29.04.2009
Data of CPT show the geography of violence in rural areas

According to data from the Land Pastoral Commission-CPT and the analysis of professor Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves from the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), in 2008, a year of generalized reduction in violence and conflict indexes, the number of assassinated people in rural areas has remained as high as in 2007. A significant change in the geography of assassinations is evident however, given that 2008 re-establishes the historical patterns of the geography of violence, where the State of Pará appears first with 46,4% of the cases in the country, while in 2007 it counted for only about 18% of the total number of assassinations. It is worth noticing that the reduction of the number of assassinations in the country and the State of Pará in particular for 2006 and 2007, according to the analysis of Carlos Walter, is due to the repercussion of the assassination of US nun Dorothy Stang, which forced the federal and state governments to adopt measures which, as the 2008 data reveal, have failed to alter the historical patterns of violence that characterize the reproduction of our structures of power. Evidently, public authorities, also in the case of Dorothy Stang, adopted emergency measures and not structural ones and, thus, the violence and destruction patterns remain in their historical levels. At the same time, another three states besides Pará, showed increased numbers of assassinations in the rural areas in 2008 - Bahia, Rondônia and Rio Grande do Sul.

The North and South regions owe their increased number of assassinations to the direct action of private actors, with 18 cases registered in the North - an 80% increase compared to 2007-, and 3 in the south - a 33% increase compared to 2007-. The states of Rondônia and Rio Grande do Sul are the two states with registered increase in the two indicators of violence from private actors, which are the number of assassinated people and the number of families displaced from their land. In the case of displaced families, four other states have registered increased numbers in 2008 compared to 2007, all in the Northeast region - Alagoas, Paraíba, Piauí and Rio Grande do Norte. It should be highlighted that this increase is the result of the expansion of sugarcane monocultures in the states of the Forest Zone (AL, PB and RN) fuelled by governmental incentives and the campaign for ethanol production in collaboration with the agribusinesses oligarchies and their private armies.

Violence from Public Authorities

With regards to actions of the public authorities exercising “legal” violence, we see that although there is a general drop in the number of imprisonments and displaced families throughout the country, the North region has experienced an increase in displacements ordered by the judiciary and implemented by the executive authorities, while the South region has experienced an increase in the number of imprisoned people, with special mention to the State of Parana with a 200% increase!

It is interesting to observe that in five states - Mato Grosso do Sul, Espirito Santo, Piauí, Amazonas and Rio Grande do Sul - violence derived from Public Authorities has increased simultaneously regarding both imprisonments and displaced families. Apart from Rio Grande do Sul where violence from Public Authorities, Executive and Judiciary, instigates the general increase of violence and conflict, we highlight the fact that in the other four states, there is strong presence and advance of large scale monoculture enterprises - Mato Grosso do Sul (sugarcane and wood monoculture), Espirito Santo (wood monoculture) and Piauí (soy). On the other hand we should highlight the high numbers of incidents in units of Legal Amazon where the public authorities have been using all their powers in the conflict by either imprisoning or displacing: in the State of Amazonas in both indexes; in the States of Acre, Pará and Roraima, mostly with imprisonments and in the State of Maranhão, mostly with displacements. Pará is presenting a sui generis situation where violence from private actors is skyrocketing (mainly assassinations), while institutional violence by means of actions of the state is due mainly to the increase of displacements of families and less to imprisonments which are in fact reducing. In proportional numbers, while the number of assassinations increased 160% and the numbers of displaced families by 53%, the number of imprisonments has dropped by about 50%.

The protagonists of the fight for land

In 2007, according to data of the Documentation Sector of CPT, Landless People were involved in 44% of the total land dispute related incidents, which in 2008 the percentage has dropped significantly  to 36,3% and brought Landless People in second place amongst other groups. On the other hand, Traditional Populations which occupied the 2^nd place in 2007 with 41%, in 2008 occupied the first place with 53% of the total cases. The prominence of these two categories is related to the fact that Landless People until today have been the populations that mostly occupied lands that have been expropriated and traditional populations are now occupying the first place since they are affected by a serious land expropriation process that is on course since the 70s. Let us observe that 65.4% of the Traditional Populations involved in land conflicts are living in Legal Amazon, while 60.1% of the Landless People involved in conflicts are concentrated in the central-southern region of the country. Knowing that the policy of the government with regards to the agrarian issue has been following the old patterns of opposing agrarian reform and creating settlements all over the Amazonian region, we see that the expropriation model sanctified during the military regime (1960-1970), has been updated. Data are revealing: there is an increase in the proportion of conflict-involved Traditional Populations as a whole and not only in the Amazonian region, and that is because of the expropriation of lands they traditionally occupy. On the other hand the cases of conflict-involved Landless People are dominating in the regions where the expropriation process has already been advancing for a long time.

The effect of this process, contextualized on the accumulation patterns of the Brazilian agricultural model, is that sugarcane, soy, maize (intrinsically linked to poultry and swine industries) and wood monocultures (mainly eucalyptus), tend to occupy land in regions of better infrastructure like in the centre-south of the country, making agrarian reform even more difficult due to the increase in land prices and thus contributing to the search for, and  occupation of new areas (that is the Amazonian region and the plains of west Bahia, south Maranhão and Piauí), where land-grabbers/timber extractors are already occupying public lands and displacing traditional populations.