We transmit an unofficial translation of the Letter of the 2nd Peasant Meeting of South and Southeast of Pará which took place in April 7 and 8 in Marabá municipality. Peasants from all the region, quilombola and indigenous communities, people affected by mining and many organizations like the Poor Peasants League (LCP), People´s Brigades and representatives of the National Front of Struggles in the Countryside and in the City (FNL). Also people from trade unions, professors and progressive intellectuals, people´s lawyers, popular press and student entities took part in the event.
Picture of the meeting
Letter of the 2nd Peasant Meeting of the South and Southeast Pará
Land for the tiller and for those living on it!
Marabá, April 07 and 08, 2018
Unite peasants, indigenous and quilombola peoples and people affected by mining and dams!
Seize the land and territories, end of latifundium!
Called by the Peasant Meeting of the South of Pará – which took place in October 28 and 29, 2017, in Pau D´Arco – the 2nd Peasant Meeting of the South and Southeast Pará reaffirms once more “the solidarity to the relatives of the comrades who were cowardly murdered in Santa Lúcia farm in May 24, 2017, and call their names together with all the others among millions of anonymous who felt in the struggle for land in our country through its history.
We also reaffirm our incontrovertible decision to keep struggling for the seizure of lands and for the end of latifundium at all costs to free our peasant people from the secular exploitation and oppression which submits them to the landlords and their allies, the big bourgeoisie, through its old and genocide State, situation that, following the deepening of the crisis, points out as the fundamental in order to liberate the Brazilian Nation from the subjugation and plunder of our natural resources, which imperialism, mainly north-American – the successor of Portuguese and English colonialism – has carried out continuously.
We denounce the sinister purpose of the landlords and big bourgeois, their old State and their shift managements, as well as their imperialist masters, of drowning our struggle in blood, proclaiming loud and clear that, on the contrary to what they expect, the precious spilled blood of our heroes and heroines waters our struggle and makes bigger and more glorious our cause for a new society without exploitation and oppression, without rich and poor, of equality and solidarity! And we serenely affirm that, just like through the centuries, our struggle for land never stopped and each time more the time for payback is coming, in which the suffered, thousand times trampled down and humiliated people from the countryside with the support of the poor in the city will rise to end for good with all latifundium seizing all their lands, piece by piece, through the agrarian revolution, giving the land to the landless or with little land poor peasants and united with the people from the city will put an end to this system of exploitation and oppression over our people and subjugation and plunder of the riches of our Motherland, to achieve a new democracy, new economy, new culture and the new Brazil!
We insist in denouncing that, just like the majority of the massacres and murders of peasants in struggle for land until now, the Massacre of Pau D´Arco which took place in May 24, 2017, that an operation of the Military Police of Pará cowardly murdered 10 peasants who were struggling for the dispossession of the Santa Lúcia farm, is being criminally muffled.
Everything proves that the arrest of the 15 military policemen who were accused for the massacre was only to answer the international public opinion, mainly the international human rights organizations. The Brazilian State, historically known by these organizations for violating the most elementary rights of the people, has been on the top of the world ranking of homicides for the last ten years, homicides which are known to be result of the brutal action of the repressive organs of this State, particularly the military polices.
The repercussion of this massacre of peasants, which happened in the sequence of two other of peasants from the region of Colniza, in Mato Grosso, border with Rondônia, and the Gamela indigenous people in Maranhão, in a brief time period had put the State, the federal and state governments under a hard disapproval inside the country and internationally. This explains the swiftness that the investigations and arrests of the executing criminals were made. But despite the Federal Police had concluded the investigation proving the guilt of the arrested military men in the massacre, they were soon released, just like nothing hideous had happened and only after many protests Justice determined the arrest of these coward murderers, but without any mention to whom ordered it.
The form this happened also shows the objective to hide the criminal organization of the landlords in the region, who since the 1970s has paramilitary groups, deathsquads, formed by henchmen, former policemen and active policemen. It is well known the political link of the landlords, thieves who steals the lands of the Union and the poor in the federal, state and municipal spheres, in the executive, legislative and judiciary of the Brazilian State. So, just like it is not about an isolated case, in this collusion of landlords and "authorities" is also patent the character of STATE CRIME.
