This article first appeared on Sumaúma one 24 April 2026. It was translated from the Portuguese for LAB by Theodora Bradford. You can real the original here.
In the area divided up after the slaughter of workers by the Pará Military Police, families cultivate the land and the memory of the victims, while those responsible continue to enjoy impunity in a state where, in the last 45 years, over a thousand people have been murdered in the countryside.
Maria Zelzuita de Araújo’s living room wall is a family album, a memorial that flowers over ruins. It includes Wanderlan, her eldest son, and Wanderlléya and Cíntia, who came later. Her granddaughters and grandsons. It isn’t long before three of them, Ysadora, Theo and Ícaro, turn up to play on their grandma’s floor. In the backyard, a child’s bicycle, two scooters and a small handprint in green paint speak to the passing of time and life starting over in Assentamento 17 de Abril (17th of April Settlement). But Maria Zelzuita won’t let anyone forget that this land, now trampled by her grandchildren, is ‘a shoot watered with blood.’
Thirty years ago, the Pará Military Police murdered 19 landless rural workers and injured another 69 in Eldorado do Carajás, in the southeast of Pará. A further two landless workers died days later, from gunshot wounds. The date was 17 April 1996. Approximately 2,500 peasants were participating in a march, blocking PA-150, Rodovia Paulo Fonteles, on a stretch of the road known as the S Curve. They were asking the Government of Pará for food and transport to take them to the neighbouring town of Marabá and the capital, Belém, where they would pressure the state government and INCRA (the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) to expropriate the Macaxeira Farm Complex, a large estate in the Carajás region that they were claiming for agrarian reform. That afternoon, they were corralled by 155 armed police officers with rifles, sub-machine guns and revolvers.
Maria Zelzuita was one of the landless workers on the march. She was in the firing line and saw the uniformed men arrive, guns blazing. ‘They couldn’t get transport for us. But they could for the police. Their orders were to get us off the road by any means possible. The means they decided on was violence,’ recalls Maria Zelzuita, now 61, a survivor of the massacre.
Raimundo Lopes Pereira was murdered. He died aged twenty, hit by three bullets, two of them in the head. He wasn’t participating in the march. He lived in the city and had gone to the camp of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST – Landless Workers’ Movement) to take medicine to his father.
The portrait of Raimundo on the wall of Luzia Pereira’s house, in the urban centre of Eldorado do Carajás, attempts to fill the void left by the son who was taken from her. Luzia no longer remembers his age. But she doesn’t forget the cruelty that ended his life. She returns to the S Curve every year to honour the memory of the young man murdered by the Brazilian state. Ever since that April, time has been split in two. Part of Luzia died alongside her son. ‘They took his life and mine with it,’ she says. But part of Raimundo lives on with his mother in between those walls. ‘I believe my son has lunch and dinner here with me.’
Out of all the police officers who were accused, only the chiefs of the operation were convicted: Colonel Mário Colares Pantoja was sentenced to 228 years in prison; Major José Maria de Oliveira, 158. Pantoja spent part of his sentence in confinement and the other under house arrest. He died in 2020, aged 74. Oliveira was also imprisoned for a time, but he is now under house arrest. The other military police officers who participated in the killing were acquitted. The authorities at the top of the command chain at the time weren’t even charged: the Governor of Pará, Almir Gabriel, the Secretary of Public Security, Paulo Sette Câmara, and the Commander-General of the Military Police, Colonel Fabiano Lopes, died with impunity.
The Massacre of Eldorado do Carajás is a crime of the New Republic, a period of democratization in Brazil that began in 1985, after 21 years of corporate-military dictatorship (1964-1985). The crime of a democracy that, instead of breaking away from, fraternizes with the old colonial estates, with military authoritarianism, with the violence that permeates our bodies, our land and our history. According to a survey based on documents from the Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT – Pastoral Land Commission), from 1980 to 2024, in the State of Pará alone, over a thousand people were killed in the countryside, 317 of them victims of 59 slaughters and massacres. 309 investigations or cases pertaining to these murders have been identified and in only 61 cases were the individuals responsible for these crimes prosecuted. And violence also takes other forms. The rural caucus, the largest and most powerful in the National Congress, legislates as if it is waging war.
After the slaughter on the S Curve, 17 April became the International Day of Peasant Struggles. This year, the MST reconstructed the interrupted march, from Curionópolis to Eldorado do Carajás. But there have been oversights along the way. Not all of those injured receive a pension from the State of Pará. The government no longer guarantees healthcare.
Remembering the massacre is decorating the living room wall with the families of Maria Zelzuita and Luiza, it’s having lunch and dinner with those this nation project has killed, it’s confronting the shoots we continue to water with blood.
