Environmental campaigners have blamed the Brazilian government for intensifying violence in the lawless Amazon after two land campaigners were murdered and a transporter carrying vehicles for the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) was torched last week.
Campaigners said government plans to reduce forest protection gave farmers, loggers and land grabbers a sense of impunity to attack government inspectors and campaigners squatting rural properties.
“We are seeing a very big increase in violence in rural areas and the biggest cause is the posture, the behavior and the policies being adopted in Brasilia,” Greenpeace Brazil policy coordinator Marcio Astrini said.
Controversial proposals in Brazil’s conservative congress, where a powerful agribusiness lobby wields considerable influence, include liberalizing strict environmental licensing regulations and lowering the legal protection for much of a 1.3 million hectare forest reserve.
According to the Pastoral Land Commission, a non-profit group, 45 people have been murdered this year in land conflicts, compared with 61 in the whole of last year.
On Thursday, Ademir Pereira, 44, local leader of a group called the League of Poor Peasants, was murdered at a car wash in Porto Velho, capital of Rondonia State, while his wife was meeting the local superintendent of the Brazilian National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), a government land reform agency. He was shot dead by two men in a car.
“It is not possible to live in a country where people die while seeking a piece of land,” Cletho de Brito, the INCRA official who was with Pereira’s wife when she found out about his killing, told the news site newsrondonia.com in a video interview.
Afonso Chagas, a Pastoral Land Commission volunteer in Rondonia State, said Pereira was part of a long-standing occupation called Terra Nossa.
Six people have been killed over the occupation in the past two years, Chagas said.
On Friday, Rosenilton de Almeida, 44, was murdered leaving an evangelical church in Rio Maria, Para State, by two men on a motorcycle, police spokesman Walrimar Santos said.
De Almeida was in an advocacy group whose members occupied land in the area, police said.
Ten people from the same group were killed on May 24 when 21 police officers arrived at remote farmland near Pau d’Arco they had occupied to carry out an arrest warrant.
Witnesses said police arrived firing and executed the 10 occupiers.
Officers said they were received by shots, said Clarissa Leao, a spokeswoman for the Brazilian Federal Police.
In the early hours of Friday, a transporter carrying eight vehicles for IBAMA was set on fire while parked in Cachoeira da Serra, also in Para.
“They set it on fire while the driver was in it. He nearly got burned alive, he opened the door, it was burning,” IBAMA Environmental Protection Director Luciano Evaristo said.
IBAMA ordered local sawmills to be closed after the attack.
“It is a war of the Brazilian state against crime,” Evaristo said.
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