Caros Amigos magazine
November 19, 2001
By Maria Luisa Mendonça

On July 4th, farmworker Manoel Messias de Souza was assassinated in the south of Pará state. On July 9th, farmworker José Pinheiro Lima, his wife and son were assassinated in Marabá state. On July 11th, farmworker Divino Francisco Santos was assassinated in Itupiranga. On August 25th, the Federation of Agricultural Workers union leader Ademir Alfeu Fredericci was assassinated in Altamira. On September 1st, landless farmworker Miguel Freitas was assassinated on the border of Tucuruí and Baião. On October 5th, farmworker Gilson de Souza Lima was assassinated with a gunshot to the face in Marabá.

According to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), 706 farmworker were assassinated in the state of Pará between 1971 and 2001. Between 1995 and 2001, 90 farmworkers were assassinated in the region. In last the thirty years, only two of these crimes had been brought to court.

The process of settling land in southern Pará has been marked with impunity and violence against farmworkers. One recent report released by the Commission on Human Rights of the Brazilian House of Representatives denounced the "lack of political will to defend farmworkers' citizenship from gunmen and the formation of large landholders' militias and from the widely-known fraudulent granting of titles to public lands to large landholders."

In addition to hundreds of deaths, the predatory land occupations of large landholders in the region have also resulted in environmental destruction and extreme poverty. Since the time of the military regimen, southern Pará has been controlled by large economic groupings and central-southern Pará has been controlled by the large-scale cattle industry gain title to land "donated" by the government in the late 1960's.

For example, Bradesco Bank received 85 thousand hectares, Bamerindus Bank received 60 thousand hectares and Volkswagen received 139 thousand hectares of land. Years later, in the mid-1970's, the government began encouraging landless workers to migrate to other regions of Brazil. The motto of the time was: "land without men for men without land."

With massive migration came the intensification of joblessness and rural conflicts, and an absence of land reform policies. Meanwhile, the occupation of large unproductive estates continued to be the only ray of hope for landless families. Today there are approximately 100,000 families occupying land throughout the country. With the increase of repression in past few months, there have also been 126 registered detentions of landless workers between April and June 2001 in the state of Pará alone. These arrests normally happen during violent land evictions carried out by the Military Police's "shock troops."

These de-occupations have also occurred in where the expropriation process has already begun such as in the case of the Bannach and Santo Antônio estates in Paraupebas, where landless families had been encamped for more that two years. According state government data, each land eviction costs an average of $110,000 Reals. At the same time, the government alleges that there are no resources available for land reform and there is no system of protection available for workers who receive death threats in the region.

Today, there is a list with 24 names, all of whom are "marked for death." "At least ten landowners are threatening me, saying that I will be next. Even though I have registered complaints to the police station, I have never been called to give deposition," explains José Brito, president of the Agricultural Workers Union of Rondon in Pará. He concludes: "Whoever fights for life here will have his own life threatened."

Local leader Antônio Rodrigues de Souza, director of the Agricultural Workers Union of Paraupebas, has also received threats. "Sometimes I receive three death threats by phone per day," he says. Even though he has taken his complaint to the Secretary of Social Defense, Pablo Sette Câmara, not one step has been taken to protect him.

These complaints have also been presented to the Popular Tribunal of Land Reform held on October 9, 2001 in Brasília. The objective of this symbolic tribunal was to denounce the government's disregard of the Constitution, which speaks to the concept that land should serve a social function. Therefore, it is the government's obligation to dispossess unproductive lands to be put toward land reform. The accusations against the government also included violence against agricultural workers, the destruction of family-based agricultural economy, and the concentration of income and land, not to mention the violation of the right to work, health, education and life of millions of Brazilian peasants.

One of the Tribunal witnesses, D. Tomás Balduíno, President of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), remembered that 220 agricultural workers were murdered during the FHC government. There were 16 murders in 2001 alone. Balduíno also denounced the implementation of the so-called "market land reform" financed by the World Bank, which substitutes the constitutional process of land reform for the buying and selling of land.

Luiz Eduardo Greenhalgh, the lawyer responsible for the accusation, argued, "those who fight for land reform, fight for love and obedience to the Constitution." Juror Andres Magalhães Barros, of the Commission of Human Rights of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB), pointed out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights considers the fight against poverty and inequality legitimate as "rebellion against tyranny and oppression." Theologian Leonardo Boff, who also participated as a juror, denounced the systematic repression of agricultural workers: "the government despises the poor, despises social movements."

The jury unanimously condemned the government and the President of the Tribunal, Dr. Marcelo Laven�re, concluded in his own words that the Federal Government is "guilty for attacks on the Constitution, against land reform, attacks of agricultural workers, guilty for encouraging violence and not having the political will to fight it, guilty for carrying out policies that are contrary to land reform, for criminalizing and illegally restraining agricultural workers' social movements and for promoting agricultural policies that benefit large landowners and harm the democratization and development of agricultural life." In closing, Dom Tomás Balduíno welcomed the Tribunal as instrument "through which land reform can proceed as the people of the land."