A chara, - Brazil's Ambassador to Ireland, Mr Carlos Bettencourt Bueno (April 1st) stated that RTE "missed a golden opportunity to convey to its Irish audience a clear picture of the realities that are a paramount challenge to all Brazilians". Trocaire disagrees with this statement. The Leargas documentary highlighted very clearly the struggles and suffering which millions of rural families are facing throughout Brazil.
The country has the land and natural resources to meet the needs of all its inhabitants. The problem, as illustrated in the documentary, is the unjust and unequal distribution of these resources. In the case of the families mentioned in the documentary, their struggle for justice and fair play is against the local state government. This calls into question the ambassador's argument that the Brazilian authorities are serious in their attempts to address the distribution of land and wealth.
With 25 years' experience of working with the Brazilian Church, with Irish missionaries, and with national and community development organisations, Trocaire is well aware of the scale and complexity of the land ownership issue in Brazil. There may be no immediate solution to the problem, but what concerns Trocaire and our Brazilian partners is that successive governments have failed to genuinely address it. Of course the current and previous administrations have redistributed some land, but official statistics (1997) show that, over the past 50 years, the problem of land concentration has worsened, rather than improved. In a special report published in January 1998, the human rights organisation Amnesty International highlighted this fact and pointed to the direct link between land concentration, violence and abuse of human rights.
The Leargas documentary referred to one particular case of land-related violence - the massacre by military police of 19 poor farmers in El Dorado de Carajas, Para State, on April 17th, 1996. The scale of this massacre caused outrage in Brazil and internationally. As the second anniversary of this tragic event passes, it is timely to remind the Brazilian government of the promises it made then on land redistribution and on the bringing to justice of those guilty of both ordering and carrying out the killings. - Yours, etc.,
Justin Kilcullen
Director, Trocaire, Blackrock, Co Dublin.