Dead trees mark the site of the 1996 massacre in Eldorado dos Carajás. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
ELDORADO DOS CARAJÁS, Brazil , Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

The order came from the office of the governor of the northern Brazilian state of Pará, Almir Gabriel, at 5:00 PM on Apr. 17, 1996: clear route PA-150, the epicentre of social protests for land reform, at any cost.

Route PA-150 joined the city of Marabá and the town of Parauapebas, in the southeast of the Amazonian state of Pará, the location of some of the country’s largest mining and ranching projects.

On that day in 1996, at a spot known as the “S” curve on route PA-150 in Eldorado dos Carajás municipality, 800 kilometres from the state capital Belém, 150 police officers opened fire on some 1,000 demonstrators belonging to the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) who were blocking the road.

Nineteen people were killed and 70 were wounded. The demonstrators were on their way to Belém to demand the expropriation of the Macaxeira estate in Curionópolis, close to Eldorado, already under occupation by 1,500 families, and the distribution of its land under the land reform laws.

The tragedy placed land reform on the political agenda of this South American country, and Apr. 17 was named International Day of Peasant Struggle.

This year is the 17th anniversary of the massacre, and the 15th anniversary of the creation of Assentamento 17 de Abril, the peasant settlement founded in response to the demonstrators’ demands.

The settlement was created nearly two years after the massacre, when the National Institute for Colonisation and Land Reform (INCRA) declared the Macaxeira estate unproductive, a necessary condition for expropriation according to the land reform laws.

Some 700 previously landless families are now settled on 37,000 hectares of the estate which the MST activists occupied in 1996. Today they are struggling to survive, without sources of employment or support to make their plots of land productive.

Ivagno Brito, the son of peasants, was 13 years old when he witnessed the massacre. Today he is 30, and dedicated to the MST cause.

“People were desperate, it was sheer madness. Imagine the scene, a whole bunch of people in the crossfire. What affected me most was seeing women and children taking cover in a small chapel that no longer exists,” said Brito, pointing out the exact spot of the massacre on the “S” curve.

“I can’t forget it. I lost my head. I couldn’t find my father and I began to run…Later on I found myself in the bushes,” he told IPS.

Maria Zelzuita, 48, was also there. “They wanted us to clear the road but we were on foot. So the police decided to open fire to clear it. What I can’t forget was the people screaming and the children crying for their mothers,” she said.

“There were already people dead on the asphalt. I took four little children by the hand to rescue them. I ran off the road towards the bushes, and we also carried a boy who had been shot.”

Zelzuita has a plot of 25 hectares of land where she grows rice, cassava, maize and pumpkins.

But experience has shown that it is not enough to distribute land without providing the instruments and knowledge to develop sustainable agriculture.

Zelzuita works in partnership with the people in the settlement. She earns a living as an assistant cook at the local school, and she is also a student and a single mother of three. At home she has piped water and electricity.

“I am happy to be a settler; I have somewhere to live and raise my children. Before I did not have this, and I can’t imagine myself in a city. But there is no employment here, and many people have to go to the cities to find work,” she told IPS.

In the face of these difficulties, many INCRA settlers have sold their lots and left. The sale of plots in the land reform settlements is a frequent occurrence in Pará.

Forty-nine-year-old “Dona” Rosa Costa Miranda has no plans to leave the rural area, but she was overwhelmed by the effort it took to cultivate a vegetable garden in such poor soil, so she decided to rent her land for grazing cattle.

“Today I have a plot of land and a house. I produce hardly anything because I am on my own, but I rent it out. Life in the settlement is hard because there is no work. Some people owe money to the bank and have no way of making payments,” she told IPS.

Dona Rosa was born in Maranhão, in the arid Northeast, the poorest part of Brazil. At the age of 16 she came to Pará with her husband, a farmer. She took part in the occupation of the Macaxeira estate, and on the day of the massacre she was one of the women who hid in the small chapel.

Recently, Dona Rosa got funds to plant “cupuaçu”, an Amazonian fruit. But a slash-and-burn fire lit by her neighbours – a common practice to clean and prepare the land for cultivation – spread out of control and burned her fruit trees.

