A dangerous place for human rights defenders

In May 2017, landless worker Fernando Santos Araújo witnessed the murder of his boyfriend and nine of his closest friends up close. Police officers killed them in the southern part of Pará, an Amazonian state where land disputes are commonplace, during an operation to recover a piece of land the landless workers had occupied. 

The Pau d’Arco massacre, as it became known, left ten dead and 14 injured — in the most violent episode against landless workers in nearly 30 years.

Mr. Araújo entered a witness protection program but eventually returned to the settlement. In September 2020, he was shot in the stomach with a shotgun. Again, he survived. Again, he pointed to the police as the perpetrator. He would continue receiving threats until, four months later, he was finally shot dead while packing to leave the settlement for good.

A preliminary investigation found that Mr. Araújo’s killer was the same police officer who shot him in September 2020. He has still not faced trial for either attack. Nor have the other 16 officers accused of the 2017 massacre. 

Mr. Araújo’s case is not an outlier. Between 2019 and 2022, 169 human rights defenders...