Class struggle manifests in various forms, including strikes, protests, and the dispute for the institutional politics. It is also expressed through several forms of daily mobilization promoted by unions, social movements, political parties, associations, and collectives. In addition to these forms, class struggle also takes place in the struggle for memory.
August 23, 2024, occurred a victory for the Brazilian working class through the State’s “official memory”, with the first recognition of collective political amnesty for a peasant community in Brazil, approved by the Amnesty Commission[i], along with a formal apology from the State.
The request for Collective Amnesty was based on the doctoral thesis of Gabriel Bastos, a member of CASAS, aiming to provide reparations to the community of Pedra Lisa, a rural area located between the municipalities of Japeri and Nova Iguaçu in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro. This population was the target of intense repression during the corporate-military dictatorship (1964-1985). The request, drafted by the author of the thesis in collaboration with the Federal Public Defender’s Office of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Defensoria Pública da União – DPU-RJ), was made on behalf of the Association of the Traditional Community of the Peasants of Pedra Lisa and Surroundings (Associação da Comunidade Tradicional dos Camponeses da Pedra Lisa e Adjacências – ACTPL). This association currently operates in the same building as the former Society of Small Farmers and Squatters of Pedra Lisa, an association founded in 1948, whose members were targets of intense political persecution during the dictatorial regime.
After initial meetings between the author and Thales Treiger, the Regional Human Rights Defender in Rio de Janeiro of the Federal Public Defender’s Office, along with his team, contact was made with the ACTPL, local victims, and public officials, in order to organize a meeting at the association’s headquarters. During this meeting, numerous human rights violations were reported, and documents and newspapers were presented to the author and the Federal Public Defender’s Office members. Subsequently, the association recorded several video testimonies to gather additional materials for the petition. These materials, combined with the thesis, formed the basis for the request submitted to the Amnesty Commission in October 2023.
This was the third collective reparation request submitted to the Amnesty Commission and the first directed at peasant populations since the implementation of its new Internal Regulations in March 2023, which began allowing collective amnesty requests[ii]. As mentioned earlier, after being reviewed by the Amnesty Commission, it became the first approved collective political amnesty request for peasant populations in Brazil, in August 23, 2024.
The Case of Pedra Lisa and the Insertion of the Peasantry in Brazil’s Truth Commissions
On April 1, 1964, during the consolidation of the coup in Brazil, an armed group linked to land grabbers arrived in the Pedra Lisa region. The objective of this group was to locate and assassinate peasant leaders. Shortly after, a troop of the Army, equipped with battle tanks, occupied the region and began searching for “subversives,” members of the Society of Small Farmers and Squatters of Pedra Lisa, as well as hidden weapons in several houses, imposing violence against the residents. Local peasant leaders fled and went into hiding; some were arrested and tortured. A climate of political persecution was established in the area, with the involvement of informers who provided the names of peasant leaders to the repression commanders in exchange for benefits.
By revealing the names of peasant leaders to the repressive forces, these collaborators of the dictatorial regime received, in return, tools, machinery, animals, and even lands, taken from the persecuted peasant leaders.
This process of repression and political persecution was preceded by more than a decade of intense land conflicts in the region. The Society of Small Farmers and Squatters of Pedra Lisa organized, throughout the 1950s and early 60s, legal struggles and armed resistance against eviction attempts orchestrated by would-be landowners and land speculators. They organized themselves with the support of the Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Brasileiro – PCB), a mandate from the Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrático – PSD), the Brazilian Labor Party (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro – PTB), unions, two federations of rural workers’ associations, and the progressive press that supported them. These mobilizations culminated in the expropriation of land by the state government in favor of the Society of Small Farmers and Squatters of Pedra Lisa.
