"“We must never forget, so it never happens again”: Brazil’s peasant internationalism"

On 17 April 1996, exactly 20 years ago, 19 rural landless workers participated in a march in defence of agrarian reform in the state of Pará, Brazil. They were brutally murdered by police forces in an act of repression that gained international notoriety. In the same week, peasant movements, from all over the world, gathering in Tlaxcala, Mexico, for the II International Conference of La Via Campesina, declared 17 April as International Day of Peasant Struggles. Since then, on this date, thousands of actions worldwide are organised to reaffirm the struggle for land as a powerful proof of peasant movements’ international solidarity.