The Dark Side of Brazil’s Economic Miracle

Para is one of Brazil’s most resource-rich states, part of the country’s immense Amazonian region. It is, however, also one of Brazil’s most violent states. In 2008 alone, 13 people were assassinated because of their involvement in land reform issues. It is a disturbing counterindicator to all of the talk of Brazil being a 21st-century economic role model at the forefront of the newly developed coterie of nations. (Why Brazil is the one country that might avoid recession.)

The area around the town of Redencao is a particularly bloody battlefield. It is the home to powerful cattle barons who are in constant conflict with reform activists. In 2005, an American nun Dorothy Stang, who supported land reform, was murdered. On Thursday, as a local court postponed the third trial of a man accused of killing her, unknown gunmen shot dead Pedro Alcantara de Souza, another activist for land reform in Redencao. Police believe Souza was targeted because he works for the Federation of Family Farmers, a group that defends the rights of small producers and landowners in southern Para state. (From TIME’s Archive: the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.)

Souza, who sought the agrarian reform that would give small plots to the area’s poor, was shot three or four times as he bicycled with his wife and her friend on Tuesday evening, said Loyana Nogueira da Silva, the police officer who was on duty when the case was called in. The three were on the edge of a temporary settlement of poor farmers, when an unidentified assailant or assailants approached him on a motorcycle and opened fire. Souza’s wife and her friend had biked ahead and turned when they heard the shots. Although they have no firm leads to go on, police are treating the case as murder. “I think it was because of his work,” Nogueira da Silva told TIME in a telephone interview. “His work was dangerous, he dealt with land grabbers and these people always have pistoleiros. What he did was a high risk activity.”

According to the Pastoral da Terra, the Roman Catholic Church group that monitors land conflicts, more than 1,400 rural workers have been killed in land conflicts since the commission began keeping records in 1985. The 13 people killed in Para in 2008 over land issues is almost half the national total and more than in any other state. The Ohio-born Stang, who was 63, was one of the highest profile victims of the conflicts. Two hit men were jailed for her murder and a powerful rancher who believed her activism was instrumental in him losing a parcel of land to small farmers, was found guilty of ordering her killing. However, he was cleared at a second trial and the third due to start this week was put back until April 12.

Experts on Brazil’s rural violence said land ownership, along with the related issues of deforestation, logging, land grabbing, and the slave labor sometimes used by powerful landowners, are the key factors in making Brazil’s remote hinterlands such bloody places. “Economic interests are linked to land ownership and anyone opposed to them is in danger,” says Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, the author of “Brazil Violence Map,” a government-sponsored study of the country’s most violent areas.

Many of the most violent municipalities in the country are remote and lawless areas reminiscent of the Wild West. Settlers struggle for control of land and the small and ill-equipped police officers and justice officials are powerless to stop them. Three of the 10 towns with the highest homicide rates are in the Arc of Deforestation that runs around the Amazon’s eastern and southern fringe. “That is closely related to the presence of loggers, slave labor, land grabbers and the local political and economic powers,” he says.

Another issue is the agricultural frontier that is constantly encroaching on the Amazon. Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse and the world’s biggest exporter or producer of sugar, soy beans, coffee, orange juice, beef and chicken. Thirst for land, produce, and the jobs, development and hard currency they brings, are motivating factors behind the bloodshed, says Father Edilberto Senna, an activist priest in the north of Para. “Nothing changes,” he says. “Brazil is proud that it was the 12th biggest economy in the world and that it is now the ninth biggest and will soon be the fifth biggest. But who pays for these ambitious goals? Amazonia, the home of the biggest reserves of minerals and timber.