Road in Pará's Amazonian region shows only pasture where once there was rainforest. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
MARABÁ, Brazil, May 2 2013 (IPS)

A fresh outbreak of violence between large landowners and landless peasants is looming in the Amazonian state of Pará, in northern Brazil.

The large estate of Itacaiúnas, in the southeast of Pará, in the municipality of Marabá, 684 kilometres from the state capital, Belém, is owned by Agro Santa Bárbara (AGRO-SB), a company that possesses at least 600,000 hectares of land in the state of Pará.

Since 2002 the Federation of Agricultural Workers of Pará (FETAGRI) has demanded that the property be confiscated and the land redistributed under Brazil’s land reform laws. More than 300 families are living on the land, in an encampment.

In late April, the landless rural workers announced that they would carry out “definitive occupation” of the estate and on Monday Apr. 29 they started dividing it into lots in order to “build the settlement themselves,” according to a FETAGRI communiqué.

AGRO-SB regards the landless farmers as criminals and says it has reported their actions to the military police, in order to keep the peace and avoid conflict.

“This group of land invaders is planning to divide the property into lots. Its goal is to expand the illegal occupation. This is a new criminal action by the invaders, who have the estate under their control and are blocking access by other people,” AGRO-SB said in a communiqué.

There is a real possibility of imminent violent conflict, because heavily armed groups hired by the estate owners have been reported in the area.

José Batista, a lawyer for the Catholic Church Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) who is following developments closely, told IPS the conflict in Itacaiúnas is “quite serious.”

“These families have been waiting to be settled (with legal distribution of land under the land reform process) for a long time. The company has hired armed guards and we have received information that it has poisoned the pastures in order to force the families to leave. This has added to the tension, and now (the peasants) have decided to occupy a larger area,” he said.

Although the police were called in to prevent a direct clash between the rural workers and the armed guards, sometimes the police presence itself generates conflict.

According to Batista, the government decided to expropriate the estate in 2010, but AGRO-SB obtained a court injunction suspending the issuing of property titles to the settlers by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).

“The encamped families will not give way, but they want a peaceful solution to the problem,” Batista said.

Meanwhile, there is a dispute over the value of the indemnity that the government should pay AGRO-SB for expropriating the estate. The company had negotiated with INCRA to accept the equivalent of 11.5 million dollars.

But the cost of the environmental damage caused by the company, which deforested the jungle area of the estate, estimated at three million dollars, was deducted from that sum. The company then presented a report valuing the property at 21 million dollars.
According to Batista, the estate has an area of 10,600 hectares. There are reports that over 60 percent of the land was publicly owned, and that the estate is unproductive.

A large proportion of the conflicts and deaths caused by land disputes have occurred in the Amazonian region, where the agricultural frontier is expanding and infrastructure and mining projects have intruded.

This is one of the main causes of violence in the south and southeast of Pará, the second largest state in the country and the national leader for human rights violations and murders over land conflicts.

According to the CPT, between 1964 and 2010 there were 914 murders of rural workers, trade unionists, lawyers and members of religious orders in Pará, of which 654 were perpetrated in the south and southeast of the state.

The figures are not precise, because many cases do not even make it to the light of day, according to the report “Violação de direitos humanos sul e sudeste do Pará” (Human Rights Violations in the South and Southeast of Pará) published by the CPT, FETAGRI, and other organisations in March 2013.

“Action by the justice system is also a distance of light-years away from the crimes committed and the punishment of offenders,” Batista said.

Of the 914 murders in Pará mentioned above, only 18 have come to trial.

Between 1980 and 2003, 35 massacres were committed in the south and southeast of Pará, with a death toll of 212 rural workers. Some of the trials in the courts have dragged on for more than 25 years.

Death threats are common currency. The report says that between 2000 and 2011, 165 people in the country received death threats, including 71 in Pará. Of those threatened, 42 have been murdered, 18 of them in Pará state.

“Land reform is a Utopia. Violence in Pará is increasing, impunity hinders any advance in the investigation of cases, and the targets of the murders are leaders of social organisations,” Adebral Lima Júnior, the representative in Pará of the human rights commission of the Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, the Brazilian bar association, told IPS.

According to Marianne Andersson, a member of the board of trustees of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation who was part of a delegation that visited the area in April in solidarity with Brazilian activists, “internationalising” the issue is a way of pressuring for its solution.

“We should never keep silent about these injustices and deaths. Nowhere in the world are so many murders related to land and the environment committed as in Brazil. Half of the worldwide murders related to land conflicts take place in this country. This is unacceptable,” Andersson, a former member of the Swedish parliament, told IPS.

The Foundation, which awards what is known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” will encourage its global network to write letters of complaint to Brazilian embassies the world over. “We are calling on the Brazilian government to urgently implement land reform for the sake of justice,” Andersson said.

A sign put up by activists in Marabá, Brazil demands justice for the murders of Amazon activists José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
MARABÁ, Brazil , Apr 5 2013 (IPS)

Peasants and human rights defenders in Brazil are indignant over the acquittal of the man accused of ordering the May 2011 murders of two prominent Amazon activists, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo.

The trial ended Thursday Apr. 4 with the sentencing of two men paid to kill the couple in the Amazon jungle state of Pará. But the third man held for the crime, the landowner accused by the prosecutors of hiring the other two, was absolved on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

The trial was one of the six slated to take place this year in Brazil involving land conflicts, one of the main causes of violence in South America’s giant.

