CHICO MENDES: SON OF THE RAINFOREST, BASTARD CHILD OF PROGRESS

The son of a rubber tapper in the Amazon rainforest, he began working before the age of ten. He became a representative of the workers, whom he rallied to the cause of environmental protection, promoting the idea that progress could be achieved in a balanced and sustainable way. He stood up to the military government, to landowners, and to criminals. Here is part of his story.

Chico Mendes, worker and environmentalist.

The night in the rainforest is absolute darkness. Deep within or along its edges, the night renders everything—and everyone—invisible, especially providing cover for the killers who lie in wait for that one careless movement their victim inevitably makes. The jungle at night is generous to murderers, offering them that brief, opportune moment in time to commit the crime. In the dark, the forest and the assassins vanish together. In the depths of the rainforest, “progress” rises from the roots, climbs up the trunks, and spreads through the canopy—the same trees that bind the forest and the night in a love affair. The jungle has no fixed boundaries. It has a periphery, but it’s nearly impossible to say where it truly ends. Little by little, the rainforest begins to lose its volume—its defining feature, the very quality that gives it its name. Its heart, on the other hand, can be defined in two ways: either by coordinates, generally agreed upon by scientists, or by the will of other men—businessmen. In the case of the Amazon rainforest, the center was defined by landowners who, in the mid-19th century, began exporting latex from rubber trees—seringueiras in Portuguese—that populate the entire Amazon Basin.

Rubber had long been used by Indigenous peoples to make containers, belts, balls, and shoes. But as demand exploded following the invention of vulcanization—a physical-chemical process that made rubber stronger and more durable—the drive to amass vast fortunes from natural resources turned toward this once-overlooked substance. Rubber began to be used in massive quantities with the rise of new industries that emerged from the Industrial Revolution, particularly those focused on transport, communications, and powered machinery. A handful of landowners and emerging capitalists in the Northern Hemisphere quickly monopolized the market. Others, eager to get a piece of the business, crossed the ocean to reach the Amazon and seize control of what had become the industrial world’s prized raw material: rubber. Hundreds made the journey, venturing deep into the forest to build makeshift outposts from which they could coordinate the extraction of latex. The nerve center of that network was the settlement once known as Cidade da Barra do Rio Negro—first a fortress, then a village—which in 1856 received its final name: Manaus.

Manaus, the landed capital of the Amazon.

The landowners and capitalists built an entire modern city, which they defined as the heart of the Amazon. The city of Manaus rose on the left bank of the Rio Negro, the most voluminous tributary of the Amazon River. The vast network of rivers became the main route through which rubber, dyes, timber, and even slaves were transported to the Atlantic. European businessmen imported their entire social and cultural structure into the jungle. The Belle Époquearrived in Manaus and transformed it into the Paris of the Tropics. A courthouse, a theater with capacity for seven hundred people, and a municipal market designed by Gustave Eiffel—the same engineer who gave Paris its tower—were all decorated with Louis XV furniture, Italian marble, and British ironwork. These became the cultural and political centerpieces of Manaus.

Along with Manaus' cultural Europeanization came disease and a “refinement” of the production model. Thousands of Indigenous people began to die of illnesses they had never known before: smallpox, measles, typhus, and syphilis, among others. But the real innovation that devastated Indigenous communities was the perfected application of slave labor to rubber extraction. Men, women, boys, and girls were forced to extract latex from rubber trees. Indebted, tortured, raped—by the thousands—they died daily, sick, broken, prostituted, and exhausted from the endless labor, pushed deeper into the jungle. Those who weren’t forced into becoming seringueiros—the Portuguese term that emerged during those dark times to describe rubber tappers—were made to build and develop the city, until the first rubber boom came to an end.

While Manaus became a living hell in development, British businessmen were smuggling vast quantities of rubber tree seeds and planting them across extensive territories in their Southeast Asian colonies. By doing so, they effectively seized control of the entire global rubber production and distribution chain, destroying Brazil’s share of the market. Manaus collapsed almost overnight. The price of Amazonian rubber plummeted, and the businessmen doubled down on the exploitation of seringueiros in a desperate attempt to maintain their profit margins. Labor was the main adjustment variable—and remained so when the Japanese army invaded Malaysia and other rubber-producing regions of the South Pacific during World War II, cutting off rubber supplies to the British and the rest of the Allied forces. Once again, Manaus and the broader Amazon became the world’s primary rubber supplier.

