Thirty years after the tragedy at the "S-curve," the state of Pará still leads the nation in rural conflicts, even as agribusiness expands its frontiers across the country.
It was a Wednesday of intense sunshine in southern Pará—the date, April 17, 1996—and approximately 1,500 rural workers were marching peacefully along highway PA-150, heading toward Belém. They were men, women, children, and the elderly—all landless workers—united by a single plea to the Brazilian State: access to land so they could work and live with dignity. But what the state Military Police troops—commanded by Colonel Mário Pantoja—had in store for them at that bend in the road, on the outskirts of the municipality of Eldorado do Carajás, would be captured by local news cameras and go down in history as the largest massacre of rural workers in the history of the Brazilian Republic.
The projectiles recovered from the bodies of those workers told a story that no official narrative could ever erase, even after 30 years. With numerous bodies bearing wounds to the back of the head and the back, the evidence documented by forensic experts from the Legal Medical Institute (IML) revealed a clear intent to carry out summary executions—acts committed while the victims were already wounded or had surrendered, attempting to flee into the woods and vegetation lining the highway. At least seven of the 19 people killed at the scene bore marks consistent with point-blank gunshot wounds.
It would likely have been just another atrocity "within the bounds of normality," had television cameras not been present at the scene to capture part of the police operation. The footage, broadcast by Brazilian and international networks in the hours that followed, revealed a side of Brazil that the world rarely saw: not the "land of tropical progress," but rather a realm of armed *coronelismo*—a world where a bullet to the back of the head awaits the poor person who dares to lay claim to the land. And the world reacted.
The immediate reaction of then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) revealed the government's priorities: in the first few hours, FHC and his aides crafted a narrative that placed the responsibility for the confrontation on the workers themselves. The then-Minister of Justice, Nelson Jobim, framed the episode as a matter of public order, not a human rights violation.
However, national and international pressure compelled the government to announce measures—among them, the creation of the Extraordinary Ministry of Land Policy, headed by Raul Jungmann (a portfolio that would eventually become the current Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Farming—MDA). The official discourse portrayed the massacre as a regrettable episode that had “moved” the government.
Yet the workers of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST)—and the families of the victims—were well aware of the pattern of impunity that prevails in the country; thirty years later, that date remains an open, unhealed wound. Among the Landless workers who still live in encampments in southern Pará, many are the children and grandchildren of those who marched along the PA-150 highway on that April 17th. They carry with them a question that the Brazilian State has never truly answered: To whom does the land belong?
The State Created the *Latifúndio*; Then, It Shot at the Landless
To understand April 17, 1996, one must look back to the 1970s and grasp how the Brazilian State itself constructed the explosive land tenure structure that would make the massacre possible—and, in the view of many analysts, inevitable. The region of southern Pará—which the military regime transformed into a frontier for economic expansion—was handed over not to rural workers, but to large economic groups, both domestic and foreign. These groups arrived bearing tax incentives and departed holding immense tracts of public land.
As noted by Jorge Neri, a member of the MST’s state leadership in Pará, historical responsibility for the region’s chaotic land situation traces directly back to the official policies of the dictatorship. “The State of Pará has historically been marked by unparalleled violence in the struggle for land ownership.” In his view, this is not a matter of spontaneous violence or a conflict between equals; rather, it represents a structural choice made by the State.
“Land in Pará was parceled out in collusion with large landowners, through official policies that encouraged outsiders to come and engage in land-grabbing here in the 70s—facilitated by the opening of the Trans-Amazonian Highway and the SUDAM [Amazon Development Superintendence]. This ushered in massive agribusiness, mining, and hydroelectric projects—all pushed forward by the government itself—with absolutely no regard for the people who were already living here.”
Jorge Neri, from the MST State Directorate
Thus, companies that had absolutely no connection to agricultural work—such as Volkswagen and Bradesco—received incentives and favorable conditions from the State to become major rural landowners in the Amazon. According to Neri, this process was cemented through the active participation of local land registries and regional oligarchies, which, in league with these economic groups, orchestrated a vast scheme of organized land grabbing.