In spite of the difficulties, “this is better than living on the outskirts of cities or in the favelas (shanty towns). Having a plot of land nowadays means security. I don’t plan to move. City streets are very dangerous,” she said.

Expropriating unproductive portions of estates and redistributing the land is a slow process that can take up to a decade.

The creation of the 17 de Abril settlement was achieved “two years after the massacre because of the blood that was spilt. People in some encampments have been waiting for 12 years and land reform has still not arrived for them,” Dona Rosa said.

The Amazon region is no longer what it was when she first arrived from the Northeast. To reach Assentamento 17 de Abril, you drive through small villages and urban areas that have sprung up along the side of the road, like Sororó, Eldorado dos Carajás and Curionópolis, places where there is heavy traffic of trucks loaded with minerals.

The former route PA-150, now paved federal highway BR-155, passes close by the industrial district of Marabá which has 12 steelmaking plants and large ranching properties, all of them in the middle of Amazonia.

The view from Marabá is a landscape of pasture, without a single tree. “It’s changing a lot, that’s why we’re dying of drought. In a few years’ time there won’t be any rain, because there aren’t any trees,” Dona Rosa complained.

Children at the MST’s Frei Henri des Roziers Camp in Pará, Brazil. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
MARABÁ, Brazil, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

Toiling beneath a blazing sun in the humid heat of the Amazon, Waldemar dos Santos, 60, tends the community garden he shares with other landless peasant farmers in the Brazilian state of Pará, as they wait for agrarian reform to provide them with the opportunity for a better life.

“My dream is a small plot of land. Our goal is to bring an end to hunger in this country, which is falling off the precipice of need,” he told Tierramérica*. As a child, Santos fled the drought-stricken northeast Brazilian state of Bahia and migrated to the northern state of Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region.

His family is one of the 280 families living in the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp, established by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Aug. 8, 2010. The camp is named after a Dominican friar and lawyer from the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission who continues to fight in defence of human rights in the region at the age of 82.

The landless peasants are occupying a 400-hectare estate known as Fazendinha, located off federal highway BR-155 roughly 100 kilometres from the city of Marabá. They say that the purported owners of the estate, formerly a cattle ranch, created it by invading and illegally deforesting public land, and that at the time of the occupation, it had been left idle and unproductive.

This is the justification for almost all of the land occupations by social movements demanding agrarian reform in Brazil.

In the southeast of Pará, where the struggle over land is most violent, over 500 settlements of small farmers have been legalised by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). But there are still more than 100 camps of families living in tents and straw huts waiting for the federal government to grant them legal ownership of the land.

It takes an average of five years to get the government to confiscate a property and allocate the land to agrarian reform.

To reach the Frei Henri camp, you need to drive along a long stretch of the dusty BR-155, full of potholes and trucks loaded with minerals that block the road day and night.

The region was once rich in cashew trees, which were razed to make way for cattle pastures. Right in the heart of the Amazon, the towering green canopies and exuberant vegetation of the rainforest were replaced with the flat monotony of grassland years ago.

The occupation of Fazendinha has led to bitter conflicts with local ranch owners, who have joined forces and hired private armed guards to intimidate the landless farmers and destroy their crops.

“We plant crops to grow healthy food. The ranch owners don’t produce anything and claim that their lands are productive. We face constant threats. Justice in Pará is very slow. We wait and despair,” said Dos Santos.

“Here, land is power,” declared Maria Raimunda César, 39, a member of the MST coordinating committee in Pará. “The conflict is never-ending. In Pará, people are gunned down like animals. A side of beef for export is worth more than a human life. There is tremendous injustice, and growing oppression and violence.”

According to César, agrarian reform is ignored in national policies. Both the current government of Dilma Rousseff and that of her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) “removed the issue from the agenda.”

Changes in land use tend to follow a similar perverse pattern, said César. First the rainforest is opened up to make way for mining and logging for charcoal production. This is followed by the invasion of public lands by private landholders, who destroy the forest and plant grasses for cattle grazing.

On average, there is one head of cattle per hectare, she noted.