Rubber prices surged again—but the region had been left abandoned, short on both capital and labor after the first boom ended. The Brazilian government responded by sending thousands of poor workers into the rainforest to ramp up latex extraction and meet international demand. A hundred thousand people—once again, men, women, and children—entered the jungle to tap rubber. The Amazon once more became the devil’s playground. The decaying luxury inherited from the first boom was now populated by soldiers tasked with controlling the seringueiros. Forced to work over twelve hours a day, poorly fed, and barely equipped, thirty thousand seringueiros died during the course of the war. Almost at its end, on December 15, 1944, the Amazon pulsed from its core. On that day, the rainforest, its people, its guardians exhaled in sync with the very first breath of life taken by Francisco Alves Mendes Filho—known throughout the Amazon, the rainforest, and by every rubber tapper as Chico Mendes.

The son of a seringueiro, like his father before him, he began working as a child—at the age of nine—tapping rubber in his hometown of Xapuri, in the western Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil. By the time Chico was born, opportunities for seringueiros remained scarce. When the war ended, demand for rubber collapsed, prices fell, and it became increasingly impossible to survive off an industry that was now being replaced by cheaper, better alternatives. Like most seringueiros, Chico didn’t learn to read or write until many years later. The economic situation was dire. And just as had happened a century earlier with rubber, the capital of landowners and businessmen began shifting toward meeting a new global demand: food. Deforestation across vast areas of the Amazon for agriculture and cattle ranching began to corner seringueiros, who were desperately trying to defend their livelihoods and basic means of survival.

Since the interwar period, Brazilian businessmen and military officers had repeatedly disrupted democratic governments. Until 1964, democratically elected administrations and military coups alternated with varying consequences. But on the morning of April 1, 1964, the military—backed by the Brazilian bourgeoisie—installed a semi-democratic, semi-dictatorial regime that would remain in power until 1985. Kidnappings, torture, and forced disappearances of union leaders, farmers, students, and political activists—especially those who were democrats, socialists, or communists—became grotesquely common during much of what was known as the Revolução Militar de 64. In the cities, the ruling class welcomed the regime’s policies: unions were shut down, strikes were banned, wages were frozen. Financially, the economy was liberalized, and Brazil was plunged into a period of rapid, reckless foreign debt. In the Amazon, the government’s and landowners’ incursions into the territories of smallholders, laborers, and Indigenous communities moved in unison—a dance for two partners. This military regime was far more organized than its predecessors. It aimed to stay in power indefinitely and to fully implement its objectives. From the beginning, it sought to transform vast swathes of rainforest into pastureland for cattle. Logging was intensified for international markets, and new, deeper incursions into the jungle were ordered in search of iron, copper, and nickel reserves. To achieve this, and with military labor, the government coordinated the forced displacement of poor workers and entire Indigenous communities to other regions—while environmental conditions deteriorated dramatically.

While the Brazilian dictatorship solidified the conditions for its long stay in power, Chico, at twenty years old, began to express concern about his own living conditions, those of his father, and those of the seringueiros. Despite the dictatorship and its repressive methods, resistance groups were organizing in all regions—most of them led by socialist and communist activists who had fled the major cities under tight military control. These groups sought to engage with workers and peasants through community-based activities such as literacy programs and food assistance. Chico was one of the many workers who benefited from this political engagement. Years later, he would acknowledge that he learned to read and write at the age of twenty-four thanks to Euclides Távora, a communist militant who had settled in Xapuri after taking part in the Bolivian workers’ uprising that had successfully defended the elected government of the National Revolutionary Movement against a military coup attempt.

The mobilization of rubber tappers during World War II cost the lives of more than thirty thousand people.

Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, better known as Chico Mendes.

