3 Officers Acquitted in Brazil Farm Massacre

The president and human rights groups condemned the acquittal of three police officers in one of Brazil’s bloodiest land disputes, saying Thursday’s verdict sends a message to police and rich landowners that they can act with impunity.

After a 40-hour trial, a seven-member jury found there was insufficient evidence to convict the three officers on charges of leading the massacre of 19 landless Amazon farm workers.

President Fernando Henrique Cardoso said, “speaking as a citizen,” that the acquittal was “lamentable,” adding that “a feeling of impunity is what prevents the consolidation of democracy.”

Cardoso told reporters that the judgment gives “a bit of a strange sensation for those who were expecting some sort of condemnation.”

The three officers were the first of 150 policemen to be tried for the killings on April 17, 1996, when police were sent to clear a road blocked by 2,000 workers protesting for land reform in Eldorado dos Carajas, a southeastern Amazon town 1,300 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.

The protesters charged at police, who responded with gunfire. Many of the 19 victims were shot at close range, and several were hacked to death with their own scythes and machetes.

“Police in Brazil often act as if they had a license to kill, and they frequently do,” said Julia Rochester of the London-based rights group Amnesty International. “This decision will simply encourage them.”

Leftist opposition party leaders in the capital, Brasilia, protested the acquittal, lighting candles outside Congress and carrying a coffin that they said marked the death of Brazil’s justice system.

“Justice has not been done,” the government’s human rights secretary, Jose Gregori, said. “It’s hard to understand that the commanders of a police expedition that ends with 19 deaths, and apparently six executions, don’t deserve some kind of punishment.”

The massacre focused national and international attention on rural violence and unequal land distribution in Brazil, where the poorest 40% of the people own just 1% of the land.

Figures compiled by the Roman Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission show that more than 400 people have died in land conflicts in Brazil since 1995, often killed by gunmen working for large landowners.

Prosecutors argued that the three officers--Col. Mario Pantoja, Maj. Jose Maria Oliveira and Capt. Jose Almendra--were responsible for the killings as commanding officers.

Prosecutors say police fired on the workers at the urging of local landowners, who allegedly paid Pantoja the equivalent of $85,000 to eliminate 10 leaders of the Landless Rural Workers Movement, or MST, which supported the protest.

Defense lawyers argued that the police were simply caught in the middle of a larger battle between the Para state government and the MST.

After the verdict Thursday, MST members clashed briefly with riot police outside the University of Amazonia, where the trial was held. One man was hit on the head by a rock and three men were arrested before police quelled the disturbance.