RIGHTS-BRAZIL: Protesters Take Capital by Storm

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 6 1999 (IPS) - Social organisations in Brazil began to virtually occupy the capital Wednesday, with protest marches in defence of public education and against the government’s economic policy, as well as the organisation of the so-called Assembly of Grassroots Fighters.

Thousands of teachers and students took part Wednesday in the March for the Defence and Promotion of Public Education, called by trade unionists to demand increased funding for the sector and higher wages.

The protesters are demanding a threefold increase in funding for education over the next 10 years, and a minimum wage for teachers equivalent to 460 dollars. A survey found that 68 percent of those interviewed believed low salaries were the chief problem in the sector.

The People’s March for Brazil, headed by the Landless Movement (MST), is even more ambitious.

Demonstrators will gather outside the Central Bank Thursday to protest “the economic policy of subordination to the International Monetary Fund and international capital,” said Joao Pedro Stédile, the MST’s chief coordinator.

The 1,580-km march, which set out on Jul 26 from Rio de Janeiro, drew around 1,000 homemakers, unemployed, religious workers, students and indigenous people.

Along the way, hundreds of meetings and debates were held in 130 towns and cities, and 200,000 pamphlets on Brazil’s economic and social crisis, as well as proposed solutions, were distributed, said Stédile.

The aim is to launch an open dialogue with the people, social movements, political parties, academics and organised society in general, in order to jointly draw up a “People’s Project” for Brazil, as an alternative to the policies that led the country into the present crisis, he explained.

For that reason, the march from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia was the chief focus of “a new way of doing politics,” and demonstrations in Brasilia over the next few days will serve as a “symbolic closure,” he said.

From Friday to Sunday, the Assembly of Grassroots Fighters will draw another 5,000 activists from throughout the country and representing a number of grassroots organisations, to discuss solutions to the crisis.

The broad public debate will take place in a camp set up on the University of Brasilia campus.

The activities will culminate Tuesday with the “Latin American Shout of the Excluded” in Brasilia – a demonstration that will be repeated simultaneously in thirteen regions in Brazil, to protest the consequences of IMF and U.S. policies for the region.

At a news briefing, Stédile told foreign correspondents that the MST’s mission continued to be “organising the rural poor” and pushing for broader, more effective land reform.

But the experience of 15 years of struggle, especially through occupations of land left idle, and the current economic model which “makes family farms non-viable,” led the MST to join together with other movements to press for political change, he added.

Stédile said that by favouring export-oriented agribusiness, the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso had displaced more families from the countryside than those it had settled on small plots of land through its agrarian reform programme, as demonstrated by the official rural census carried out last year.

“Agrarian reform will only be successful if economic policy encourages family farms, something that will only be possible with a change in the economic model,” he contended.

The MST, which groups around 5,000 activists nationwide, will not become a political party, because “that would mean its death.” But it will attempt to “provide an example encouraging the organisation of other sectors of the population,” because it believes that “only organised people can change the country,” Stédile added.

The government, meanwhile, says it has granted special attention to land reform and family farms. “The small productive unit” is top priority, said Cardoso, upon the creation Wednesday of a National Council for Rural Development, an inter-ministerial body.

Family farms support 21 million of Brazil’s 161 inhabitants and account for 70 percent of rural employment, stressed Minister of Agrarian Policy Raúl Jungmann.

The National Council, which will also be organised at a state and municipal level, will pave the way for a convergence of efforts by governments and the private sector towards rural development, which will not be limited to agricultural activity, said the minister.

One example was the agreement signed with the Brazilian Association of Supermarkets, which will enable families who have received land as part of the agrarian reform process to sell their produce through the major retail chains.