Chico became increasingly concerned about the political and social situation—not only that of his city or his region, or even the portion of the forest where he worked. Learning to read and write opened up a whole new world to him, and he began reading books, texts, and socialist and communist manifestos. But Chico wasn’t drawn to academic theorizing. Instead, he gravitated toward institutions dedicated to organizing workers. Labor and environmental conditions in the region were rapidly deteriorating. Worker debts were growing, and life began to resemble the same hell that had existed two centuries before. Sporadic worker protests demanding better living conditions were brutally suppressed—by security forces and by armed criminals hired by landowners to guard their property. In 1975, Chico formally joined the rural workers’ movement when he was elected secretary of the Rural Workers’ Union of Brasiléia, a city in the state of Acre and a neighbor to his hometown of Xapuri.

The main concern among workers in the region was deforestation—the complete elimination of their sources of livelihood. Chico and other union leaders began to promote a form of protest known as empate, which quickly gained traction. During the empates, seringueiros would stand in front of the trees—sometimes even tying themselves to them—to prevent them from being cut down. This novel form of resistance produced immediate, though temporary, results. Those small victories—when the loggers’ saws were forced to rest against the earth—gave the seringueiros a jolt of adrenaline and hope. They were encouraged not only to keep fighting for their jobs and working conditions but also to stop the eviction of small landowners who had fallen into debt.

The politics and practice of uniting struggles became a driving force for Chico and Wilson Pinheiro, president of the Rural Workers' Union of Brasiléia. It would become a defining characteristic of the seringueiros’ movement in those years. Chico’s activism grew, and just a year after launching the empates and bringing seringueiros into the struggle, he managed to establish the Rural Workers’ Union in his hometown of Xapuri in 1977. His union work developed alongside his growing environmental awareness. He became a correspondent for a small newspaper, which he distributed among the seringueiros, using it as material to promote political education and discussion.

That same year, having successfully created the union in Xapuri, Chico ran for city council as a candidate for the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), the only opposition party officially permitted by the military dictatorship to take part in elections. The party was diverse, made up mostly of men with varying political ideologies—many with political concerns, but few with an interest in labor or environmental issues. The party showed little interest in supporting its representatives from the remote states, far from Brazil’s main political and economic centers.

Chico’s involvement in labor, environmental, and political struggles began to draw the attention—and irritation—of the landowners, who were disturbed by the influence a simple seringueiro was gaining among workers and the general population. Threats began to reach Chico, but so too did gestures of solidarity from his fellow seringueiros—though not from his party colleagues. By mid-1979, frustrated and disillusioned with the party, Chico decided to use his city council seat to organize a forum for dialogue among labor, grassroots, and religious leaders at Xapuri’s city hall. The event was a success and provoked the wrath of military authorities, who accused him of organizing subversive activities. Chico was illegally arrested, tortured, and—after a brief time in jail—finally released. Once again, the party offered no help. It did not denounce his illegal detention and gave him no support when he tried to report the torture he had endured. At the end of that same year, the Brazilian Democratic Movement splintered into several factions. Most of its members regrouped under the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB); another formed the Democratic Labour Party (PDT); and a group of union leaders founded the Workers’ Party (PT), which included Chico and the then-metalworkers’ union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Violence carried out by criminals in the pay of landowners spiraled out of control. In September 1979, Wilson Pinheiro—Chico’s friend, president of the Brasiléia union, and a member of the newly formed PT—organized a massive march against the gunmen hired by landowners. The seringueiros ambushed the criminals, disarmed them, and turned the weapons over to the local military authorities. The coordinated action, led by Wilson, sent shockwaves through the landowning elite, who began meeting to figure out how to prevent similar acts of defiance in the future. The landowners were determined to do whatever it took to regain control. After several meetings involving ranchers from multiple states, they agreed to order the assassination of the rebellion’s leader. On the night of July 21, 1980, as Wilson was watching television with colleagues at the union office, two hired gunmen—one from Xapuri who knew Wilson personally, and the other from Brasília—fired three shots and ended his life.

Violence gave way to more violence. After Wilson Pinheiro’s murder, a group of seringueiros killed one of the gunmen hired by landowners to surveil the workers. The landowners accused Chico of being the intellectual author and instigator of the killing, and military authorities—acting in the landowners’ interest—branded him a subversive before the courts. Chico began living in constant danger. In 1981, the newspaper for which he was a correspondent was shut down—the same year Chico assumed the presidency of the Brasiléia Rural Workers' Union, stepping into the role once held by his murdered friend and comrade. In 1982, he ran for state deputy as a candidate for the Workers’ Party (PT), though he was not elected. His struggle focused on merging labor and environmental issues, on forging a broad and strategic understanding of the economic system.

