Back to front page


In Southern Para nothing is as it seems. I learned that before but now, several years later, it seems more apparent than ever. This place is a paradise for a paranoid, where the most minor accident or a sudden illness can be easily be construed as an assassination attempt: the man emerging from the shadows your killer, the accusations of the town mayor part of an organized slander campaign, the new cook in the local restaurant plotting to poison you. All events resulting in death are suspect because shootings, kidnappings and murders are never successfully prosecuted in the courts. They are never confirmed or refuted. They exist in a strange state of limbo where they feed the imagination. It was only in the 1980's that a justice system was put in place here and it is a sham. The files of cases constantly disappear, detainees are arbitrarily released, and judges' lives are often threatened. Justice is decided by intimidation, and assassination practiced with impunity. It is as if the victims never existed, forgotten in public record, but remembered only by people like Father Ricardo Rezende who have worked tirelessly for decades to make certain that with each death there are photos taken, facts documented, testimonies submitted, and pressure -- however futile -- levied on this chaotic, inept, and, some would say, corrupt justice system.

In the last two decades, more than five hundred peasants, human rights activists and community leaders have been selectively assassinated in the state of Para. And there are usually a half dozen unsuccessful attempts against others who remain, and another dozen threats forcing still other to flee. These days Padre Ricardo refers to the telephone as an "instrument of terror" because of the frequency of death-threat phone calls. They come at any hour of the day or night. Sometimes the voice on the other end will simply ask for the "Dead Man." At other times the message is more elaborate and sinister, the caller reveling in the power of his violent intent, increasing the frequency of the calls to heighten the tension, occasionally bringing friends or girl friends on the line to participate in the ritual.

One such call to a local activist and socialist party candidate named Joao Bernardo:

"What's the address of Sebastiao, that agitator on the city council?" the caller asks.
"I don't know," said Joao Bernardo. He has already received four suspicious calls.
"What's his telephone number?"
"I don't know that either."
"You know it. He will die, just like you. You're not involved in land problems, but you agitate a lot around here."
"Here? Where?"
"In Rio Maria. I'm going to kill you."
"Why?"
"Never mind. You're going to die."

Joao Bernardo left Rio Maria shortly after this call. Others, however, have chosen to stay on. There is another man in town who has received so many death threats that his friends jokingly refer to him as "A.D." for "Already Dead". Often Father Ricardo's phone will suddenly go on the blink. He can only receive calls but can't call out. He finds that suspicious, but there is nothing he can do about it. This is southern Para, a region where the phone company and the court system are equally inefficient and unreliable. Is it part of a plot? That is left up to the imagination.

As I was driving to Rio Maria this morning, I thought about Ricardo's best friend, a man named Father Josimo Tavares, who was shot in the back of the head several years ago while walking into the offices of the Pastoral Land Commission. Just two weeks before he had escaped an attempt on his life when his assassin-possibly the same man who eventually killed him, but perhaps not -- riddled his car with bullets, none of which happened to hit him. The man ultimately convicted of his murder didn't know he had killed a priest. "If I had known he was a priest I wouldn't have done it," said Geraldo Rodrigues, his killer. "I am a Catholic, " he added from his jail cell. Tavares' assassin was the only man to be successfully prosecuted for a politically motivated murder in this region. Yet he managed on two occasions to escape from prison. The frequency with which accused murderers awaiting trial "escape" from "notoriously lax jails" has become the focus of criticism by human rights groups. Yet no one knows exactly how they happen, whether bribes or political pressure are involved. Rodriques, after his second escape in 1990, was recaptured in 1991 and is now serving a sentence of eighteen years and six months.

This story on Padre Ricardo is just one of a series of news pieces that I will be doing in the Amazon in 1992 prior to the start of the United Nation's Earth Summit. There have been six attempts against his life since he first started doing human rights work in the Parrot's Beak in the 1980's. Recently there was a drive-by shooting that strafed the outside of his compound. The threats have become so serious that he now has a twenty-four hour armed bodyguard assigned by a state judge. His new home of Rio Maria is even more violent than Conceicao do Araguaia where I filmed him five years ago. Friends are urging him to leave the area until the death threats subside. Like Chico Mendes, he insists on staying. He doesn't want to give into to the tactics of intimidation.