Human rights organisations in Brazil are clamouring for justice following the murder of a Black community activist who had been receiving threats.
Maria Bernadete Pacífico, a community and religious leader in the Pitanga dos Palmares quilombo – an Afro-Brazilian settlement of descendants of escaped slaves in the north-east state of Bahia – was killed on Thursday evening.
The 72-year-old, known as Mãe Bernadete (Mother Bernadete), had spent years demanding answers for the unsolved murder of her son Fábio Gabriel Pacífico, who was gunned down outside the community’s school in 2017.
She was killed on Thursday when two men wearing helmets entered her house and reportedly fired more than a dozen shots at her face.
“It is an immeasurable loss for the [quilombola] movement. She was a warrior, a fighter, she fought for human rights for everyone,” said Sandra Maria Andrade, the executive coordinator of the national quilombo association Conaq, of which Pacífico was a representative.
The murder has been condemned by national and international authorities, including the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the UN’s human rights regional office for South America. Both the federal police and the Bahia state police are investigating the death.
Facing constant intimidation, the Black leader had been included in a state protection programme after her son’s murder, but people close to her say the safety measures provided were inadequate.
In a public statement, the human rights ministry said awarding quilombos land titles was key to staving off violence from these persecuted territories. In the case of Pitanga dos Palmares, located in a rural area on the outskirts of Salvador, this process of legal recognition is still incomplete. Local farmers and speculators eyeing the land were allegedly behind threats to Pacífico.
“The crime was an execution. They executed my brother in 2017, now they’ve executed my mother. This makes me think I am next,” her surviving son, Jurandir Wellington Pacífico, told the Folha de S Paulo newspaper.
Brazil is one of the deadliest countries in the world for land defenders, according to the NGO Global Witness. Conaq says at least 30 quilombola people have been murdered in the last decade, 11 of them in Bahia. The state is home to 30% of Brazil’s 1.3 million quilombola people, according to census data.
Speaking at an event with the supreme court justice Rosa Weber weeks before her death, Pacífico accused the state of failing Brazil’s Black population. Andrade called for this to change.
“The deaths of quilombola leaders go unseen … We must fight for justice now, find out who did this and punish them, because while [this crime] goes unpunished, they will keep killing us,” she said.
