A people’s lawyer and four peasants from LCP in Rondônia, Brasil condemned
We publish an unofficial translation of an article by A Nova Democracia.
The court of Rondônia condemned last week the people’s lawyer Lenir Correia and four peasants from the League of Poor Peasants (LCP), as a result of a four-year political persecution disguised under the name of Operation “Canaã” and coordinated by the 2nd Police Station for the Repression of Organized Crime of Porto Velho (Draco 2) of the Civil Police.
The operation was marked by a series of violations of democratic rights, such as the invasion of the homes of peasants and the lawyer herself, and the arrest of 30 peasants in November 2021, during “phase 3” of Operation “Canaã.” At that time, notes, cell phones, and laptops belonging to Dr. Correia were confiscated, in a clear violation of the inviolability of the relationship between lawyer and client.
The conviction by the court of Rondônia states that the popular lawyer and the four peasants formed a “criminal organization” that sought to occupy land, divide the lots, and sell them irregularly.
This accusation has been disputed for years by the accused and by people’s movements. The Brazilian Center for Solidarity with the Peoples (Cebraspo) described the conviction as a “clearly one-sided process aimed at favoring big landlords and criminalizing the peasant struggle and people’s advocacy.”
In a joint statement with the Brazilian Association of People’s Lawyers Gabriel Pimenta, Cebraspo stated that “the objectives of the process are clear: 1) to criminalize the people’s struggle for rights, in this case, the right to land; 2) to persecute the most combative advocacy, which struggles daily to realize the constitutionally guaranteed rights to housing, work, and even the right to demand rights.”
Cebraspo also stated that Law 12.850, concerning criminal organizations, was supposedly created to combat transnational organized crime and white-collar crimes, but in the capitalist regime, it mainly serves to condemn the people. “Thus, the criminalization of the LCP is part of a State project, whose main objective is to maintain the status quo in the countryside, which is a concentration of land that began during colonization and has never been interrupted.”
The coordination of the Pastoral Land Commission in Rondônia stated to the media monopoly G1 that it considers the sentence to be a “criminalization of people’s advocacy that has acted in defense of the rural workers struggling for land.”
The LCP is a combative peasant movement with a wide presence across the country that defenses Agrarian Revolution. The movement is known for occupying land from the latifundium and immediately dividing the land among the peasants, granting them titles to the lots in a Popular Assembly, a process called Popular Cutting. This method differs from those applied by other peasant movements precisely because it delivers the title of the land to the peasants, giving them rights over their own possession.
Dr. Lenir Correia is a lawyer nationally known for defending the rights of the people. She holds a master’s degree and is completing her doctorate in Agrarian Law through the Graduate Program in Agrarian Law at the Federal University of Goiás and was a researcher at the University of Brasília, where she participated in various academic events and wrote articles on the subject. She has been working for over 20 years in defense of peasant movements.
