This Friday, the landless workers of Brazil are marching two thousand strong into Salvador, a river of red crawling up the BR-324 highway. They are occupying fazendas in Madalena and in Darcinópolis, where just three years ago a hundred workers languished in modern slavery. And in Pará, three thousand landless move to occupy a stretch of highway some nine kilometers from the town of Eldorado do Carajás.
They hold up banners and wooden crosses and red flags on poles. “If we are silent,” says one sign, “the stones will scream.” They are not silent: they cry, they beat drums, they sing. Their voices are echoed in India, in Indonesia, in South Africa, where peasants and landless rural laborers likewise rally in solidarity with their Brazilian counterparts.
This phenomenal spate of political activity marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Eldorado do Carajás massacre, when Brazilian military police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration led by the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST, the Landless Workers’ Movement), killing twenty-one landless activists and wounding more than sixty others. It is an atrocity in the history of the global labor struggle on par with Peterloo, Ciénaga, and Marikana — a litany attesting to the terrible power of the state against the protesting poor.
The marchers in Salvador invoke the massacre’s legacy as both a denunciation and a defiance. “Thirty years of impunity,” proclaim the banners, “but also of resistance.” Impunity and resistance continue to define the struggle of Brazil’s landless poor for agrarian reform against Latin America’s most powerful rural oligarchy. Carajás remains a touchstone for Brazil’s far right, an extreme expression of the violence required to maintain one of the world’s most unequal systems of land tenure. At the same time, Carajás reaffirms the tenacity and pride of the movement that survived it.
The massacre of Eldorado do Carajás remains woefully…
Auteur: Tyler Antonio Lynch
