SÃO PAULO – An official of the Brazilian bishop’s conference who works on land disputes recently escaped after being kidnapped and beaten and has been enrolled in a government protection program for human rights advocates.
The incident took place Sept. 18 in Pernambuco state in northeastern Brazil, in an area with the state’s highest number of land disputes, which typically pit small-scale farmers or indigenous groups against wealthy ranchers and major agrobusiness interests.
Edina Maria da Silva, an agent of the bishops’ Land Pastoral Commission (CPT) said she was on a bus from a college in the city of Palmares, to her home in the city of Tamandaré. As she got off the vehicle, she said, a hooded man approached her and two other passengers, showed his gun, and asked for their cellphones, which the three victims gave him.
The man then told the other two victims to go away and took Edina with him. They walked for several miles, during which time da Silva said her captor repeatedly beat her. They eventually arrived at an unknown location, when the man told da Silva that he was hired to kill her.
She said he fought back and she eventually managed to escape. She walked for six miles till she arrived in a community and asked for help.
Geovani Leão, who is part of the same CPT group, told Crux that da Silva has several injuries and is traumatized. The police are investigating the case, and da Silva has been included in the federal government’s human rights’ advocates protection program.
“That’s a region of great sugarcane farms that used to produce high volumes of sugar and alcohol in the past. Most of them went bankrupt or were simply shut down several decades ago, and peasant families have been occupying them for at least 50 years,” Leão said.
Several owners of the territories have decided to sell or rent them to cattle ranchers, who have been putting pressure on the families to leave the areas. Some of them have been violent, and conflicts have been more and more common.
“The small growers have been constantly harassed. There have been lists of people under threat and even some killings over the last few years,” Leão said.
Up to this point, CPT agents had never been directly menaced nor suffered any kind of violence in Pernambuco.
Father Agivaldo Lessa Leão, who’s in charge of the social pastoral ministry of the Diocese of Palmares, said that the church has been accompanying many of such communities over the past years.
“The diocese’s Land Pastoral Commission and Justice and Peace Commission have been directly engaged in those groups’ struggles,” Lessa Leão told Crux.
He said he’s visited a number of communities in the nearby city of Jaqueira, which is part of the Diocese of Palmares, along with the local bishop.
“We listened to the small growers, and they told us how fearful and insecure they have been feeling,” Lessa Leão described.
Those peasants often see their crops being totally destroyed by the ranchers’ hitmen, the priest said. Many people in those groups are pious Catholics who make a huge effort in order to keep their spiritual life and, at the same time, to fight for their rights, he said.
“Only with faith and hope for better days can those people move on. God willing, they will have their lands some time in the future,” Lessa Leão said.
According to the CPT’s annual report on land disputes and violence in Brazil, Pernambuco state had at least 18,301 people who didn’t own their lands and were involved in land conflicts in 2023. At least 1,894 families were part of such disputes.
Almost 60 land disputes occurred last year in Pernambuco state, many of them in the southeastern region, where the sugarcane production used to be highly concentrated.
Many peasant families also suffer with the indiscriminate use of pesticides, some of them illegal in Brazil, in the lands they occupy.
The city of Jaqueira is one of the municipalities with the highest number of land disputes in Brazil, with 46 cases in 2023. Two peasants received death threats there last year.
Lessa Leão said that he asks God everyday for justice and for a better day in the years to come for so many peasants and landless workers in the Diocese of Palmares.
“We also make an effort to constantly raise awareness among them on their constitutional rights as well,” he said.
