Brazil Remembers Campesino Massacre Amid 'Political Coup'
Brazil Remembers Campesino Massacre Amid 'Political Coup'
Published 17 April 2016
Brazil’s largest workers’ movement says the impeachment of the president and rural violence are “two faces of the same class struggle.”
Twenty years ago, 21 members of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) were slaughtered in the northern state of Para, while 69 campesinos were severely injured.
According to the official investigation, most of them were shot down at point blank range in the back of the neck on April 17, 1996 by over 150 military police officers - in what Attorney General Marco Aurelio Nascimiento called “a real bloodbath,” in an interview with daily Brasil de Fato.
One of the campesinos was killed with a knife, and was left with a third of his head cut, he added.
Survivors of the massacre recounted that the victims were among a group of 1,500 men, women and children, who were marching toward Para's capital, Belem, to protest against their eviction from a land lot known as the Hacienda Macaxeire in the town of Eldorado dos Carajas. The landless campesinos had been occupying the lot since November 1995.
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazil-Remembers-Campesino-Massacre-Amid-Political-Coup-20160417-0045.html