In 1983, Chico remarried. He had previously been married and had a daughter, but that first union had ended quickly. With his new wife, Ilzamar Gadelha—a woman several years younger than him—he settled into a small wooden house, lent to them by a friend, in his hometown of Xapuri. There, they would raise their two future children: Elenira and Sandino Mendes.

In one of the many meetings with workers and environmentalists.

Chico’s main focus remained the organization of workers. In 1985, he organized, convened, and led the First National Seringueiros Meeting, during which participants agreed to establish the National Council of Rubber Tappers (Conselho Nacional dos Seringueiros)—the most important tool ever created for the sector. Through this council, workers began to coordinate their actions with both a national and international outlook. The council also adopted Chico’s visionary proposal to form the Union of the Peoples of the Forest (União dos Povos da Floresta), a coalition of rubber tappers, Indigenous peoples, artisanal fishers, coconut harvesters, and other forest workers who sought not only to improve labor conditions, but above all to protect the very ecosystems that sustained their work.

Chico, together with a group of workers, developed a groundbreaking proposal for that time—one that remains relevant today: the designation of large forest areas as extractive reserves, where the forest’s natural resources and Indigenous populations would be preserved, and the uncontrolled exploitation of land strictly prohibited. Backed by a wide array of academics, the seringueiros produced reports to support the plan. Together—in a new and dynamic intersectoral effort driven by workers—they demonstrated that one hectare of forest, when used for sustainable extraction of rubber, nuts, and fruits, could generate far greater value than if the same land were converted to cattle ranching.

Meanwhile, the military government—backed by funding from international institutions like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank—launched massive infrastructure projects deep in the heart of the Amazon. Roads, highways, mining operations, and oil extraction sites began to be financed and developed across Brazil, sparking deep concern among Chico and other leaders in the region. The army, business elites, and criminal gangs used napalm-type explosives to clear vast areas of forest—and to remove the Indigenous communities who lived there—in order to make way for construction. Two of the most significant projects were the BR-364 highway, stretching more than 1,200 kilometers from the state of Rondônia (south of Acre) to Mato Grosso, and the Tucuruí hydroelectric dam, built on one of the many tributaries of the Amazon River. These megaprojects led to widespread violence against both local inhabitants and the environment. In the case of the dam, the ecological devastation continues to cause severe consequences to this day.

On the left, Lula Da Silva, on the right, Chico Mendes at the first meetings of the PT.

The growth of the National Council of Rubber Tappers—and especially of the Union of the Peoples of the Forest—amplified the denunciations surrounding the infrastructure projects funded by international institutions controlled by the United States. International organizations, journalists, and documentary filmmakers traveled deep into the Amazon to document the worsening environmental crisis brought about by these developments. Labor unions and local communities brought their complaints all the way to the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. International pressure temporarily succeeded in halting the flow of foreign funding to these projects, triggering a serious crisis for the landowners and the national government, who responded by intensifying and refining their persecution tactics against all those speaking out.

The vast network of international contacts enabled UN officials to travel to Xapuri and interview Chico and other members of the Union of the Peoples of the Forest, who for the first time were able to fully detail the crimes being committed against both the environment and the people who lived in the region. Two months after the UN visit, international social organizations arranged a series of meetings between Chico and officials from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank in the United States. The opportunity to hold additional meetings in Washington—the very seat of U.S. and global power—expanded further, and Chico met with Senator Robert Kasten, then chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. The senator requested that the international banks funding the Brazilian projects provide detailed reports on the environmental impact these developments were having on the Amazon. Only two months after Chico's visit to the United States, the funding for the projects was suspended indefinitely. It would only be released again if contractors, the Brazilian government, and landowners could prove that construction would respect both the environment and local communities.

The blow dealt by the loss of funding was devastating for the Brazilian government and the landowners. Both accused Chico and the Union of being enemies of progress, of wanting to keep regional workers in poverty—as a political tactic to deflect from the growing international criticism. Yet public opinion in the Northern Hemisphere increasingly recognized Chico and the rubber tappers’ movement as a legitimate struggle for labor rights and environmental protection. The government's disinformation campaigns failed to gain traction abroad, and international organizations remained unconvinced. In a show of support, the United Nations invited Chico to London to receive the Global 500 Award, a recognition of individuals and organizations making outstanding contributions to the environment worldwide.