The result was a brutal concentration of land that displaced squatters while simultaneously attracting waves of landless workers from other parts of the country, creating the "social cauldron" that would eventually erupt decades later. Ayala Ferreira, from the MST National Directorate, reinforces this analysis with concrete data and a diagnosis pointing to the continued persistence of this model.
“The Eldorado do Carajás massacre on April 17, 1996, was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident; it is part of a harsh reality in which violence reigns supreme as a mechanism for maintaining an agrarian structure based on the extreme concentration of land and the exploitation of natural resources—such as forests, minerals, and water. By this, I mean that what prevents us from implementing an Agrarian Reform policy in Pará and throughout our country is the prevailing model, which is based on the existence of *latifúndios* (large landed estates) and agribusiness.”
Ayala Ferreira, National Leadership of the MST
In Ayala’s view, the Brazilian State—ever since it first defined itself as such—has prioritized this model. Consequently, over the years, it has adopted various tools and narratives to hinder the organization and mobilization of rural workers. Violence is one such tool, though certainly not the only one, particularly when considering the criminalization of grassroots leaders and the chronic lack of budgetary allocations and public policies that acknowledge the need to democratize land ownership.
21st-Century Feudal Estates
One of the narratives most frequently repeated by the agribusiness sector—and its spokespersons in Parliament—is that the Brazilian countryside has modernized; that the old rural oligarchies have supposedly given way to a scientifically grounded form of agriculture that is technological, efficient, and fully integrated into the global market. However, when this narrative reaches southern Pará, it encounters a reality that starkly contradicts it.
Jorge Neri points out that, in Pará, the so-called “modern agribusiness” sector has failed to break ties with the old power structures. In his view, even the agribusiness sector “that claims to be modern” remains in its infancy here, in the sense that it is not yet fully integrated with the major economic conglomerates of the agribusiness world. Instead, the dominant forces remain the traditional families—the old oligarchies—now operating in association with ostensibly modern groups involved in cattle ranching, particularly within this specific region.
“This region was handed over to powerful families, and subsequently evolved into a system of *latifúndios*,” asserts Neri.
This continuity of oligarchies manifests concretely in cases such as that of the Miranda family’s Fazenda Complex, where the Terra Liberdade encampment is located. As Neri describes, it comprises over 150,000 hectares of land belonging to a family characterized by illicit practices—including the exploitation of human labor, with allegations of slave labor and environmental crimes—yet one that, over the last 50 or 60 years, has steadily taken control of these lands. The result, according to him, is that “this is becoming consolidated as a vast feudal estate right here in the 21st century.”
Neri highlights that the historical formation of these large estates occurred through a process that began during the colonial period and has persisted to this day—specifically as an extractive region, focused, for instance, on the harvesting of Brazil nuts. These lands were granted to powerful local families through titles authorizing Brazil nut extraction; over time, these titles evolved into full property deeds, giving rise to vast landed estates. “What began as an extractive concession transformed into private property and subsequently into cattle-ranching operations—and the Brazilian State validated every step of this conversion.”
Ayala, for her part, draws attention to the role played by land regularization policies—measures intended to resolve the problem of land grabbing—which, in many instances, ended up producing the exact opposite effect. As the national leader of the MST points out, land regularization policies should have identified available lands suitable for agrarian reform and for the demarcation of traditional territories; however, this is not what transpired. “A policy divorced from on-site inspections—necessary to verify who was truly in possession of these areas—ultimately led the State to ‘legalize’ rural properties that had been illegally grabbed or that serve no function other than to exist as speculative assets.”
Impunity: The Powder Keg That Only Grew
Alongside large-scale cattle ranching and land speculation, a third actor structures the agrarian and social crisis in southern Pará: the mining industry. In particular, Vale—originally established as a state-owned enterprise and privatized in 1997, one year after the massacre—controls a vast portfolio of land holdings scattered across the state, with a particularly high concentration in southeastern Pará, specifically within the Carajás region.
