Wilson Pinheiro

He was a colleague of Chico Mendes, the president of the Xapuri Rural Workers Union, who similarly lost his life defending the Amazon.

In the early 1970s, Pinheiro became a member of the Confederation of Agricultural Workers, supported by the Catholic Church, through which he and Mendes began to set up human blockades, a technique known in Portuguese as the empate.

The first empate took place in March 1976 in a rubber estate near Brasileia, when 60 men spent three days in trenches in order to stop logging.

[4] He was watching a television program, a police thriller, when he was shot to death by a gunman hired by local ranchers who opposed his union.

According to Augusta Dwyer's book Into the Amazon: Chico Mendes and the Struggle for the Rainforest, the gunman waited for the sound of shots from the show Pinheiro was watching to begin shooting.

[5] Wilson Pinheiro was featured in the movie The Burning Season (in Portuguese, Amazônia em Chamas), directed by the filmmaker John Frankenheimer and based on the book of the same name by Andrew Revkin.