Chico Mendes Is Killed Defending the Amazon

On the evening of 22 December 1988, Brazilian rural labor leader Francisco Mendes Filho, widely known as Chico Mendes, was shot and killed at his home in the Amazonian town of Xapuri. Mendes was forty-four years old and had spent years organizing fellow rubber tappers against the destruction of the surrounding forests. His killer was Darci Alves da Silva, the son of a local cattle rancher named Darly Alves da Silva, who had acquired land within a rubber reserve and sought to clear it for pasture. His death came amid a wave of killings of rural union leaders, workers and activists in Brazil.

Born in 1944 on a rubber reserve in Acre, Mendes began tapping trees alongside his father when he was nine years old. Landowners systematically barred schools from operating near plantations to prevent laborers from understanding their accounts, leaving Mendes unable to read until he reached the age of eighteen. An activist turned tapper named Euclides Távora taught him to read using political news clippings, prompting Mendes to establish literacy programs for other workers. Recognizing that their forest livelihoods were threatened by clear-cutting and cattle ranching, the tappers organized through the Xapuri Rural Workers' Union and relied on nonviolent blockades, known as empates, to obstruct logging crews.