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Brazil: map and timeline of rural massacres

The Pastoral Land Commission's interactive map of massacres since 1985

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As mentioned in Sue Branford & Thais Borges’ article (Brazilian Amazon, 3 massaces in 12 days)Brazil’s Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) has launched a a new website: Massacres in the Co

untryside. That page will be updated with newly confirmed reports of massacres — a killing involving three or more people. Between 1985 and 2017, CPT recorded 45 massacres in which 214 people in nine states were killed. Pará state saw the largest number of massacres over this period — 26 in all, in which 125 people were killed, over half of the victims in all of the massacres.

The CPT website (in Portuguese) is headed “Massacres in the Countryside – Resistance is not a Crime. We will never forget.”

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The introduction reads: “The CPT is making public and will keep up-to-date a register of massacres in the countryside from 1985 to the present day. This type of crime has always occurred in the Brazilian countryside, despite a few of them achieving notoriety on the national scene. CPT’s methodology defines a massacre as the killing of three or more persons in the same incident. Spurred on by the repercussions of the crimes in Mato Grosso and Pará, CPT in 2017 began to develop this special web-page, to make visible all the massacres which have taken place in the past 33 years, and to show society that this type of crime is another of the strategies of capital to expel poor people from their lands and territories. A time-line enables you to view the massacres, each with details of the event and a brief history of what happened. Photographs and videos are included in the archive, which can also be searched via a clickable map. During the whole period, CPT has registered 49 massacres, which killed a total of 230 people across 10 Brazilian states.”

Clicking the time-line (or using the scroll-arrows) takes the reader to the details and case-histories. Hovering the mouse over the map reveals a list of massacres in the selected state.

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