A settlement of survivors
Laurindo da Costa’s feet aren’t as steady these days, but they are rooted in the land he always dreamt of. At 66, he walks around his plot carrying a machete and five herniated disks that restrict his labour. He cuts a stalk of bananas, harvests cacao, shows us the cajá tree, offers us papaya. Far away from here, the day stretches on relentlessly. After surviving the massacre, Laurindo got the land he fought for. It didn’t need to go the way it did. ‘If they could give it to us afterwards, why couldn’t they give it to us before the bloodshed?’ he asks.
Assentamento 17 de Abril was created in 1997 on 18,000 hectares expropriated from the Macaxeira Farm Complex. The families who didn’t leave after the massacre returned to the camp from which they had departed for the march, in another part of the Macaxeira complex, and continued the fight. In the aftermath of the event, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (of the PSDB – Brazilian Social Democracy Party) created the Extraordinary Ministry of Land Policy, led by Raul Jungmann. INCRA carried out an inspection confirming the farm was unproductive and, in June 1996, it was expropriated.
698 families now live on land previously controlled by just one. The settlers made a village where they have built houses, a school and a community health centre. It is surrounded by plots of five alqueires (approximately 25 ha) assigned to each family to cultivate and raise dairy cows. Some of the workers in the settlement have formed an agricultural cooperative so that they can collectively organize production and access lines of credit.
Maria Zelzuita de Araújo was born in Piauí and raised in Maranhão. Up to the age of 18 she was a babassu coconut breaker with her mother. She came to Pará to work as a domestic servant. Later, she began to cook for workers on a farm and in a restaurant. Laurindo da Costa grew up in Maranhão with his father, who was a sharecropper: he worked someone else’s land and split the proceeds with the owner. When he arrived in Pará, he tried to earn a living as a miner, moving earth in Serra Pelada, before returning to farming. Maria Zelzuita and Laurindo joined the MST without ever having had any land to call their own.
In her house in 17 de Abril, Maria Zelzuita settled down and raised her children alone. Wanderlléya was born in 1997, at the same time as the settlement. She saw her mother growing cassava, making farinha and working at the school, where she continues to help out. The village streets Maria Zelzuita walks are filled with stories that intersect with the MST’s struggle and the barbarism of the S Curve. In addition to her and Laurindo, we meet Raimundo Gouveia, also a survivor of the massacre, and Miguel da Silva, one of the 69 injured.
The Macaxeira complex was a 42,000ha agricultural estate controlled by the Pinheiros, an influential family from Marabá. The land had been given to the family by the State of Pará for Brazil nut extraction, but most of the Brazil nut trees on the farms were burnt and cut down. In November 1995, the president of INCRA at the time, Francisco Graziano, was in Curionópolis and promised the MST that Macaxeira would undergo an inspection. The first inspection deemed the farms to be productive. That same month, the MST occupied the Centro de Orientação e Formação Agropastoril de Curionópolis (Curionópolis Centre of Orientation and Agropastoral Training).
In March 1996, the workers established a camp on one of the 13 farms comprising the Macaxeira complex. Dividing an estate into various farms is an act of fraud often carried out by landgrabbers and landowners to undermine the legally defined limits of a property. So many people took part in the MST occupation that there wasn’t enough food to go around. This was one of the reasons the landless workers set off on the march on 10 April.
The peasants got to Eldorado on 15 April 1996. They set up camp on the S Curve. The following day, pounded by heavy rain, the landless workers blocked the road. The PA-150 was cleared by nightfall. But the Government of Pará would have until the end of the morning on 17 April to respond to their request for buses and food before they closed it off again.
The decision was made to ignore the workers’ request. The Governor of Pará, Almir Gabriel, ordered the Military Police to clear the road. After the event, in an interview with Belém’s O Liberal newspaper, Gabriel said he gave the order to clear the road, but not with the use of violence. On the morning of 17 April, Colonel Mário Pantoja, of the Military Police Battalion in Marabá, spoke on the phone with his boss, Colonel Fabiano Lopes, Commander-General of the Military Police. He heard that the governor was fed up with the MST’s demands. According to the newspapers of the time, Pantoja told Major José de Oliveira, of the police of Parauapebas, the neighbouring municipality: ‘The governor said to prepare the troops.’
Eldorado do Carajás sits between Marabá and Parauapebas, but it is closer to Parauapebas. As a result, Major Oliveira arrived first to the S Curve. He positioned his officers and waited for the troops from Marabá. Colonel Pantoja and his soldiers arrived from the other direction, around 4.30pm, in two buses rented from the state-run Companhia Vale do Rio Doce. They deployed tear gas canisters and fired shots into the air. A cattle truck was blocking the road, to prevent vehicles from getting through. The Marabá Military Police advanced and started the massacre. The Parauapebas troops understood the assignment and began to shoot. Corralled between the two platoons, the peasants fought back with sticks, stones, machetes and shots from the odd gun or two they had at their disposal.
