A BRAZILIAN human rights worker, who had investigated death squads among local police officers, has been found murdered in the farming state of Tocantins.
The body of Sebastião Bezerra da Silva (40) was found early on Monday buried on a farm in the remote municipality of Dueré. He had gone missing early on Saturday while travelling to work.
Colleagues who identified his body said he had been tortured. Several fingers and toes had been broken and sharp objects had been forced under his nails. Although the cause of death was strangulation, he was also severely beaten around the head with a blunt object.
Mr da Silva, who was the centre-west region’s co-ordinator of Brazil’s National Movement of Human Rights, was a constant recipient of death threats over the years.
After he went missing on Saturday, his family received several calls from his mobile phone in which an unidentified man said he had run off with a lover, a claim his family dismiss as an attempt to cover the tracks of those responsible for the murder.
“The fact Sebastião was tortured and that the killers tried to sow false trails for the family means there is no doubt this was not a common robbery but something more serious,” Paulo Henrique Costa Mattos, who worked with Mr da Silva and identified his body, said.
Mr Mattos said there were many people who had sworn vengeance against Mr da Silva for his role in denouncing human rights abuses.
Last week the last of a group of local police officers that Mr da Silva had charged with torture and attempted murder was exonerated. The officers had beaten a young suspect who had then pretended to be dead in order to save his life.
After Mr da Silva brought the charges they were suspended from the force, but all have been cleared by local courts.
The expansion of Brazil’s farming frontier into rural states such as Tocantins has been a long-standing source of conflict between big ranchers, landless peasants and indigenous peoples.
In 2009, 25 people were killed in such conflicts, according to the land commission of Brazil’s Catholic Church, nearly all activists opposed to landlord interests.
“Receiving death threats is unfortunately normal for human rights activists, it is part of the process of intimidation,” said Ricardo Barbosa de Lima, president of the Central Brazil Institute, a group working for human rights in rural central Brazil.
Mr da Silva leaves a widow and two daughters aged 12 and 8 years.