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

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 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. 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. 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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

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. 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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, 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, 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

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, 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 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, 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, 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

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, 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. 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.

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