Brazil: AND Editorial – the Paladins of Fascism
We share an unofficial translation of the latest Editorial published byA Nova Democracia.
The report by the Pastoral Land’s Commission (CPT) published on 23rd of April is showing, for the second consecutive year, a record of agrarian conflicts in 2024. There were more than 2,185 recorded cases, maintaining the same level as in 2023, and both are the highest since 1985. Without any doubt, it proves that the scenario old State’s and the far right big landlord’s gangs and their goons’ violence against the countryside’s poors, and the tireless resistance of them in the struggle for their rights and their secular demands of the democratization of land – and for the destruction of the consequences of their monopoly –, is a constant and not an occasional phenomenon.
Such increase, like everything similar, is beyond reality, therefore: the reality is al lot worse. The report states that there has been 13 murders connected to agrarian conflicts, because it bases on official data which are normally manipulated by the police in concordance with the big landlords. How many peasants, indigenous people and other poor people of the countryside were murdered by paramilitary gangs or police and had their cases recorded as “drug trafficking reckoning”, “passion crime”, murder as a result of “misunderstanding” (occasional fight) or even suicide?
The “blindness” by the government towards the crimes by the far right and the latifundium – government which on the contrary surrendered completely to the agribusiness’ front of the parliament, being utilized by it – , results in the encouragement of the disgusting actions, that not only in general the paramilitary gangs commit, but its explicit connection with the big landlords and their ideological and political motivation. The report shows that for example “Invasão Zero” realized attacks in at least 6 states in all the country’s regions; other similar groups are in charge of the other states where it doesn’t act. And even more, 46% of all executions were commanded directly by the big landlords. It means, these actions were that brazen, that it was impossible to cover it.
Democrats and progressives cannot minimize or turn a “deaf ears” to such a scenario. We cannot forget that precisely the latifundium is the social base and stronghold of the most reactionary and anti-peoples’ values that, together, they produce and foster political phenomena like Bolsonaro and his anti-communist base ready to mobilize for the fascist military regime. We must not forget, for example, that the coup agitation of 2022-2023, which almost produced the expected rupture of the constitutional order, had its most financiers among the “agribusiness people”, in the words of Mauro Cid. It was the “agribusiness people” – not in general, but in specific – as the “De Olho nos Ruralistas” portal found out, who were behind the attempt to blow up a tanker truck on December 25, 2022 , which purpose was admitted by the perpetrator, George Washington de Sousa, and it was to cause commotion and justify the rupture. They are the paladins of fascism and extreme reaction. So anyone who really talks about defending democratic freedoms, is talking about fighting the far right and fascism; those who talk about the far right talk about latifundium; and those who talk about fighting them all talk about armed peasant self-defense and the Agrarian Revolution, as the highest form of class struggle in the countryside. After all, who talk neither about learning to swim, nor about boats, don’t really want to reach the other bank of the river.
***
This is an scenario of war over land ownership, such as the one taking place currently in in Rondônia. In the area Gedeon José Duque, in Machadinho D’Oeste, dozens of paramilitaries tried to storm the area, and failed facing the peasant self-defense. The leader of this attempt is a man called Gesulino, condemned for crime, known as the “Jacinópolis massacre” to decades in prison, and strangely released after serving a tenth of his sentence. Then he took over as head of the biggest extermination group in the north of the state.
We are no longer dealing with a totally spontaneous armed confrontation in the struggle for land: while it is true that the peasants and other poor people in the countryside are increasingly united under the Agrarian Revolution and armed resistance against the big landlords, perhaps imagining a future in which they exercise political power in the agrarian areas. The big landlords are also acting with a deeper motivation rather than merely economic, since they act out of the ideological conviction that a communist peasant subversion is being prevented, because they feel that a ghost is touching their beautiful properties built up by almost 500 years of slavery and servitude of black, indigenous people and poor whites.
***
Having failed in its attempt to exterminate the Palestinian people, Yankee imperialism finds itself in a delicate situation. Zionist troops can occupy 50% of the Gaza Strip, but only on the National Resistance’s decision. After all, according to their own information, more than 10,000 troops have been put out of action through death or injury. Its also Israeli information, that the rate of reservists called up is between 30 and 40%, which makes it clear that the efficiency of the Resistance in fighting the invading troops, has repercussions internally in Israel as a casualty in the “flame of war”, as they say. Not without reason, the Zionist Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, expressed his concerns in a statement to Benjamin Netanyahu, because “the shortage of soldiers may limit the army’s ability to achieve the ambitions and plans of the political leadership”, while military personnel of all ranks are sending petitions, so that Netanyahu suspends the deployment of new troops, mostly poorly trained and unprepared conscripts, in a blatant breach of military discipline on the invasion front.
In this sense, the 50% of the territory of the Gaza Strip occupied by the invading by the invading troops is nothing more than part of the trap of the Palestinian guerrillas: to let them enter hostile terrain, carefully prepared with endless traps, and where every Palestinian is a militant ready to inflict casualties on the invading troops. This does not mean that the genocide and extermination of the Palestinian people on going. However, they are powerless, because with each killing committed, the international political siege of the Zionist State of Israel, is limiting its room for maneuver. and the Palestinian people become even more united in it’s national liberation. It is therefore urgent to raise international solidarity to the Resistance and to the thousand times heroic Palestinian people.
