We hereby publish an unofficial translation of an article published by A Nova Democracia.

On August 17, the peasant Melquisedeque Gomes da Silva was murdered while he was doing a horse-ride in the Mariposa community, 1,5 kilometers away from Timbiras, in Maranhão, by an attack with a knife.

The denounces made point out that this might be a crime done by goons, as Melquisedeque was a well-known defender of the struggle for land in Maranhão. There, it is common that the goons cause troubles in public places in order to murder peasants out of the context of an agrarian conflict. Before murdering Melquisede, the murder, Gilvan Sousa de Almeia, fought with other people next to the peasant.

Melk do Mutirão, as Melquisedeque was know, was considered an outstanding fighter by his comrades in the struggle for land. He denounced the land-grabbing in Eastern Maranhão and he fought the goons gangs who acted in the region.

Constant target

The peasant already faced attacks before. In 2019, men with uniforms of the Agoramatá company set fire to the house of Melk along with other 36 houses at the Jaqueira community. They also set fire to flour producing structures as well as to the crops of the peasants.

Before the day of his death, Melk denounced the scenario of war imposed by the latifundium against his community:

– They were always armed, shooting to the trees, air, the doors of the people (…) all what belonged to the people was burned. In this conflict the people attempted to save what they could and meanwhile the goons were shooting. Two days after, the goons came back and set fire to what was left. They carried out tortures at the house of an old man, who days after dyed by a heart-attack, and a woman suffered a stroke due to the terror she faced. But we cannot go anywhere, we came back and resisted. We are rebuilding everything again, little by little, because we even ran out of food.

According to the CPT, with the burning of houses and storehouses of food from the community, 450 families were without houses, crops and food. They faced all kind of violations for almost two decades and this is not easy, and comrades such as Melk make the difference with their spirit and disposition.

Outstanding fighter

Few hours before his murder, Melk shared in his social media a video called “Contaminated land, threatened life: Timbiras free of pesticides”, of the Agrarian-Ecology Network of Maranhão (Rama), which denounces the use of planes by the latifundium to spread pesticides, intentionally, on the peasant and Quilombola communities of the region, also on the water sources, crops, livestock and the villages themselves; what results in skin burns, poisoning, death of animals, decreasing of production and development of several kind of cancer.

Melk recently filmed one of those actions, when, while the peasants were harvesting rice in Jaqueira, planes of the Agromaratá company spread poison on the workers. In the video, Melk shows that he is aware of the scope of the struggle for land in Maranhão when he states that this is an act of chemical and biological warfare. After what occurred, FETAEMA, RAMA, STTR of Timbiras, CPT and the Catholic Church started a campaign to ban the use of planes to spreading pesticides in Timbiras.

Melquisedeque Gomes da Silva was a worker at the forefront of the struggle, as a leader of his people, against land-grabbing and the latifundium arbitrariness, who extended its plague all over the State. Melk never stopped to publicly denounce the attacks faced in Jaqueira, and this put himself in a position of vulnerability, intensified by the decisions taken by the public power, what left the crimes committed against the people unpunished, and reinforce the intensification of conflicts.

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