"Even if the thing thickens, this land is ours!". This slogan was a demonstration of the firm decision of those families who, like a large part of the peasants of Rondônia, represent the mixture of the Brazilian peasantry: they are gauchos, Paraná, São Paulo, Espírito Santo, northeasterners, miners, etc., who migrated to those lands and ended up finding themselves through the struggle in that portion of the Eastern Amazon.
The news of the seizure of the farm spread rapidly throughout the region, encouraging the peasants, terrorizing and filling the local landowners and politicians with hatred.
The landowner Antenor Duarte organized other large farmers neighboring the Santa Elina farm, hired and armed gunmen and, together with the Military Police and at the behest of the governor at the time, Valdir Raupp, attacked the camp in the early hours of August 9, 1995.
The cowardly attack by the landowners and the police took place at dawn. But the peasants were vigilant and prepared for resistance. Given the alarm, brave men and women resisted heroically with sticks, stones, scythes and their hunting weapons. They resisted to the maximum, until, due to the military superiority of the enemies, the camp was taken by storm by the troops of repression.
After surrendering, they were barbarously tortured and humiliated. The most prominent leaders of the resistance were hunted down and some kidnapped, tortured and executed. Sérgio Rodrigues, who, despite not being part of the camp, supported the fight, was shot, dragged to a soccer field and tortured. Finally, the gunmen threw him into a Toyota pickup truck and his body appeared 18 days later on the banks of a river in Chupinguaia, completely torn apart by torture.
The accounts of the peasants who survived the cowardly police attack describe heinous crimes by the landowners and the police. Peasants had their eyes pierced and were castrated alive. A peasant, under torture, was forced to eat part of the brain of a comrade who had his head crushed by the police. Little Vanessa Santos, only 7 years old, was murdered by a rifle shot. Ten other peasants were murdered and several were disappeared.
Also during the assault on the camp, women were grabbed and used as shields by police and gunmen, many of them beaten with rifle butts, carbines and shotguns. A soccer field near the camp was turned into a macabre torture camp, where cowardly hooded police officers humiliated and beat men in front of children and women. A photo of this field went around the world: the continued genocidal practice of the old bourgeois-landowner state that served imperialism. These events became known worldwide as the "Corumbiara Massacre".
The latifundia wanted to drown in blood that struggle of the peasants for land and they only failed to do so due to the fierce and intrepid resistance of the peasant masses of Corumbiara.
The first news of the Battle of Santa Elina began to be disseminated throughout the country, initially due to the denunciations of the Pastoral Land Commission and the trade union movement. The MST leadership, which has positioned itself against that struggle since the beginning of the occupation of the Santa Elina farm, acted as a snitch pointing out leaders of the resistance to the State Security Secretariat (PMDB government of which the PT was a part).
In this same period, revolutionary militants — who came from a process of struggle and rupture with national-reformism, grouped in the purpose of reconstituting the revolutionary movement in the country — quickly moved representatives to the region to support the resistance, in addition to organizing solidarity with the families fighting in that heroic struggle. Other organizations also provided support by joining committees of solidarity with the struggle of Corumbiara.
The struggle for the application of the revolutionary-democratic line to the workers' struggle in the cities of that period had resulted in the foundation of the Workers' and Peasants' League. Leading some class-based unions, this organization, which played an important role in political and material support for the families of Santa Elina, spread the struggle, carried out campaigns to denounce the crimes of the latifundia and, through the advance and adjustment of the revolutionary political line, was able to lay the foundations for the promotion of the worker-peasant alliance.
At the same time, an important ideological struggle was developing in the direction of the Battle of Santa Elina. The leadership of the MST, like other organizations of the popular movement, revealed all their opportunism with a cowardly silence, when they did not attack the struggle of Corumbiara, echoing the reaction. Therefore, in the clashes with INCRA, the opportunists, mainly from the CUT-RO, showed their capitulatory position by pressuring the masses to accept the proposals of this landowner body to "settle" the families in other lands and not in Santa Elina.
The most combative leadership of the peasant resistance of Santa Elina (which was underground due to the persecutions of the organs of repression of the state, in addition to having their heads put at a price by the landowners), with the support of the Workers' and Peasants' League, decided to convene the Meeting of the Families of the Resistance of Santa Elina. At this meeting, a hard struggle was waged between the combative and revolutionary positions and those of opportunism. After the opportunists were defeated, the families marched with the position of the League to form the Corumbiara Peasant Movement (MCC), raising high the flag of the retaking of the Santa Elina farm.
