Brazil: LCP – Punish the Coward Murderers of Cleomar Rodrigues!

We hereby share an unofficial translation of a statement published by the National Commission of the League of Poor Peasants (LCP), published by the website Resistencia Camponesa.

Immediate legalization of the occupations of the comrades of the Cleomar Rodrigues Revolutionary Area!

Goiânia, 10^th of February, 2025

The Brazilian Association of People’s Lawyers (ABRAPO) announced (and at the same time requested support for the participation of a consistent legal presence) that on February 19 those accused of the murder of the National Leader of the LCP and Political Coordinator of the LCP Northern Minas and Southern Bahia, Cleomar Rodrigues, will be brought before a popular jury in Januária, Minas Gerais. We reinforce the call for support and count on the comrades of the union movement, of the people’s activists and true democrats who are not satisfied with conciliation with the crimes by the latifundium, organized today mainly in groups of heavily armed paramilitary bandits, the main of them calling themselves “Invasão Zero”, who invariably act as the rearguard of the State’s military police counting with the complicit silence of the judiciary and under the blessing of the most corrupt National Congress in the history of Brazil, controlled by the rotten “ruralist” bench that, in addition to stealing land and killing peasants, steals the budget of the Union.

This inquiry is a farce

The presence and participation of everyone is very important. We must take this opportunity to denounce that, 10 years after the murder of Cleomar Rodrigues, no name of any intellectual author has even been said or investigated; that the formation of a cartel of big landlords to expel the peasants from the area was omitted; that the civilian policeman Danilo Oliveira, who publicly threatened comrade Cleomar Rodrigues, was never at least listened to by this juridical system at the service of the powerful. In addition, to this day the lands that motivated Cleomar’s murder, which since 2008 had been expropriated by INCRA (Cleomar was murdered in 2014), have not yet been handed over by the State. The way in which this investigation was carried out is aiming at a new acquittal of the latifundium and of the Brazilian State itself, responsible for the murder of Cleomar Rodrigues.

Freedom for Luzivaldo

And while those accused of being the executioners of Cleomar Rodrigues respond to the process in freedom, comrade Luzivaldo is imprisoned, with absolutely no evidence, of a crime committed in the region of Campina Verde. Luzivaldo’s trial was so shameful that the judge himself, faced with his conviction by a jury made up of landowners where Luzivaldo led the struggle for land, proclaimed the minimum sentence. If the jurisprudence were complied with, which orders the release of the accused for “listening”, Luzivaldo would be appealing this unjust sentence in freedom. Luzivaldo is a political prisoner!