Eldorado do Carajás massacre

During the 1970s, the military dictatorship in Brazil allowed for greater extraction in the Amazon rainforest, attracting tens of thousands of landless workers to migrate to Pará to work in mines and plantations. The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement, or MST) began to organize in Pará in 1989. The organization frequently held large land occupations to call for land reform. ==Massacre==

In April 1996, 3,500 landless families affiliated with the MST occupied the Macaxeira fazenda, calling for land reform. 1,500 farmers began to march towards Belém on highway PA-150 in the Eldorado do Carajás municipality. and Secretary of Public Security Paulo Sette Câmara ordered police to "clear the people [..] at any cost". Around 4:00 p.m. on April 17, 1996, 155 military police arrived at the MST blockade and began kettling the crowd. Following the killings, police patrolled nearby hospitals in search of injured protestors and shot one wounded person. Police also looted corpses and the encampment for valuables. ==Aftermath==

The massacre was filmed by a local TV crew and quickly made international news. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso called the killing "an embarrassment for the country." It drew formal condemnation from Portugal, France, Germany, and the Vatican. Conviction In June 2002, 127 military police and 19 higher ranking officers went on trial for the killing. Colonel Mario Pantoja and Major José Maria Oliveira were convicted, but the rest of the officers were absolved following a trial "riddled with irregularities". Amnesty International stated that the case was "emblematic of the culture of impunity in Pará", citing "inept police investigation, woefully inadequate forensic research, and the failure to offer protection to witnesses who received threats". On May 7, 2012, sixteen years after the event, the two commanders of the Eldorado do Carajas massacre, in which 19 people were killed, were finally jailed. ==Legacy==

Mass killings of protestors in Brazil continued to occur after the massacre, with 51 mass killings and 1,501 killed from 1985 to 2020. In 2018, presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro gave a speech at the site of the massacre calling the MST "scoundrels and vagabonds" and stating that the police acted in self defense. On April 17, 2026, 2,000 landless workers led a march along the BR-324 highway in Salvador in remembrance of the 30th anniversary of the massacre. There is filmed re-enactment of the Eldorado do Carajás massacre. The play premiered in May 2023, before going on tour in Europe. The play is performed in several languages, with English subtitles for its 2024 run at the Adelaide Festival in Adelaide, South Australia, in March 2024. ==See also==