BRAZIL: Internat’l Trial Needed for Carajas Massacre – Activists

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 13 2002 (IPS) - Pro-agrarian reform organisations in Brazil announced their decision Thursday to organise an international trial for the Apr 17, 1996 massacre of 19 landless peasants by military police in Eldorado de Carajás, in the Amazonian state of Pará.

Representatives of the agrarian reform groups meeting in Brasilia resolved Thursday to reject a court’s acquittal earlier this week of 142 military police from Pará who were accused of participating in the largest massacre of peasants in Brazil in recent decades.

A local television crew filmed the bloody 1996 incident, and the images shook Brazil and the world.

Only two guilty sentences were handed down – to the two officers who led busloads of heavily armed military police in a crackdown on the roadblock and protest march staged by landless peasants on a rural highway. Nineteen demonstrators were killed and 69 were injured.

In the first sessions of the trial, held last month, the two officers, Mario Pantoja and José María Oliveira, were sentenced to 228 and 158 years in prison, respectively, based on 12 years for each murder.

But because they are first-time offenders, they can appeal the verdict, so their imprisonment may be put off, and the legal proceedings could drag on for another decade.

In the last of five court sessions, begun Monday and ending Wednesday in Belém, capital of Pará, 124 soldiers and sergeants, accused of participating in the massacre, were absolved. The court ruled that they had only “fired their weapons into the air” and not at the peasants.

The jury had previously cleared a captain and 15 lieutenants and sergeants, citing similar arguments.

The condemnation of the high-ranking officers and not those who perpetrated the massacre is “absurd”, say prosecutors Rui Barbosa and Marco Aurelio do Nascimento, who announced that they are preparing further legal action in order to obtain guilty sentences for the accused.

“We do not recognise the court’s decision,” one of the national coordinators of the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Peasant Movement, Joao Paulo Rodrigues, told IPS.

The victims of the Eldorado de Carajás massacre were MST activists.

The MST and other rights organisations assert that massacres like this, and other human rights violations, must be tried by federal courts, not by a state court, as occurred in the Carajás case.

And an international trial, “although merely symbolic,” would show that “it is not acceptable that 19 people are assassinated and nobody is sentenced,” said Rodrigues.

The two colonels will not complete their prison sentences due to the opportunities they have for delaying the proceedings, predicted the peasant leader.

In Brazil, land is concentrated in the hands of only a few. While 44 percent of all arable land in this country of 162 million is owned by just one percent of farmers, millions of peasants have no land and are forced to migrate to the slums of the big cities or roam the countryside looking for low-paid seasonal work.

As the government’s land reform programme has slowly distributed public land and expropriated privately owned uncultivated farmland and transferred it to landless farmers, powerful landholders have organised to block the agrarian reform efforts, often forming their own private militias.

Hundreds of peasant farmers have been murdered in land disputes in Brazil, and almost none of the killers are brought to justice.

The impunity surrounding various cases of massacres worsens Brazil’s already sullied international image, as the country is under investigation by commissions of the United Nations and of the Organisation of American States (OAS), and the target of campaigns by non-governmental groups regarding its human rights record.

And this is a fear of the national Human Rights Secretary, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, a veteran activist who was appointed to his government post last year.

Pinheiro agrees with the activists that these cases should be investigated by the federal police and justice authorities.

Currently, public security is the duty of the state governments, and nearly all crimes, including assassination, are investigated by the state police and courts, which are under the direct influence of the local large landowners, business executives and political leaders.

According to the human rights activists, this is an important cause of the impunity that encourages violence against peasants, agrarian reform leaders and their defenders, particularly in the state of Pará.

The acquittals of the direct participants in the Eldorado de Carajás massacre were predictable, James Cavallaro, coordinator of the non-governmental Centre for Global Justice, told IPS.

To obtain a ruling against the perpetrators would require “individualising” the role of each one in the crime, because those who were passively involved cannot be punished in the same was as those who fired the fatal shots or carried out executions, in some cases leaving signs of cruelty, he said.

But the police did not perform the necessary steps in the hours and days after the massacre, such as collecting the bullets found in the area or in the victims’ bodies, in order to identify which weapons had been fired.

Furthermore, said Cavallaro, the weapons carried by each of the officials were not identified and the registries of the arms used by the battalions mobilised for the operation disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

And tests were not conducted to determine which of the military police had traces of gunpowder on their hands.

Unable to identify which of the officers killed the peasants, the prosecutors had to accuse all of the military police participating in the operation of homicide.

But all of the defendants refused to provide information about their colleagues or to identify who among their ranks might have fired shots at the protesting peasants.