The Pau D'Arco Massacre was the police killing of 10
landless Landlessness is the quality or state of being without land, without access to land, or without having private ownership of land. Although overlapping considerably, landlessness is not a necessary condition of poverty. In modern capitalist societies, ...
activists associated with the Brazilian
Landless Worker's Movement, on the Santa Lúcia farm in
Pau d'Arco, Pará. The massacre occurred on May 24, 2017, and was ostensibly carried out as the enforcement of an eviction order.
Confrontation
State officials initially reported the killings as having been performed in self-defense, while eyewitnesses and survivors claimed that the victims of the massacre had neither attacked nor received warning from the police.
In an independent investigation, the magazine
piauí
Piaui (, ) is one of the states of Brazil, located in the country's Northeast Region. The state has 1.6% of the Brazilian population and produces 0.7% of the Brazilian GDP.
Piaui has the shortest coastline of any coastal Brazilian state at 66&n ...
found that the injuries inflicted on the victims were more consistent with what would be expected from one-sided executions, than what would be expected from a firefight. Specifically, more than half of the victims had been shot multiple times, shot in the back, or shot with precision at close range. Additionally, there were no traces of gunpowder found on any of the victims' hands, prompting the local prosecutor to conclude that none of them had fired a gun over the course of the confrontation.
Under questioning, two of the policemen present for the massacre confirmed that they had effectively performed it as an extrajudicial mass execution. At a press conference, the highest ranking law-enforcement official in the region stated, "There are strong indications this was an execution".
Legality of the eviction order
At the time of the killing, the activists alleged that the ownership deeds of the land they occupied had been forged, which would have meant that it was public land. If this was true, the Brazilian constitution would have required for ownership of the land to be transferred to workers without land.
Aftermath
Two years after the killings, the area of the massacre was still occupied and worked by 200 rural families.
Of the 17 civilian and military policemen responsible for carrying out the massacre, 13 had been charged and arrested within the first two months, 15 had been charged within the first two years,
and one was later cleared of charges.
Most of them were allowed to remain on the police force.
A lawyer who had advised the activists before the killings has consistently been the target of threats since the massacre.
These have included persistent visits by vehicles of unknown ownership and the delivery of unsolicited packages outside his places of work and residence, including a device that appeared to be a bomb.
The officials who ordered the massacre have not yet been publicly identified.
See also
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1989 Santa Elmira massacre The Santa Elmira massacre was a massacre on activists of the Brazilean Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Rio Grande do Sul in 1989. In early 1989 a group of the MST that had been resettled in Salto do Jacuí occupied the Santa Elmira ranch. An o ...
*
Eldorado do Carajás massacre
The Eldorado do Carajás massacre () was the mass killing of nineteen landless farmers who were squatting at a private ranch. They were shot by military police on April 17, 1996, in the southern region of the Pará state, Brazil.
On April 17, 199 ...
*
List of massacres in Brazil
References
{{coord missing, Brazil
2017 in Brazil
Massacres in Brazil
Massacres in 2017
Pará