With the deepening of the struggles that followed with the seizure of the Primavera farm, in Theobroma, among others, the resistance and all the repercussions that the Battle of Santa Elina reached, the MCC grew throughout the state. With this growth, the ideological struggle within the MCC deepened, marching towards the frontal clash of the opportunist positions of some of its leaders with those of the group of leaders forged in the fire of the Battle of Santa Elina, who understood more deeply the principles of the combative peasant movement. This struggle, which marked the differentiation between two lines, ended with the expulsion of individuals who had degenerated into practices of exploitation of the masses, passing to the denunciation of the movement to the enemy.
The most combative and decisive cadres and militants, defenders of the Corumbiara Resistance, went deeper into the ideological battle around the balance of the resistance and the debate on the agrarian and peasant problem in Brazil. The balance of practice pointed out that the MCC phase had been exhausted. Through the Peasant Commissions of Struggle, the path of the peasant movement in the North of Minas Gerais was advanced and, like it, formed the League of Poor Peasants (LCP).
The process of struggles, purification and formulation of the democratic-revolutionary line of the Agrarian Revolution in our country continued to deepen with victories and defeats, but always advancing towards new battles. The remaining families of the Battle of Santa Elina, with the support of the Workers' League* and other class and popular organizations, developed other organizations of struggle and resistance. Popular Aid was created to support the affected peasant families, the prisoners, the tortured and the families of the murdered. Also in the treatment of health, physical and mental sequelae of the combatants of the struggle. The Committee for the Defense of the Victims of Santa Elina (Codevise) was created, formed by remnants of the Corumbiara Resistance and their families, to continue the struggle for the resumption and possession of land by peasants. Lawyers, doctors and other supporters mobilized to support the struggle.
Based on the forceful denunciations of the crimes of the latifundio and the forces of repression, the old Brazilian State was condemned in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In a trial staging, which aimed to try to silence the accusations, two of the leaders of the battle (Cícero and Claudemir) and two soldiers of the Military Police were convicted. But the main masterminds and executors of the heinous crimes committed against the peasants of Santa Elina remain unpunished to this day: José Ventura Pereira, lieutenant colonel who commanded the murderous troops; Valdir Raupp (PMDB), governor at the time and general commander of the Military Police; the secretary of security of the state of Rondônia, Antonio Ferreira Pinto; and Antenor Duarte, a landowner in the region known for the massacres against indigenous populations and organizer of the gunmen against the encampments of Santa Elina.
In August 1995, shortly after the events at the Santa Elina farm, Luiz Inácio Lula (PT) went to the site of the razed camp and gave an interview to the press next to the well that, according to reports, at the time, was the place where the remains of the bodies of peasants incinerated by police and gunmen had been thrown. At the time, he promised that, if he were ever elected president of the country, he would expropriate the Santa Elina farm, hand it over to the peasants and punish those responsible for the torture and murders. After 20 years, what we have seen from the PT administration was the total support for the latifundio with colossal funds for the so-called agribusiness and for the peasant movement only increased repression, particularly on the most combative movement.
In these 20 years and especially in the more than 12 years of PT administration in the state of Rondônia alone, dozens of peasants and their leaders have been murdered. The leaders of the LCP of Rondônia and Western Amazonia: Francisco Pereira do Nascimento, Zé Bentão, one of the founders of the LCP, murdered in 2008 in a stakeout, in the region of Jacinópolis; Élcio Machado and Gilson Teixeira Gonçalves, leaders of the LCP kidnapped, barbarously tortured and murdered by gunmen at the behest of landowners in Buritis in December 2009; the peasant leader and revolutionary activist Renato Nathan, executed by police in the region of Jacinópolis in April 2012. And in addition to these, numerous LCP activists, many of them not even included in the already underestimated reports of deaths in agrarian conflicts.
Today, the PT administration, sunk in the economic, political and moral crisis, in the face of this balance makes it very clear about the role it has played at the service of the dominant classes, the latifundia, the big bourgeoisie and imperialism, mainly Yankee.
The peasants of Santa Elina, organized by Codevise and with the support of the LCP, continued to fight for the resumption and possession of the land. Soon after the Battle of Santa Elina, the landowner tried to divide the farm, creating several others. In 2007, a delegation composed of dozens of peasants remaining from Batalha went to Brasilia to demand that the manager Lula fulfill his campaign promise. The peasants remained there for 23 days camped and, cowardly, Mr. Luiz Inácio refused to receive them, sending his secretary Gilberto Carvalho and Paulo Vanucci, secretary of human rights, to reel in the peasants.
