RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Murders of Rural Activists on the Rise

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 28 2003 (IPS) - The level of violence marking conflicts over land in Brazil, as measured by the number of murders of campesinos and land activists, has increased this year.

A total of 44 such murders have been reported so far this year, compared to 43 for all of last year, according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a Catholic Church group that has been producing annual reports on the question of land conflicts since 1985.

”We decided to produce a partial report about the first part of the year, to counteract widely circulating versions that the social movement is causing a climate of chaos and violence in the country,” said CPT national coordinator Isabel Cristina Diniz.

The ”Report on Crimes of the Latifundium”, which will be presented to the government’s Secretary of Human Rights, Nilmario Miranda, underlines that peasant farmers and rural activists are the victims, not the cause, of rural violence.

Diniz pointed out that the already heavy concentration of land ownership in Brazil has increased in recent years, and that just 50,000 people own half of the farmland in this country of 171 million today.

As in much of Latin America, the latifundium – defined by Webster’s as ”a great landed estate with primitive agriculture and labour often in a state of partial servitude” – dominates the Brazilian countryside.

The rural movements calling for a land reform programme that is swifter and more effective than the efforts that governments have been carrying out for years note that only 60 million of the 400 million hectares of land registered as private property in Brazil are actually cultivated, while there are 4.8 million landless campesino families.

The Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Workers Movement, and 96 other organisations demanding effective agrarian reform argue that there is plenty of land to go around, and stage occupations of farmland that has been left idle and unproductive.

But rural activists frequently become the targets of attacks and killings ordered by large landowners.

A total of 1,280 peasant farmers and rural workers, rural labour organisers, lawyers, church workers and agronomists involved in the campesino struggle for land were murdered between 1985 and 2002, and 715 cases of torture, 19,349 cases of ”physical aggression,” and a large number of death threats were documented, according to the CPT report.

But the justice system favours the landowners who order the killings and the thugs who carry them out, said Diniz.

The lion’s share of those 1,280 murders have gone unpunished. In fact, only 121 cases even went to trial, and half of the suspected perpetrators who were prosecuted were acquitted. Of the 14 people tried for ordering murders, only seven were convicted. ”Such impunity acts as a stimulus for the crimes of the large landowners,” she said.

On the other hand, 6,330 campesinos have been imprisoned since 1985, most of them wrongfully, according to the CPT report, which was released at a news briefing in Rio de Janeiro Tuesday.

The partiality and pro-landowner bias of rural judges who act under the direct influence of local landowners is clearly demonstrated by the frequency with which higher courts ”overturn the convictions and prison sentences of rural workers,” said lawyer Aton Fon Filho, director of the non-governmental Social Network of Justice and Human Rights.

Murders of campesinos take place with especial frequency in the northern Amazon state of Pará, where half of this year’s 44 cases occurred.

But the repression of movements calling for land reform takes different shapes depending on the region, says the CPT. In Sao Paulo, for example, the richest and most industrialised state in Brazil, activists are subjected to ”arbitrary arrests and prison terms.”

Last year, a judge ordered the imprisonment of 28 MST activists in the region of Pontal de Paranapanema in the western part of the state of Sao Paulo, the site of intense conflicts over land. But ”26 of the 28 imprisonment orders were overturned by higher courts,” Fon Filho pointed out.

However, Carlos Fernando Xavier, president of the Agriculture and Stockbreeders Federation of Pará, told IPS that the CPT report ”completely fails to mention the invasions of property by the MST and other groups.”

”Invading land that belongs to others is violence, and provokes defensive reactions by those whose property has come under attack,” he said.

To explain the greater frequency of violent land disputes in the state, Xavier said Pará is ”a frontier of agricultural expansion, where the State is still absent, and there are not enough roads, schools or notary’s offices.”

Only one percent of rural properties in the state have electricity, compared to southern Brazil, where all farms have electric power, he added.

But in Diniz’s view, the worsening of rural violence since last year is due to the slow pace at which agrarian reform is moving forward.

The mushrooming of rural movements, which number nearly 100, reflects the need to distribute land and offer better living conditions to the people living in Brazil’s countryside, she argued.

There are 140,000 landless families living in precarious camps around the country waiting to be settled on a small plot of land, said the CPT coordinator.

A group of well-known TV and film actors created the Human Rights Movement to support demands for agrarian reform and to protest the violence. Eduardo Tornaghi, one of the group’s members, said its aim is to ”take advantage of our visibility in the media to show the real Brazil, which is different from the official Brazil,” and to promote respect for human rights.

Leonardo Vieira, an actor famous for the role he played several years ago in the popular soap opera ”Renacer”, which was set on a coffee plantation, told reporters that he attended a trial in Pará a few months ago, and said it was ”very sad” that it took 18 years to convict the murderer of peasant farmer Joao Canuto, one of the ”natural heirs of the land.”

”When will this year’s 44 murders be tried?” he wondered.