Bankrupt sugarcane mills lead to tension and violence in Pernambuco

Geovane da Silva Santos was watching television with his family on the night of February 10, when seven armed masked men broke into his house. One of the gunmen shot at Geovane and the bullet grazed his shoulder.

“That’s not the guy,” warned one of the criminals.

Indeed, Geovane was the intended target, but the gunmen did not know what he looked like. When they came across the 51-year-old rural worker, with skin aged from too much sun, they didn’t recognize him.

Geovane managed to flee the house, but his wife Marlene, two children, and two nieces remained inside. They ran to the bedroom, where Marlene and her youngest son hid underneath the bed. The men dragged 9-year-old Jonathas from his mother’s arms and, not swayed by her screams, shot him repeatedly in the stomach.

At first, investigators believed the men may not have intended to shoot Jonathas, given the house was in almost complete darkness. But they were wrong.

Bullet marks on the bedroom floor show that Jonathas was not underneath the mattress when he was executed. He was in the middle of the room, where it would have been clear to the assailants that he was just a child. “It was pure cruelty,” says Bruno Ribeiro, a lawyer from the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), which is assisting the family.

“When I got back [home], they weren’t there anymore, and my son was laid out on the floor,” Geovane later told the press. “My wife told me she said ‘don’t shoot my son, for the love of God,’ when the man saw him under the bed. But it was no use.”

At that time, Jonathas was still alive. He was put into a neighbor’s car to be transported to the closest hospital, but the vehicle ran out of gas. Geovane’s family live in Roncadorzinho, a village on an old sugarcane mill near the town of Barreiros, just over 100 kilometers from the northeastern Pernambuco state capital of Recife. The hospital they were trying to reach was located almost one hour’s drive away.

The car came to a halt in the middle of the road and the family had to wait to be rescued. When they finally did arrive at the hospital, Jonathas could no longer be saved.

Jonathas’s burial rocked Barreiros all of the residents of Roncadorzinho were present and they held a funeral procession under a scorching afternoon sun. Jonathas’s classmates brought placards, honoring their friend.

The family lives off the sale of fruits and vegetables, with a monthly income that does not surpass Brazil’s BRL 1,210 (USD 235)...