The Massacre of Pau D´Arco was another one that thrown in daylight what happens almost every day in the Brazilian countryside in all its history, systematically: State agents protecting landlords- robbers of land, evicting, arresting and torturing peasants, indigenous and quilombola peoples, kidnapping, hiding and killing.
However when such massacres happens in moments of crisis, like the one which lives in our country for four years, it echoes the revolt and secular cry of the poor in the countryside against latifundium and for land for the tiller. Because, more than expose the bowels of injustice, oppression and exploitation daily hidden under the laws and by propaganda and lies of the governmental notices and monopolized communication media, they crudely reveal the reality of misery and exploitation that millions of families are subject by the system of land concentration, which Rede Globo embellishes with their “almighty” seal as “the richness industry of Brazil”. (Letter of Pau D´Arco, October, 2017)
Comrades reunited here today, in addition to movements and organizations, after less than six months what we have?
Did, by chance, the decomposition crisis of this backward bureaucratic capitalism in Brazil, in the agonizing general crisis of imperialism in world scale, cooled down? The economy resumed growing, the sinister clouds charged of lightning that looms over the poor and exploited dissipated and can we see the sun shine?
No, thousand times no!
The Yankee, Russian, Chinese and European imperialists engage each time more sharp disputes. Invaded and occupied countries by murderous hordes of the imperialists are cut to pieces like in Iraq and Syria. Russia points its missiles, the thug and terrorist Zionist State of Israel murders the Palestinian people with sniper shots against elders, women and children and launches bombs with their drones, imperialist countries exchange ambassador expulsions, spies are poisoned… How the press monopoly deals with crisis of such proportion? “Commercial War”, “diplomatic crisis”, “humanitarian” interventions, “regional wars” and loads of euphemism to hide that we are already in the period of the thirds world war.
In Brazil, on the contrary to what the worn out authorities of the country proclaim, the crisis sharpens as political, moral and military crisis. The military intervention in Rio de Janeiro, the proof of the bankruptcy of these authorities and their rotten institutions, is made to deepen the war against the people, which do not fit the framework of “Democratic State of Law” anymore. It is not a “civil intervention” and is not limited to Rio as General Etchegoyen and General Heleno, the executioner of Haiti, proclaim and repeated by the puppet former Defense Minister Raul Jungman, spokesman of the demoralized civil mafia that answers for the Old State. It is another preparation for the ongoing State coup aimed at preventing the inevitable and violent revolt of the people against so much exploitation, misery and unemployment, so much abuse and injustice, so much oppression and brutal repression to the popular claims and demands. Not even two months have passed and everything is crystal clear. The militaries openly defends preventive “habeas corpus” for their commanded to invade the houses of poor people, arrest, torture and kill workers, mainly their sons, youth, black, who are always labeled by the press monopoly as criminals and drug dealers, they even warn thay will not accept a new “Truth Commission” in the future.
And the class character of this military intervention, its real objective, is evident when the “militia”, which turned into the main military and political force in Rio de Janeiro, puts the corpse of the Deputy Marielle Franco – defender of human rights who was cowardly executed four days after denouncing the 41th Battalion of the Military Police because of the murder of young people in Acari favela – on the generals´ table. No declaration, no repudiation, and they even ask for two months to clarify the crime. What the General wants is two months to make up a version about a murder which everybody in Rio de Janeiro knows who commit. General Heleno, so coward against the Haitian people, so much against corruption after more than 10 years receiving almost R$ 50.000,00 monthly from COB, Brazilian Olympic Committee, as security advisor of Carlos Arthur Nuzman, who is today arrested for corruption, cannot answer those who are under his command, which are the ones who terrorizes and exploit the poor people of Rio de Janeiro.
But the impatience of the masses who rose up against Marielle's murder all over the country, and the intense struggles in the countryside and in the city, with strikes, road blocks, land seizures, school and public buildings occupations, that never cease, are reflected in its contenders, and the high military command, in the face of the imminent failure of the operation orchestrated by the hands of the Yankee embassy to clear the facade of rotten and corrupt capitalism popularly known as "Lava-jato", that was on the edge with the compliance with the constitution which meant not arresting Luiz Inácio, had to expose itself. They could not wait for the results of their military intervention step by step, and they framed.