With his second wife and his two minor children.

The struggle of workers, Indigenous peoples, the poor, the excluded, the martyred, and the exploited was gaining strength—and provoking increasingly violent reactions from the landowners. The proposal to create forest reserves was now being discussed in the highest political circles. The sophisticated and coordinated action of workers and Indigenous communities, combined with unwavering international pressure, opened the door for Chico to present the forest reserve project before the Legislative Assembly of Acre. By the end of 1987, Chico and other rubber tapper leaders began organizing a new empate—a human blockade—in the Cachoeira seringal (rubber plantation), owned by powerful landowner Darly Alves. The Cachoeira empate grew rapidly, and the rubber tappers successfully stopped the felling of 400 rubber trees. Between 1976 and 1988, Chico and his companions had organized 45 empates, resulting in more than 400 people arrested and tortured, several murdered, and nearly 1.2 million hectares of forest saved from deforestation. But the empate at Cachoeira would become a historical milestone in the rubber tappers' struggle. It forced the government to yield to the demands of the workers' movement: Cachoeira was officially declared the first forest reserve in Brazil.

The landowners, more than ever before, felt their privileges slipping away. Desperate, they began targeting leaders who either supported—or merely sympathized with—the struggle of workers and Indigenous communities in the Amazon. In what seemed to be a calculated move to rein in the landowners and perhaps ease the pressure from the tappers’ movement, the federal government ordered the expropriation of land and the creation of three more forest reserves in the Amazon. Threats against Chico began to intensify, but he refused to stop working or change his daily routine. The government assigned him military protection, while Chico traveled across the country defending and promoting the forest reserve initiative.

On November 21, 1988, Moisés Vittorio dos Santos, president of the Rural Workers' Union of Várzea Nova, was shot and killed after filing a complaint with the police about the actions of gunmen hired by local landowners who had been threatening and robbing workers in the area. In just over six years, more than 1,000 union, environmental, political and social leaders, as well as priests and lawyers, had been murdered.

Chico in his wooden house with his daughter Elenira and his son Sandino.

On December 6, 1988, Chico traveled to São Paulo to deliver the closing address at a major conference organized by the city's university. In that auditorium, before hundreds of attendees, he gave a speech that would be remembered as one of the most powerful of his life. His words, greeted with thunderous applause, became immortal: “I don't want flowers on my grave because I know they’ll be taken from the forest. I only want my death to help put an end to the impunity of the gunmen who enjoy the protection of the Acre police and who, since 1975, have killed over 50 people like me—rubber tapper leaders committed to saving the Amazon forest and proving that progress without destruction is possible. But experience teaches me otherwise. Protests and funerals will not save the Amazon. I want to live.” That same day, violence struck again: João Batista, a Socialist Party representative in the Chamber of Deputies, was gunned down.

After his time in São Paulo, Chico returned to Xapuri and gave interviews to various press outlets. In them, he publicly declared that he was under death threats from landowner Darly Alves Pereira—the former owner of the Cachoeira seringal—and from members of the União Democrática Ruralista (Democratic Ruralist Union), a landowners’ association created in 1985 under the guise of “preserving property rights and maintaining order and respect for the country’s laws.” December 15 marked Chico’s 44th birthday, but before he could celebrate with a few games of dominoes with his guards, his wife, and his two young children, he addressed thousands of union delegates at the 3rd National Congress of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (Unified Workers’ Central). Once again, he publicly denounced the threats against him—threats that had now practically become a death sentence. At the end of the congress, the delegates elected him as an alternate member of the National Executive Council of the Workers’ Central, and in March of the following year, he would become president of the National Council of Rubber Tappers, the very organization he had helped create years earlier.

On Thursday, December 22, 1988, the forest and the night were in perfect harmony—or rather, in love. They cloaked everything and everyone. Chico had returned home after midday and spent hours playing dominoes with his bodyguards. His wife and children moved around him—she cleaning and cooking, they playing and running about—while Chico kept his eyes fixed on the dots etched onto the domino tiles: ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, and sixes. Despite the creaking of the wooden floor with every step, despite the shadows sweeping across the daylight, Chico never lifted his eyes from the table covered with tiles. Those dots were his only amusement, or perhaps his only form of escape, other than the time he spent with his wife and children.

