Faced with the dead, it is said that there are two types of silence: that of respect and that of forgetting. In Eldorado do Carajás, in the Brazilian Amazon, it is difficult to know which one predominates. Along a curve of the BR-155 road, at the end of January, around fifteen crosses lie scattered in the weeds. Some are surrounded by a red ribbon in faded blood tones. A dog is sleeping, trucks are passing… When suddenly, out of nowhere, a kid with blond curls appears, barefoot and bare-chested. “Here, a lot of people died,” he confides, a finger on his mouth, before disappearing. Like after revealing a dark secret.
“A bunch of people”? Nineteen, exactly: murdered right here on April 17, 1996. Hundreds of poor peasants then camped in this lost corner of the southeast of Pará, this Brazilian state as large as twice the size of France. Men, women, old people and children are blocking the road: they plan to go to Belém, the state capital, to claim their rights to unexploited land. But quickly the police arrived and surrounded the demonstrators. The bloodbath begins… Several victims are executed at close range with a bullet in the back, others are mutilated with machetes or sickles. Several dozen injured were reported.
Today, the monument in memory of the victims of the Eldorado massacre seems abandoned. Erected shortly after the tragedy, the latter is the work of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), the largest militant organization in Latin America, born in January 1984, and which has been fighting for forty years for a more just land by occupying agricultural areas and large farms left abandoned by their owners.
A war for land
In addition to the crosses, a small house with vermilion walls and a padlocked door serves as a place of meditation. Through the window, we see a fresco that looks like a Brazilian Guernica, with police officers machine-gunning, grieving families and a man on his knees with a bullet hole. Outside, a plaque recalling the tragedy ends with a very strange question: “The walnut trees remember. And you ? »
The walnut is the emblematic tree of the Amazon. With its 50 meters height and its 500-year life expectancy, it is like the lookout of the great forest, the guardian of its guilty conscience. The silent witness to the massacres which constantly strike this region of the world. Because the “lung of the planet” is not just the seat of the genocide of indigenous people and the unbridled destruction of nature. It is also, and for decades, the scene of another silent and bloody drama: that of the war for land. A conflict, with its battles, its armed soldiers and its civilian victims – nearly fifteen hundred in four decades.
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