Part One: Chico Mendes & the Rubber Tappers Who Fought for the Rainforest

Margaret talks with Prop about the rural union of rubber tappers who fought slash and burn ranching in the Amazon rainforest.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff,
the podcast where I sit in moral judgment of everyone
who's ever lived. I'm your host, Margaret with me today
is one of my favorite ever guests. Prop. What are
you doing man? Tell me something good? Yeah, saying miss
out there? Good? I need something good? Yeah, yeah, this

(00:23):
is gonna be happy. But this is this is gonna
be moral complexity week. Unfortunately, It's gonna be good. It's
gonna exists. Okay, I got any percent through this biography
before I was like, oh yeah, I need some comic
book level fifties comic book good guys, bad guys. Give

(00:48):
me some just that would be happy about and a
listener you want to hear that? Go back to our
first episode that I did with Prop. Oh yeah, just
people destroying the Confederacy from the inside. Yeah yeah, yeah,
yeah that was one comic level good. Yeah, that was easy.

(01:08):
Our producers Sophie, Hi, Sophie, how are you doing him? Great?
I'm good? Pops here yea yeah, squad, this is our
comic level good is okay? In our audio engineer, h
I what The theme music was written for us by
a woman probably have you ever heard of the Amazon rainforest.

(01:41):
Yeah yeah, all right, So this week we are talking
about a coalition of people who lived in that rainforest
in Brazil who did there aren't most to stop it
from destruction. Most of that story is going to focus
around a union of rubber tappers, the people who collect
latex from rubber trees. Okay, and we're gonna tell that
story means of the most famous of these people is

(02:02):
a guy named Chico Mendez. Okay, And the complicated part here,
I tend to judge people who date women based on
how they treat those women as like kind of my
first and foremost bar I hold everyone too. Mendez's not
go ahead. I was gonna say, it's a pretty easy metric,

(02:24):
Like it's like, you know, just like does a person
like bathe you know, yeah, yeah, Like that's an easy
metric that you could just be like check strike one,
you know, like yeah, yeah. So Chico Mendez was not
up to par in that regard, failed that one. We're
gonna talk about that, but it's another moral complexity week.

(02:48):
And the movement that he's part of did amazing fucking
ship and he was a crucial part of doing a
lot of this amazing ship. He was only forty four
and he got murdered by the ranchers who wanted to
see the rainforest burn. Oh man, And along the way
he and the rest of the movement did just amazing ship,

(03:09):
cool ship, cool stuff. So let's get into it. Yeah,
I wrote a song about the forest. Oh yeah, oh ship,
that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I listened to it recently. Actually,
yea everybody, Yeah, yeah, that songs sols fun to write,
you know. I'm actually now I'm like about to im

(03:30):
feeling myself about to get emotional when you get to
the dark sides. It is because I'm just like, it's
so front of mine right now. Yeah, it's it's funny.
As I was, I was reading about all this stuff,
you know, and a lot all the books of chapters
and chapters about a horrible destruction. And I think one
of the things that I do often on this show
is like I kind of like point that there's a
bunch of bad ship, but I don't always necessarily talk
about it. Like if someone gets like tortured and raped,

(03:51):
I might just be like, and then bad ship they
got tortured and rape. I'm not gonna take in details
with the rainforest ship. I'm gonna I'm gonna try in there, yeah,
but but I'm not gonna go like hard at it,
because I think everyone knows. Everyone listening to this knows
the forest fucking matters. Before we get to the rubber tappers,
we're gonna race our way through some of Brazil's complex history,

(04:13):
and we're gonna stop for a moment for this side quest.
I guess and describe one of the coolest things that's
ever happened in the history of the world, the Columbo
dos Palmyras. And I apologize for any Portuguese that I
pronounced accidentally like Spanish, which I'm not particularly good at
speaking Spanish, but I like understand how to pronounce it vaguely,
and I have a I did look up all of

(04:34):
the Portuguese names and ship but I sometimes accidentally ain't
going to pronounce them like they're Spanish. So Brazil has
been occupied by people for at least eleven thousand years,
probably a lot longer than that. It gets its name
and its boundaries and shipped from European colonizers. Of course,
in this case it is the Portuguese. They show up
in fifteen hundred, they settle it in two. They name

(04:55):
it after the brazil wood trees. The Portuguese actually tried
to call it the Land of the Holy Cross, but
the sailors kept being like, no, no, it's where the
brazil wood trees are. Pretty soon, that's a that's a
good beef where it's like, that's a good beef. It's
like the Holy Cross. Not it's just just named after
the trees. Many more trees here. Yeah, that's kind of
kind of a fun little beef. I know, there's a

(05:17):
lot of like, yeah, the the language, the etymology in
some of these places, that's really interesting. Um, and then't
even a brazil would it comes from basically a word
for ember because it's like a red They make a
red dye out of it at the time. Pretty soon
the whole colony, at least the coast is a sugar plantation,
the rainforest on the interior. It gets rated first by

(05:38):
conquistadors were looking for El Dorado, the Lost City of Gold.
Like I always thought that was like sort of bullshit,
like no one actually believed that, Like the yeah, Colombia
in Colombia and Brazil, like it was like nas here. Yeah, um,
hundreds of fucking years is murdering people, being like where's
the gold. Natives are like what yeah, fuck you yeah,

(06:01):
what are you talking about? And then after the Conquistadores,
you get the Bandaritas, the flag bearers, and they're even worse.
They're specifically there to funk up indigenous people and steal
them and sell them to the sugar plantations. And this
history of the Bandaritas and the Rainforce is going to
set the stage for a lot of what we're gonna
talk about later. They're basically this class of slavery bandits

(06:25):
who push westward expansion in Brazil, kind of the cowboys
in a certain way, although the pistole Eros will get
to later or even more cowboys, and they do all
kinds of dirty tricks and ship to get away with this.
One of the things that they do is that the
Jesuits actually really interestingly have a good reputation with the
indigenous people and the Amazon at this time, because the

(06:47):
Jesuits are literally the only white people who aren't trying
to steal them and put them into slavery. So the
fucking flag bears would dress up as Jesuits and then
go around and rob okay, and then they actually started
raising Jesuit raiding Jesuit villages. The end up we end

