Chico Mendes

Francisco Alves Mendes Filho was born in 1944 on a rubber estate in Acre, in the far west of the Brazilian Amazon, and began tapping trees at nine. The estates did not allow schools, and he learned to read at 18 from a political refugee who was hiding in the forest and taught him from newspapers. In the 1970s, as the government pushed roads into Acre and cattle ranchers began buying up the forest and burning it, he became a union organiser.

The tappers' weapon was the empate, a standoff in which whole families, women and children in front, walked into the forest and stood between the ranchers' workers and the trees. Some ended in arrests and beatings; many succeeded. Mendes reckoned they had saved more than a million hectares of forest. He argued that the tappers, who harvested rubber and nuts without felling the trees, were the forest's best protectors, and proposed extractive reserves, land owned by the state and managed by the communities living on it.

In 1987 he flew to Washington and Miami to lobby the banks funding the roads, and the loans were suspended. He won a United Nations environmental prize, which made him famous abroad and hated at home. He named the ranchers who had threatened him and predicted his own death.

On 22 December 1988 he was shot with a shotgun as he stepped out of his back door. A rancher and his son were convicted. The first extractive reserves were created two years later, one of them in his name.