RIGHTS-BRAZIL/GUATEMALA: Fighting Impunity Surrounding Massacres

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 23 1999 (IPS) - Brazil’s international image, the credibility of its legal system and the agrarian reform programme are all being brought into play by the biggest trial in the history of Brazil, which began Monday.

The defendants in the trial being held in Belem, the capital of the northern state of Para, are 150 military police agents implicated in an Apr 17, 1997 massacre of 19 landless peasant farmers in Eldorado de Carajas, a municipality in southern Para, an area notorious for its high level of rural violence.

In Guatemala, meanwhile, rights activists were outraged last week when 26 members of the military were sentenced to five-year commutable sentences for a 1995 massacre of 11 indigenous peasants.

In Brazil, the pressure is on from rights groups and especially the ‘Movimento dos Sem Terra’ (Landless Movement – MST), which organised the 1997 protest march that was repressed in Eldorado de Carajas, to keep the military police from getting off scot-free, or with light sentences as in the case of the 1995 massacre in Guatemala.

The 109-day trial in the Brazilian city of Belem, to be divided into 27 sessions, is to run through December. But analysts say it may be extended, given the controversy surrounding the whole affair and the conflicting pressures involved.

The first to take the bench was commanding officer Colonel Mario Colares Pantoja. A total of 18 witnesses, including Para Governor Almir Gabriel – a member of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s Brazilian Social Democratic Party – are to testify in the first session alone.

Colares Pantoja’s defence lawyer will argue that his client was ordered by the governor to clear – “at any cost” – a highway blocked by 1,500 landless peasants in a demonstration demanding agrarian reform.

The rank-and-file, corporals and sergeants will be let off the hook if the officers are indicted, said the president of the Association of Military Police, Captain Luiz Fernando Furtado.

The sentence for premeditated murder, the charge faced by the defendants, is 12 to 30 years in prison. The prosecutor heading the case announced however that he did not plan to push for the maximum sentence.

Brazilian legislation stipulates that those sentenced to more than 20 years have the right to a re-trial.

The strongest pressure in favour of heavy sentences is coming from the MST. Around 700 MST militants are camped out in front of the Belem courthouse where the trial is taking place.

Demonstrations will also be held in front of the main courthouses in the rest of Brazil’s 26 states on every day of the trial, the MST announced.

The Eldorado de Carajas massacre shook the country, gave the MST an even higher profile, strengthened public backing for a broad land reform programme and drew the condemnation of international human rights groups.

The 1,500 peasant demonstrators were preparing to march more than 600 kms to Belem to protest the slow progress of the distribution of land – which is concentrated in a few hands in Brazil as in most Latin American countries – and the violence of which they are so frequently the victims in their quest for a plot of land.

Para heads the list in Brazil in terms of the number of murders – 11 last year – committed in the context of disputes over land, according to the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission.

The military police, ordered to crack down on the marchers in Eldorado de Carajas, opened fire on the demonstrators, who answered with rocks and sticks.

Autopsies found that most of the victims were killed in summary execution-style murders, with nearly half stabbed to death or finished off with point-blank shots to the head, according to two coroners.

Several of the 69 wounded in the crackdown were left permanently disabled.

The scope of the trial brought Justice Minister Jose Carlos Dias, Minister of Agrarian Affairs Raul Jungmann, and National Secretary of Human Rights Jose Gregori to Belem.

Impunity is one of the factors tarnishing the foreign image and human rights record of Brazil, South America’s giant and the world’s eighth largest economy.

In its aim to keep the accused from being tried in southern Para, where hostility surrounding the massacre runs particularly high, the Cardoso administration got the trial moved to Belem.

Brazil is also facing international censure for other massacres, such as the 1992 shooting of 11 prisoners in a Sao Paulo prison, and the 1996 killing of at least 10 landless peasants in a clash with police in Corumbiaria, in the northwestern state of Rondonia.

Impunity and an ineffective justice system are major problems in Brazil, where prisoners, street children, priests, trade unionists and attorneys working with the landless are at particularly high risk of attack.

But the problem is not limited to Brazil. Another Latin American country whose human rights record is often called into question, despite the end of a 36-year civil war in 1996, is Guatemala.

Last week, a court in Coban, in the state of Alta Verapaz, found 26 members of the military guilty of killing 11 peasants celebrating the anniversary of their return to their home region, after long years of exile due to the armed conflict.

But the defendants were found guilty of manslaughter and concealment of manslaughter rather than extrajudicial execution, attempted extrajudicial execution and assault and battery as charged by the prosecutors, which would have brought them life sentences or capital punishment.

The judges based their ruling on the argument of the defence attorneys, who alleged that the accused acted in self-defence, and that although they should not have entered the “Aurora 8 de Octubre” community in the first place – the army was ordered to stay away from returning refugees and displaced – they did so without any intention of harming local residents.

The ruling confirmed the fears of Guatemalan indigenous leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Rigoberta Menchu, who initially acted as an additional plaintiff in the trial but withdrew alleging negligence, ommission of evidence and bias on the part of the judges.

“We Guatemalans are ashamed about how justice operates in our country,” lawyer Karen Fischer, with the non-governmental Alliance Against Impunity, told IPS.

Estela Lopez, an attorney with the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, maintained that the verdict was negotiated by the judges and the army, and said “you can’t talk about manslaughter when those involved were civilians, mainly unarmed women and children.”

Lopez said the Guatemalan state would have to respond before the Inter-American Court on Human Rights for the failure to adequately punish those responsible for the deaths of the 11 indigenous victims. The case may be appealed.