The information service of the Confederação da Agricultura e Pecuária do Brasil — the CNA,, the agribusiness syndicate — helpfully places events in context.
A series of five murders of agrarian reform activists in recent weeks, according to CNA President and federal Senator Kátia Abréu, are being milked to promote a political agenda and avert attention from other matters of public morality — a flap over the consulting business of a key government minister while out of office.
They had nothing whatever to do with the sort of death squads that were found operating in many, many rural areas by a congressional inquiry several years ago
On the same day another rural worker was found murdered, Senator Kátia Abreu (TO) called the coverage afforded the deaths “opportunistic” and said the murders were ordinary crimes. In recent weeks, five activists were assassinated.
— This is opportunism. It’s an attempt to use a lamentable situation, unacceptable to all, to blame an environmental law of the Forestry Code — said Kátia, who is also president of the CNA). — It’s a shame, but public safety has become a national issue. In 2009, the CNAcalled on the Minister of Justice to come up with a plan to deal with the invasions and nothing was done.
Essentially, landless workers use civil disobedience — trespassing and camping on disputed lands — to try to bring questions of title into open court where they can be settled.
Brazil has always been a jerkwater nowhere run by back-stabbling elites who do whatever they feel like doing –Paul Francis
Latifundarian landholders have often turned to lethal violence in order to avoid having such cases heard in court. The retired chairman of the board of Gol, for example, was arrested in a raid on his rural holdings that discovered large caches of illegal weapons and a small private army.
The leader of the ruralist caucus, federal deputy Moreira Mendes (PPS-RO) said he regretted the deaths,but also called the episodes “opportunistic”. In his view, the government making so much of these cases in order to distract public opinion from the case involving Antonio Palocci, chief of staff of the presidency:
These people are given to these sorts of grotesque talking points when someone gets the death penalty for $100 trespassing ticket.
Violence against rural workers is increasing in a disproportionate manner when compared to the increase of organised protests and marches by rural workers’ movements. The recrudescence of repression is highlighted in the publicationConflitos no Campo Brasil 2009 (2009 Conflicts in the Brazilian Rural Areas) released on April 15, 2010, by the CPT (Land Commission of the Catholic Church).
In the introduction by the National Secretary of the CPT, Antônio Canuto, it states that on the whole, the year 2009 “was a very difficult year,” with a marked increase in the outlawing [of rural movements]. According to the report, a pact between large rural landholders, the Congress, the Judicial Powers and the corporate press caused the noose to tighten on rural organisations, “undermining the support from society that has taken years of struggle to build up”.
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