Chico Mendes and the Empate: Environmentalist Bodies, Movements, and Histories

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Brazilian rubber tapper Chico Mendes led forest-dwelling men, women, and children in empates, or confrontational standoffs, to halt deforestation. Empates involved activists situating their bodies between machines and trees, and their mobilizations were effective. With time, Mendes found national and eventually international allies, becoming the face of a movement for sustainable development within the embattled Amazon Rainforest. This presentation examines how and why Mendes and his allies’ bodies and their movements rippled outward to find receptive audiences among global power holders, who eventually agreed to halt international funding for road building projects that threatened further destruction. Although historic, this landmark victory resonated with other effective movements to protect the earth elsewhere in the world. From peasant women hugging trees in a Himalayan village in 1973 to Native American water protectors resisting eviction at Standing Rock in 2016, bodies in motion have challenged capitalist forces, attracted global attention, provoked reactionary violence, and changed policies. In kind, Chico Mendes staged a particular form of performative environmental activism that has a larger lesson for historians who might study very different times, peoples, and places. As seen in Mendes’s trajectory and other histories of environmental activism, changes over time can only be fully understood by attending to the physical movements that animated everyday life and dramatic protests. Embodied and ephemeral moves provide a missing explanatory link for why history unfolded as it did.