(07:09):
up with these like warfare between the Jesuits and the
bandartez Um. Later the Jesuits go to war, and this
is at this point a lot of the Jesuits were
going to war our indigenous people themselves, right, um, go
to war against the Spanish and the Portuguese, and really
interestedly in this story way more than other stories I've read,
the Catholic Church is kind of being both good and

(07:29):
bad instead of usually it's just kind of on the bedside.
But the Colombo Dolls dos Palmyras happens around this time
beginning of Brazil's colonization. A columbo is a Maroon community
more or less, um, this is a place where people
escaping slavery go and live free. Usually in the US

(07:50):
you have mirroron communities and the swamps and stuff in
the mountains. This one was fucking huge. It lasted for generations.
It lasted a twenty four times longer than the Confederacy,
which just makes me very happy. They had a fucking
standing army. They repelled seventeen different assaults from the Portuguese

(08:12):
and I think the Dutch. Let's go yeah, so they
It wasn't called Columbo at the time. The word Columbo
comes later sixteen seventies the people. The word the people
use at the time was a macambo, which is an
Umbunda word for war camp. M hmm, and colombo also
means war camp actually from the same language. But oh yeah,

(08:36):
Now I didn't know. I didn't. I had heard of
Columbo's but um, I didn't know as an African word.
I didn't know shit about it. Portugal, I don't know,
even if I can say this sarcastically, I don't never
knew about this slavery thing prop but it's a big
and bad thing. I was. I was aware this this little,

(08:58):
this little Atlantic triangle year yeah and Atlantic yeah yeah, yeah.
They got off the boat before us down there down south,
yeah yep. And Portugal was was first among equals in
the slave trade. They were the slaveyest and they're the
only European power to actually participate in the rating in Africa,

(09:19):
I think, as far as I can tell, like on
a major level, everyone else just bought people, but the Portuguese,
We're fucking monsters. I'm trying to plut through this lighthearted thing.
But um, yeah, it's real bad. Yeah. Ye, anybody, anybody
in my sphere knows this. You know. It was first
they was there for that good, that good African salt,
and then after that they was like, how about the

(09:40):
people that's on the land that had assault? What about
them too? And they just started just packing foods up. Yeah. Yeah,
I've seen anywhere from two point eight to five point
eight million Africans who were stolen by the Portuguese and
transported to Brazil specifically. Yeah, for chunks of time, thirty

(10:03):
of the population of Brazil's enslaved. It's about the same
as the US South in eighteen sixty, but in places
with more plantations. In Brazil it was upwards of sixty
percent of the people. And there's a bunch of reasons
why they had a hard time holding on to enslave people,
and one of them is Mocambo's and that's the cool reason.

(10:26):
The other reason is that enslaved the life expectancy of
enslaved indigenous people was nineteen years and enslaved Africans was
twenty four years in Brazil. And also complicatedly, it was
easier for people to become freed people in Brazil than
in other countries. Um, you get more stories of freed
slaves turning around and enslaving people in Brazil than you

(10:47):
do in other countries. But the other reason that they
had a hard time holding onto people is people got
the funk out and got into the goddamn mountains. Yeah,
in northeast Brazil and the my Dern state of alag As,
we get what's called the Colombo does Palmyras or Angola Jonga.
And because Angola was where Portugal stealing, Yeah, most of

(11:10):
them are from Angola. Yeah, there's something specific. This is
a side note about please, and it's like, I like,
these are the things that like are just so fascinating
to me because people from that region and you know,
specifically Angola, this Brazil, Portuguese, sort of Spain, indigenous goulash,

(11:37):
this is just freakishly beautiful. Like I just don't understand
why y'all are so gorgeous, Like you know, everyone right,
and uh as always Brazil makes this some of the
most beautiful people on earth. But um, but specifically, when
you start looking at a lot of the Brazilian drums,
um music, dance, you could just you if you know

(11:59):
African stuff, you're just like, oh, my god, Angola, Like
it's like immediate, you know what I mean, And it's
just it's it's it's it's a testament to like how
you know, even when how do I say this cut
off from a legacy and a heritage, that that magic,

(12:21):
you know, that somehow continues on, you know what I'm
saying that like you know, like joyous protests, you know
what I'm saying, dances, protests, like it's it's I feel
like Brazil is one of those those those places Brazili
and Columbia to like a lot of people don't really
realize how many African slaves were in Colombia. And if
you go there now, like you're like, you dode, this

(12:42):
looks like this looks like New Orleans, you know, I
mean there's parts of Columbia. Columbia look like New Orleans.
It's just black folks dancing and you're like, yeah, it's like,
well it's Colombia, you know, yeah, no, No, that's like
and it would've been reading about is that some of
the Macombos or some of the reason that a lot
of ship was able to be held onto because you
have like multiple generations of people who now live in

(13:06):
Brazil who like aren't being as forcefully cut off of things.
I mean, on a long enough timeline. I'm not trying
to paint this utopian lee right yeah, yeaheah, We're still
talking about slavery. Yeah, and people who have to escape
from it and only get away for a while or
you know, although you get people who escape and then

(13:27):
have free grandkids who live and die free, you know,
but then they're great grandkids are back in it. Um,
so you get Angola Jonga. In sixteen o two, the
first enslaved people start running away into the hills, and
the hills are full of palm trees, thus palmyras, and
they start setting at Mocambo's and then just fucking more

(13:48):
and more of them. In sixteen o five forty people
who get out I think of sugar plantation, but to
get out of slavery, go out there and set up
a village. Pretty soon there's entire towns. Then there's networks
of towns, and it just keeps going for generations. By
the mid sixteen fifties, it's a kingdom. It literally has
a king. The king is elected. It's modeled on a

(14:11):
kind of syncretic government. It's basically it's like not Europe
is the thing that like, you know, you're like king
and then there's just like image in people's head. Yeah,
but you get the syncretic governmental structure that borrows mostly
borrows isn't even the right words is where people are from,
but like it comes from African systems, primarily in Golan
and also I think Congo, and it also has some

(14:34):
European elements that has indigenous elements within it. And historians
seem to argue about all this because everyone really likes
this place. If you're not evil, you really like this place. Yeah,
And so everyone was like no, no, like that was us.
We totally did that, you know. But the leaders are
a mix of elected and appointed um in a hierarchy

