WHERE THERE IS HATRED, LET US TAKE RESILIENT LOVE!
“Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” (Isaiah 5:8)
The tragedy announced on the afternoon of 19 April in the little community of Taquaruçu, in the municipality of Colniza in Mato Grosso, must provoke a wave of indignation and bring to an end the impunity of the rural caucus, which, with its agri-business focus, does not hesitate to sacrifice families and inflict horror in the cowardly shooting and stabbing of settlers who, since 2004, have fought for the sacred right to land, because that is where they work and feed their communities and the country.
Woe to you who insatiably join one field to another, interrupting lives and sacrificing hope. It is not possible to dissociate this violence from the climate of misrule in Brazil – with Temer and the Minister of Justice, rural caucus member Osmar Serraglio, with the offensive beef caucus which sees land as a mere means of production, as a jungle to be dominated by their gigantic, voracious machines, contaminating the waters, spreading poison and monoculture – creating green deserts for an exporting agriculture that respects neither frontiers nor the poor, who will one day possess this land, because they live and work on it, because through it they maintain roots and venerate it as a mother; Pachamama.
This is not an isolated fact. A recent report published by the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra: CPT) provides evidence of worsening living conditions and threats in the Brazilian rural areas – conflicts have increased by 26%, with more than 1500 cases related to the struggle for land and water, to labour issues and slave labour. The number of killings has increased by more than 20%, as have those incarcerated (185%) and threatened (440%). Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia are among the most violent states. In recent years, more than 120 people have been killed in the rural areas of Mato Grosso. “Nobody has been arrested”, says a CPT advisor. Increasingly protected by a predatory system, agri-business sectors are sowing the seeds of hatred and injustice.
Conflicts have long occurred in the region, as far back as 2007 Colniza received the designation of “most violent city in Brazil” in a study conducted by the Organization of Ibero-American States, having attained the absurd average of 165.3 killings per 100 thousand inhabitants. In one old report a journalist commented: “Not many threats are made in Colniza. When the subject discovers that there are people against him, they are already dead”, as can be attested to in the clandestine cemeteries around the region. In this last siege, nine workers were sacrificed, including a Pastor from the Assembly of God church, in the suspicion that they were from the same religious community. Police say that Pastor Sebastiao de Souza, 57 years old, was tortured the most, taken unawares by hooded men, poor murdering devils paid by the ranchers, mowing down lives and creating a climate that radicalizes laws of death and exclusion. These include PEC 215, which will allow Congress to make decisions about indigenous and quilombola lands, will relax the mining code and the Agrarian Reform, and facilitate the sale of lands to foreigners.
In the context of the indigenous peoples’ fight in the Free Earth Encampment and the 21 years since the massacre of Eldorado de Carajás, CESE stands in solidarity with the mourning families, with the local groups and associations, with the Assembly of God, with the CPT, the Prelacy of São Félix and the Diocese of Juína, encouraging them to resist in their struggle for justice; calling for the criminals and their sponsors to be punished; for the agencies within the different spheres of government and the state to enter into this scenario and contain the scourges made by the plunderers of biodiversity and of the population, to benefit Life and restore Peace in the rural areas.
Salvador, 24 April 2017