Other nearby rural areas in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro and other parts of the state’ that had been focal points of land conflicts and peasant mobilization, in the period before the coup, experienced similar events almost immediately after the 1964 coup was unleashed. In the municipality of Magé, particularly in the América Fabril estate, land grabbers began acting in conjunction with the police to evict rural workers without a court order, simply by accusing them of being “subversives” or “communists”[iii]. In the municipality of Duque de Caxias, in conflict areas within the district of Xerém—such as the São Lourenço and Capivari estates, rural areas near the National Motor Factory—there are reports of thefts, arrests followed by torture, and the destruction of crops and homes perpetrated by the Army[iv]. At the São José da Boa Morte estate in the municipality of Cachoeiras de Macacu, the Army conducted an incursion to expel landholders and arrest leaders[v]. In the northern region of the state of Rio de Janeiro, there are reports of arrests and disappearances in the Imbé Colonial Settlement, an area also marked by land conflicts[vi]. Following the 1964 coup, 22 land expropriations that had taken place in the state of Rio de Janeiro since 1958 in favor of landholders were reversed[vii].
Despite the establishment of the National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade – CNV) in 2012, the most significant—albeit delayed—transitional justice measure undertaken in Brazil, the recognition of this type of repressive process is normally marginalized. This occurs primarily because the hegemonic understanding of the dictatorship’s history grants greater visibility to victims who were part of the organized left instead of those who were not affiliated with political organizations. Secondly, this marginalization results from the CNV’s conception of “serious human rights violations”, defined as arbitrary arrests, torture, execution, and enforced disappearance, which does not encompass other forms of violence, such as forced land evictions[viii].
In this context, Gilney Viana’s work[ix] provides important data regarding the low official recognition of peasants as victims: of the 434 individuals officially recognized as dead or disappeared by the CNV, only 41 peasants are acknowledged as victims. In contrast, the Peasant Truth Commission (Comissão Camponesa da Verdade – CCV)[x] listed 1,196 peasants and supporters as dead or disappeared between 1964 and 1988. In addition to the low number of peasants officially recognized as dead or disappeared by the CNV, the 41 peasants listed were already recognized by the Brazilian state through the Report-Book of the Special Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances (Comissão Especial sobre Mortos e Desaparecidos Políticos – CEMDP) and/or the second edition, published in 2009, of the Dossier on Political Deaths and Disappearances since 1964, compiled by the Commission of Families of the Dead and Disappeared Political Prisoners (Comissão de Familiares de Mortos e Desaparecidos Políticos – CFMDP) and the Brazilian Amnesty Committee of Rio Grande do Sul (Comitê Brasileiro pela Anistia do Rio Grande do Sul – CBA/RS), both civil society entities. Both reports operated under the perspective of recognizing victims only among political militants, requiring proof of “participation or accusation of participation in political activities,” as established by the previously defined criteria of the CEMDP.
Historically, the limited recognition of victims of forced evictions is also evident in the operations of the Amnesty Commission. Between 2002, when the Commission began its work, and February 2020, a total of 78,589 reparation requests were submitted. Among those, only 2,413 (3%) were from peasants, of which only 263 (10%) were processed. Another 851 were rejected, 348 were archived, and 950 remained pending until February 2020. The number of requests submitted by Indigenous people was even smaller, with only 102 (0.1%) applications, of which only 15 (15%) were granted. Two were rejected, 12 were archived, and 74 were still under consideration until February 2020. In general terms, the approval rate was significantly higher, with 38,966 (50%) requests accepted, while 28,748 (37%) were rejected or archived. The remaining cases were still awaiting consideration[xi]. Fortunately, this trend may be reversing, as in April 2024, four months before the approval of the collective amnesty request for the peasant community of Pedra Lisa, the Amnesty Commission granted collective political amnesty to Indigenous people: the Krenak from the northern region of the state of Minas Gerais and the Guarani-Kaiowá from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul[xii].
Despite these challenges of recognition, over the past decade, experiences of the working-class fractions during the dictatorship have increasingly garnered attention, particularly following the establishment of the National Truth Commission and the subsequent creation of State, Municipal, and sectoral[xiii] Truth Commissions.
In the case of the state of Rio de Janeiro, with the aim to support the work of the Rio de Janeiro State Truth Commission (Comissão Estadual da Verdade do Rio de Janeiro – CEV-RJ), the project Land Conflicts and Repression in Rural Areas of the State of Rio de Janeiro (1946-1988) focused on cases of violence, conflicts, and repression in rural areas of the state, within the temporal framework established by the CNV. The final report indicates that, among 200 mapped cases of conflicts in Rio de Janeiro, beyond the actions of the State, private actors also played a role in human rights violations[xiv].
