Eldorado do Carajás massacre

The Eldorado do Carajás massacre was the mass killing of 19 landless farmers who were taking part in a peaceful protest. They were shot by military police on April 17, 1996, in the southern region of the Pará state, Brazil.

Description
On April 17, 1996, 19 members of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement, or MST) were shot dead, and 69 more injured, by Pará state military police at the "S" curve of highway PA-150 in Eldorado do Carajás municipality, in southern Pará state. These people were part of a demonstration calling for the federal appropriation of a private ranch where the MST had mounted a camp called "Macaxeira" with almost 3000 families.

On the orders of the state secretary of public security, Paulo Sette Câmara, the police were ordered to clear the highway "at any cost".

Designation as a massacre
The Portuguese word massacre (chacina) has been used repeatedly and consistently in the Brazilian press to describe the shooting deaths of these farmers. There are well over 100 Brazilian news internet sites which use the exact phrase "chacina de Eldorado de Carajás" to designate these killings.

Conviction
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.

Remembrance
The President of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, Arlindo Chinaglia, gave a speech to remember the horror of the Massacre de Eldorado de Carajás in Brasília on 17 April 2008, to mark the 12th year after the massacre.

In the arts
Swiss theatre director and political activist Milo Rau, then artistic director of NTGent in Belgium, travelled with his team to Pará, In collaboration with the MST, they created a performance called Antigone in the Amazon, an allegorical play about the impact of the modern state and impact on traditional land rights, which causes huge displacements of people and devastation of culture. Scenes were filmed in Brazil, and the performance combines storytelling, music, film, and theatre, to illustrate its themes of political protest, state brutality, and heroism, based on Sophocles' play Antigone; a Greek tragedy transposed to a modern village in the Amazon. 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.