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REPORTS: BRAZIL |
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War
Against the Poor
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Landless workers are constantly targeted with violence MST
Amnesty International compares levels of violence to Israeli-Palestinian war zones.
Antônio Alves da Silva, aged 43, was shot dead by gunmen on June 4. He and nearly 1,500 other landless workers had been planting a field they had occupied when men under the direction of the land’s owner, Marcos Napoleao, attacked them. The attack left 10 other people wounded, including a woman and a 14-year-old girl.
The violence took place in the municipality of Jacarau, 65 kilometers from João Pessoa, Paraíba. The landless families occupied the 4000 hectares of land in August 2001. They asked the government agrarian reform agency, the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), to inspect the land, but their request was denied.
The violence in Paraíba comes on the heels of an Amnesty International (AI) report that compares levels of violence in Brazil between 2000 and 2002 to conflict zones in Israeli and Palestinian territories. Most of the violence took place in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro where thousands of people have been killed in confrontations with the police.
The circumstances of many of the killings suggest extra-judicial executions, according to the AI report. Released in May, the report also affirms that torture and ill treatment continued to be widespread and systematic in police stations, prisons and juvenile detention centers. Inmates are victims of on-going violence in over-crowded, deteriorating prisons. Many reported cases of killings came at the hands of police and prison guards, but more often as a result of inter-prisoner violence committed with the acquiescence of relevant authorities (LP, March 19, 2001).
What’s more, says the report, human rights defenders across the country continued to suffer attacks, threats, intimidation and killings, especially when denouncing organized crime, corruption and impunity.
Popular demands for tougher public security policies dominated last year’s presidential election that resulted in a landslide victory for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (LP, Dec. 30, 2002). According to AI, residents of poor neighborhoods continued to suffer most from violent crimes committed by both criminal gangs and corrupt elements within the police. Da Silva assumed office in January 2003. (LP, Jan. 15, 2003)
According to the São Paulo police Ombudsman’s office, police killings in the state numbered 703 between January and October 2002, matching the total for the whole of 2001. Of these killings, 652 were registered as "resistance followed by death," 138 of which were attributed to off-duty police officers. In Rio de Janeiro, 656 killings by police had been registered by September last year, already outstripping the previous year’s total of 592. Death squads reportedly continued to act with impunity in certain states with the participation or collusion of the police.
Although the federal government launched a campaign to combat torture in 2001, prosecution figures under the 1997 torture law continued to be extremely low given the endemic practice of the crime. The São Paulo non-governmental Christian Action for the Abolition of Torture presented a report to state authorities citing 1,631 of the 5,000 cases of torture in the state that it had recorded between June 2000 and June 2002. According to figures given to the non-governmental Global Justice, the São Paulo state Public Prosecutor’s Office had begun only 30 prosecutions under the torture law since 1997.
According to the AI report, land activists suffered harassment and attacks by military police responsible for carrying out evictions as well as killings by hired gunmen often acting with the apparent compliance of police and local authorities. The Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission documented 38 killings of land activists in 2002, an increase of 31 percent over 2001. At least 10 killings of rural workers and trade unionists were reported in Pará state alone.
Land reform activists continued to be held under preventive detention orders and to have politically motivated criminal charges brought against them. In many cases charges appeared to be prompted solely because of their nonviolent activities in favor of land reform
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