(14:55):
that has kind of an interesting both democratic and bottom
up elements as well as autocratic top down element. The
town leaders, I believe, were elected and together they wound
up electing a king who then went in appointed family
members to like lead a whole bunch of the ship. Mhm.
There were churches there. There are a lot of churches.
A lot of them were Catholic, but they practice one

(15:15):
of those things that I love to talk to so much,
about that show. They called themselves Christians and then kept
on doing exactly what they were doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah Jesus,
yeah yeah, totally, yeah, totally, and then just continued entirely anyway.
So so get this one leaf, you know, mixed that
with this herb okay you know, yeah yeah, and then

(15:37):
pray to the following spirits not guys anymore or whatever. Yeah,
and so Cuelombo Cuellombo does palmaris or Angola jonga. It's
mostly African born or Afro Brazilian folks, but there's a
ton of other people to including indigenous people, mixed race people,
and Europeans. Um. The Europeans tended to either be deserters
from conscription. Basically, people were like, no, not fighting for

(16:00):
the fucking Brazilians. Funck this. They run away into the mountains.
And then also women escaping abuse of husbands would run
into the mountains and go be part of the society.
Anyone with a reason to run, you just get yourself
to Angela Djonga. At its peak, there's anywhere between eleven
thousand and thirty thousand people living in eleven towns, surrounded
by innumerable small villages and homesteads and they're on decent

(16:23):
terms with their neighbors, including like the white settlers around them. Um,
they're just trading peacefully and ship because they just are
there and no one's able to dislodge them. They start
getting supplied gunpowder and shipped by urban merchants. I think
enslave folks who worked for the merchants. And it's first king,
or rather it's first high Lord. We're gonna go back
to Africa for a second. Yeah, you've got this woman.

(16:46):
Her name is aqual Tune. I cannot figure out how
to pronounce this name. I looked for a long time. Yeah,
we say yeah. I kind of feel like I had
a duty to know this and I don't know no people.
She's kind of a legend, so you know, people write
a lot of things about her like they're fact, and

(17:07):
those don't line up with each other. She was born
god knows when in the Kingdom of Congo. That's Congo
with a K. Yeah, like no one knows when she
was born. People roughly know when she died. Um, she's
born in Congo with a K, a kingdom that lasted
about five hundred years that includes pieces of modern day Angola,
and then the two countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo
and the Republic of Congo. H She's born there. She's

(17:29):
a princess. Her dad is the Many Congo, the King
of the Congo. But she doesn't like sit around in
a tower and like wait for a prince. She's not
that sort of princess. She's the military leader of Congo
as far as I can tell, because she led a
battalion of ten thousand warriors in a battle that only
had fifteen thousand warriors on her side. So she's the
military leader of the Congo. She fights the Portuguese in

(17:54):
a battle in sixteen sixty five called the Battle of Mullah, which,
because history is really messy, was mostly African soldiers on
both sides, with European musketeers on both sides, but it
was a battle between Congo and the Portuguese. Um she lost.
This is the biggest problem that happened. Portuguese round up

(18:16):
her entire fucking family, including her dad, the king, including her,
including hundreds of nobles, thousands of other folks and sold
them to sugar plantations in Brazil. Her son was with
her at the battle and at the sugar plantation. She
didn't stay put um. She and maybe her children led

(18:36):
a rebellion at the plantation and then got herself and
family the fuck to the micambo. Um. Yeah, and her son,
one of her sons. Um. He's mostly known to history
is Ganga Zoomba, although that name probably means great Lord. Um,
so it's likely his title. Because he becomes the great Lord.
He is elected the king of Angola Jonga and he

(18:59):
is a legit a king. He has a palace, he
has three wives, he has guards, he has ministers, fucking
standing army. Yeah, like when you you know, like, oh,
it's like rebels in the hills. One of them like
calls himself king, Like no, this is a fucking nation.
I don't think you get it. Yeah. Yeah, we're talking people, y'all.
Yeah yeah, at the lowest the lowest esteate yeah. Um.

(19:22):
And he appoints his family to all the positions, including
most importantly his nephews Zombie to the commander to be
commander of the army. More and more people start showing
up in the maroon nation. Okay, but they do this,
and I'm kind of curious your your take on this.
They get people in a mixed, mixed sort of ways.
People are running away. That's awesome people, um, and people

(19:44):
who escape slavery will go back to where they're from
at night and be like, yo, you gotta get away, man,
it's fucking great out there. Yeah. And sometimes they would
raid plantations and free people. Sometimes they would raid plantations
and take slaves. Yeah, of course they would, but cap
But it's really interesting because captives is kind of a
better word because a goalajanga doesn't have chattel slavery, but

(20:07):
it has unfree people of every race. If you want
to get free, one of the ways that you can
become free is you can go on a rate and
capture someone else and have them take your place. Ah. Yeah,
well you know, you're you're it's like you're still living
in the same universe as the system that you set

(20:27):
yourself free phone totally to another planet. You're still you're
still a product of your of your time, you know,
which sucks. And it's like, you know, uh, slavery or
captivity was, Yeah, chattow slavery was the thing that was
just so new. But like we're we're they're still Africans
and indigenous and yeah, we've capturing people since the dawn

(20:49):
of time, you know, what I'm saying. So their their
concept of it is like, of course, it's like, well, yeah,
this is I mean, this is different. It's not. It
ain't what they're doing, Joe say it. Yeah no, And
that's such an important point. Is like one of the
things that I think that people try because we want
a cleaner version of history, right, we want to be

(21:09):
able to be like, all these people were good and
bad and good and oppressed, and these people are bad
oppressors and there's the Portuguese are the fucking bad ones
in this story. Right, But it's like, but you don't
have like the clean, perfect people who knew everything. And
then also everyone throughout the entire fucking world. Not every culture,
but most cultures practice some form of slavery and chattel

(21:33):
slavery really was different. And that's the thing that I
think that people don't want to yeah address you know,
it's too Yeah, it's the thought is too ghastly. And
because if if if you have to accept that, if
you have to say that, then you have to be
like then the domino effect of like, oh, that means
that what these people are talking about in diversity, equity

(21:54):
and inclusion is also true. Oh, man, maybe we do
need to talk about reparations. Maybe we do. I'm saying,
it's like, but if you're just like dude, it's just like, look, man,
this is just that, you know, it's like ancient people
have been doing this forever. It's like, no, ancient people
have not been doing that forever. Yeah, you know, yeah totally.
It's just actually a different thing. I can still sit

