Gunplay in Brazil’s ‘Wild West’ : International courts should deal with killings linked to development in rain forests

Manoel Ribeiro told friends last summer that he feared being killed while trying to track down the murderers of 11 homesteaders in Rondonia state, in western Brazil. His apprehension was warranted. He was shot fatally just days ago.

Ribeiro, a councilman and a mayoral candidate in the city of Corumbiara, suffered a fate similar to that of Francisco “Chico” Mendez, a courageous Brazilian environmentalist and union leader who was killed in 1988 and whose story was told in the acclaimed film “The Burning Season.” Human rights activists say there are striking similarities between the Mendez and Ribeiro murders. Both men had taken a hard and dangerous stand against powerful land speculators.

Claiming to be colonizing Brazil’s “wild west,” speculators, ranchers and developers have been clearing trees and preparing grazing areas in the Amazon region, pushing the local inhabitants off the land in the process, sometimes through killings and usually with the support of local police and military officers. They claim the land, acquire title, sell for a profit and head off for another windfall, which often again lies in an irreplaceable rain forest. This practice destroys the environment and human lives too.

President Fernando Henrique Cardozo, said to be outraged over the killings, has ordered an investigation. But in Rondonia, the only agency authorized to investigate is the state police, the very outfit that allegedly does the speculators’ bidding.

Human Rights Watch has now joined several Brazilian organizations in a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a part of the Organization of American States, demanding an investigation of the Ribeiro case. Given Brazil’s dismal record of convictions in such crimes, that’s worth supporting, as is intervention by the Inter-American Court, another OAS agency. According to Human Rights Watch, 1,681 workers and land reform activists were slain between 1964 and 1992 in rural Brazil. Only 26 cases went to trial, with a paltry 15 ending in convictions.

Brazil, of course, is not alone in this problem. Colombian and Peruvian human rights organizations recently issued reports condemning similar abuses in those countries and what they called a dismaying lack of response from the judicial system.

There is a tradition of abuse by the oligarchs in collusion with the police authorities, and the guilty usually escape punishment even if called to answer in the justice systems. It is intolerable that powerful forces can commit these crimes with impunity. Justice demands that corrupt and inefficient judicial systems be exposed, and the best way to achieve that is through hauling human rights violations into international courts.