It’s raining this morning, here in Montevideo, in the south of the south. The rain is coming down hard, the sky overcast and gray. However, it’s impossible to shake off the sensations awakened by our recent experience, just days ago, as we were suffocating in the heat of the dusty Trans-Amazonian highway in the Brazilian state of Pará, some 600 kilometers south of its capital, Belém do Pará.

A team from the IUF Latin American Regional Office, formed by Álvaro Santos, Emiliano Camacho and myself, had arrived there to begin our field work, the outcome of which was to be a 20-minute documentary -now being edited-, one of the key components of the international campaign against rural violence in Brazil that will be launched in the next few weeks jointly by IUF and the Confederation of Women and Men Farmers of Brazil (CONTAG).*

This work plan, developed together with the Federation of Agricultural Workers (FETAGRI) of the state of Pará, began to take form in Marabá. In the outskirts of this city we met one of Dedé’s sons, the sole survivor of a massacre that still remains unpunished, where labor activist Dedé was murdered along with his wife and younger son. The murderers were set free by decision of the court. We were introduced to the Fundação Agraria do Tocantins Araguaia, an educational and professional training center for young farmers and peasants that uses a methodology known as “alternation pedagogy,” whereby students spend 15 days at school and return home for the rest of the month so as not to neglect their families’ productive activities. The center also carries out various projects connected with community learning, cooperation and natural resource management.

A few kilometers from Marabá we visited a settlement of more than 80 families of landless farmers who have been struggling for the last three years to be granted an unproductive piece of land that they’ve already occupied three times, and from which they’ve been driven out three times. They are now living in what were once pigpens -given to them by a neighboring settlement- where they lack both electricity and water.

In Rondón do Pará we met Joel, the widow of the rural leader Dezinho, murdered two years ago. Joel was later elected president of the Union of Rural Workers of Rondón, and due to the death threats she constantly receives she needs to be protected by a bodyguard around the clock.

In Paraupebas we heard of the murder of rural leader Soares, recounted by his brother and Indio, a fellow union member. We also gathered the testimony of the widow of Antonio do Alho, a former rural labor leader and advisor to the local Prefeitura’s Secretary of Agriculture, murdered just three months ago. Antonio left behind four children, the youngest barely four months old.

After traveling down a long stretch of the Trans-Amazonian highway, we reached Pacajá, where we came upon Dorival, a local leader who was forced to flee his plot of land, in search of a safer situation in town, after receiving a death threat.

We then went on to Anapú, the small city that had been home to the American-Brazilian nun Dorothy Stang, a member of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, murdered a few months back, after 25 years of continuous threats and intimidations. There we spoke with Janine, another American nun, who over the last 20 years had fought alongside Dorothy. The landless peasant community shared with us their testimony and memory of the murdered nun, and we also heard from Chiquinho, president of the local rural workers’ union, who was Dorothy’s spiritual son and former PT candidate for mayor. He has also received death threats from the same “consortium” that murdered Sister Dorothy.

From Anapú we traveled to Santarem, where we met with Ivete, president of the peasant’s union, who has been threatened to death by soybean growers and “fazendeiros” (large landowners) that have taken over millions of hectares of public lands which used to be selva, tropical rainforests, and have now been turned into grasslands and crops undergoing a rapid process of desertification. Ivete comes from a traditional community that has always lived in the rainforest and whose livelihood consists of gathering various products of the forest. She led us to two “quilombola” communities that live along the banks of the Tocantins river, deep inside the “mata”, or bush. There we saw firsthand the consequences of the pressure that is exerted by dominant economic interests over these communities, to force them out of their villages so that they can take over the rainforest that provides their livelihoods. Quilombos are black communities originally formed by fugitive slaves that sought refuge in the rainforest, and who often mixed with the indigenous groups they found in the places they settled in. They have inhabited these lands for centuries, and their remaining there is one of the best chances the forest has of surviving, as they live off it and know it better than anyone. However, they are under a continuous threat of violence.

Finally, a few kilometers from Belém, we found the family of Rejane –her widower and two children. She was an activist of the peasant women’s movement of the region, who was murdered ten years ago in her own home, in front of her small children and nieces and nephews. Her murder, like all the others, remains unpunished, because while her killer was arrested a few minutes after slaying her, the Police made sure he was silenced, as he was shot “while trying to escape” -as they say- from the police station. The killer was also killed that same day, and the people behind the murder were never exposed. Rejane’s family gave us a moving testimony of the love that this intelligent, warm, and beautiful woman from Bahia put into everything she did in life.

These people fought in the “first line of fire,” where the “grilleros”** burn thousands and thousands of hectares of rainforest to take over those lands without having any legal titles -and when they do have them, they’re always forged-, and exploit it for the few remaining years of fertility, as the land is inevitably condemned to desertification. The alliance formed by newly rich adventurers, retired and active military officers who began their own feudal dynasties during the dictatorship of the 1960s, fine wood exporters that have cut down nearly 40% of the finest trees in the Brazilian Amazonia and continue to advance, and cattle ranchers and soybean growers, extending over huge strips of misappropriated lands, constitutes a strong power factor that -apart from rare and honorable exceptions- dominates the local Courts, Police and government. The traditional passivity of the State -which is actually an expression of the complicity and connivance of each new government- has changed somewhat since the murder of Sister Dorothy, which had a great impact worldwide. The government of Lula da Silva has sent several military and Federal Police forces to the area, who are supposedly less influenced by local pressures. In the “trenches” of the struggle for land and against impunity -key elements of this institutionalized violence- things haven’t changed much. People may breath a little easier, but fear is still the language in which every day life is written.

Despite that fear, the people we interviewed have decided not only to continue to fight where they live, but also, and more importantly, to remain there because that is where they want to live.

The cry that echoes in the south of Pará, and throughout rural Brazil, is not a mournful cry, it’s not a lament, it’s a call to live, to celebrate life and the wealth through which life expresses itself in these lands. A cry so deep and strong that sooner or later it will bury forever the messengers of death, ignorance and selfishness. Whatever the cost may be.

Carlos Amorín

© Rel-UITA

October 17, 2005

* Rel-UITA thanks FETAGRI for the support it provided locally, and Cesar Ramos, Carmen Helena Ferreira, and Paulo Caralo of CONTAG.

** Thus called because in order to forge the titles to the lands, by giving them an “aged” look, they place them in boxes with crickets (“grilos”), whose urine gives the paper that yellowish color.