General Eduardo Villas Boas, Commander of the Army, the same one exalted by opportunists as "democratic," as if he had any moral to speak of "impunity" heading an institution that tortured, killed and disappeared with thousands of Brazilians and refuses to open its terror files, threatened the STF (Federal Superior Court – Translation note) not to grant habeas corpus to the former president Luiz Inacio Lula, what was followed by his fascist commanded by the "social networks," with hysterical calls "to arms." Not until the legal arm of the military coup brought to jail the friends of Temer, released by an ashamed prosecutor of the "republic" put there by himself to save him from deposition in this desperate struggle between political factions of the ruling classes. Apart from a few ones, all the powers of the old state in front of the STF, almost all the power groups of the fractions of the great bourgeoisie and of the landowners handed Luiz Inacio's head to the military.
Sérgio Moro would not dare to arrest him, with such an impressive speed, while so many who find themselves in much more flagrant situations, are still free and circulating in the parliament and forums, if he were not properly oriented, protected and under the orders of the reactionary military, anti-communist minions and Yankee lackeys.
When the pact of class collaboration is broken, by discarding an ally like Luiz Inácio, violating its own constitution, which is vowed to defend, to arrest him without any legally valid proof, it is revealed that the gravity of the situation is already a crisis of domination about to explode in violent revolts. It is also revealed the pathetic role of the opportunists who insist on deceiving the people with the tale that elections and bourgeois democracy would be sufficient to end the secular exploitation and oppression, to divert it from the only possible path to its liberation, which is to destroy the three mountains of exploitation and oppression, the latifundium, the great bourgeoisie and imperialism. The arrest of Luiz Inácio Lula is another step towards the counterrevolutionary coup d'état that is ongoing.
To the peasant masses, to the natives and quilombolas, to those affected by mining and dams, in short, all workers in the countryside and in the city, the struggle is the best and only way.
Here in the south and southeast of Pará, the immediate response of the masses of Pau D`Arco to the coward massacre, retaking in less than 15 days the lands from which they were evicted, as well as the mobilization of support in Brazil and the "negative" repercussion for the Old State internationally, forced the illegitimate, corrupt and unpopular government of Temer to declare the dispossession of the Saint Lucia farm at the end of last December.
But to make clear that this measure meant a point outside the curve in the declared war against the peasantry to give all the land to the latifundium and to promote bloodbaths, a wave of ownership repossessions in our region was announced to put "order" in the house. The wave of evictions, the crimes and persecutions committed by Vale, the mining companies and the hydroelectric power plants, the Barcarena disaster, and the recent criminalization and imprisonment of Father Amaro of CPT in Anapu.
And that now this declared war against peasants is prepared within the ongoing military coup.
For this purpose the various meetings that INCRA (National Institute for Agrarian Reform - translation note) promoted with movements, promising something here and there, identifying land without documentation, etc., but also identifying leaderships and calming the spirits for the violence that is to come. What is coming is that this wave of ownership repossession will occur with the participation of the Army. And the attack on the peasants will be the first to try to clear the way and break the resistance of the masses of our rich region, where the people live so bad and oppressed, while the nation is looted and plundered associated with the lackeys of the great bourgeoisie and of the latifundium.
To form a front of resistance and struggle, without illusions in the false elections, trusting and putting all the effort and audacity in mobilizing, politicizing and organizing the masses, is the way and the challenge that is put forward. For the moment and for the upcoming times. The murderous and exploitative wrath of Yankee imperialism, its praetorian guard of the High Command of the Armed Forces, the big bourgeoisie and the latifundium will fail. This crisis is theirs, the more they scream it is because they are more divided and threatened and tremble as the masses move organized. History and the people will not forgive vacillations and whimpers.
Sooner or later our rich region will rise. Let it be earlier! And together with the people of the country and the city of the whole country will reverberate its war cry!
Land for the tiller and for those living on it!
Death to the latifundium!
Down with the coup and the scammers!
