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Outside Magazine October 2002

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Blood Wood
Remember the rainforest? Fourteen years after the martyrdom of Brazilian activist Chico Mendes, environmentalists are once again being murdered, while illegal logging pushes deeper into the world's last great tropical jungle. In this investigative report, Patrick Symmes follows the money, the mahogany, and the mafias—and goes underground to join a brave new eco-crusader with a price on his head.

By Patrick Symmes


	Illegal mahogany seized by Ibama—Brazil's environmental agency—awaits a court ruling on the upper reaches of the Rio Xingu. (Seamus Murphy)

JUMP GOT HIS NAME BECAUSE HE twitches like the Tasmanian Devil. He is as brown as his father, a Munduruku Indian, but he speaks the slum Portuguese of his mother's home, Altamira, an ugly sawmill boomtown on the Rio Xingu, in Brazil's Pará state. The first time I saw Jump, standing in the trash-strewn mud of Altamira's port, I thought he was drunk, because he was dancing a jig at 9 a.m. But he was sober, and concealed his violent spasms, whatever their neurological cause, beneath a repertoire of gestures—suddenly reaching up to comb his hair, or leaping from a chair to point at something. Only in his voadeira, the fast aluminum canoe of the Amazon's backwaters, did Jump seem truly at home. He is a good boatman, popular on the river, and since the impulsive shudders of his tiller hand average out, Jump steers true.

High on the Xingu in the wilderness beyond Altamira, Jump takes us straight into the trees, fast, and cuts the engine. At the end of the rainy season, the Xingu runs black and turbulent, drowning its rapids, flooding through the surrounding forest so fiercely that every tree casts a wake. We slide quietly through a slice in the trees, and ground on a spit of red clay. Following Jump, I tramp across the dark space beneath the lush triple canopy. "A Terra do Meio," Jump says: the Middle Land. A chunk of public land the size of Austria, the Middle Land begins here at the confluence of the brown Rio Iriri and the black Rio Xingu. Its pristine stretch of rainforest is itself surrounded by 62,500 square miles of Indian lands—the home of more than 20 tribes, from the Arara and Araweté to the Kayapó, a group renowned for its fierce resistance to outsiders.

Howler monkeys are somewhere up in the trees, lending their bloody-murder screams to a soundtrack of parrot squawks and dripping water. It takes only half an hour to find the place we're looking for, where the chairs, tables, and fine nightstands of the future grow in isolation on slight rises in the jungle, where the soil is rich with minerals and sometimes even dry. Jump pauses to point out various lesser trees, slashing at one with his machete until it drips milky white. "Borracha," he says. Rubber. He points at another—"Cinchona," whose bark is the natural source of quinine—and pantomimes malarial fever. Finally, as we approach the looming trunk of a giant, Jump utters the word I've traveled 200 river miles to hear: "Mogno." Mahogany.

And there before us towers the immense cause of the trouble in this paradise: a lone, regal Swietenia macrophylla, a big-leaf mahogany tree rising 130 feet toward the sunlight of the upper canopy, its age, perhaps a century, visible in its gnarled branches, in the alteration of craggy bark and bald spots, in the thick roots that flare out like flying buttresses. Skyward, its small, green crown hardly seems enough to support so much force of life.

The Brazilians like to call mahogany ouro verde—green gold. Its wood has become the cocaine of the Amazon, a commodity whose trade thrives on corruption and intimidation, a contraband source of wealth and power jealously guarded by backwoods kingpins. Mahogany is the reason that the head of Greenpeace's Amazon campaign, Paulo Adario, is in hiding, after numerous death threats, disguising himself with an ugly wig and donning a bulletproof vest. Mahogany may be the reason half a dozen Brazilian environmentalists have been gunned down in the last year alone.

If Jump had brought a chainsaw, I suppose we could hack into one side of this giant's trunk and bring it down. If we dragged it to the river, we could probably get only about $30 for it, or the equivalent in sugar and gasoline. If we somehow managed to float it 75 miles back down the Xingu to Altamira, the price could increase to over $3,000. Maybe more. It's a big tree.

But the real money is always farther downstream. In Pôrto do Moz, near the confluence of the Xingu and the Amazon, we could cut it into thick boards, load it on a ship, and send it steaming out into the Atlantic through the wide delta at Belém, where all the wood from a thousand tributaries must eventually pass. You could get more than a dozen dining-room tables from this monster, each of which could wholesale for $4,000 and retail for much more: In the showrooms on Lexington Avenue back in Manhattan, I've seen table after table of Brazilian mahogany for $15,000 and up. Rough out the math: By the time this tree reaches the furniture markets of America and Europe, the wood could be worth almost a quarter-million dollars.

Our giant is safe, for the moment. Jump aims the machete, waits for a spasm to pass, and makes a shallow slash in the bark to reveal the wood. The first layer is bright red, and fibrous. He strikes again—still a harmless cut, but this time revealing the pale white core. If this mahogany were to float downstream, its heartwood would change. It would dry out, darken. Eventually it would take on a rich red-brown tinge, as though it had been soaked in blood.

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Patrick Symmes last reported for Outside from Dahab, Egypt.

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