Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population

BRAZIL: Death Threats a Fact of Life for Land-Rights Activists

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 7 2005 (IPS) - Maria Joel Dias da Costa, president of the Rural Workers Union in Rondon de Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon region, lives her life under the permanent threat of death.

She took over the union’s leadership when the former president, José Dutra da Costa – her husband – was shot down on Nov. 21, 2000.

A neighbour who witnessed the crime and apprehended the killer was himself brought down with three bullets to the head a year and a half later. The gunman is in custody but has yet to face trial, while those who hired him continue to enjoy full impunity.

The union’s treasurer was murdered in February 2004, while four of its members, local peasant farmers, have been shot dead since 1997. No one has been arrested in connection with any of these crimes. In the meantime, along with the president, another three current directors of the Rural Workers Union are the targets of ongoing death threats.

"I have four children, between the ages of 17 and 22, and they can’t go everywhere they’d like to go," the union leader, better known as Joelma, told IPS.

According to Joelma, she is one of a list 61 people "marked for death" in the state of Pará. The people behind this relentless violence against local peasants, she said, are large landholders.

On Feb. 12, two gunmen murdered U.S.-born Catholic nun and environmental activist Dorothy Stang in Anapú, another municipality in the state of Pará.

The international outcry sparked by her shooting led the government of leftist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to announce measures aimed at resolving the land ownership conflicts that lie at the roots of the violence in this state.

As a result, Maria Joel da Costa is now guarded by two military police officers around the clock. The same protection has also been provided for Henri Burin de Roziers, a French monk who has worked actively since 1978 in a high-conflict zone in the neighbouring state of Tocantins and southern Pará, as a missionary and legal advisor with the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT).

Both of them are featured in a documentary entitled "This Man is Going to Die," which tells the story of 14 people on "hit lists" in Pará – including six who have already been killed.

The next on the list would most likely be Father Ricardo Rezende, a former parish priest in Rio Maria, another Pará municipality rocked by ongoing violence, according to the documentary’s director, Emilio Gallo.

Rezende moved to Rio de Janeiro to complete a doctoral thesis on modern-day slave labour – another common phenomenon in Pará – and is currently the coordinator of a study group addressing the issue at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Gallo, a TV journalist-turned-filmmaker, said the situation in Pará is like something out of a work of fiction, where deaths are announced in advance. Nevertheless, the targets identified remain where they are, instead of seeking shelter, because "they don’t want to abandon their comrades in the struggle."

Speaking at a press conference for foreign journalists held Wednesday, Burin de Roziers said the extreme violence in the region stems from two fundamental causes: the slow progress of agrarian reform, and the impunity enjoyed by human rights violators.

In 39 municipalities in south and southeast Pará, there are 11,000 peasant families who have been camped out along the highways since 2003, along with another 8,000 living on occupied lands, while waiting for land ownership titles that never come.

In total, there are 45,000 families living in "disastrous conditions" in the area, with no roads, schools or medical care, observed the 75-year-old monk.

Meanwhile, the prevailing impunity simply serves to encourage the use of firearms to resolve conflicts. Since 1984, 26 peasant leaders have been killed as part of a "selective extermination" of the movement’s leadership. Very few of the actual perpetrators of these murders have been prosecuted, while those who ordered them have remained almost completely untouched, he noted.

In recent years, intensive efforts by attorneys have successfully ended in the trial and sentencing of three large landholders for the murders of rural activists. However, two of them remain at large, having appealed their sentences to a higher court, while the third is serving his sentence under house arrest "in his luxury home," Burin de Roziers reported.

This situation has changed little since Lula became president in January 2003, despite the high hopes inspired by his election. According to Rezende, the Lula administration "has done more than previous ones, but less than what was expected and less than what is needed."

The fight against slave labour, for example, was brought to a halt because Federal Police agents refused to provide protection for the Ministry of Labour Mobile Inspection Group responsible for investigating reports of slave labour. The police claimed that they were not paid enough to cover their costs in the inspections, Rezende said.

The rural conflict is fundamentally rooted in the chaotic state of land ownership, marked by an abundance of forged title deeds. If all of the land represented by these documents was put together, the resulting total would be two times larger than the actual area in question, said Burin de Roziers.

The government has initiated a process of reviewing land registries, but this is a gargantuan task that seems doomed to failure, concurred the two Catholic clergyman threatened with death for defending the rights of peasants.

Further complicating matters are the longstanding jurisdictional disputes between the federal government’s National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform and the Land Institute of the state of Pará.

Because the two agencies did not share information in the past, they have issued numerous overlapping title deeds and concessions. And now they lack the material and human resources to remedy the situation.

But the violence in Pará is not limited to conflicts over land ownership, Burin de Roziers noted. Armed attacks on buses have become a frequent occurrence, with three incidents last week alone, he reported.

Moreover, the police escorts accompanying the monk have become an additional source of danger, as opposed to protection, when he is travelling, because they heighten the risk of a shoot-out.

The attackers – "all of whom are known," he added – open fire on police officers when they are able to identify them. "That’s why police captains always travel in disguise," he said.

Essentially, Pará is ruled by a culture of violence and the failure of the authorities to ensure public safety, he concluded.