Police massacre case turns back tide of injustice in Brazil
This piece in today's LA Times is very moving.
<snip>
At 4 in the afternoon on April 17, 1996, a 13-year-old girl with blond hair climbed onto a truck stopped on a road in the Amazon basin. From the top, Ana Paula Silva — known for a long time after as "the girl" — could see everything.
More than a thousand protesters had gathered on the road outside a village called Eldorado dos Carajas. People called them the sem terra, the landless. They sharecropped for large landowners, and they were among the poorest people in a country of very many poor and very few rich.
They wanted to make their way to Belem, the capital of Para state, to contend for land of their own, but the horizon seemed to retreat forever. When a pregnant woman could go no farther, they stopped to devise a new plan.
The women sat along the shoulders of the road and tended to the children, washing, nursing, rocking them to sleep. The men stood in the road and stopped trucks passing on the highway. That was the plan: They would block the road with the trucks to get the attention of the military police.
<snip>
More at: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-brazil-amazon-massacre-20121007,0,2055775.story