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In this week´s edition of News from Brazil:

• Without Africa, what is Brazil?
• Update on the murder trial of Vicente Cañas Costa

By Dirce Carrion, director of Olhares Cruzadas project

"Without Angola, there is no Brazil," said the polemical Fr. Antonio Vieira at the beginning of the 17^th Century. Now we, being the largest black nation second only to Nigeria, ask the question, "Without Africa, what is Brazil?"

During 350 years of black slavery in Brazil, millions of Africans were pulled out of their natural and social environments, condemned to years of dispersion and miscegenation, marketed and sold in the most perverse, harsh and lucrative business of the New World.

Brazil and Africa were united in a tragic form through the trafficking of slaves. But we could say poetically that it was the waves and the winds of the Atlantic Ocean that united us in historic resistance to slavery and social exclusion. Perhaps the oldest and most effective form of resistance can be found in our rituals and the various manifestations of our Afro-Brazilian cultures.

The terrible journey across the Atlantic did not deprive the African people of the memories of their gods, nor the ability to recognize foreign gods, and certainly not their ability to identify with others in their state of slavery. It was through this constant interchange that gave birth to Afro-Brazilian culture.

Africa still suffers from the effects of the immense exodus of workers. It suffers from colonialism’s arbitrary division of its territories which grouped together ethnic rivals and separated groups that were friendly to each other, generating incessant internal strife. But the strength of its ancient culture continues to be a unique and fundamental reference for the world.

In the last decades, economic interests have destroyed the lives of millions around the world. The peoples of Africa, still wrapped up in the long process of de-colonizing themselves, have paid dearly in this contemporary Holocaust. It is very serious that the world stands by as this happens. But now, hoping to understand this context better and to change it, we are proposing new steps which may engender a different Brazil-Africa exchange, with new a basis for relationships, without personal agendas and certainly not neo-colonial motives. Now that political dependency on the colonizers has been cut off, the ex-colonies have begun to talk more about friendship and cooperation among themselves. We believe that now is the time to diversify and increase the quality of our relations through increased mutual understanding.

Yet the greater part of our information about Africa comes through the media, which only highlights the negative: wars, epidemics, hunger, misery. We envision changing the way we see Africa; and to do this, we need to highlight the positive: the strength of its cultures and its history of resistance.

This is the line we are taking in our project, Olhares Cruzados. The project promotes the identification of common, cultural roots through the exchange of photographs, cards, drawings, videos, toys, musical instruments and crafts produced by children of Brazil, Africa and the Caribbean while participating in creative, imaginative workshops. Using artistic methods which permit the children to use their own language, our intention is to help children make these methods of expression their own so that they can see themselves in their work, through their own way of looking, not through a "colonialist" or vertical reading in which the context is not accessible to the agents.

Taking into account the local reality and respecting the traditional culture of each country, we facilitate exchanges between children from Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Senegal and Haiti, the latter being the first independent country of the Americas and the first free black nation of the world.

In 2007, together with Revista Viracao, project Olhares Cruzados plans to host an exchange between children of a MST (Movement of Rural Workers Without Land) encampment and children of a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The plan is to send a team of Brazilians to conduct workshops in the Congo, and then in the spirit of reciprocity, we will invite African educators and artists to come and do the same here in Brazil.

Whether they be from Africa, Brazil or the Caribbean, the children always want to deal with themes that are most dear to them: family, friends, television, toys, food, the parts of home life that are the "prettiest." We have noticed that even in regions where the reality is very difficult, the children’s letters, drawings and artwork are permeated with happiness and a hope for a better future.

Believing that self-esteem is essential in overcoming prejudices and the barriers that are placed in front of them, we always try to have them look through an optimistic lens so that they will have a better chance of inserting themselves in the world.

In Brazil, where many do not believe that racism exists (but the society continues to practice it), it is up to us Brazilians and Africans to show that the waters that brought slavery and different cultures also created a solid bridge, which many still refuse to recognize.

Believing in the possibilities that it offers, as a form of expression and communication, a way to promote peace, a fight against social exclusion and racial intolerance, we hope that Olhares Cruzadas project be one more step in the long journey of making right the cultural relations among peoples.

Source: Revista Sem Terra, November/December 2006

The seven jurors of the second trial related to the murder of Jesuit missionary Vicente Cañas Costa acquitted by five votes against two the defendant José Vicente da Silva, who had been charged with committing the crime. The result was announced Wednesday (the 8th) night, three days after the beginning of the trial, which was held in the auditorium of the federal court in Cuiabá, state of Mato Grosso, and was presided over by the judge Dr. Jéferson Schneider.

The Federal Prosecutor's Office announced that it will appeal the sentence, as it did in relation to the trial held between October 24 and 29, when Ronaldo Antonio Osmar was acquitted of the charges of being one of the men who contracted the murderers of the missionary.

The assistant prosecuting attorney, Dr. Michael Nolan, agrees that it is difficult to prosecute cases marked by problems since the initial investigations. "There is not a single piece of evidence in the records prepared by the police. They did not produce any evidence," she said. Evidence was only produced years later through parallel investigations carried out by indigenous entities.

The judge in charge of the trial, Jeferson Schneider, said that the proceedings had strengths and weaknesses. "The negative aspect was the time that the case lasted. Everybody knows that the agencies in charge of ensuring justice in Brazil are slow. As a result, values protected by the Federal Constitution, such as the right to life, are disregarded. Proceedings like this one are innocuous. They don't build a society and make you feel that impunity tends to prevail. The positive side is that the proceedings are finally over. My duty was to complete the process and hold a jury trial. And this was done."

The trial

During the discussions which closed the trial, Mario Lucio Avelar tried to prove that there was material evidence that a murder had been committed. He also located the crime in the conflicting context of the city of Juína when it was committed and then described the motive of the crime, namely, that farmers such as Pedro Chiquetti and Camilo Carlos Óbice were interested in indigenous lands. Although they were charged with the crime, both farmers are dead now.

Thesis of the prosecutors

The defendant José Vicente da Silva worked in the Londrina farm deforesting land, as he said in his deposition on Monday. The Londrina farm is the rural property mentioned in the depositions of Paulo Tompeba and Adalberto Pito, who heard reports of the murder on two different occasions, both in 1989. José Vicente is the defendant who was accused of being one of the members of the group that killed Cañas at the request of the man who later would become his boss, Pedro Chiquetti.

The thesis of the prosecutors is that the group of which José Vicente da Silva was a member reached the shack of the Cimi missionary using a trail that started in the Londrina farm. This trail was only identified in 1990 by indigenous people.

"The depositions coincide with the crime scene and confirm that the trail was used by the group to reach the shack," said Cláudio Comte, who late in the 1980s was hired by the indigenous organization Opan to collect information on the murder after it was seen that the investigations carried out by the police were not advancing, a fact which Comte blames on the involvement of the former chief of police of Juína, Ronaldo Osmar, in the murder. At that time, Cláudio analyzed the diaries kept by missionary Vicente Cañas and found different reports of attempted land invasions in them, many of which had been carried out by another farmer, Camilo Carlos Óbice, who later on would be indicted in connection with the murder.

Source: Cimi, Boletim Mundo, November 10, 2006

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