POLITICS-BRAZIL: Peasant’s Death Heightens Tensions

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 4 2000 (IPS) - The death of a Brazilian protester after police used force to contain peasant demonstrations in Paraná state has intensified the confrontational climate between the government and the Landless Movement (Movimento dos Sem Terra – MST).

Antonio Tavares Pereira, 38, a peasant and father of five, was shot in his abdomen Tuesday morning when approximately 1,000 military police pushed back some 1,300 MST protesters on a road outside Paraná’s capital, Curitiba.

Tavares Pereira was immediately hospitalised, but died late Tuesday night.

The state secretary of public safety, José Tavares, played down the role of the police in the tragedy, arguing that the wounded man had been taken to the hospital at 9:09 local time, more than an hour before the major confrontations began, and that he had been injured on another road where there were no such conflicts.

But Roberto Baggio, an MST co-ordinator in Paraná, charged that the state official was lying. He pointed out that police began to use force against the protesters trying to enter Curitiba around 8:15, and that several witnesses had seen Tavares Pereira in a group that was “brutally attacked.”

There are probably “other deaths covered up by the police,” who fired on the protesters and then violently hunted them down, asserted Baggio. He estimated there were 300 people wounded in the tumult, as well as several “disappearances.”

The secretary of public safety assured that the police had fired only rubber bullets, not lethal ammunition, in the operation. But the Legal Medical Institute confirmed that the peasant protester had died from a wound caused by a lead bullet.

The victim’s wife, Maria Sebastiana Pereira, said she was sure her husband, an MST member for the last six years, was killed when the police attacked the peasants after forcing them to get off the buses carrying them into the city.

The Pastoral Commission of the Earth, an agency of the Roman Catholic Church, released a letter in which it “vehemently rejects” the version told by secretary Tavares and accuses Paraná governor Jaime Lerner of implementing a policy of “violent repression” against peasants.

“During his term in office, 15 rural workers have been assassinated, many of them by the military police,” says the letter, which emphasises that these crimes all remain unpunished.

Secretary Tavares said the police operation Tuesday was necessary because the MST demonstrators tried “to invade public offices in Curitiba,” just as their counterparts successfully did in 12 other state capitals throughout Brazil Tuesday morning.

He also justified the police use of force saying the peasants were “heavily armed” with machetes and scythes, and reported that 200 such items and a pistol had been seized by the security forces.

“They are tools for work and symbols of the movement, not weapons,” countered Baggio, who was held by the police for several hours Tuesday.

The goal was to mount a “peaceful demonstration” as a call for agrarian reform to benefit the landless and for more farm credits for the peasants who have land, he added.

The state MST leader maintained that the police use of force was “illegal and not protected by the Constitution” because it was not based on any judicial order.

Governor Lerner “uses the police to kill and massacre, and identifies the MST as the enemy,” stated Baggio.

Fellow MST leader Gilmar Mauro announced in Brasilia that the movement would relinquish control over the government offices it had occupied in a dozen cities, but he stressed that the landless peasants would remain camped outside.

On the “day of struggle” initiated Tuesday with occupations and demonstrations in 19 state capitals, the MST primarily targeted offices of the Finance Ministry, not the National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform, an agency of the Agrarian Development Ministry, which is entrusted with responding to their claims.

Agrarian reform is dependent on resources that only president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Finance minister Pedro Malán can release, while the head of the Agrarian Development Ministry, Raul Jungmann, “has no power,” argued Mauro.

The MST, therefore, will end its protests if its leaders are allowed to meet with Cardoso, Malán or at least the head of the presidential cabinet, Pedro Parente, who is part of the government’s economic team, he said.

Leftist opposition legislators criticised the radicalisation of the MST and are trying to negotiate for dialogue between the landless peasants and the government in order to contain the escalation of violence on both sides.

But the authorities see the conflict as a police issue.

President Cardoso accused the movement of “deviating from the democratic order” as he justified the force implemented by state governments through their police since mid-April.

The government has a peasant settlement programme, but the MST does not see it as agrarian reform. The Agrarian Development Ministry has settled more than 300,000 families since Cardoso took office in 1995, “more than the combined total of all previous governments,” said minister Jungmann.

In that period, the government expropriated unused land from major landowners totalling an area larger than Belgium, Jungmann added.

But the MST says it is still not enough to solve the problem of large landholdings in Brazil, where one percent of landowners hold 44 percent of the nation’s territory, while five million families do not have land to farm.

The peasant movement co-ordinates encampments throughout Brazil, where some 100,000 families wait for land to be distributed.

According to official data, current government policies have forced some 400,000 families to leave rural areas in just two years. That is more than the total number of families the government has settled in five years, point out the MST leaders.