For the Movement and its allies, this territory could—and should—be allocated for agrarian reform. Neri argues: “We believe that a mining company does not require such extensive land holdings, given that its operations are focused on specific mineral deposits; consequently, we contend that these lands could be made available for agrarian reform.” In fact, the expansion of mining also fuels a cycle of poverty and migration that places pressure on contested territories.
The scenario Neri describes for the cities in the region is one of perverse development—one that generates wealth for a few, while creating exclusion for many. Municipalities such as Eldorado do Carajás, Curionópolis, Marabá, Parauapebas, and Xinguara are home to hundreds of thousands of impoverished people who, lacking any other means to secure a dignified life, tend to focus their efforts on the struggle for land—whether for agricultural work and agrarian reform, or simply for land tenure and housing. In the absence of housing policies, the struggle for land becomes a matter of survival.
“The concentration of land brought many landless people here. The government offered incentives but failed to create policies to improve the lives of these people, and so the region became a stage for violence. The State began using the police and the judiciary to inflict defeat upon rural workers—as if fighting for land were a crime,” denounces Neri.
The scale of impunity regarding crimes in rural areas is equally structural; according to Ayala, the figures reveal the full extent of the problem. From 1985 to 2024, approximately 1,833 people were murdered in connection with rural land conflicts in Brazil, and 44% of these killings occurred in the Amazon region, according to reports by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). In Ferreira’s view, this reveals the second pillar sustaining the *latifúndio* (large-estate) model: a culture of impunity as the standard response to acts of violence.
“The culture of impunity with which cases of violence are handled is extremely grave. Only 61 of the conflicts documented by the CPT ever reached the trial stage. Of those cases, charges were brought against the masterminds in just 30 instances (half of whom were ultimately acquitted), while 42 hired gunmen were convicted as the actual perpetrators. In the vast majority of these homicides, the police investigation was never even concluded,” notes the MST leader.
Historically, killing a rural leader in Brazil has carried no consequences for those who ordered the crime. This reality—thirty years after the Eldorado do Carajás massacre—remains virtually unchanged; it forms part of the diagnosis that the Movement upholds in its efforts to preserve memory and denounce injustice in connection with April 17th.
The Day That Became a Global Symbol
The presence of television cameras at the “Curva do S” (S-Curve) transformed the Eldorado do Carajás massacre into a tragedy of global significance, thereby altering the course of history for both the Movement and the international peasant struggle. News agencies such as Reuters, the Associated Press, and AFP distributed images and accounts of the incident to dozens of countries within the first 24 hours. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch published reports demanding an independent investigation and accountability for those involved. European governments—particularly those of France, Germany, and Portugal—expressed formal concern to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Brazil, which had previously managed to relegate the murders of rural leaders to the category of “local incidents”—much like the contract killing of Chico Mendes years earlier—was thrust into the center of the international debate regarding impunity and rural violence. The sheer scale of the events of April 17—with 21 people killed in a single police operation, captured on film and fully documented—resulted in the country coming under the scrutiny of international human rights organizations with an intensity it had never experienced before.
In 1998, a consortium of Brazilian human rights organizations, supported by international entities, submitted a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), holding the Brazilian State accountable for the deaths and for the systematic failures in the conduct of the criminal investigation. This marked a new phase in the struggle against the culture of impunity—a struggle waged through a petition that documented not only the killings and injuries inflicted during the massacre but also the sluggish pace of the judicial process, wherein the principal defendants—Colonel Mário Pantoja and Major José Oliveira—remained at liberty years later, having benefited from legal appeals and delaying tactics. In 2000, Brazil entered into a friendly settlement agreement with the Commission, pledging to compensate the victims' families and to expedite the criminal proceedings.
The most enduring impact of April 17, however, was the transformation of this date into a global symbol of resistance. In direct response to the massacre, La Vía Campesina—an international organization bringing together peasant movements from over 70 countries across every continent—declared April 17 the International Day of Peasant Struggle. Every year on April 17, peasants in Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and dozens of other countries organize marches, symbolic occupations, and demonstrations to commemorate the events that unfolded on the PA-150 highway.
