AND: Weekly Editorial – Latifundium advances with complicit silence
We publish an unofficial translation of the Weekly Editorial of A Nova Democracia published here.
It was published this week two denounces: the fist one is a brutal execution of a poor peasant couple in a rural district of Humaia (Amazonas, near to the border with northern of Rondônia); the second one is a coordinated operation of goons and MP [translator’s note: Military Police] to evict and arrest workers in a recently build camp in Cujubim (North of Rondônia). Both actions shows the sharpening of the struggle for the land.
In the first case, the couple was identified in WhatsApp groups by the local big landlords as militants of the Poor Peasant League (LCP) of Rondônia who would be in the south of Amazonas to support the occupation of lands. Both were murdered in the most brutal way at home. Cleide, the wife, was executed with five shots in the chest. About the second case, the big landlords organized a troop with more than 60 paramilitaries to assault the camp and together with police patrols that also detained 25 peasants. Their motorcycles and other belongings were destroyed in the fire and the houses destroyed.
What calls the attention is not that these brutal crimes of the latifundium occurs. As the fable of the scorpion and the frog, they are following their essence and nothing else can be expected. However, the complicit silence of the false Left is the same as the press monopolies do: they are hiding the crime, and when they talk about it, is to condemn the peasant organization and the defenders of their struggle.
The current government was elected because it promised to repair the “Bolsonarist setbacks” and other promises. Immediately, it gave the Agriculture Ministry to Carlos Fávara, whose personal relationships with well-known Bolsonarists are not a secret to no anyone. And the Ministry supposedly responsible of the “agrarian reform”, the Agrarian Development Ministry, was given to Paulo Teixeira, a man who promised not to be benevolent with the “invaders” of the latifundium. In addition, the govern put the “agrobussiness” more and more in the center of the national economy, with a R$ 364,2 billions Safra Plan [translator’s note: Harvest Plan], a 26% higher than the amount that Bolsonaro gave past year. Now demagogically is being held the biggest robbery of original people’s land of history in the most shameful way through the “Temporal Framework” without a single cry of protest by the government. What else do the big landowners need to take?
It has a reason why the complicit silence is their answer. The party and the person who leads this current government obtained their popularity by promising the agrarian reform during years to millions of peasants, including dozens of fighters in the countryside that were murdered for organizing PT [translator’s note: Partido dos Trabalhadores, party of Lula and in the current government] there. Ironically, now this government depends on the big landlords like a child that depends on his parents. The big landlords those “heroes” of the agrobussiness are the owners of the party, and therefore, they choose the music, the dance and the food. The position of Luiz Inácio is not the position of an inexperienced chief of the government who is in this situation but wants to go beyond it. He is in the position of an experimented politician, who knows exactly how the things work and obey them, because he considers the fundamental basis right and their differences are just superficial.
Following such denounces, this week the LCP called on peasants to set up self-defense groups to resist attacks by the armed bands from the latifundium. The government will do nothing to stop the crimes of latifundium. For their part and despite the criminalization and defamation of their struggle by this government, the peasants will know how to struggle relentlessly against those parasites of the Nation and their hordes of paid murderers.