The peasants never stopped trying to retake their land. In 2008 there was an attempt that failed due to the sabotage of opportunists linked to the PT and Fetagro. While gunmen threatened, the opportunists played all the time to divide the masses, creating fear and proposing to camp outside the farm, in addition to playing against the entrance to the land. In 2010, under the firm leadership of the LCP, which had been preparing for a new onslaught, the peasants victoriously retook more than half of the Santa Elina farm.
The retaking was celebrated by peasants and welcomed throughout the country. They faced the threats and provocations of gangs of gunmen and police, on the one hand, and on the other the sabotage of INCRA and the opportunists of the PT. With the takeover, facing the pressures of Incra and the National Agrarian Ombudsman, Gercino Silva, who threatened the leadership of the LCP with actions by the Federal Police and the army, the peasants immediately cut their lands on their own, distributed the lots, started abundant production, built houses, roads and bridges. The lands watered by the heroic resistance were named Zé Bentão Revolutionary Area, in honor of the LCP leader murdered in 2008.
But the peasants' possession of the land did not materialize without new battles. The governments and INCRA, together with Gercino Silva, acted surreptitiously to try to divide the peasants. As they were unable to prevent the resumption or carry out the eviction, they pressured to impose a list of families presented by Fetagro and by the deputies and councilors of the PT. They promoted intrigues of all kinds, even confusing the masses with the threat that the popular cut was not valid and that the families would not obtain the land ownership documents. With this, they imposed a "new" cut, reducing the size and arrangement of the lots.
Patiently and persistently, the 800 families, organized by Codevise and LCP, continued to fight and work. They created associations and increased production. They held demonstrations, occupied public buildings and closed highways. They conquered, with combative struggle, electricity, renovation of roads and bridges, construction of a school and health center in the area.
After 20 years of the Heroic Resistance of Corumbiara, revolutionaries, democrats and good people, truly committed to our people, must make a deep reflection on their role. Why is this struggle so little remembered by the monopolies and not even mentioned by the opportunists?
The Battle of Santa Elina, even in its relative situation of spontaneous movement, turned out to be the watershed, not only in the peasant movement, but also in the popular movement as a whole. Precisely because it was the proof that the masses, exercising just revolutionary violence as opposed to the unjust and genocidal violence of the old state, are capable of conquering their rights and holding their heads high. It is the materialization that rebelling is just. The Battle of Santa Elina and all its developments are enemies of electoral opportunism and its lying promises. They are proof that organized people can destroy the old and build the new. The Battle of Santa Elina and all its developments are proof that reactionary elections do not change anything for the people. They are the latent example that the peasants have a fortress and that the worker-peasant alliance is capable of carrying out the most difficult works.
On August 9, 2015, the peasants will be celebrating on their land the hard-won victory of the peasant resistance. 20 years of hard toil, sacrifices and suffering, but mainly the combative struggle and the glorification of the comrades who shed their precious blood for the conquest of those lands, for the Agrarian Revolution, for Justice and a New Democracy in our country. On the festive tables will be his production, the result of his work and his struggle. There will be peasants from all over the region, from other parts of the country and organizations that support the struggle.
In the 20 years of the Resistance, we evoke and honor the heroes of the people who fell in the Battle of Santa Elina: Sérgio Rodrigues Gomes, Vanessa dos Santos Silva, Manoel Ribeiro "Nelinho", Maria Bonita, Ari Pinheiro dos Santos, Alcindo Correia da Silva, Enio Rocha Borges, Ercílio Oliveira de Campos, José Marcondes da Silva, Nelci Ferreira and Odilon Feliciano. We pay tribute to the remnants of this struggle who died over the years without ceasing to fight for a single day for their rights and dignity and gave their precious share of blood to the repossession of the lands. To the leaders and activists of the LCP of Rondônia who fell in the struggle against the latifundia, who, facing jail, torture and the cowardly bullets of the gunmen and the forces of repression, mobilize, politicize and organize the peasants under the banner of the Agrarian Revolution.
Note: *In 1997, at its Second Congress, the Workers' and Peasants' League changed its name to the Workers' League, based on the understanding that, with the emergence of the Poor Peasants' League, it was up to the Workers' League to organize the class and combative struggle of the workers in the cities and to promote the worker-peasant alliance as a fundamental instrument for the revolution in our country.
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