Also along highway BR-155, but close to Marabá, there is another camp of landless peasant farmers, the Helenira Resende Camp, which was set up on Mar. 1, 2010 and is now home to 150 families. In addition to intimidation by armed men, these farmers also face airborne threats: toxic agricultural products sprayed over their homes and fields.

Raúl Montenegro, an Argentine activist who participated in an international mission in solidarity with the landless peasants of Pará, told Tierramérica that “the combined use of bullets and poisons is tantamount to chemical warfare against these communities.”

“The large landholders claim that they are spraying these chemicals on their own lands, but this is a way of evading responsibility,” said Montenegro, the president of the Foundation for the Defence of the Environment, based in Córdoba, Argentina, and a recipient in 2004 of the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”.

“We were not only able to confirm that groups of armed men laid siege to an entire community and subjected them to a nightly hail of gunfire and loud bombs at the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp. We also witnessed how companies like Santa Barbara conduct aerial spraying of pesticides,” he denounced.

“This poison reaches children, adolescents and adults, with total impunity, with no government control, and no epidemiological or environmental testing,” he added.

“Our motto is to occupy and resist, but they are an extremely powerful group. The men at the ranch are heavily armed and they shoot,” said Aldemir Monteiro de Souza, 28, a resident of the Helenira Resende Camp, which occupies 50 hectares within the Cedro ranch, an estate covering a total area of almost 15,000 hectares.

The “powerful group” he is referring to are the owners of the cattle company Agropecuária Santa Barbara. One of the company’s biggest shareholders is banker Daniel Dantas, who was arrested in 2008 for financial crimes and money laundering.

According to the MST and the Pastoral Land Commission, in the last 10 years alone, the Santa Barbara Group has bought up 800,000 hectares of land in six municipalities in Pará.

“The group appropriates public lands, uses slave labour, and commits environmental crimes,” said Charles Trocate, an MST coordinator in Pará.

The landless peasants are waiting for INCRA technicians to inspect the Cedro ranch to determine if it is productive and legal. If irregularities are detected, the process for its expropriation will begin, and the land will subsequently be allocated in parcels to the farmers.

A hearing with the INCRA agrarian oversight committee has been scheduled for May 22 at the Justice Forum in Marabá. This will be the first step, after years of occupation and the establishment of the landless farmers’ camp.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

The execution-style killing of a leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement in a sugarcane plantation in the southeastern Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, where bodies of opponents of the dictatorship were incinerated in the 1970s, recalls one of the most tragic chapters in this country’s history.

Cícero Guedes, murdered Jan. 26 in the north of Rio de Janeiro.

In the book “Memórias de uma Guerra Suja” (Memoirs of a Dirty War), Cláudio Guerra, formerly an agent of the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS), the 1964-1985 military regime’s political police, tells how the bodies of 10 leftwing activists were burned, in order to leave no trace, in the oven of the Usina Cambahyba sugarcane plant in Campos dos Goytacazes, a municipality in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Forty years later, the name of this agroindustrial complex of seven plantations with a total area of 3,500 hectares is again linked to the silencing of a bothersome voice, but this time under a full democracy.

Fifty-four-year-old Cícero Guedes was an outstanding leader in the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). He led the land occupation of the Usina Cambahyba plant which gave rise to the Luiz Maranhão encampment.

“He was a real symbol, and (his murder) sends a powerful message to the MST, which is organising the land claims of rural workers in the area,” one of the MST national directors, Marcelo Durão, told IPS.

“We are in conflict with the forces of oppression in the region,” he said, and he described Guedes as “a staunch activist, consistent and very focused on the struggle for land, as well as an authority on agroecological production.”

Marcos Pedlowski, a professor at the State University of North Fluminense who has studied land reform issues there since 1998, said the murder “is clearly an attempt to break up the organisation, rather than a petty dispute.” Guedes was “an icon of efforts in the struggle for land”, he said.

The MST leader was cut down by at least 10 bullets in an ambush in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 26, near the sugarcane industrial complex. He was cycling home from a meeting to negotiate the legalisation of the situation of the 100 landless families in the encampment.

