AMERICA/BRAZIL - Report of the Pastoral Land Commission: 2020 "year of terror" due to registered conflicts

Brasilia (Agenzia Fides) - The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), an organization linked to the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), presented the 35th edition of the report that contains information on conflicts in the Brazilian countryside for the year 2020. At the launch, the CPT paid tribute to Dom Andre de Witte, Bishop who presided over the CPT in the last administration, and died on April 25, 2021.
The Bishop of Itacoatiara and current President of the CPT, Mgr. José Ionilton Lisboa de Oliveira, stressed that since the beginning of the CPT, in 1975, the pastoral care has tried to record the violence in the countryside and highlighted the importance of the work of systematization done by the Dom Tomás Balduino Documentation Center, created in 1985, with the mission of recording violence and attacks on human rights in the countryside. The Bishop also spoke of the principles that inspire this archival work done by the CPT.
The Archbishop of Belo Horizonte and President of the CNBB, Archbishop Walmor de Oliveira Azevedo, sent a message at the presentation on May 31, in which he affirms that the CPT prophetically walks alongside the poor deprived of their essential right: a place to live and earn a living.
The President of the CNBB said the publication helps the country to see the serious reality of workers in the fields, waters and forests in Brazil. In the face of conflicts, he stressed the importance of guaranteeing the social function of the land and of work.
He also spoke of the lack of management and the absence of the State in the countryside, which facilitated the irregular occupation of the territories by land grabbers, one of the groups responsible for the conflicts.
The representative of the Dom Tomás Balduino Documentation Center, Paulo Cesar Moreira, presented the systematized data of 2020 for land, water and labor conflicts. He drew attention to a growing trend over the past two years which was confirmed this year. The Conflict Report for the 2019 data presented an increase of 26% compared to the 2018 data (from 1,000 cases to 1,260). In 2020, the increase was 25%.
General data on conflicts in the countryside shows that the number of events increased from 1,903 in 2019 to 2,054 in 2020, an increase of 8%. This is the highest number of rural conflicts ever recorded by the CPT since 1985. The number of people involved in these conflicts rose from 898,635 in 2019 to 914,144 in 2020, an increase of nearly 2%.
"2020 was the year of terror with an 8% increase in conflicts in the countryside and water compared to 2019, an average of 6.62 conflicts per day. The first two years of the Bolsonaro government registerd the highest number of conflict increases in the countryside.
Indigenous peoples (42%) were the group that suffered the most conflict actions over land, followed by the quilombolas, with 17%, and the squatters, with 15%", says the report.
The CPT also documented and systematized 1,576 cases of land conflicts in 2020, the highest number since 1985, when the report began to be published, 25% more than in 2019 and 57.6% in 2018. These conflicts involved 171,625 families. The data are even more frightening if we analyze only the numbers that refer to indigenous populations in Brazil in this type of conflict: 656 cases (41.6% of the total), with 96,931 families (56.5%). (CE) (Agenzia Fides, 4/6/2021)

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