Among the reported conflicts, 53 murders were recorded, along with three missing persons, three kidnapping victims (including a minor), two cases of concealment of bodies, 19 victims of torture, over 200 arrests, more than 60 victims of physical assault, over 300 cases of evictions, more than 220 individuals with destroyed crops, and over ten situations of forced partnership and lease agreements. It is worth noting that this list of detainees ranges from people detained for just one day for intimidation or interrogation, as well as those formally convicted. Additionally, there are several “collective” arrests, listed, for instance, as “squatter rural workers of the Alpina farm,” with the number of individuals not specified. Some cases of physical assault victims, evictions, individuals with destroyed crops, and situations of forced partnership and lease agreements are listed in a quite similar way. Therefore, despite the high number of occurrences of various forms of violence, the presented data is certainly far from representing all the victims of several forms of violence in the countryside in the state of Rio de Janeiro during this period.
In Gabriel Bastos’s research, which served as the foundation for the collective amnesty request for Pedra Lisa, several additional cases were identified through different sources — both oral and written — were not included in the aforementioned report. This further indicates that much remains to be investigated concerning human rights violations in rural areas of the state of Rio de Janeiro during the dictatorship period.
Final considerations
By contrasting these data with the limited public awareness, specialized knowledge, and official recognition of the violence inflicted upon peasant populations in Brazil, we can collectively refer to Ricœur’s notion of “blocked memory”[xv]. This concept relates to the effort—whether undertaken by the individual due to various social conditions or by the actions of other agents—to avoid the recollection of disturbing or traumatic memories. However, when addressing collective forgetfulness, in the sense of the lack of widespread public awareness of these repressive events, we take this discussion a step further.
Firstly, this collective forgetfulness reinforces the silence of those who were victims, or close to the victims, of these repressive events, turning these traumatic memories into “subterranean memories” [xvi], which can only be articulated at opportune moments. Secondly, the historical persistence of the legacy of the dictatorial conservative modernization project for agricultural development in Brazil, along with the lack of policies for democratizing land access, are elements connected to the absence of a broad critical remembrance of this process in Brazilian society, thus reinforcing the politics of erasure concerning the agrarian issue in Brazil[xvii].
In this manner, the Brazilian state`s formal apology to the Pedra Lisa community, declaring it collectively amnestied, represents a first and small victory. It constitutes an initial step in a long journey that must be undertaken for Brazilian society, through the actions of the state, to achieve a critical remembrance of the role played by the corporate-military dictatorship in the countryside.
Gabriel Souza Bastos
[i] Created by Law No. 10 559/2002, the Amnesty Commission has the specific purpose of analyzing amnesty requests that have unequivocal proof of facts related to persecution of an exclusively political nature, as well as issuing advisory opinions on the amnesty requests to assist the responsible Minister of State. Since its creation, the Amnesty Commission was linked to the Ministry of Justice. However, since early 2023, the Amnesty Commission has been linked to the Ministry of Human Rights.
[ii] According to a response to an information access request on the “Fala.BR” platform, on November 9, 2023.
[iii] TEIXEIRA, Marco. Tempo da Ditadura: Conflitos por terra e repressão política contra trabalhadores rurais em Magé. In: MEDEIROS, L. (Org). Ditadura, Conflito e Repressão no Campo: A resistência camponesa no estado do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Consequência, 2018. p. 169–204.
[iv] MAIA, Aline. O lugar do rural na Baixada Fluminense: incorporação urbana, luta pela terra e articulações ruro-fabris em Duque de Caxias. In: MEDEIROS, L. (Org.). Ditadura, conflitos e repressão no campo: A resistência camponesa no estado do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Consequência, 2018a. p. 93–130.
[v] BRITO, Ricardo. “Luta-se pela terra livre”: conflitos fundiários e ocupações de terra na região da Fazenda São José da Boa Morte. In: MEDEIROS, L. (Org.). Ditadura, Conflito e Repressão no Campo: A resistência camponesa no estado do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Consequência, 2018, p. 205–243.
