'We sing ...
because our dead and our survivors want us to sing.'
Mário Benedetti
A Song for Peace resounds at a moment when the empire is declaring war
on the poor of Afghanistan, as a retaliation against the attack on the twin
towers of New York and the Pentagon, those symbols of the capitalist might and
belligerent authority of the twenty-first century’s new Rome, currently
undergoing an existential crisis.
Amongst the victims of the 'war on terror' are children, blamed for being the
softer target of American missiles seeking the sons of Mohammed? Blessed
by the fury of Western public opinion, which seems to have forgotten more than a
million dead, are nephews and nieces of Uncle Ho in Vietnam. The hundreds
of thousands of innocent people who disappeared in the atomic flowering in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Yankee support of the Indonesian genocide against
our brothers in East Timor. Of the cowardly actions of the bombings which
annihilated/wiped out 130 thousand Iraqi children. The same empire which
inflicts on our continent the death of hundreds and thousands of children,
victims of malnutrition and hunger.
We from this corner of the world, cut off by five hundred years of violence of
the LATIFUNDIUM which bleeds our history and condemns us to make our way in
obscurity in a society which fails to keep account of its past of slavery,
colony, dependence. The Brazil of Eldorado dos Carajás and of so
many other massacres of the poor, of black people, the Indians, the street
children, the shanty town dwellers, Cabanos, Canudos, Palmares ... the Brazil of
silence and anonymous pain, of torture, of the underground war against its
people.
The Brazil of this corner. The lungs of the world. Of
the Araguaia, the Amazon, the Tocatins, the Madeira rivers, of the lea. Of
Tapajós, of Carajás ... Which like a furious volcano spews
out its sorrow in the form of music. The songs of Cláudio,
Pedrinho, Adilson, Zeca, Munhoz, Ricardo, Mário, Melônio,
Curuperé, Gaya, César, Uchoa, Martin, Ray, Manos da Baixada,
Afonso, Eduardo, Arcano, Rafael, Carlos, Otávio, Demilson, Edmilson and
so many other workers and voices.
Brothers, other stages summon us: the streets, the encampments, schools,
strikes, marches, land occupations. A new intifada is arising at
every street corner because, as Leminsk said; 'All forms of weapons are valid in
the struggle: stones, nights and poems.'
Thank you, comrades, for having helped us, in these times of war, to bombard
this world with A Song for Peace! Free homeland. We shall
conquer!
State Direction of the Landless Movement - Pará Marabá,
November 2001
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