The dispute over land ownership with agribusiness owners in the region “has been exacerbated by the delay in legal procedures involving properties regarded as unproductive, and therefore subject to expropriation for agrarian reform purposes,” said Maria do Rosário Nunes, the human rights secretary for the Brazilian Presidency. The Cambahyba case is an example, she said in a communiqué.

Legal authorisation for the expropriation, which effectively allows it to go ahead, was granted in August 2012, 14 years after the ruling by the Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).

“The backdrop (to the murder) is the slowness of federal justice,” Marcelo Freixo, a state legislator for the Socialism and Freedom Party and chair of the Human Rights Commission of the Rio de Janeiro state legislature, told IPS in an interview.

“The large plantations in the sugarcane processing region are bankrupt and are in debt to the state, in an area where there is a great concentration of poor and landless people. This is where INCRA really has to ensure land reform,” he said.

The large estates belonged to the late Heli Ribeiro Gomes, a former deputy governor of Rio de Janeiro, and were passed on to his heirs.

In the book, Guerra says he took advantage of his friendship with Ribeiro Gomes to “disappear” the bodies of the leftwing activists, using the factory oven.

The story is “absurd”, according to Ribeiro Gomes’s relatives, but other equally macabre tales have been borne out in reality, even in the present day, like the killing of Guedes and other rural activists whose deaths did not receive as much publicity.

“They say 10 activists were cremated. But we can well believe there were many more,” said Durão. The area is notorious for its history of violence against rural workers on the part of the “sugar kings” and their hired killers.

Durão drew attention to the “brutality” of the killing, and its “premeditated nature”, with four shots to the head and six to the left side of the chest.

Freixo said it was “a murder by several killers, an ambush… and nothing was taken. Clearly it was an execution.”

The northern part of the Fluminense flats has not changed much – at least in terms of fundamental issues like land ownership, human exploitation and violence – since the dictatorship era, nor since previous centuries, when the first forms of slavery in Brazil were introduced on sugarcane plantations.

In 2009, a Labour Ministry report said Campos dos Goytacazes was the area with the highest number of workers labouring in slave-like conditions, a shocking situation in the 21st century, Freixo said. However, it is not surprising, since this region was the last in the country to abolish slavery.

Pedlowski, author of the book “Desconstruindo o Latifúndio – a Saga da Reforma Agrária no Norte Fluminense” (Dismantling the Large Estates – the Saga of Land Reform in North Fluminense), stressed the concentration of land ownership, linked to sugarcane monoculture and violence.

The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality on a rising scale from 0 to 1, is 0.8 for land ownership in Campos dos Goytacazes, the highest inequality coefficient in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

“The same families always rule the roost in Campos,” a region that is “the traditional cradle of the extreme right, like Tradition, Family and Property (TFP, a traditional Catholic civic organisation, now-dissolved),” and a place where political corruption scandals have erupted in modern times, the book says.

Guedes fought tirelessly against the use of toxic pesticides in agriculture, in addition to fighting injustice. He was a sugarcane cutter in the northern state of Alagoas before joining MST in 1996 and obtaining a plot of land in the Zumbi dos Palmares settlement.

A father of five, Guedes ran an agroecological farm and was regularly to be found at organic produce markets, as well as participating in local coordination with the government food purchasing programme, which buys produce from family farms to provide school meals.

“He did not learn at the university. The rest of us learned from him,” Pedlowski said.

“The MST was his life. He made great sacrifices to form marketing groups for producers…and he was not satisfied with having his own land. He led from the front at other land occupations. He was the animator,” he said.

“The elimination of such a dynamic leader shows the degree of impunity and the state of paralysis of land reform, especially since (Brazilian President) Dilma (Rousseff) took office,” he said.

According to the MST, the current administration not only has not solved the problem of 150,000 families camped by the roadside waiting for land, but has increased the concentration of land ownership, some of it in the hands of foreign companies.

An INCRA report says that in 2012 the agency invested 1.05 billion dollars and benefited 23,000 families in 117 settlements.

Last year, it says, the agency obtained declarations of public interest on 31 properties for the purposes of land reform.