The immediate aftermath of the massacre in Brazil's interior proved both contradictory and revealing. After all, if the objective of the police violence was to intimidate and dismantle the Movement, the actual result was precisely the opposite. In the months following April 17, the number of MST encampments across the country grew significantly. According to historical data from the CPT (Pastoral Land Commission), the year 1996 saw the highest number of families involved in rural land conflicts recorded in Brazil up to that point, with over 167,000 families embroiled in land disputes. This time, the bullet did not silence the people; instead, it organized and empowered them.
But if April 17, 1996, produced a national and international commotion that led the federal government to announce commitments to Agrarian Reform, what did the following three decades reveal was the fragility and insincerity of those commitments?
Data from INCRA shows that the number of families settled in Pará grew slightly between 1997 and 2002, but the pace slowed during subsequent governments, with the exception of a partial recovery during President Lula's first term. From the mid-2000s onwards, Agrarian Reform in Pará entered a progressive collapse that deepened in the second half of the 2010s.
According to Neri, while Agrarian Reform stagnated, agribusiness expanded its frontiers in southern Pará rapidly and, in many cases, with legal backing. The area planted with soybeans in southeastern Pará, which was residual in 1996, exceeded 2 million hectares in the 2020s, accompanied by the accelerated expansion of intensive livestock farming. Researchers from the Institute of Man and Environment of the Amazon (Imazon) and the Socio-environmental Institute (ISA) indicate that large landowners used the land regularization process to consolidate farms in historically disputed regions. Municipalities that were scenes of open agrarian conflict have become regional agribusiness hubs.
The Struggle for Land and Public Policies
Given this diagnosis, the MST (Landless Workers' Movement) arrives at the 30th anniversary of the Massacre not only with the memory of the victims, but with a concrete, urgent, and structural agenda addressed to the federal government, the government of the state of Pará, and the corporations that profit from Amazonian land. It is an agenda born from decades of accumulated struggle, from encampments that have aged while waiting for a response from the State, from leaders murdered with impunity.
According to Neri, immediate measures are urgently needed. "The government needs to take emergency measures, for example, now, to settle all the families camped by the MST, especially in the most conflict-ridden areas."
He also points to the need for the State to allocate resources for land acquisition and for the Vale company to make available resources from its vast wealth empire. ...constituted through the extraction of subsurface resources, in addition to providing settlement and land acquisition policies to settle these families.
“What the Movement concretely demands from the federal government is the courage to resume a development policy in our country—one grounded in overcoming inequalities and combating the privileges of an elite that usurps collective assets. In the countryside, this development model would be one that guarantees the democratization of access to land; the recognition of the rights of traditional peoples and communities; food production free from financial speculation and agrochemicals; and the provision of credit and investment in family farming territories, ensuring access to housing, education, healthcare, security, and technology for those who live in rural areas.”
Ayala Ferreira
Every year on April 17, the MST honors the memory of the Martyrs of Eldorado do Carajás—doing so in the very spirit of those who occupy the land: with organization, with discipline, and with the awareness that history is not merely the past, but rather a tool for the present.
The names of the 21 Landless workers murdered at the “Curva do S” (S-Curve) are not merely inscriptions on marble plaques or entries in the reports of international organizations. They are names that the Landless carry within their bodies—during their marches, in their encampments, and in their settlements—names that endure on the borders of unproductive estates, and in the voices of those who continue to demand the very same things that those workers demanded in April 1996.
The struggle for land thus becomes a crucial element in conceptualizing any form of regional development—as Neri points out—one that incorporates care for environmental issues and a commitment to rethinking the implementation of economic policies in the region, ensuring they do not merely look outward, treating the region’s biodiversity solely as a commodity for export. People’s Agrarian Reform is not merely about land redistribution; it is a civilizational project for the Amazon.
