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19 April 2011 | News | Human rights | Social activists at risk | Food Sovereignty
Thou Shall not Forget
Peasants mobilize around the world 15 years after the massacre of Eldorado de Carajas
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On 17 April of 1996 nearly 1,500 landless peasants of the state of Para in Brazil, who had been expelled from their lands mobilized to the state’s capital, Belem, to demand solutions. When they arrived in Eldorado de Carajas they stopped marching because the pregnant women and the children were tired. However, over 140 military police officers fired at the peasants. 19 peasants were killed and another 69 were injured in the assault.
They were all members of the Rural Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST). That day, La Via Campesina, a network comprising peasant organizations from all over the world, was met in Trinidad, Mexico, in their second international conference. When the leaders heard about the killings in Para, they decided to declare April 17 as the “International Day of Peasant Struggle”.
None of the responsible for the crime, known as “the massacre of Eldorado de Carajas” are in prison. Only two were convicted. But every 17 of April La Via Campesina mobilizes all over the world to honor the fallen fellow peasants and to avoid that other crimes are forgotten. It is a day of struggle and demands.
Over 100 activities were expected this year all over the world, including
actions, demonstrations, workshops, screening of films, debates and conferences. The activities mainly focused on remembering the massacre, on the agrarian reform, the struggle for land, peasant seeds, food sovereignty, and other political demands.
La Via Campesina International issued a press release on Sunday to recall the “need to free ourselves from the industrial system of food production”, while they reaffirmed that “peasant agriculture can feed the world”. The peasants believe that the ruling industrial food system has failed and explain that the number of people who suffer hunger in the world went from 800 million in 1996 to one billion today.
One of the issues that concerns La Via Campesina the most is land grabbing by governments and transnational corporations in Latin America and Africa. The Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC), Via Campesina, said this in a release on the International Day of Peasant Struggle titled: “Against land grabbing and for the recovery of our land and our territories”.
CLOC says “Our continent and its people are facing strong land grabbing by the major transnational corporations, which pillage our natural resources” to produce sugar cane, palm oil, soya, banano and corn.
Land grabbing makes the peasant struggle even more difficult because of the problem of access to land, and it imposes a model based on monoculture plantations and degrading practices for the environment (such as GMOs and agrotoxics). The companies’ control over the territories has increased violence in the rural area against peasants and indigenous and the criminalization of their protest.
CLOC is concerned about the advance of the financial and transnational capital over the lands of the region. They seek to continue increasing the production of agriculture commodities and agrofuels for exports, to the detriment of food production. They say that several governments of the region support these practices.
In turn, the Latin American peasant’s slogan is food sovereignty to meet the food needs of the local and national population, and they strongly advocate for the production of healthy food. “Our struggle is for food sovereignty of our peoples, for solidarity with all the peoples; we fight for a system where life is what matters. We fight for food sovereignty, to continue feeding the world with healthy food”.
CLOC warns that the peasants will continue the struggle for land, water, seeds as the peoples’ heritage, the conservation of Mother Earth, despite being “discriminated against, being oppressed, arrested, persecuted, murdered and massacred for fighting for our rights”. “We show rebellion, outrage, solidarity, change and struggle”, they conclude.