That night, darkness conquered daylight earlier than usual. In the forest, night always lasts longer than day. Whether sunny, cloudy, lightly drizzling or pouring, night always walks hand-in-hand with the jungle. At 6:30 p.m., Ilzamar—Chico’s wife—asked him to stop playing and clear the table so she could serve dinner. Chico gathered the pieces, placed them in a wooden box, and picked up a towel he’d received just seven days earlier as a birthday gift. He wanted to wash up before dinner; humidity and sweat are also lovers of the jungle. He reached the back door of their modest wooden house to head toward the bathroom, which was outside in the backyard, surrounded by the trees that marked the forest's edge. As he stood at the back door, Chico no longer seemed like himself—not the son the forest had birthed. Only then did he realize it was completely dark, that night had fully taken hold, as it always did in the Amazon. He turned around and went back to the kitchen to grab a flashlight. With the flashlight in hand and the towel over his forearm, he stepped back outside, crossed the door, and descended the two steps that separated the house from the yard. From the depths of the jungle’s darkness emerged two hitmen, cloaked by the night. Forty-two lead pellets tore through the right side of Chico’s torso and ended his life.

The borrowed house where Chico lived until his murder.

En el séptimo atentado contra su persona, a Chico finalmente le robaban la vida. Darcy y Oloci Alves, los hijos del terrateniente Darly Alves, al que Chico había acusado de planificar su asesinato, cumplían con los desesos de su padre y de otros dirigentes de la Unión Democrática Ruralista que querían a Chico muerto. Rapidamente los compañeros de Chico y las diferentes organizaciones con las que había trabajado se unían y creaban el Comité Chico Mendes desde el cual coordinaban las acciones politicas y judiciales para lograr esclarecer su asesinato.

Cuatro días después del crimen, el 26 de diciembre de 1988, Darcy Alves se entregaba a las autoridades y confesaba ser quién le había disparado a Chico. Exactamente un año después, un jurado popular lo condenaba a él y a su padre a la pena de 19 años de prisión por el asesinato de Chico. Antes del crimen, Darly Alves ya se encontraba procesado y con pedido de captura por una serie de asesinatos que se habían cometido en otros estados. Chico había informado de esta orden sobre el terrateniente a las autoridades policiales, pero no hicieron nada debido a las relaciones que estas tenían con los terratenientes de la Unión Democrática Ruralista.

Tres años después de la condena, los asesinos de Chico escapaban de la cárcel y se mantenían prófugos durante más de tres años. Darly Alves -el padre- se escondía en la sede del Instituto Nacional de Colonización y Reforma Agraria y a traves de documentos de identidad falsificados obtenía un crédito bancario -del Banco da Amazonia- para desarrollar nuevos emprendimientos agropecuarios. En 2008, a los 71 años de edad obtenía la prisión domiciliaria por su condición de salud; en cambio su hijo Darcy, recien diez años después -cuando ya había cumplido su condena-, se trasladaba hasta la ciudad de Medicilândia en el estado de Pará y fundaba una iglesia evangélica desde la cual se acercaba a la política y se convertía en un referente del Partido Liberal, aliado del entonces candidato a presidente Jair Bolsonaro. Pero los vínculos de la familia Alves con los crímenes ambientales no se detendrían con esa condena. Una investigación periodística del portal Sumaúma del año 2024 encontraba al menos a cinco familiares de los Alves en la lista de infractores medioambientales del Instituto Brasileño de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales Renovables: el padre de Darcy e instigador del asesinato de Chico, dos hermanos, un primo y su esposa habían sido denunciados, condenados y sancionados por deforestar zonas protegidas.

El legado de Chico Mendes supera las distintas representaciones culturales y políticas que muy merecidamente se le siguen haciendo. Su trabajo, su visión y su esfuerzo por aunar, conceptos y luchas en relación a una causa común fue su mayor legado. Su afán por transformar la fragmentación que caracterizaba a la política abrió el camino a nueva forma de hacer política, una que amalgama a la comunidad y al ambiente.