When I stepped onto the tarmac after a 24-hour trip from São Paulo to Kyoto on May 25th, I turned on my cellphone and found a handful of horror. While I’d been dozing and nibbling peanuts high above the sea, police had killed 10 landless peasants at Santa Lucia farm, in the state of Pará.
Police gave the routine explanation: they fired in self-defense when attacked. But no police officer was injured, and they removed the bodies before forensic experts arrived. Surviving peasants later said that police responded to a protest by opening fire unprovoked, tortured the victims, and responded to those pleading for their lives with a bullet to the head.
History offers plenty of reasons to doubt the official story. As I read the news, I recalled the 1996 “Carajás massacre”-- also in Pará--when police killed 19 landless workers. They also removed the bodies from the crime scene --and were never punished. I was a teenager at the time, but in the train into Kyoto I distinctly remembered the images of the hopeless mothers and daughters burying their beloved husbands and fathers.
The same horrors are still haunting us, the same lack of respect for human life, and the same disregard for the law by those whose duty is to uphold it. Disputes between landowners and landless peasants claimed the lives of 61 people last year alone, according to the Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic nongovernmental group. The feeling of history repeating itself causes me great stress as a human rights defender. Psychologists call it “moral injury”- the injury to our moral conscience resulting from a violation of core values.
I was arriving in Kyoto, coincidentally, to attend a conference of fellow human rights defenders and was about to get a lesson from a master in resisting moral injury. Michael Kirby served for 13 years as a justice on Australia’s high court before, at age 74, taking on the job of heading the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that documented crimes against humanity in North Korea. He described being reduced to tears by exposure to the many cases of torture, arbitrary detention in concentration camps, sexual violence, and forced disappearances that he uncovered.
Notwithstanding the endless hardship, he did not seem to have lost any of his commitment or passion for defending human rights. He was the living embodiment of the wisdom that the remedy for moral injury is to confront the behaviors and systems that repel us. It means persistently approaching, not avoiding, the worst that humanity has to offer.
In Brazil, despite the many daunting human rights challenges we face, the persistence of rights advocates, justice officials and ordinary citizens have actually yielded some important results. It took 16 years, but two commanders of the operation in the Carajás massacre were convicted and sent to prison in 2012. And the response by state and federal authorities to the most recent Pará case is cause for some hope. The state human rights legislative commission immediately questioned the police narrative, stating that the evidence showed there was no shootout. The Justice Ministry agreed to a request by the National Council for Human Rights and authorized the Federal Police to investigate the case, a Positive move to ensure a more independent inquiry.
A thorough, impartial, and prompt investigation of the Pará case and prosecution of anyone found responsible for abuses would be a crucial step in the right direction.