(22:15):
in judgment and be like, you know what sucks capturing
people and making them your slave? That sucks? Yeah, you
know what's saying? Yeah? Yeah, the ones that the part,
even if it is a tale as old as time,
that still sucks too. Like that, you know, I'm saying, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And you know what else sucks is no, wait, no,
you know what else is great? All the advertisers who

(22:38):
support the show, none of whom have ever No, I
can't even straight face, let us pray buy stuff instead
of people. How's that that? You know what? We could
go with that one? I'd rather you purchase, you don't,

(22:59):
I'm saying objects rather than proper nouns, you know, yeah, totally.
Al Right, here's some ats and we are back. So
it might have been our most problematic transition we've ever done,
and we've done a lot of good good Lord, Yeah,

(23:21):
that one was that was a struggle that was out there.
I hope that people take the context of what we're
saying instead of taking things out of Margaret. Text of
what we're saying, give me a trouble over here, Margaret. So,
Portugal and the Dutch are not happy about this place existence,

(23:42):
so they keep attacking. But the thing is that they
keep losing too, because of the Maroons. They really actually
like not being they like being free. So they and
they have spears and they have bows, and they have
some guns, and they know the mountains really fucking well
because they live there. And so they do what defeats

(24:02):
great powers throughout history, the guerrilla warfare, the ship out
of all the invading forces, and Zoomba himself, the Great
Lord is not afraid to throw down once again, not
a European king, Nope. During one campaign against his country
um in sixteen seventy six and sixteen seventy seven, he
gets wounded and a bunch of his kids and grandkids

(24:22):
get captured and he freaks out, so he sues for peace.
He writes the Portugal and it's like Hey, let's can
I have my family back. In sixteen seventy eight, he
sells his people out. He signs a treaty with the Portuguese,
agreeing to move everyone to the lowlands where they be
easier to deal with, and to return any runaway slaves.

(24:42):
I've run across two different versions of this. He either
promised to only let the people born free stay free,
or he was like, all the people were supposed to
stay free, but they'd stop rating and bringing more people
into freedom. Okay, so we don't know, yeah, and some
knows yeah, um, somebody knows. Yeah. Either way, this is

(25:08):
not seen as good by the people who elected him king.
He's in charge because they respect him, not because of like,
you know, divine right or something. So his people are like, hey,
fuck you. Um. In particular, his nephew, the commander of
the army, whose name is Zoombie not Zoomba, leads a
revolt against him, and I guess you could say this

(25:30):
is Brazil's first coup and it will not be the
last one. Zombie is a national hero in Brazil, and
for really fucking good reasons. He was born free in Palmyras.
He was captured as a little kid educated in slavery
at a church, and then he busted out at fifteen,
got the funk back to Palmyras. He led a revolt
against his sellout uncle and he won as for his uncle. Yeah. Yeah,

(25:53):
and his uncle dies of poison around this time. And
there's two two versions of this story. The most common
version is a zoombie and his crew poison him right
for being a sellout. But there's a version that I've
also heard that I like narratively, so I think it's
more likely to be true. It does not actually make
it more likely to be true, but it sounds dope
with it. Does a version were zoom but poisoned himself

(26:15):
because he was ashamed of what he did and he
wanted to warn his friends not to trust the Portuguese.
I like that narratively too. Yeah. I also think so
as a as a as an aside, especially about this
this um displaced in the mountains. I just think there's

(26:35):
an interesting thing happening here in the sense that like
the Brazilian forest and Angola are the same forest, They're
just on the other side of the Atlantic, you know
what I'm saying. So even when you think, like how
these angold and freed slaves were able to be like,
we're just gonna go live up here. It's because it's

(26:56):
the same as where they're from, you know, It's just
it's just how plate tectonics work. It's the same forest, right,
It's kind of dope if you think about it like that,
in the same way that like if you think about,
like the science nerd, the Appalachian Mountains and the Scottish Isles,
that they're the same mountains, you know, it's just on

(27:17):
the other side of the ocean. So so so when
you think about again, like I'll say that again, like,
which is part of to me, just the the beauty
of the diaspora between black and indigenous people. It's like
we've been living in the same forest, you know, it's
just on the other side of the ocean. Yeah, No,
that makes so much sense. And also like yeah, so
they're like they're in forests that they fucking basically grew

(27:39):
up in. Yeah, And the Portuguese are like, we know,
boats in Portugal. I don't know. I don't know, you know,
like y'ah too far north, you don't know about this
equator life. Yeah. Yeah, So Zoobie wins this revolt and
Palmyra stays free some people, not most people. They stick

(28:00):
to the sign treaty. They decided safer and they moved
down to the low Lens. And this is gonna shock
you what happened. The Portuguese didn't stick to their treaty. Wait,
I'm sorry what? Yeah? No, you think that Western civilization,
if there's one thing that's good at its keeping promises.

(28:21):
It sounds like you said, they didn't keep their word. Yeah. Yeah,
I think this is the only time in history it's
gotta be man because you know. Yeah, so the countries
are the people who decided to trust the Portuguese get
captured back into slave horse. The people who stick with
the rebel zoom bie, they get to keep their place

(28:42):
for fifteen more years because it takes fifteen more years
before eventually and there's like constant attacks that whole time,
and they keep fighting them off. January nineteen sorry not
nineteen sixty four, was like wow, that sounds like four

(29:03):
hundred and sixteen years. Yeah, just bad at mac you know. Yeah.
So in the Portuguese finally wipe out the Columbo does
pomaras Um and they were set because again this is
moral complexity. Week they were wiped out by a Portuguese
lead army of indigenous people. Brazil has a really long

(29:24):
history of using indigenous people against each other and against
Maroons like every other colonial Yeah, this community lasted almost
a hundred years. It's the longest lasting rebel society I've
run across so far. In this show, once again, always
fun to remind people that the Confederacy lasted four fucking years. Uh,
Nirvana lasted longer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the band Nirvana lasted

(29:51):
longer than uh. Yeah, to go around replace all the
flags of what was there, things like some like weird
happy face or something that face. Yeah. It took eighteen
attempts by the colonizers over this almost hundred year period. Uh,
and even against artillery. The main town held out for
forty two days before it fell. When it fell, two

