Bishop’s land dispute agent kidnapped, beaten in Brazil

SÃO PAULO – An official of the Episcopal Conference of Brazil working on land disputes recently escaped after being kidnapped and beaten and enrolled in a government protection program for human rights defenders.

The incident occurred on September 18 in Pernambuco state in northeastern Brazil, an area with the highest number of land disputes in the state, which typically pit small-scale farmers or indigenous groups against wealthy farmers and major agribusiness interests .

Edina Maria da Silva, an agent of the Episcopal Territorial Pastoral Commission (CPT) said she was on a bus from a college in the town of Palmares to her home in the town of Tamandaré. When she got out of the vehicle, she said, a hooded man approached her and two other passengers, pointed his gun and demanded their cell phones, which the three victims gave him.

The man then told the other two victims to leave and took Edina with him. They walked several miles, during which da Silva said her captor beat her repeatedly. They eventually arrived at an unknown location, when the man told da Silva that he had been hired to kill her.

She said she fought back and was eventually able to escape. He walked six miles until he reached a community and asked for help.

Geovani Leão, who is part of the same CPT group, said Crux that da Silva has multiple injuries and is traumatized. Police are investigating the case, and da Silva has been placed under the federal government’s human rights defenders protection program.

“This is a region with great sugarcane farms that used to produce large amounts of sugar and alcohol. Most of them went bankrupt or were simply closed decades ago, and peasant families have been occupying them for at least 50 years,” said Leão.

Several owners of the territories decided to sell or lease them to cattle ranchers, who pressured families to leave the areas. Some of them were violent, and conflicts were more and more frequent.

“Small growers were constantly harassed. There have been lists of threatened people and even some murders in recent years,” said Leão.

Up to this point, CPT agents have never been directly threatened or suffered any kind of violence in Pernambuco.

Father Agivaldo Lessa Leão, who is in charge of the social pastoral ministry of the Diocese of Palmares, said that the church has accompanied many of these communities in recent years.

“The Diocesan Pastoral Commission and the Justice and Peace Commission were directly involved in the struggles of these groups,” Lessa Leão told Crux.

He said he visited a number of communities in the nearby town of Jaqueira, which is part of the Diocese of Palmares, with the local bishop.

“We listened to the small farmers and they told us how scared and insecure they felt,” Lessa Leão described.

Those peasants often see their crops totally destroyed by farmer killers, the priest said. Many people in these groups are devout Catholics who make a huge effort to preserve their spiritual lives and at the same time fight for their rights, he said.

“Only with faith and hope for better days can these people move forward. God willing, they will have their lands sometime in the future,” said Lessa Leão.

According to the CPT’s annual report on land disputes and violence in Brazil, the state of Pernambuco had at least 18,301 people who did not own their land and were involved in land conflicts in 2023. At least 1,894 families were part of such disputes.

Nearly 60 land disputes took place in Pernambuco state last year, many of them in the southeastern region, where sugarcane production was once highly concentrated.

Many peasant families also suffer from the indiscriminate use of pesticides, some of which are illegal in Brazil, on the land they occupy.

The city of Jaqueira is one of the municipalities with the highest number of land disputes in Brazil, with 46 cases in 2023. Two peasants received death threats there last year.

Lessa Leão said she asks God every day for justice and a better day in the years to come for so many landless peasants and workers in the Diocese of Palmares.

“We are also making efforts to constantly sensitize them on their constitutional rights as well,” he said.