The first to die was Amâncio Rodrigues dos Santos. He was 42 years old and deaf. He approached the police officers unperturbed by the sound of gunshots and swung his wooden machete at them. They responded with punches, kicks and bullets, one of them to his head. Miguel da Silva was shot in the leg. He thought about running, but his mother, Deuzilda, was in the camp, and he couldn’t leave without knowing she was okay. He fell into a ditch and lay there, waiting. ‘I heard the occasional bullet. At that point, they were executing the injured,’ he says. Miguel and Deuzilda survived.
Two children, Rosângela and Roseny, found themselves in the middle of the killing. Their parents, Raimundo and Maria Gouveia, managed to run into the bushes, taking the girls with them. Maria Zelzuita sheltered with other women and children in a wooden house on the side of the road. The police broke in. Maria Zelzuita managed to pick up two of the children and, not knowing where their mothers were, took them towards São Geraldo do Araguaia. Laurindo also ran in that direction.
There was a man in the house helping to protect the children: Oziel Alves Pereira. At 18, he was one of the leaders of the march. He gave orders through a loudspeaker, guiding the rural workers. The Military Police seized Oziel: they handcuffed, dragged and beat the youth before killing him with three shots to the head and one in the chest.
Inácio Pereira was knocked to the ground and, to avoid being executed, stayed there, pretending he was dead. Once the killing was over, the police gathered the bodies on a lorry. Inácio was dragged and thrown into the vehicle. He travelled as far as the morgue of Curionópolis Hospital in silence, in amongst a heap of bodies. One of the bodies was that of Raimundo Lopes Pereira, his 20-year-old son.
Inácio is now 86. When we get to the house he shares with Luzia, he gets up from his hammock and sits in a vinyl cord chair to receive us. He recalls how he loved his plot, how he loved the land. He complains about the noise of cars on the street outside. He says how no reparation can heal his pain. ‘For what happened to me, not even five alqueires of land is enough. They took my son from me.’ Inácio avoids talking about the massacre. Luzia says her partner is afraid they’ll come back to kill him.
‘Struggle is the only way’
There was a time when the region of Carajás was covered in Brazil nut trees. Until the first decade of the 20th century, Indigenous peoples and extractivist communities gathered Brazil nuts freely. Later, agrarian oligarchies gained control over the vast Brazil nut groves: the State of Pará gave them authority over these areas despite them being public land. Then came the opening of the road between Belém and Brasília at the end of the 1950s and the corporate-military dictatorship from 1964, transforming land on the side of federal highways into government assets and creating the conditions that would turn this stretch of the Amazon into a powder keg.
Peasant migration to the southeast of Pará was encouraged while tax incentives and public loans facilitated the transfer of estates to large corporations, like Volkswagen, charged for subjecting its workers to slave-like conditions on a company-owned farm between 1974 and 1986. The propaganda of the National Integration Plan (PIN), which promised ‘land without people for people without land,’ was doubly deceptive: first, because it ignored that the region was already inhabited, primarily on the banks of the Tocantins and Araguaia rivers; and secondly, because the families who arrived there were not guaranteed a piece of land – the authoritarian regime favoured land concentration, not distribution.
The dictatorship sought to impose on the region a development model based on extensive agriculture alongside timber and mineral extraction. The old Brazil nut groves, which also populated the Macaxeira Farm Complex, were cut down to make room for pasture and cattle. Today, soya monoculture spreads out across the farms. Another predatory activity in the region is mineral extraction, inscribed in the name of the municipality marked by the April 1996 massacre: Eldorado is a reference to the gold rush of Serra Pelada, in Curionópolis, 50km away, and other goldmines; Carajás refers to the Serra do Carajás, principally the area of Parauapebas, where the Brazilian multinational Vale, previously Companhia Vale do Rio Doce – which is also involved in a dispute with landless workers in the region – extracts iron.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the southeast of Pará experienced the only rural guerrilla movement in Brazil. It’s a living memory in those parts. The guerrillas who fought against the corporate-military dictatorship witnessed the reality of land grabbing, contract killing and landowners exploiting peasants. The dictatorship’s repression of the Araguaia Guerrilla didn’t just affect militants of the armed struggle. It also assassinated and tortured workers, displacing them from the land. Military violence has been a constant ever since.
