Francisco (Chico) Alves Mendes Filho was born December 15, 1944 on a rubber estate in the northwestern Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil. While traditional rubber estates did not allow for rubber tappers to cultivate their own crops, by the time Chico was born, many rubber tappers had learned to grow their own food and to live from the abundance of fruits, nuts, medicinal plants, and wild game that a healthy forest could supply. Chico learned to read and write as a young adult, and while gaining literacy, Chico also began to gain critical consciousness of the vast inequalities and oppressive relations between the estate owners and the rubber tappers. Coming of age in this time of political tension and military dictatorship, Chico began organizing rubber tappers to defend themselves and the forest from land-grabbing ranchers that had taken over the rubber estates in the 1960s and 70s. He helped to organize the Xapuri Rural Workers Union and later became its president. Along with the workers' union, he soon joined the resistance against deforestation. In collaboration with local unions and other allies, Chico founded the National Council of Rubber Tappers (CNS) in 1985, through which he emphasized the need for the defense of the Amazon forest. This movement of rubber tappers was committed to nonviolent resistance in the face of ongoing violence from landowners and law enforcement. Chico and the CNS thus saved over 1.2 million hectares of the forest over the course of 15 years. Chico’s leadership in the struggle for environmental justice put him, like so many others, in the path of harm. Just a week after his forty-fourth birthday, on December 22, 1988, Chico was relaxing with his family at home in the town of Xaipuri when the son of a local rancher shot him to death. Chico lives on in the work of the rubber tappers of Acre, in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, and in all of the extractive reserves of the Amazon that maintain ecological integrity while providing for the needs of forest dwellers. He lives on in the international environmental movement and the struggle for climate justice. He lives on in the species of bird that bears his name, Chico’s tyrannulet (Zimmerius chicomendesi), and in the forest itself, which continues to be threatened and destroyed by powerful interests to this very day.