17 April 1996 – a day we must not forget, a crime that must never happen again. On that Wednesday afternoon, about 1500 families were camped on the highway at Curva do S, in the municipality of Eldorado dos Carajás in the south east of Pará (PA), in yet another chapter in the struggle for land in Brazil. Since the 10th of that month, peasant workers had been marching through the state in order to reach Belém and achieve the expropriation of the Macaxeira ranch, which was occupied by about 3500 homeless families.
However, the workers’ struggle was brutally interrupted. The encampment was shocked by an operation undertaken by 155 military police from Parauapebas and Marabá, who encircled the area and started launching teargas bombs. At the end of the attack, 69 people had been injured and 21 had been killed, 19 of them on the spot.
The killings, known as the Massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás, represent one of the most barbarous crimes against peasant workers seen across the world. Batista Nascimento Silva, who was only 15 years old at the time, witnessed the massacre. “I saw my companions helping others who’d been shot. There was an enclosed part of a house and I pulled open the door seeking refuge inside and there were various people lying on the floor in there, children, women, old and young people,” he recalled in an interview with the Brasil de Fato newspaper (in Portuguese). Today Batista is a teacher, State Director of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra: MST) and lives in the Lourival Santana settlement. He believes that the operation was in retaliation against the homeless struggle. “At the time, the system in the region here was dominated by the ideals of the landlord kings, with a part of society that included traders, companies, for example Vale, who were furious about the MST’s expansion and territorialization,” he noted.
Impunity, however, was another mark of the massacre. Despite the participation of hundreds of police officers and the consent of Almir Gabriel (Brazilian Social Democracy Party – Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira: PSDB), state governor at the time, and the Pará State Security Secretary, Paulo Sette Câmara, who authorized the use of police force, only two people were found guilty: Colonel Mário Colares Pantoja, who received a prison sentence of 228 years and Major José Maria Pereira Oliveria, who was condemned to 154 years. By 2012, however, they had both appealed while still free.
Impact within and outside Brazil
The Massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás generated an international process of denouncement and solidarity. To mark the date, the Via Campesina, a coalition of peasant movements from five continents, named 17 April International Day of the Peasant Struggle. In Brazil, the date is also remembered as the National Day of Struggle for Agrarian Reform, based on a decree signed by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then President of the Republic. The day marks the struggle for a range of grassroots movements from the countryside and the city, both within and outside Brazil, including the MST, in defence of the democratization of land and for agrarian reform in Brazil.
CESE played an important part in this mobilization. Antônio Dimas Galvão, CESE’s Projects and Training Coordinator, described the organization’s intervention immediately following the crime: “As soon as the massacre occurred, CESE quickly mobilized to hold an ecumenical mission in the region in order to offer solidarity to the families and, above all, to denounce the violence at international level and at the World Council of Churches. At the same time, we decided that the struggle for land in Brazil would be one of CESE’s main lines of operation at that time,” he explained.
“From there, we increased our support to small projects for activities in informal and other settlements, for political mobilizations, seminars, congresses and national activities to demonstrate to the public the urgent need for agrarian reform in Brazil as a condition to reduce violence in the countryside, while, at the same time, strengthening democracy and increasing food production,” Dimas noted.
The landless carry on the struggle
As part of their action for remembrance and for the struggle as a result of the massacre, every year, in April, the MST holds a National Campaign of Struggle in Defence of Agrarian Reform, a cycle of public activities related to the agrarian agenda. In a press conference on Tuesday 11 April, the movement announced the 26th edition of the campaign, which will concentrate on activities between 17 and 20 April, under the slogan “Against hunger and slavery: for land, democracy and the environment.”
The MST campaign expresses the current situation of the fight for land in Brazil. The data demonstrates the complex nature of the challenges involved. According to the 2021 Agricultural Census, 77% of agricultural establishments in Brazil are made up of small properties, while 23% are large or medium sized. However, small properties only occupy 23% of the territory, while large ones occupy 77% of the country’s land. Recalling these figures, Dimas pointed out that “if there was a concentration of land ownership, there was also a concentration of these people’s political power, because they founded the rural caucus, the bullets and evangelical caucus in Congress. There are 3 allied caucuses with conservative agendas, which collaborate to maintain the power of agribusiness and of large land estates in Brazil.”
For CESE, however, today the fight for land has taken on a different shape, one that goes beyond the struggle for agrarian reform, although this is a necessary banner for the struggle. The defence of land also includes the guarantee of territories for traditional peoples and communities; it guarantees the areas where traditional populations harvest their products, as is the case of the babassu coconut breakers; it includes the guarantee of extractivist areas in forests or semi-arid regions and the guarantee of the conditions for production and survival in the semi-arid region, to cite only a few examples. “So we say that today the fight for land and for the right to land has various aspects, not only focused on the traditional model of agrarian reform, although that agenda is absolutely relevant now, but it is not the only one,” Dimas explained.
Just like the MST, Dimas notes that the fight for land is, in essence, a fight for the defence of human rights. “In addition to increased destruction of the environment and of traditional communities’ ways of life, the concentration of land ownership violates many rights, not only worker rights, but also access to land, to produce food to feed the Brazilian people rather than to serve as an export product. So, this land concentration has countless negative effects on democracy and on the consolidation of human rights. Without reducing land concentration in the country, I think it’s hard for us to have true democracy,” he concluded.