“Everyone is coming back,” Oliveira answered. “Are you
going to lose your lot?”
The next morning, Araujo and his boyfriend arrived at the
entrance to the farm, where they waited along with 40 other
squatters. By noon, Oliveira and Tonho still hadn’t arrived. Part
of the group left, vowing to return the next day, when a truck
picking up another 40 members of the movement was also
scheduled to arrive.
By the time Oliveira showed up at Santa Lucia, only 25 squat-
ters remained. Fearing they would be spotted from the road,
she led them onto the property. The sun was setting as they
pitched their camp in the tall grass, stringing hammocks in the
trees. The air smelled of rain. A heavy storm was on its way.
THE FIRST SHOT
RANG OUT WITH
NO WARNING.
Crouched in the forest with the rain thundering down, shield-
ed only by a makeshift tarp, the squatters found themselves
surrounded.
Araujo was knocked to the ground by his boyfriend, who
had been shot. The smell of gunpowder lled his lungs, and
his ears rang from the sound of gunre. Terried, Araujo lay
frozen on the ground, his boyfriend moaning and trembling
as he died.
Blondie, who had hidden in a thicket of trees, could not see
what was happening, but she heard the police approaching.
“Lie on the ground, bitch!” one of them called out. Oliveira was
the only woman in the group that police were ring on. Blondie
would later testify that she recognized one of the voices as that
of Antonio Miranda, head of the civil police.
The command was followed by a series of heavy thumps.
Autopsy reports would later suggest that some of the squat-
ters had suffered brutal beatings before they were killed.
“Whoever runs, dies!” the police called out, ring at anyone
who tried to ee.
“The fucking bitch has to die!” one of the killers said. “They
all have to die!”
“Run, bitch!” an ocer shouted.
Oliveira was shot nine times, four in the back. Blondie
assumed she had been beaten so badly that she couldn’t move.
Other witnesses say she was forced to rise to her knees before
she was killed.
An ocer named Valvadino Miranda da Silva, who had been
sent to another part of the farm, was shocked by what he saw
when he arrived at the scene of the massacre. Bodies were scat-
tered everywhere. Oliveira’s body had already turned a ghostly
white, drained of blood from an open leg fracture. A few squat-
ters were lying on the ground, still alive.
“So,” an ocer who had taken part in the massacre asked
Silva. “What’s it going to be?”
The most experienced ocer on the scene, Raimundo Non-
ato Lopes, had arrived with Silva. He immediately recognized
that they had stepped into a trap. Either they would have to
participate in the killing, or they would be killed themselves,
reported as casualties of a gunght with the sem terra.
Silva had gone into shock. So Lopes drew his service pistol
and pointed it at Lico, who was lying on the ground.
“If you’re going to kill me,” Lico said, “let me die standing.”
Lopes and the other ocers waited for Lico to rise to his feet.
Then they opened re on anyone still breathing.THE BODIES BEGAN
ARRIVING AT THE
HOSPITAL IN REDENÇÃO
BEFORE NOON.
By then, word had spread of the shooting, and a crowd had
gathered in front of the hospital, which had set up a makeshift
morgue. Family members who peered through windows saw
a sickening tableau. Only the body of Jane de Oliveira lay on a
stretcher. The nine other victims, including Tonho and Lico,
had been dumped in a heap, their arms and legs tangled, blood
staining the floor beneath them. By the time doctors inally
examined the bodies, nine hours later, the small concrete room
gave o a nauseating stench of death.
The police insisted they had acted in self-defense. The squat-
ters, they claimed, had red on them when they arrived to serve
arrest warrants for the killing of the security guard. But the
autopsy reports did not match the police’s version of events.
According to an investigation by the Brazilian magazine piauí,
two of the dead were shot in the back, as if eeing. Six had mul-
tiple gunshot wounds to their chests, and two had been shot in
the head at close range. The precision of the shots suggested
an execution, not a shoot-out. None of the squatters had any
gunpowder on their hands, leading the local prosecutor to con-
clude that none of them had red a gun.
Survivors also contradicted the police. Jose Vargas tracked
down Fernando Araujo, who had hidden in the jungle until the
police had left. A federal prosecutor whisked other survivors to
a hotel in Redenção, where they spoke until dawn, providing
eyewitness accounts of what had actually happened.
Then prosecutors got their biggest break. Under question-
ing by federal police, Silva broke down. Weeping, he admitted
what had happened, including his part in the massacre. “It
would have been better if I’d died there,” he said. Days later,
Lopes conrmed Silva’s version of events. The ocial story, he
admitted, was a lie.
“There are strong indications this was an execution,” the
region’s highest-ranking law enforcement ocial announced
at a press conference. Fifteen police ocers were charged in
the massacre, but most were allowed to remain on the force.
The survivors, meanwhile, were placed in witness protection,
along with Lopes and Silva.
Two years later, on a hot afternoon last June, Vargas stood in a
eld beneath a thatched canopy at the Santa Lucia farm, not far
from where the massacre took place. It was the burning season in
the Amazon, and 2. 3 million acres were about to go up in ames,96 VANITY FAIR