He murdered an Amazon defender, then became a political leader

Usually, the appointment of an evangelical Christian pastor as the local chairman of a major political party in the small northern Brazilian town of Medicilândia would not make national news. 

But the far-right Liberal Party of former President Jair Bolsonaro and its choice to nominate Pastor Daniel as party chief in the town of 32,000 people caused somewhat of a scandal — so much so that the Liberal Party’s national chairman had to intervene and undo the appointment.

The problem was that Pastor Daniel, real name Darci Alves Pereira, is a convicted murderer, having been sentenced to 19 years in jail in 1990 for confessing to killing environmentalist figurehead Chico Mendes two years earlier. The murder caused such a shock that it made the front page of The New York Times.

Mr. Pereira spent a total of more than 12 years in jail for his crime, being released in 2004.

A rubber tapper, trade unionist, and environmentalist, Chico Mendes fought to change how Brazil made use of its forests. One of the earliest proponents of the concept of sustainable development in the Amazon — creating wealth from the forest without cutting trees — he is partly responsible for the model of environmental preservation employed today by the Brazilian government.

His 1988 assassination made him a symbol of the ongoing fight for environmental conservation and social justice in the Amazon, where his legacy endures as a reminder of the critical need to protect vital ecosystems and the communities dependent on them.

The death of Chico Mendes

In the year of his death, Chico Mendes was involved in the creation of Brazil’s first extractive reserves, which are areas of protected rainforest where only the local community is allowed to engage in traditional practices such as harvesting plants and hunting.

“Marrying preservation with development, the model proved that it is possible to live [in protected areas] and prosper economically, without having to engage in deforestation,” says activist Ângela Mendes, one of the children of the late environmentalist, speaking to The Brazilian Report.

But the creation of one such reserve, close to Mr. Mendes’s hometown of Xapuri in the Amazonian state of Acre,...