POLITICS-BRAZIL: Repression on the Rise as Agrarian Model Fails

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 20 2000 (IPS) - The escalating repression of social protests in Brazil is one more indicator that the government’s agricultural development model has failed, says the principal leader of the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST – Landless Movement), Joao Pedro Stédile.

The government’s own statistics reveal that Brazilian farmers have grown increasingly poor over recent decades, a process that has continued during the five years of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, Stédile told the foreign press Friday.

A 1996 agricultural census by the Brazilian Institute of Statistics and Geography indicates that 942,000 small farms had disappeared since 1990, 400,000 of them under president Cardoso’s watch in 1995 and 1996.

The disappearance of small farms has intensified the process of land concentration in a country where a few large landowners hold the vast majority of the arable territory, according to Stédile.

In addition, two-thirds of the 784,539 owners of rural businesses were on the verge of bankruptcy, reporting insufficient income or even losses. Among the 4.07 million family farmers in 1996, 2.4 million were in a similarly untenable situation.

This panorama leads to predictions that two million poor rural families will leave the countryside in the coming years, adding eight to 13 million more people to the misery in the outskirts of Brazil’s major cities. Government experts acknowledged as much in an article published in the Agricultural Ministry’s journal last November, said Stédile.

This “disaster” is the result of the agricultural development model, inspired by the United States, which encourages the production of grains for export, especially soy, with heavy investment in transportation infrastructure, such as railroads and ports.

This implies the “denationalisation of the Brazilian agricultural market, which passed into the hands of the major foreign corporations,” and, among small farmers, favouring those who are integrated with agro-industry, observed the philosophical leader of the MST.

Such policies lead to further poverty and the expulsion of millions of peasants from rural areas, undoing any advances in agrarian reforms, which, according to the minister of Agrarian Development, Raul Jungmann, resettled more than 300,000 families in rural areas over the last five years.

This rural poverty, Stédile said, is the true obstacle to raising the national minimum wage, which the government has maintained at 151 ‘reais’ (83 dollars) since April, despite the protests of unions and even of some parliamentarians who support president Cardoso.

A minimum monthly wage the equivalent of 100 dollars, as the political opposition is demanding, would only intensify the exodus from the countryside, because a domestic employee in the city would earn more than a family farmer, argued the MST leader.

For Brazil’s economic authorities, the fiscal deficit makes it impossible to raise the minimum wage. Nearly 13 million retirees earn this amount, and any increase would only deepen the imbalance of the social security system.

Maintaining the current agricultural policies makes true agrarian reform impossible, Stédile said. There are more than 100,000 families in 500 camps set up on rural lands they have taken over or along highways. Many of them have been waiting years for the government to assign them land, he said.

As a result of growing rural poverty, social movements intensified their protests, “and it is not just the MST.”

The Rural Women’s Movement united 4,000 peasant women for a protest in Brasilia last March, rural unions and local small farm organisations occupied farmland, government buildings and highways to demand land, loans and better conditions in the agricultural market, Stédile pointed out.

From 1990 to 1996, officials reported an average of 100 to 120 invasions – or “occupations” in the parlance of the MST – of rural lands each year. This total since 1997 reaches 480 and “tends to keep growing as social discontent” increases and other organisations begin to engage in this form of struggle, he said.

The government is responding to this situation with police repression and is attempting to discredit the MST through the mass media, said the movement leader.

In addition to attacks that include gunfire and teargas, which resulted in one death and dozens of arrests on May 2, when the MST took over the Finance Ministry’s offices in several Brazilian state capitals, the government has created a political repression division within the Federal Police, threatened to mobilise the army and decreed new laws against land occupations.

The repressive wave felt in this country since last month also saw the brutal police breakup of a demonstration involving 3,000 indigenous peoples and blacks. They had intended to protest the official celebrations on April 22 of the 500-year anniversary of the Portuguese arrival at a beach in what is now Bahía state.

Some days earlier, the police destroyed a monument the indigenous demonstrators had erected to pay homage to their ancestors who died in resistance to Portuguese colonisation.

Most recently, a street battle Thursday in Sao Paulo reportedly left more than 20 people injured when police attacked public employees, primarily teachers and professors, as they protested their low salaries.

The MST will respond to the government’s repression with “larger mobilisations, alliances with other social organisations, without radicalisation,” affirmed Stédile, but will maintain its traditional forms of struggle, such as taking over unproductive farmland and government buildings – actions the government condemns as “anti-democratic.”

Meanwhile, the movement is attempting to negotiate with authorities to find a solution for the more than 100,000 families living in camps as they await land on which to settle, and to obtain loans for the families who have already been settled.