current leadership of the movement is making concessions, accepting money from the seven richest countries to develop timber extraction. Each day there are more non-governmental organizations and the movement is weakening.

We need to unite with you to fight capitalism, whether with its neoliberal or its social democratic face. We want to fight the system in its totality and not in parts, and although we are doing this at the level of our country, we need that struggle to be strengthened internationally.

We believe that the political conditions are very favorable since the grassroots base is in revolt against the executive of the National Council of Seringueiros, where only a minority identifies with the base. The peoples of the forest-seringueiros, Indians, rebeirinhos (craft fishermen), castanheiros (people who crack Brazil nuts)-were the main subjects of a proposal to defend the Amazon. Their proposal is based on traditional ways and their ways of life in the extraction and gathering of diverse products (such as rubber, Para nut, fish, potato, acai-a palm used in wine, cream, sorbet, and so on-oil, fruits, and others), maintaining a profound relationship with the ecosystem, extracting from nature not only the necessities for basic survival.

On the other hand, the government's model of development established in that region from the '60s onwards-with the opening of roads, fiscal incentives to the estate owners and agro-industries, and colonization projects-brought a profound loss of character to the space and social life. One of the assumptions of the government's model, that of a demographic void and absence of economic activities with resulting large immediate profits, did not allow the perception of the existence of complex forms of survival, both economic and cultural, characteristic of a tropical forest region.

The resulting social and ecological transformations-deforestation, expulsion of populations, a high poverty rate of the urban populations, and loss of ethnic and cultural character-are a product of a process with two faces. On the one hand, there's the implementation of completely predatory economic activities, causing profound modifications in the environment. On the other hand, there's the destruction of the activities that already existed as agricultural and extracting activities in which the local populations were involved.

CONTRADICTIONS AND VICTORIES

In the Western Amazon, especially in Acre, the seringueiros every year organize in the summer a movement for the defense of the forest against the devastation. These are the empates which are collective actions that envisage stopping or preventing the destruction of the forest. During the empates the camps of the enterprises are disrupted, the chain saws and the agricultural instruments seized, and there are also discussions with the workers in those estates to persuade them to abandon the work of forest destruction. The National Council of Seringueiros of the Amazon, formed by the representatives of several rural unions in the region as a result of the first empate /meeting of seringueiros that took place in 1985, took a similar part in the movement in the region.

Those actions, true historical beacons in the defense of the forest and of the peoples that live in it, are beginning to suffer from a great erosion process due to the bureaucratization and degeneration of the current leadership which no longer defends important principles. For example, they don't defend the movement of the people who live in the forest and who had the objective of strengthening the rural union movement which is fighting for agrarian reform under their control, and against all the extension projects financed by the seven richest countries whose only objective is immediate profits.

Today, with the current leadership, those actions which were truly historical events in the defense of the Amazon peoples and forest are not finding a response because they take place in remote and isolated regions, through individual activities by small groups of people.

Even with all these problems, even with many comrades being killed in this war, the movement has had important victories. We managed to remove from the hands of the woodland estate owners 11,786 square miles of forests during the decade of the '80s. This land area is a victory for 9,174 families in the struggle for land and agrarian reform. From 1990 to 1995 we increased that area to approximately 19,300 square miles, but it is important to highlight that 347,500 square miles have extractable potential. This means that the war will continue since land reform in Brazil will only take place when a revolutionary perspective will become strong enough. The current war we are engaged in is already part of the revolutionary process.

We think that it is time to stop the advance of capitalist barbarism in the cities as well as the rural areas. Preventing them from applying their policies in the Amazon is to inflict a defeat to the system. But we know that this struggle cannot be carried out only by those workers who are directly involved. It is a wide struggle that depends on the solidarity and understanding of its importance at the international level.