(30:12):
people in the main town killed themselves. Rather than be
returned to slavery. Zoombie went on the run, but he
was caught and beheaded, and his head was paraded around
on a pike because at that point he was seen
as a demigod and invincible, and so they wanted to
prove that he was vincible. He was vincible, Yeah, vinced yeah,

(30:33):
thank you, he could get vinced. Yeah, it was like
one of the most he is one of the coolest
people I've ever read about in history. Um, and this
is only the largest of the Quilumbos. There are a
ton more, enough that they have two different fucking words
for it, you know, across the entire country and across
the entire New World, because people worked really fucking hard

(30:55):
to be free and white history doesn't like admitting that
that was the cooler kind of rebel around Brazil at
this time. You're also the boring kind of rebel, the
rich white Brazilians who wanted to be free from Brazil
to keep having their colonial venture like the US. Did
you know, yeah, um, in fact, they were inspired by
the U. S Revolution. Yeah. I was gonna say, there's

(31:17):
a good number of Confederates that left America to go
to Brazil to continue that the the Oh yeah, that
makes sense, the experience or the experiment with the Confederacy
because they felt like America lost its way, but we
could we could keep it going down here. Okay, no,
in this case, I'm talking about the Revolutionary War. But
but that makes sense. A confederate like also doing that. Um,

(31:40):
now I I find the U s Revolution to be
this like thing that seems like on the surface, like
really cool, but it's actually just cementing a colonial relationship,
like kind of a lateral move um from my point
of view. But so, and that's what happens in the end.
In Brazil, these less interesting revolutionaries create the Hire of

(32:00):
Brazil in eighteen eighty nine, they have a coup and
become a republic, and they're still settler colonial state. They
go from a sugar plantation economy to a mining economy
to a cattle ranching economy. Always slave labor um. Cattle
ranching is gonna come up a whole bunch in today's story.
They were the last country in the Western world to
abolish slavery. Oh, this makes sense of the Confederacy ship, right.

(32:21):
It wasn't until eight that they finally get of slavery legally.
One of the reasons that rich people suddenly decided that
they cared about slavery at the end of the nineteenth
century is that the economy was shifting away from um
from enslaved people to underpaid immigrant labor. Yeah, specifically because

(32:43):
it was cheaper and a million Italians came over and
got treated so badly as wage workers that Italy for
a while bandits people from going to Brazil. Wow. But yeah, yeah,
I only just like, you know, slavery is just so messy.
It's just got a lot of baggage, you know. I
just want to be able to do all this stuff

(33:04):
without all the baggage. You don't have to pay health
insurance for, you know, like you don't have to you
don't have to keep a wage worker alive. Yeah, like
the slaves, actually they have to live here. Yeah, I
don't live here. Yeah. Yeah. Along the way from forward
from there, Brazil goes through a fucking thousand twists and turns,

(33:26):
including indigenous people leading the war, a war against the Jesuit,
indigenous people waiting a war against the combined forces of
the Spanish and Portuguese in seventeen fifty nine, and this
Christian mystic Antonio Concierro. Uh, this herodic guy who wandered
around basically preaching Christian communism but not under that name.
And the abolitionus slavery yeah he uh. Some of the underpinnings,

(33:51):
like theological underpinnings, not sometimes it's a little bit indirect,
but like of sort of like black liberation theology and
um sort of just the left leaning like uh, faith
of people of color in America, like a lot of
that actually came from Brazil and some of the thinkers
down there. I believe he was like one of the
one of them, one of the dudes. Yeah, no, that

(34:13):
makes sense because a lot of the a lot of
liberation theology is going to keep coming up in this episode.
And and the church was like trying to shut this
guy up. They were like, no, you can't preach anymore,
like you know, like everywhere he would go. And to
quote historian Carlos m Rama, in hardly five years after
the abolition of slavery, Antonio Concierro and a group of

(34:34):
peasants occupied the abandoned Canudos Haciendo and they're established a
community of workers based to some degree on self management
beyond the exploitation of landowners and the laws of the
Republican state. The swift arrival of a large number of
slaves left of that work or means of livelihood by
manumission is no surprise, nor is the fact that in
the in the few months the community number twenty five thousand,

(34:56):
all dedicated to agricultural and livestock work. The community was
founded as you cleared, as d Kaana says, in the
appropriation of homes and their furnishings, in the absolute community
of the land, pastors, flocks, and herds and all farm products.
Concierro promoted a strain of Christian communism, fought against the
consumption of alcohol as much as against clerical influence, did

(35:17):
not recognize the state or any constitutional authorities, refused to
pay taxes, held no respect for the military, permitted divorce
and free love, and above all abolished private property. And
there's no prison. But there's no prison though, Yeah, I
mean they kick you out if you sunk up. And
I have no idea whether it's like it's one of

(35:39):
these things where like this sounds fucking awesome or shitty
and culty or maybe both. Yeah, that's that's what I'm like.
I feel like that's what we're getting at here like that.
You know, it's a little a little complicated because a
lot of stuff's dope, and a lot of stuff is
like yo, yeah, yeah, a lot of people like people
let people have a beer after work, relaxed. Yeah. It

(36:01):
took four military attempts to shut this basically commune down.
The first three failed, leaving five thousand dead on which
side I don't know. I'm really annoyed because this is
since this is like a side note, I only have
like one source on this, you know, I didn't The
fourth attempt annihilated it, like literally they went in and
killed half the people living there. Whack. But what I'm

(36:22):
saying is Brazil is a fucking interesting place. Lots of
people wanted to be independent for a lot of reasons,
and the church and the left intersect time and time again,
which will tie into our main story. Proper, was something
really good we should be sponsored by. I'm pushing for turnal.
If if we were sponsored by some sort of like

(36:46):
soul food restaurant, or like some sort of like ramen spot,
like a local like community of like of like local
like mom and pop restaurants, may because that means we personally,
as the voices in the show, could walk in and

(37:07):
benefit from this, you know that that would be hard
or some sort of like cannabis dispensary spot, Like if
we were sponsored by one of those and we just
have like a promo code joint, that actually would be
really cool. Yeah, promo code joint pun attended bars. I
want to delivery. I want a Ramen delivery service to do.