In the trial, which lasted 48 hours with only a few breaks, a seven-person jury found Alberto Lopes do Nascimento and Lindonjonson Silva Rocha guilty. They were given sentences of 45 years and 42 years and eight months, respectively, on two counts of aggravated murder and cruelty.

Da Silva, 54, and his wife Maria do Espírito Santo, 53, were riding a motorcycle when they were ambushed and gunned down in the rainforest in the northern state of Pará on May 24, 2011. The killers cut off a dying da Silva’s ear.

The murders “used methods that made it impossible for José Cláudio and Maria, killed in a cruel ambush…to defend themselves,” reads the sentence handed down by Judge Murilo Lemos Simão, which goes on to state that the motive was a dispute over land, described as an aggravating element.

But José Rodrigues Moreira, who was accused of masterminding the murders, was acquitted because there were “no concrete elements” proving his guilt, according to the judge. Prosecutors were seeking a 70-year sentence for the landowner.

The trial, attended by the delegates of dozens of national and international social movements and human rights groups, took place in the city of Marabá, in the southeast of Pará, the state that has the largest number of land disputes in Brazil.

Nearly 200 people held a vigil outside the courthouse, next to the Trans-Amazonian highway. When the sentences were read out, activists and rural workers burned crosses and threw stones at the courthouse windows.

“The verdict is more of the same, from Brazil’s justice system: it condemns those who are at one tip of the murder and acquits those who had the motives to commit it,” the head of the Brazilian NGO Terra de Direitos, Antônio Escrivão Filho, told IPS.

Da Silva, known as “Zé Castanha”, and his wife were community leaders and environmentalists involved in a project for sustainable agriculture and the gathering of rainforest fruits in the remote settlement of Praia Alta Piranheira, 500 km from Belém, the state capital.

Since 2005, the couple had been battling the illegal occupation of land on the 22,000-hectare settlement by loggers and charcoal producers. In Praia Alta Piranheira, the trees have been cut on 75 percent of the land.

The catalyst for the murders was the illegal purchase by Rodrigues of a 150-hectare plot in the area where the Praia Alta Piranheira project was being carried out.

Three families lived on half of the lot. Rodrigues tried to evict them, but failed, thanks to the support they received from Zé Castanha and his wife.

In reprisal, Rodrigues decided to hire gunmen to murder them, according to the prosecution. After the two community leaders were killed, the intimidation against the three families continued, and given the lack of police protection, they finally abandoned the land.

The prosecutor, Danyllo Pompeu Collares, announced that he would appeal the verdict.

“Society is not yet prepared to put the blame on the person responsible (for the killings) for fear of his economic power and political influence,” said the prosecutor. “The rest of the family (of the two victims) will continue to be under threat as long as (Rodrigues) is free.”

The south and southeast of Pará is one of the most violent parts of Brazil, in terms of deadly land conflicts. According to the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), of 1,645 murders related to land disputes committed since 1985, just 100 went to trial, and in only 22 of those cases was the person accused of masterminding the killings found guilty.

“The justice system in Pará is very conservative,” Marabá Mayor João Salame, who took office this year, told IPS. “I wanted a guilty verdict; any light sentence would be an incentive for hired killings. The punishment has to be stiff.”

Atila Roque, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, told IPS that “the couple had a history of defending the law and working to pacify the conflict. The state played a role of complete omission…it is shocking and shameful.”

The 200 activists who came to Marabá to stand vigil outside the courthouse starting at 5:00 AM the first day included representatives of Amnesty, Brazil’s National Human Rights Movement, and the foundation that grants the Right Livelihood Award, better known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.

During the trial, activists and local small farmers set up an altar outside the building, with a photo of the victims and offerings of cashews.

“They defended the jungle,” said Maria do Espírito Santo’s brother-in-law, José Sampaio, who was the first to testify at the trial. “In this region there are many ranchers, loggers, charcoal producers and farmers who have settled on land. The couple were ‘agro-extractivists’ and lived off the rainforest.”

According to Laísa Sampaio, his wife and Maria’s sister, the couple had received death threats since 2001.

“They denounced crimes, the charcoal makers and loggers, and illegal occupation of land, and were carrying out an educational process to show people that it was possible to make a living from the jungle,” said Laísa, who also received threats and was forced off the land where she was living.

According to José Batista of the CPT, who assisted the prosecution, abundant physical evidence was gathered by the police, such as strands of hair found in a diving mask that was used in the murder and which, by means of DNA testing, made it possible to determine that it belonged to one of the two murderers.

“The conviction was a sure thing based on the existing evidence, which was compelling and gave us the certainty that the jurors would hand back a guilty sentence,” Batista told IPS.

Despite his health problems, 82-year-old French Dominican friar Henri des Roziers, a CPT lawyer in Pará who is known locally as Frei Henri, made it a point to attend the trial.

He said the case was similar to that of the assassination of legendary environmental activist Chico Mendes, a leader of the seringueiros or rubber tappers who was killed in 1988 in the northwest state of Acre.

“The impunity remains in place; I am leaving with a heavy heart,” Henri said.

“Extractivism and the preservation of nature are still a cause of death,” he said. “These murders were like that of Chico Mendes – the reasons were the same. These people were an irritant for the current model of agribusiness, agrotoxics and scorn for nature.”