Problems of Lawless Violence:
Rural Conflicts: Amazonia Rite of Passage from Massacre to Genocide

Chair: Tom Farer,The University of Denver
Paper: Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, Social Anthropologist, Brazil
Discussant: Roger Plant, UN Mission to Guatemala

The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Workshop on The Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America
9-11 November 1996

With the aid of a series of slides, Wagner initially described the events which took place in the Pará/Amazônia state of Brazil on 17 April 1996 at a place called "Curve do S" on the PA-150 road. Troops of the military police surrounded 1,500 rural workers who had blocked the road. The workers claimed land for work and housing. In trying to remove them, troops opened fire for 50 minutes. They shot 19 workers and injured 45; all of those killed were shot three or four times in the chest and head. Eleven people were shot in the back of the neck. Wagner moved on to describe, in general, the systemic violence that besets rural areas.

Areas of Rural Conflict

The areas most affected by ongoing violence are mainly inhabited by indigenous peoples. Today, these areas are the subject of competing claims. On the one hand, the mining, farming, fishing, or logging industries are expanding their activities, and on the other, blue collar workers are migrating back to their areas of origin in the face of dismal prospects of employment in urban areas.

In the area composed of Southern Pará, Northern Tocantins, and Western Maranhão there are 535,440 small-scale agrarian producers who do not own the land they cultivate. Included in this number are approximately 300,000 settlements of squatters paying no form of tribute to owners of land on which they squat. The Amazon is no longer a "frontier" region or an escape valve for the absorption of social problems and conflicts. It has become, in itself, a zone of conflict and social tension where land rights are bitterly contested. The conflict has a ripple effect, compelling producers to move to adjacent urban areas. Slums, homelessness, and contested land claims in urban areas have resulted.

Systemic Violence

The area is witness to increasing levels of violence that are manifest in frequent acts of brute force and physical coercion against those who demand land, and a significant growth in the number of deaths in agrarian conflicts. In general, accurate information is difficult to obtain, and no statistics recording massacres are available for a period from 1988 to 1992. Taking this into account, using data of the National Pastoral Land Commission of the Catholic Church (produced in April 1996) together with information gathered by various different rural volunteers associations, support institutes, and independent researchers from March 1985 to June 1996, at least 21 massacres are indicated within the area officially referred to as "Grande Carajas Program." There have been 1,100 assassinations in the area in the last two decades. Invariably, one male who heads a productive grouping is assassinated, disorganizing the support network essential to productive activities.

The areas affected are traditionally regarded as areas in which the government is weak. Planners seem to regard the situation as a necessary phase of a "democratic society undergoing modernization." However, the response of authorities evidences a deficient notion of democracy and an underlying devaluation of the citizenship of rural groups. Local government structures adopt the perspective of the industries, and the federal government largely accepts and relies upon the information supplied by local government. A military police apparatus sponsored and established by ranchers ensures proper conditions for forced industrialization.

Few deaths result in complaints being made to the police, even fewer are investigated, and not even a dozen perpetrators have been sentenced. Violence has become increasingly systematized-for example, victims are shot at point blank range, or in the back whilst handcuffed. Perpetrators act with impunity. Victims' survivors do not have access to legal process. Given the paucity of reliable data, one is left to infer-by reference to the manner in which murders of local indigenous people increasingly take place rather than recorded numbers of registered deaths-that, under such conditions, the line between massacre and genocide is becoming increasingly blurred.

In his capacity as chair, Farer identified the implications of the paper for land rights and land reform: Is a clarification of existing land rights required, or would a redistribution of land be more appropriate? In his view, the paper also raised the issue of the role of local cultures in self-government and policing, as it did the extent to which rural peoples are organized and unified.

 

Discussant's Comments (Roger Plant)

Failure of Neoliberal Model of Development

Plant linked the conflict Wagner described with the failings of neoliberal development models. This is not only confined to Brazil. The challenge such conflict presents is to revisit and, if necessary, arrest the application of the neoliberal model.

Land reform efforts have failed to provide land for the landless, leading instead to greater landlessness within rural areas. Governments emphasize commercial crops; this results in large-scale farming operations, reinforcing high concentrations in land ownership. Because they have no title to land, rural workers have been forced into unstable, seasonal and migrant labor. The employment crisis of the 1980s placed further pressure upon rural areas, because governments met the crisis by shifting landless workers into rural areas-where they rarely received firm title.

Restoring the Rule of Law

The challenge is to restore the rule of law in this situation. This calls for three steps: Firstly, rural violence perpetrated with state complicity needs to be noted and sanctioned. To this end, the reports of NGOs which have identified the patterns of rural violence need to be widely read and circulated in order to place rural violence perpetrated with state complicity on the agenda of UN human rights organs as a thematic issue.

Secondly, the legal system must be brought to work for the rural underprivileged. Here, access to justice can be increased by establishing ombudsmen's offices; labor law needs to be revised to cater for rural workers' interests; and programs offering legal assistance to rural populations are to be recommended. Thirdly, the broader problem of economic and social policies which marginalize the poor and perpetuate landlessness-beyond human rights and rule of law issues in the narrow sense-must be addressed. Development thinking on land reform, land titling, land security, and land banks must be reconsidered.

Plant concluded by describing the process in Guatemala, where land issues were the root of conflict. The government and insurgent groups reached a series of agreements between 1994 and May 1996. These agreements initially recognized that campesinos' calls for land restitution were legitimate. The final text of the most recent agreement is more moderate; it emphasizes labor rights and market solutions rather than tampering with title. Since this agreement has been signed, land conflicts have intensified in some regions. While police have not resorted to violence, new legislation sanctioning unlawful land occupation with imprisonment has been passed.

 

Floor Discussion

Paulo Sergio Pinheiro commented that he did not regard the Brazilian Federal Government as unduly obstructive: it was the federal government which had supplied data in respect of the events described and duly investigated them. Tensions do exist between federal and local government, and these could be used creatively in order to reinforce rights. Wagner disagreed. He emphasized that the branches of government largely supported each other. The federal government accepted and relied upon local government policy. There were racist undertones in local government policy, in that victims of violence were most often from particular indigenous groups. Farer stated that the federal government generally accepted the version of events as described from the point of view of the local governing elite.

Ana Tereza Ramos postulated that the massacre described in the paper under discussion is a reflection of the structural violence that afflicts "victims of development." Their plight is a reflection of the manner in which their citizenship is qualified in its construction, in that rural citizens who are members of indigenous groups are regarded as second-class citizens.

Rachel Sieder (Institute of Latin American Studies, England) opined that the term "the rule of law" is not neutral. Rather, models of development inform its definition. The paper under discussion evidenced a tendency within the framework of some models of development to criminalize the poor. This calls for an examination of the relationship of the state to society and the construction of citizenship.

Rodley emphasized that "the rule of law" should not be mystified. For example, everyone can understand that a culture of respect for the law cannot be maintained where the law is violated in its imposition. Law cannot be violated in the name of enforcing it.