(37:29):
Could you imagine if we're sponsored by like a Ramen
delivery thing and we could be like, hey, they and
they gave us like seven free things, so that like
we could be slurping it right now, and I would
start voicing ads. If if you are a local Ramen place,
especially if you're a worker's co op, voice ads, yeah,
voice the hell out of him ads. And here's some

(37:52):
other ads. And we are back. We're talking about Brazil
and we're getting up towards the nineteenth century. The I
started doing this thing where now I just like provide
context for pretty much the first half of the week.
But I think it's I think it helps because I

(38:12):
think that like dropping in and suddenly being like, wait,
why is the church on the side of the workers,
you know? Or you know no, That's what's so hard
about history and like and also what I love about
teaching it because it's like every context has a context.
Where do you start the story? You know? And it's
all interesting if you like really are like just interested

(38:35):
in the human experience, Like it's all dope, it's all
like yeah, so I love it. I love that you
went all the way back to the Stone Age to
explain that's about to happen in in the nineteen hunt.
It's yeah, I appreciate that. So the the early twentieth
century is rocky as funck. There's rebellions from all sides.
The beginning of the twentieth century, the left is overwhelmingly

(38:57):
anarchist because they just imported a million fucking Italis Um.
Then after the revolution, communism takes center stage. Brazil gets
a dictator, not a communist dictator, named Vargus in nineteen
thirty and three different groups trying to overthrow him. The
constitutionalists trying to bring back the republic I think, the
communists and the fascists all try to drive him out

(39:19):
and they all fail, until finally there's another coup, this
time for democracy gets him out in nineteen forty five
because ship's messy. He then wins an election in nineteen fifty,
gets back into power, and then kills himself in nineteen fifty. Yeah,
they get another dictatorship in nineteen sixty eight, democracies restored
in ninety five. That is the bigger broad strokes twentieth century,

(39:43):
um Brazil. But let's talk about the fucking Amazon rainforest.
When you talk about the Amazon rainforest, you sound like
you're lying. You get stats like we've only identified one
percent of the species here, or while the most that temperate,
Yeah yeah, exactly, like the most diverse. Just let's just

(40:05):
start there. Yeah, yeah, did you ever get do you
ever just get fucking sad thinking about the fact that
it's like the undersea creatures that we don't even know
what are, but we've already made extinct, Like it fucks
me up that we're making it. Yeah, that like and

(40:27):
you know, self plug here absolutely shameless. Like the first
lyric I say is before y'all could cut it all down,
y'all even explore it, you know, before you understood what
it could do, y'all just destroyed it. And I'm like
the idea that like you're trying to colonize Mars but
still don't know the forest is like you know, Mohamie

(40:47):
has this saying where he's like, man, you could spell,
but you don't know your A, B C s. Where
it's like you're so smart, but you're so dumb, you know,
And I feel like that's that like you said, like
there's one percent because we could still And what's crazy,
It's like, that's just us. But those who have lived
in the Amazon for centuries are like, I know exactly

(41:09):
what that frog is. I've been seeing it. You know
what I'm saying. It's just y'all, I don't know what
it is. No, I'm calling it a frog because that's
the closest you would understand of what that is. But
we got a name for it, you know what I'm saying,
We've had for centuries. Yeah, yeah, no, it's I fucking
it breaks it breaks my heart. Yeah. So, the most

(41:32):
diverse temperate forests in the world is Appalachia as species
of trees, whereas a random two point five acre chunk
of the Amazon has more than four hundred species. Is
another fucking stat I found. Some of these stats are
from the late eighties, because most of the books I
was reading about this from the late eighties really nineties. Uh.
When it floods, fish swim through the canopy and eat

(41:53):
the fruit from the trees, just from the top of
the trees. Yeah. So yeah, I can't even picture it.
I can't even sucking. Two of the world's surface area
of all bird species Amazon rainforest is three quarters the
size of the continental US. I read pieces where they

(42:16):
talk about some cutting that happened over a couple of years,
some burning, and they'll be like, it's to California's worth
of burning. That's like psycho Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And so
I'm gonna the other part for me, And the other
part for me is I'm like, y'all people live there, Yeah,

(42:41):
Like I just like when you think about the fact
that you think and you just like, we talk about
this forest as if it's like it's this uncharted, you know,
raw earth, in which it is, but also you talk
about a swap the size of three Californias. People live there. Yeah,
Like you just like, what do you like? Y'all acted

(43:02):
like y'all y'all act like nobody there, Yeah, yeah, no,
and then they do a lot of murdering um of
everyone they run across. And yeah. It's also like places
where you have, like, you know, groups of people who
didn't contact the outside world or didn't contact the Western
world until the fucking like nineteen sixties and ship you know. Yeah,

(43:27):
And so I'm going to assume that the listener comes
in understanding that the rainforest matters, whether from biodiversity or
carbon capture, or just you shouldn't go around and steal
people like fucking land. You know, do you know how
it got its name? I only learned this while researching this.
Talk to him. So, some of the early colonial explorers,

(43:49):
they got in a fight with the Tupaia people, and
women were leading the warriors into battle, so they named
them the Amazons, from the Greek word for like the
semi myth of women warriors, the Amazons. And what's funny
about it, it's like all these layers to it from
my point of view, because the Greeks believe that the
Amazons were real, and then historians later were like, no,

(44:10):
it was just like some Greek myths ship and then
like eventually people are like, yeah, no, like a lot
of the step people who came in and like just
murdered the ship. Out of all of the fucking great
civilizations like Greece had women warriors and women war queens,
and you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, the Amazons were real.
They are also real among these people. The whole thing

(44:33):
about like amazon and meaning without breast is not true.
That comes later. It probably comes from the Iranian word
for warrior and I really like the Amazons, the Greek
Ones and the rainforest, and I'm really annoyed that one
of the world's richest men has made his fortune off
of this word for like strong women Amazon. Yeah, the

(44:53):
word jungle. I know, I'm not I'm I've actually been
on the entomology kick. The word jungle is from some
Brita colonial bullshit. Really, when Britain was like fucking over India.
There's this Hindi word for waste land that sounds kind
of like jungle, Like like a dry, barren, arid area,

