"We see violence to forcibly seize land, at any price, murders and corruption"
About this Quote
The line reads like a field report that’s tired of euphemism. “We see” is doing quiet but pointed work: it claims eyewitness moral authority while implicating the listener in the same line of sight. You are not being asked to debate abstractions like “development” or “security.” You are being asked to look.
Hummes stacks nouns the way violence stacks bodies: “forcibly seize land, at any price, murders and corruption.” The list is blunt, almost bureaucratic, which sharpens its sting. No poetry, no grand metaphors - just a chain of cause and cover-up. “At any price” signals the real accusation: these aren’t isolated crimes, they’re a system with incentives. Land becomes the commodity that reorganizes ethics; the market logic (“price”) colonizes human life.
The context matters. Claudio Hummes was a Brazilian Catholic cardinal closely associated with advocacy for the Amazon and its communities. Read in that light, “seize land” isn’t generic geopolitics; it evokes the decades-long collision of agribusiness, illegal logging, mining interests, and political patronage with Indigenous land rights and environmental protections in Brazil. The subtext is that violence is not an unfortunate byproduct of progress but a tool used to make certain kinds of progress possible - and to make resistance disappear.
It’s also an indictment of respectability. By pairing “murders” with “corruption,” Hummes collapses the distance between the gunman and the official who signs the paper, between the frontier and the capital. The intent is pastoral and political at once: to name sin plainly, and to deny the powerful the comfort of deniability.
Hummes stacks nouns the way violence stacks bodies: “forcibly seize land, at any price, murders and corruption.” The list is blunt, almost bureaucratic, which sharpens its sting. No poetry, no grand metaphors - just a chain of cause and cover-up. “At any price” signals the real accusation: these aren’t isolated crimes, they’re a system with incentives. Land becomes the commodity that reorganizes ethics; the market logic (“price”) colonizes human life.
The context matters. Claudio Hummes was a Brazilian Catholic cardinal closely associated with advocacy for the Amazon and its communities. Read in that light, “seize land” isn’t generic geopolitics; it evokes the decades-long collision of agribusiness, illegal logging, mining interests, and political patronage with Indigenous land rights and environmental protections in Brazil. The subtext is that violence is not an unfortunate byproduct of progress but a tool used to make certain kinds of progress possible - and to make resistance disappear.
It’s also an indictment of respectability. By pairing “murders” with “corruption,” Hummes collapses the distance between the gunman and the official who signs the paper, between the frontier and the capital. The intent is pastoral and political at once: to name sin plainly, and to deny the powerful the comfort of deniability.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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