Rally at Brazilian Consulate over the assassination of peasant leaders

Press Advisory

Demonstration: MONDAY, APRIL 18TH

Consulate General of Brazil in San Francisco
300 Montgomery St #300, San Francisco, CA 94104


San Francisco, CA—On the afternoon of April 7th, two teams of the Brazilian Military Police, accompanied by security guards from the Araupel paper company, attacked the landless peasant encampment Dom Tomas Balduino in the Iguaçu Falls region of Parana state, Brazil. The Military Police opened fire into the peacefully assembled crowd, killing two social movement organizers and leaving another six in critical condition.

On Monday, April 18th, the Friends of the MST in collaboration with the Multicultural Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture (MESA) and other Bay Area food sovereignty organizations will hold a rally outside the Consulate General of Brazil in San Francisco to demand accountability from the Brazilian government.

This is not the first time that the Military Police in Brazil has murdered landless people and social movement organizers. In fact, April 17th, this Sunday, marks the twentieth anniversary of the Eldorado dos Carajas Massacre, when 19 landless peasants were murdered by the Military Police – sparking protests every year to mark this day as the International Day of Peasant Struggle.

These murders in Brazil also come on the heel of the assassination of Berta Caceres and other indigenous and environmentalist leaders in Honduras, and similar repression against indigenous, peasant, and environmentalist leaders around the world.

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Background:

The Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil (MST) has been organizing for land redistribution and agrarian reform for over 30 years. The Dom Tomas Baldunino encampment, located in an area belonging to the Araupel company, is organized with 2,500 families, about 7,000 people. The landless workers living on the site have been suffering constant threats from the security forces and company gunmen, threats that come with the connivance of the Parana state government.

This massacre reflects part of the climate of tension that has its roots in the struggle for access to land and against land grabbing in the region. The conflict is related to the emergence of two MST encampments in the South Central region of Paraná state that have been built in areas where Araupel, an exporter of pine and eucalyptus, is operating.

The first encampment, Heirs to the Land, is located in the municipality of Rio Bonito do Iguaçu. The occupation took place on May 1, 2014 and now houses more than a thousand families. There they have approximately 1.5 thousand hectares for food production. The second camp, Dom Tomas Balduino, whose occupation began in June 2014, has 1,500 families and is in the Iguaçu Falls region. The National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra) reported not being able to take a stand on the case since it is an encampment, not a settlement. Already the National Agrarian Ombudsman said it has no information about the case, but that it is verifying the incident.



For more Information

http://www.mstbrazil.org


MST Communique

http://www.mstbrazil.org/news/mst-communiqu%C3%A9-military-police-gunmen-attack-landless-families-murder-two-workers


Interview with Joaquin Pinheiro, from MST, on the Assassination of Two Comrades in Parana

http://www.mstbrazil.org/news/interview-joaquin-pinheiro-mst-assassination-two-comrades-parana