However, because they have little hope that such investigation will ever be carried out in Brazil, they will continue to report the crimes committed in April to the world. This month in the Brazilian state of Para, the wealthy and influential rancher Jeronimo Alves Amorim received a 19-year prison term for ordering the murder of a rural union leader, Expedito Ribeiro de Souza, nine years ago. More than 1,000 activists for the landless such as Mr. Ribeiro de Souza have been killed in Brazil in the last 10 years. Only a handful of the murderers have been tried, virtually all of them low-level hired triggermen. The conviction and sentencing of the powerful Mr. Amorim is one of several recent setbacks for Brazil's ranchers, whose drive for land is furthering the destruction of the Amazon and condemning peasants to lives of destitution.
Brazil has one of the world's most unequal patterns of land distribution.
Tens of thousands of peasants have won title after occupying idle land, but millions remain landless, and their leaders run huge risks. Other victims are rubber tappers who live in the forests claimed and burned by ranchers and farmers. The ranchers have great political power in rural Brazil and in Congress. They have little to fear from the justice system or the police, who have themselves massacred the landless. Last year three police commanders were acquitted of the massacre after a trial marred by evidence-tampering and accusations of jury bribery.