[vi] NEVES, Delma. Posseiros e comunistas: reparações diferenciais de direitos humanos. In: MEDEIROS, L. (Org.). Ditadura, Conflito e Repressão no Campo: A resistência camponesa no estado do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Consequência, 2018. p. 287–325.
[vii] ERNANDEZ, Marcelo. Sementes em trincheiras: estado do Rio de Janeiro (1948-1996). In: SIGAUD, L.; ERNANDEZ, M.; ROSA, M. (Org.). Ocupações e acampamentos: estudo comparado sobre a sociogênese das mobilizações por reforma agrária no Brasil (Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro e Pernambuco) 1960-2000. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2010, p. 133–266.
[viii][viii] TELÓ, Fabrício.; GASPAROTTO, Alessandra.; MEDEIROS, Leonilde.; SARAIVA, Regina. Land and Transitional Justice in Brazil. International Journal of Transitional Justice, v. 15, n.1, p. 190-209, 2021.
[ix] VIANA, Gilney. Camponeses na Comissão Nacional da Verdade. In: SAUER, S. (Org.). Lutas, Memórias e Violações no Campo Brasileiro: Conflitos, Repressão e Resistências no Passado e Presente. São Paulo: Outras Expressões, 2020. p. 283–306.
[x] Being an initiative composed of academic researchers and members of civil society organizations, the Peasant Truth Commission (CCV) was formed following the Unified National Meeting of Workers and Peoples of the Countryside, Waters, and Forests in August 2012. The CCV engaged with the Working Group of the National Truth Commission (CNV) that addressed issues concerning these populations.
[xi] TELÓ, et. al, op. cit. p. 203.
[xii] The Krenak were subjected to one of the most severe human rights violations of the dictatorship period, with the government establishing two reformatories within their territory that effectively served as spaces for imprisonment and torture of Indigenous people from all over Brazil. In the case of the Guarani-Kaiowá, there was persecution, resulting in their forced eviction from the Guyraroká Indigenous Territory.
[xiii] Such as those established in universities, for example.
[xiv] MEDEIROS, Leonilde. (Coord.). Conflitos por terra e repressão no campo no estado do Rio de Janeiro (1946-1988). Rio de Janeiro: CPDA/UFRRJ, 2015. Disponível em: <http://www.nmspp.net.br/arquivos/para_leitura/camponeses_e_ditadura/Conflitos%20por%20Terra%20e%20Repressao%20no%20Campo%20no%20Estado%20do%20Rio%20de%20Janeiro%20-%201946-1988.pdf>. Acessado em 28/08/2023.
[xv] RICŒUR, Paul. A Memória, a história e o esquecimento. Campinas: Editora UNICAMP, 2007.
[xvi] POLLAK, Michael. Memória, Esquecimento, Silêncio. Estudos Históricos, Rio de Janeiro, v. 2, n. 3, p. 3–15, 1989.
[xvii] LERRER, Débora; FORIGO, Adriano. A política de silêncio do problema agrário brasileiro. Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura, v. 27, n. 3, p. 483–508, 2019.
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Gabriel Souza Bastos
Gabriel Souza Bastos is a Brazilian sociologist, graduated from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and holds a Master's degree in Social Sciences from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ). He is currently a PhD candidate at the same university, in the Postgraduate Programme of Social Sciences in Development, Agriculture and Society (CPDA). As part of his doctoral training, he was a visiting student at the Lateinamerika-Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin. Gabriel worked on research that supported the works of the State Truth Commission of Rio de Janeiro, investigating cases of human rights violations, conflicts and repression in rural areas of the state during and before the corporate-military dictatorship. This research was published in book format, with a chapter of his authorship. He is currently deepening this research in his doctoral thesis. His main research interests are collective memory on repression and the corporate-military dictatorship; land conflicts, agrarian question and peasant social movements. Gabriel also teaches sociology since 2015, with experiences in popular education, aimed at low-income high school students and also at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio de Janeiro, where he taught for secondary/technical and higher education.