(45:13):
a useless area, a place that civilization is not. Is
what the British decided is a jungle? Oh wow? Not
like a place where all our medicine comes from, right,
like our medicine cabinet. Like you know what I'm saying
is really what this is? Yeah? Yeah. So the Amazon,
besides the concisestadors and the slave raids and the missionaries

(45:36):
in some trade, has been sort of left alone by Brazil.
It's the non conquered area and a lot of ways
until rubber colonists had been harvesting or trading for rubber
for a couple hundred years already, but natural rubber kind
of sucks. It gets sticky in the heat, it gets
brittle in the cold. In eighteen thirty nine, Charles Goodyear,

(45:57):
the man named after a blimp, uh, mixed that ship
with sulfur. He got vulcanized rubber. He didn't actually he
wasn't actually very good at this. He didn't really he
kind of figured it out, but then he died broke
because he never really figured it out. A couple of
years later, another guy figured out how to do it
at actual scales, names Hancock, and no one from history

(46:18):
remembers him, even though he got fucking rich off of it.
Um And the Industrial Revolution needs rubber for tires and
conveyor belts and aracers, which is the word really on
amology kicks today. I don't know why where the word
rubber comes from is from the fucking pencil eraser like
being yeah, the British rubber. Oh wow, okay, yeah, I

(46:42):
know that was my like. And they're making shoe soles
and fucking everything electrical installation. Within ten years of course,
they're making condoms out of it, I was gonna say
in latex. Yeah, and rubbers. Um. So the rainforest is
suddenly popular with these tiny towns supporting rubber extraction. And

(47:03):
this will shock you. The people who do this are
exploited by their bosses. Yeah, I know, the people who
are out at the edges of civilization are being exploited
by their bosses. It's crazy, dude. Yeah. They also enslave
a lot of people to do it. Even though slavery
had been outlawed decades prior. It doesn't matter because there

(47:27):
out past the reach of law. If anyone wants to
hear about the gay Irish anti colonial knight who brought
down some Amazon rubber plantation slavers, check out the episode
on Roger Casement we did last year. Um, he was
fucking cool. More than a hundred thousand rubber tappers are
in the Amazon by the year, and they're treated like

(47:48):
absolute shit. You can't do anything without the boss's permission. Um,
you have to bribe the boss of more rubber to
get away with anything. Um, including like go to town
and should I think thousand and upwards the ten thousand
people a year are dying doing this work. Most rubber
tappers they go into debt and you enter essentially debt slavery. Um,

(48:09):
because they're being ripped on they're being ripped off constantly,
and you just go further and further a debt the
longer you work. And if you try to skip down
on your debt, they'll set you on fire. If you're
caught growing food, If you're caught growing food instead of
buying it from the company store, they'll set you on fire.
Set you off, okay, like okay, yeah, like chill set

(48:36):
them on fire. Yeah, alright, like what are we doing here? Man? Like?
All right? Yeah? Um, schools are forbidden because not only
can no one read, but they also keep people from
being able to do basic math. I literally had never

(48:57):
heard the word enumero it before, but these people were
kept literate and enumerate numerate. Yeah, so you just don't
know how many hours you've been here and how many
units of rubber that you just dug up. You just
don't know. And they're they're taking ten percent off the top,
and they're like, you can take off whatever percent off

(49:18):
the top they want, and you fucking fight them, they'll
just set you on fire. That's crazy. And there's an
interesting tension between indigenous people and these rubber tappers, one
that will probably be familiar to anyone who reads about
the ship anywhere in colonized areas. There's a hundred years
of bloody conflict between the two groups. But they also
intermarried frequently, and most of what the rubber tappers knew

(49:40):
about the forest came from these marriages and from conversations
with indigenous people mm hmm. And really interestingly, and it's
very important to the story. They did this sustainably, Unlike
most like colonizers who go into like an untouched not
actually untouched, but you know, perceived as untouched wilderness or whatever.

(50:00):
They set up all of their rubber harvesting, at least
in Brazil actually right across the river and Bolivia, they
would just like fucking clear different. Yeah, but the rubber
tappers in Brazil would like um work with specific trees
they knew well and would like knew exactly how much
rubber they could take out of them without damaging them further,
and like just and even when they would like clear

(50:24):
some area to grow food when they could, they would
do that for a little while and let the forest
reclaim it and then do it in a new spot
and like actually pay attention to how the indigenous people
did it and do it that way. But there's still
this tension. Even though they've kind of like learned from
the indigenous people, they're also fighting over territory and yeah,

(50:46):
a little a little pragmatism, you know, kind of like
in play here. Yeah, Anyway, the boom falls apart at
the end of the nineteenth century because someone smuggles seeds
to Asia and the invasive tree does really well in
various other places where it doesn't have like its own
funguses that keep it in check, and it could be
like kind of more mono cropt The rubber tappers remain

(51:08):
in the Amazon, which was very good in some ways
because in World War Two, the Asian rubber market was
controlled by Japan. Suddenly the Allies need rubber, and so
you get these soldiers of rubber. I've never heard about this,
whoa tens of thousands of poor workers are shipped into
the Amazon and like Germany's hanging out in submarines, not

(51:29):
shooting down the boats of the soldiers of rubber because
they don't want the Allies to get rubber because you
need it for industrial war. Yeah, for war. Yeah. Half
of these workers, these soldiers die of malaria during the war,
and after the war they will promise, pensions, and ship.
They're completely abandoned. Most of them can't leave the forest

(51:51):
and return to their families because they're now in debt
to their bosses, and they'll be set on fire. Set
on fire man. Yeah, I don't how long. The set
on fire thing like that was a specific one I
read about, and I never read about any other method
that they used to kill people. And it's very evocative.
They'd like wrap you in latex, which is flammable, and
then set you on fire. One of these original rubber

(52:13):
tappers not a soldier of rubber but which just a
funny word. Yeah, it was our protagonist grandfather, and another
was our protagonist father, and another was this week's protagonist himself,
Chico Mendez. Jico Mendez was born on December four, near
the end of World War two. His full name is
Francisco Alvez Mendez Fiel Home. He was one of eighteen kids,

(52:38):
only six of who made Yeah, only six of who
made it to adulthood. That's a fucking rough it is
in the jungle. His family's poor as fuck. His dad, though,
knew how to read and how to count. Um. His
dad was cool. His dad hated parties and gossip and
just wanted to talk about how they were being exploited
by the bosses. His friends kind of hated him, but