What looms on the horizon, in Neri’s assessment, is a new cycle of violence. Yet the Landless Workers' Movement arrives at this moment with decades of accumulated experience, with dozens of organized encampments, with leaders who coordinate the struggle both nationally and internationally, and with the memory of the Martyrs of April serving as its fuel.
Violence is the prerogative of the elites—as Neri underscores—deployed in response to the people’s sectors that have been organizing since the Imperial era, and throughout the Republican period, during which various forms of people’s struggle were recorded in the fight to demand better conditions for the people of the Amazon.
Thirty years after the Curva do S massacre, the question that landless workers pose to the Brazilian State remains the same: To whom does the land belong? And the answer that the Movement constructs through constant mass mobilization—from encampment to encampment, march after march, April 17th after April 17th—is that the land belongs to those who work it. This conviction proved stronger than the 21 lifeless bodies of workers that the State left lying on the road in 1996. And it will continue to be so.
Check out the infographic below regarding the milestones marking the 30th anniversary of the Eldorado do Carajás massacre:
Key Events in the Agrarian Question in Pará (1970–2026)
1970’s Military colonization and land grabbing
The dictatorship encourages the colonization of the Amazon. Large estates are formed through the land-grabbing of public lands, alongside tens of thousands of landless families living in precarious encampments.
1988 Assassination of Chico Mendes
A rubber tapper leader is killed in Acre. The State treats the case as a local and isolated incident, inaugurating a pattern of impunity that would be repeated.
April 10, 1996 Departure of the March
On the morning of April 10, 1996, a group of families staged a major demonstration in downtown Curionópolis and began a march of nearly 900 kilometers to the capital, Belém, in protest against delays in land expropriation—particularly regarding the 40,000 hectares of Fazenda Macaxeira, which they considered idle.
April 15, 1996 Establishment of the Encampment
Landless workers on the march arrive at the site known as Curva do S, located at Km 96 of the state highway PA-150, exactly 4 kilometers from Eldorado de Carajás. Exhausted after several days of arduous marching, they decide to rest at this location for two days.
April 17, 1996 The Eldorado do Carajás Massacre
More than 1,500 workers encamped along the PA-150 highway were intercepted by the Pará Military Police. At the "S-Curve," a troop of 155 soldiers deliberately opened fire on the landless workers. By the end, 19 people lay dead at the scene—forensic reports document at least seven executions involving shots to the back of the head and the back.
1996 — Post-massacre
Mobilizing effect: explosion of encampments
Defying the repressive objective, the massacre spurs organization. The CPT records the highest number of families involved in rural conflicts in Brazil's history to date—more than 167,000 families in disputes over land.
1998 Petition to the IACHR/OAS
Human rights organizations hold the State accountable for the deaths and for the judicial delays. The main defendants remain at large years after the massacre.
2000 Agreement with the IACHR and International Day of Peasant Struggle
Brazil reaches a friendly settlement with the IACHR. La Vía Campesina declares April 17 as the International Day of Peasant Struggle, today celebrated in more than 70 countries.
2003–2006 Partial resumption of Agrarian Reform
Lula's first term saw a relative increase in settlements in Pará—the only significant resurgence after decades of slowdown.
2010 onwards Advancement of agribusiness
Expropriations suspended by injunctions. Unproductive farms left uninspected. Soy consolidates historically contested large estates in Southeastern Pará: over 2 million hectares of soy in the state.
2026 — 30 Years Pará still leads in rural conflicts in Brazil
Impunity remains intact. Quilombolas, indigenous peoples, and the Landless Movement vie for the same territories upon which agribusiness, mining, and land speculation encroach. The agrarian question remains unresolved.
Source: CPT — Pastoral Land Commission | MST | IACHR/OAS
News | Special Reports |By Fernanda Alcântara | From the MST Website | Editied by Solange Engelmann | Translated by Friends of the MST (US) | Original URL: https://mst.org.br/2026/03/30/massacre-de-eldorado-do-carajas-completa-30-anos-como-simbolo-de-resistencia-na-luta-pela-terra/
March 30, 2026
