not the motorcycle diaries

It was reported in Brazil this week that 6 people have been given prison sentences over the killing of MST and Via Campesina activist Valmir Mota de Oliveira, on an acampamento in Paraná on October 21st, less than three months ago. It is well known by now that Oliveira was shot by an armed ’security guard’ from NF Security, contracted by GM seeds multinational Sygenta*, and other ‘guards’ critically injured a number of other MST and VC militantes. According to Folha de São Paulo, Fabio Fereira, from NF, was also killed (this was new to me - there is no account of this in either the Via Campesina or MST reports). Celso Barbosa, an MST militante, has been charged with his murder and therefore makes up one of the sentenced, along with comrade Célia Lourenço.

Like MAS (although there are different interests and histories involved - not least that the MST is primarily a non-indigenous movement), 500 years of feral colonial power weighs on the MST’s efforts to secure land and, for that matter, land that flourishes organically and provides for all who live and work on it (MST settlements, in my brief experience, really do live up to that idea in many ways).

I’m thinking a lot on how the climax of killing and maiming allows those who have this weight behind them to claim that they are trapped beneath it. How this preposterous imbalance seems unable to avoid creating a world divided into victims and perpetrators, especially when it is a matter of taking life to save your own, which I imagine to be Barbosa’s (completely plausible) argument. And how the discourse of nonviolence can repeat this division by designating ‘violent’ and ‘nonviolent’ movements, events and people.

*Syngenta has an office in Australia of course, located here:
Level 1, 2-4 Lyon Park Road North Ryde NSW 2113, Australia