The 1980s saw the greatest number of rural conflicts in the region. With the revival of democracy and the Constituent Assembly, it seemed that land would finally be made available to farmers and settlers. The occupations organized by rural workers’ unions increased. But so did reprisals. Nationally, the forces against agrarian reform organized in the União Democrática Ruralista (Ruralist Democratic Union), led by Ronaldo Caiado, currently pre-candidate to the Presidency of the Republic for the PSD (Social Democratic Party).
The killings continue. Nine years ago, in the municipality of Pau D’Arco, a man and a woman, both landless workers, were killed when they reoccupied the Santa Lúcia Farm – according to a report by the Public Prosecutor of Pará, they were tortured and executed by civil and military police officers. Seventeen accused agents of the security forces are free on bail awaiting trial. For José Batista Afonso, lawyer of the CPT in the southeast of Pará and coauthor of the book Assassinatos e Impunidade no Campo no Pará: 1980 a 2024, cases of massacres committed by police officers demonstrate how the state protects the interests of large landowners.
José Batista has been following this story since 1970, when his family left the Jequitinhonha Valley, in Minas Gerais, to settle in Amazônia. His siblings are settlers. In 1996, he was at the wake and burial of MST peasants after the Eldorado do Carajás massacre – 14 of the dead are buried in the Cemetery of Curionópolis. That same year, he began working for the CPT in Marabá. Over the past 30 years, José Batista has noticed that the ruralists’ control of politics, legislation and investment has been fundamental in maintaining land concentration. Advances in agrarian reform are won thanks to the pressure of occupations, not because of structural changes to national land policy.
The number of families settled in the region is close to 77,000. 537 settlements have been created. But there are still 30,000 families in camps, occupying over 100 estates. Acampamento Terra e Liberdade (Land and Freedom Camp), in Parauapebas, home to 5,000 families, is considered the largest landless camp in Brazil. It’s impressive to witness how, on this rugged terrain, people waiting for land have built a town. According to INCRA’s Regional Superintendency in Pará, the Maria Glória settlement was created in December 2025, with capacity for 194 families. Families from Terra e Liberdade are now being settled there and other settlements are due to be created this year to receive more families from the camp.
‘The struggle speaks louder than the risk. If we only considered the risk, the deaths, we would have stopped talking about the struggle for land in this country a long time ago. Because every time someone has risen up, they’ve been attacked with iron and fire. Canudos, Contestado, Cabanagem. History and memory live on in the people’s struggle,’ says José Batista Afonso.
In July 2018, then pre-candidate to the Presidency of the Republic Jair Bolsonaro went to the S Curve to defile the memory of the assassinated landless workers. ‘It’s the MST leaders who provoked this incident who should be in prison. Those scoundrels, those vagrants. And not a colonel of the Military Police who was doing his job. Let me be clear: the police reacted the way they did to avoid being butchered by these MST bandits,’ he said. Bolsonaro became president. Now he is in prison, sentenced to 27 years and three months of confinement for the crimes of participating in an armed criminal organization, attempting to violently abolish democratic order and plotting a coup d’état, among others. His eldest son, Flávio Bolsonaro (of the PL – Liberal Party), is pre-candidate to the Presidency in the 2026 elections.
On the S Curve, under the shade of an ingá tree, people have placed stones and crosses and planted Heart of Jesus and Saint George’s sword. Previously, there was a monument with 19 trunks of dead Brazil nut trees, gathered from the deforested groves, forming the outline of the map of Brazil. The trunks didn’t last. A plaque still asks: ‘The Brazil nut trees remember. Do you?’ Further ahead is the Casa da Memória (House of Memory), erected in the place of the wooden house that sheltered Oziel Alves Pereira in the moments before his martyrdom. Maria Zelzuita remembers. The school in Assentamento 17 de Abril where she works and her grandchildren study bears Oziel’s name. Ysadora, Theo and Ícaro will also remember.
Laurindo, cultivator of land and words, leans on the windowsill. His companion, Dinalva de Sousa, joins him. She barely hears the sounds of the world these days. Laurindo’s verses may not penetrate Dinalva’s silence. But, 30 years later, they hit the ground in a country that continues to be landless.
Let us fight
For change
In this trampled land
Replete with repression
Our hearts are noble
And struggle is the only way
Because workers have the right
To a piece of land
Laurindo da Costa
Report and text: Guilherme Guerreiro Neto
Editing: Fernanda da Escóssia
Art Editor: Cacao Sousa
Photo Editor: Lela Beltrão
Fact-checker: Plínio Lopes with Eloísa Machado de Almeida in legal revision
Proofreader (Portuguese): Valquíria Della Pozza
Infographics: Rodolfo Almeida
Copyediting and finishing: Flávia Coimbra
Editorial workflow: Viviane Zandonadi
Editor-in-chief: Talita Bedinelli
Editorial director: Eliane Brum