(52:59):
I liked him, you know, mm hmmm. And his dad
had a club foot and walked the limp and had
like physical disabilities, but still taped rubber um and had
a harder time bringing in enough money, but still did so.
When Chico is nine, he started following his dad into
the forest a tap rubber by the time, and this
is a ten mile circuit they walk every day. You

(53:20):
come to know each rubber tree personally. They get several
gallons of raw latex every day, plus whatever they're able
to hunt. You go out with a shotgun and a
knife and a machette ye, go gather what you can
from the jungle. Once they're home. They smoked the latex
to prevent bacteria from growing in it, and a day's
haul is about six to seven pounds of rubber after

(53:41):
fifteen hours of work. They could only do this three
to four days a week because they didn't have enough
territory to sustainably harvest more than three. Yeah. Yeah, I
can't even fucking can't get my head. Yeah no, And
there's like there's so many stories of of like just

(54:03):
like his childhood where it's like the first time you
shoot a monkey and realize it looks like a person,
and like the brother who's killed by random wild animal
and like or like I touched the wrong caterpillar and
now I'm dead. You know, during the rainy season, the

(54:24):
rubber tappers collect brazil nuts for sale instead. And by
the time he's eleven, chicoes a full time rubber tapper.
He learned a little bit about how to read from
his dad, so he used to read the newspaper allowed
to other tappers. But he wasn't like he's gonna be
this like labor leader, right, and so people kind of
wanted to be like this charismatic kid. Like no, everyone's
like now that kids used still wander around open mouth

(54:47):
and drooling. Yeah. And then when he was twelve, a
stranger swept into town and bought an abandoned rubber tapping homestead.
You Claydie's Fernandez Tavora, and he's a communist rebel in
hiding and he never bothered cooking because he didn't like to,

(55:08):
so we just ate sugar. How long did he live,
I don't know. I think In the end, he gets
married and makes his wife cook for him. But but
he's a man after my own heart in this regard
of hat and just eating sugar. I just eat this
stick right here. It's real sweet, it's great. Yeah. He

(55:30):
had failed to overthrow the dictator in the thirties. Then
he escaped a prison island by dressing up as a
woman and getting out on a boat. Then he'd hit
in Bolivia for a while and worked started working as
a rubber tapper, which he was like not constitutionally suited for.
But he had to hide in the jungle because he's
a communist rebel. Yeah, he got caught stirring up labor
organizing in Bolivia, so he had to run back to Brazil,

(55:51):
where he radicalized one of the most important labor leaders
in Brazil's history, Chico Mendez, a twelve year old. Chico
was like, this guy's cool as fuck, and he reads
books books all the time and tried to overthrow the government.
I like him, And so soon Euclides is teaching Chico
how to read even more and teaching him marks, teaching
him that labor produces all value. Yeah. When she goes seventeen,

(56:15):
his mother dies of a complication during her nineteen pregnancy,
you'd think, you know, like, I bet you, I don't know.
It's fucking horrible. And it's just like I feel like
by the time I in my like nineteenth pregnancy, I
feel like i'd be like, it's fine, I got this,
you know. Listen, after witnessing the birth of my youngest,

(56:36):
I am like, I don't know how anyone does that again. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know why anyone has siblings. Yeah, after to
have his wots, I know, I would be like, Okay,
I experienced it. It was great. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not
doing that again. Ye no, I like nine times trip

(57:02):
she keeps getting worse. In Brazil, Leftish government came into
power to try and fix some of the ship that
was going bad. A rural movement started popping off. Landless
peasants started pushing for land reform, which is to say,
have workable land available to them instead of owned by
the rich people. Activists and the Catholic Church start pushing
for the education of the working class. Because of this,

(57:23):
left wing things doing this crazy stuff like working with
the church to educate people of the right wing, supported
by the US and the CIA, staged a coup in
nineteen sixty four installed a dictator. Eucleides gets more and
more paranoid, right the communist rebel, and he starts losing
his ship. He's convinced, for very good reason, that people
are after him. He starts getting sick. Then one day

(57:43):
he went off to walk to the hospital and he
never came back. He probably just died of being sick.
He might have died by being caught and executed, or
and this is the least likely by far, maybe he's
still living in Brazil to this day, fomenting revolution or whatever. Yeah,

(58:04):
but his last words to his protege Mendez, who's twenty
two at this time, is and I am paraphrasing here,
don't just go throw yourself into some military looking leftist
thing and get yourself killed. Join a fucking union organized,
gets shipped done. M hmm. Some ship he does get done,
which I will talk about on Wednesday. But first, prop,

(58:29):
what ship do you get done? What's the plug a bulls? Yeah,
I'll be getting done. Uh yeah, the cold Brew has
been re upped. I'm excited about that terraform called brew.
Get you some coffee, Um, please, get you some coffee.
There's that. Uh you know, we got the politics who

(58:52):
Prop season two. We've been cracking a bit kind of fun,
like introducing YadA the homies, Like a lot of people
have I've known over the years that do like super
dope stuff and are involved. Um the also yeah, also,
like the news has gotten much more comical, so it
makes it easier to you know, have stuff to talk about,

(59:13):
you say, you know so so that helps. But yeah,
and prop hip hop dot Com like I'm releasing music,
releasing poems right now. Um it's a good time. Yeah.
Um so if you got anything you want to plug, no,
I just head politics or prop Prop's got some good
episodes so so, I mean always has been coming in hot.

(59:36):
We've becoming it hot man, it's been dope. Yeah, and
your titles have been a base as an episode called
whose Man's is this? Yeah, I was looking at that
earlier today. I'm gonna listen to that bro, Like, yes,
probably the only one I want to hear telling me
about what's going on in Congress because everyone else is annoying.

(59:59):
Was annoying. Like I just feel like if anyone was
in the room right now, you would be like yoh, hey, okay, boy,
get your who bray, Hey, get your boy dog like, hey,
get your girl? What is she up there screaming about
right now? Hey, shut the funk up? Who is she?

(01:00:21):
That's the way anyone would be in his room right now.
It's so funny, So you all should check out those
things and yes, listen to us more on Wednesday. Cool
People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
Zone Media. Or more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit
our website cool zone media dot com, or check us

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out on the I Heard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.