TABLE OF CONTENTS

"So there we were, Bill & Terry, two Los Angeles Camera Guys hard at work on one of our better jobs for the month - videotaping a demolotion derby commercial. Then, out of the blue, we got a call from our Brazilian pal, Caito. Caito said he was working on a big Hollywood movie about a man named Chico Mendes and had a great opportunity for us if we got down to Costa Rica right away....We go down there thinking we had a "Behind the Scenes" video gig, but that isn't what we found. Turned out the movie had been cancelled and Caito wanted us to go with him to the Amazon where we would make our own low budget movie about Chico.

Our first stop was Belem, a bustling port city located at the mouth of the Amazon River. This is where Caito lived with his beautiful wife Angela and their lovely daughter, Julia.

We figured we would need to make some serious preparations for the two thousand mile river journey, but Caito didn't seem too concerned. When we asked him about food supplies, he took us to his favorite ice cream shop...When we asked him about mosquito repellent and malaria pills, he took us for samba lessons... And when we asked him about getting a boat, he took us to truck tire re-tread factory on the outskirts of town. He said if we wanted to know the real story about Chico Mendes, we had to first know the real story about Amazon rubber. He took us over to a truck tire re-tread factory where the son of x-rubber baron gave us the scoop on natural rubber.

Our journey up river from Belem took us through a number of small tributaries toward the Amazon River itself. Our ship, the Rodrigues Alves II carried about two hundred passengers and thousands of pounds of supplies to be dropped at dozens of small towns along the way.

On the second day out , Caito got the Captain to stop the boat so we could take a little side trip to see something called the "Mother Tree" - an important piece of rubber history about how nations once fought over the fortunes to be made from natural rubber. Deep in the forest , we heard the tale of Henry Wickham and the great rubber seed heist - an event that killed the great rubber boom and sealed the fate of the rubber tappers and the rubber trees.

We arrived in the city of Santarem hoping to start our story about Chico Mendes, but that wasn't what was on Caito's agenda. Instead, we soon found ourselves in the biggest hotel in town doing an interview with the Mayor of the city... The Mayor , it turned out, was interested in promoting tourism in the area and before we knew it, Caito had us on a new boat making a tourist video called "Santarem Te Amo."

Maybe it was the cultural differences, maybe it was the language - either way, we came to the conclusion that Caito was crazy. But just when we were about to tell him to turn the boat around and get to the story of Chico Mendes or else, he told us how life in the Amazon depended on people helping each other. "Without the Mayor," he told us, "w e wouldn't have been able to get a boat that could get us to the next important stop on our rubber history tour - Fordland.

After visiting Fordland, we became interested in meeting Ilzamar Mendes , the widow of Chico Mendes. We figured she was the one who had the answers for our growing list of questions about Chico . We wanted to know why people in America thought of Chico as an environmentalist, while people in Brazil saw him as a Marxist union leader? From what we had seen so far, ecology had very little to do with the rubber tappers struggle. Their problem was more economic and social. All they really wanted was a better life , but all they got was wave after wave of economic exploitation followed by long periods of abandonment and neglect.

As intriguing as the questions were, however, it didn't mean we could just abandon the Mayor's tourist video... or take some time to meet some old guys who told us about the rubber soldiers of World War 2...

In the city of Manaus, which was called the "Paris of the Amazon" during the great rubber boom, we came a cross a park named in honor of Chico Mendes. We went in determined to start telling the story of Chico here. Once inside, however, we learned the place wasn't a park at all. It was a landscape supply company and nobody who worked there knew who Chico was.

By that night we had come to the conclusion that Chico was better known outside Brazil than inside Brazil... And if we were ever going to tell his story we would have to get it from some of those books we found in the trash back in Costa Rica...

By this point, we could already see that Chico's story was not a "Ecology vs. Development" story as much as it was a "Left vs. Right" or "Socialist vs. Capitalist" story. Obviously, Chico's heroes were Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, not anyone in the yet to be seen ecology movement. Chico grew up during the cold war, and with his knowledge of how the rubber tappers had been exploited over the years, it was no surprise that he would line up with the "anti-capitalists."

On the other hand, the CIA backed military coup of 1964 in Brazil ushered in a military government keenly aligned with the capitalists. The General's knee jerk reaction against the possibility of the communists getting a foothold in the Amazon led to creation of "Operation Amazonia" - a development plan that turned out to be the rubber tappers worst nightmare.

Our dash to get an interview with Ilzamar Mendes led us diectly to the western Amazon town of Rio Branco and a lawyer 's house in a rich section of Rio Branco. As it turned out, we were not the first media types to come her way. She had already dinned with people like Robert Redford and Sonya Braga and knew she needed a lawyer to protect her interests. While waiting for the lawyer to discuss the possibilty of an interview with his client, we took the official Rio Branco rubber tour.

We stumbled into this little place called the "House of Rubber Tappers." It was a rubber museum of sorts where they had a section dedicated to Chico Mendes. This is where we learned how Chico became a union leader.

The road that leads from Rio Branco to Xapuri, where Ilzamar was, leads through an area that used to be forested but now has been cleared to make room for cattle ranches. The rubber tappers who used to live along this road have moved to Rio Branco or gone to Bolvia. Here we Interview Ilzamar Mendes, widow of Chico Mendes. She tells us how Chico became involved with ecologists from the United States and how they changed his life.