Brazilian Eco-Warriors at risk of assasination...

What is this world coming to? Twenty years after the killing of Chico Mendes, one of the world's most prominent rainforest defenders, hundreds of human rights and environmental activists still face the threat of assassination in Brazil new study claims.

The report, compiled by Brazil's Catholic Land Commission (CPT) and due to be released in full early next year, reveals that at least 260 people, among them a Catholic bishop, live under the threat of murder because of their fight against a coalition of loggers, farmers and cattle ranchers.

The list names Frei Henri des Rosiers, a French priest based in the Amazon town of Xinguara, as a particular target. Police are investigating claims he has a £14,000 price on his head because of his fight against slave labour. Also named are Maria José Dias da Costa, a union leader in the remote town of Rondon do Pará, and an Austrian bishop, Dom Erwin Krautler, who has been under 24-hour police guard for two years because of his battle against developers and child prostitution in his Amazonian diocese.

In February this year, Francisco da Silva, a 51-year-old leader of the landless movement in the Amazon, was killed with a single shot to the head. He had been named in a previous CPT report about rural leaders receiving death threats.

On Monday night the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to address the country on television to pay homage to the life of Mendes, a rubber tapper turned environmentalist who was gunned down outside his home on 22 December 1988. Lula's address is part of a wave of tributes across Brazil, from marches on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to celebrations in his hometown of Xapuri. But while his standing as a symbol of protest is not in doubt 20 years on, environmentalists and human rights activists are divided on Mendes's practical legacy.

Chico Mendes: Martyr for our times

It was when Chico's union successfully defended a piece of virgin rainforest sprinkled with rubber trees against the ranchers' attempts to claim it that the struggle became personal. Before the shooting of Mendes only 10 people had ever been brought to court for around 1,000 murders in the Amazon in the 1980s.

In his speeches he used to say: "Come here and kill me. My chest is open." He knew he might achieve more by his death than he had by his life.

Today the extractive reserves Chico championed are relatively successful in protecting parts of the Amazon, as are reserves run by the rainforest's indigenous people.

Now people talk of using carbon credits to protect similar areas around the world. And I realise that I had met the martyr for our times - the Gandhi, or perhaps the Che Guevara, of our environmental age.