By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 21 2007 (IPS)

A different approach to politics, with mechanisms for society to define the kind of country it wants to build through the exercise of direct democracy, is the common purpose driving the social movements participating in the “Mutirao for a New Brazil.”

“Mutirao” is an indigenous word that means working together as a group, such as when neighbours join together to harvest or sow each of their plots of land, or build a house or a public facility, like a school. The term spread from rural areas and is commonly used to designate a joint, cooperative effort in all sorts of activities.

People’s Assemblies are the venue chosen to mobilise different movements around a common cause. They take place at national, local and state level, along similar lines to the World Social Forum.

They carry out an “open debate in which the people are advised and consulted about the kind of Brazil we want and how to build it,” but in a horizontal fashion, without the hierarchies that formerly led to failures, Joceli Andreoli, one of the coordinators of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB), explained to IPS.

“Great leaders don’t exist, they are mirages,” because they cannot transform the country on their own, even when they are in power in the government, since “they end up serving the state, which is controlled by the bourgeoisie,” Andreoli said. “Only grassroots organisation,” exerting pressure and participating in power, can promote change, he added.

Andreoli was only a child when his family had to leave their home in a rural area in the southern state of Santa Catarina, because of the construction of the Itá hydroelectric station, begun in 1987 and finished in 2000.

MAB was created in 1989 out of similar struggles in three regions, the south, north and northeast, where several large hydroelectric stations have been built since the 1970s, in places where residents had to be expelled. The movement estimates that one million families have been displaced since then in this country, due to the flooding caused by the dams.

In its struggle against the huge dams, the MAB has proposed alternatives for Brazil’s energy needs, condemned the high prices people have to pay for electricity, and advocated the right of every family to 100 kilowatts a month of free electricity. This particular proposal has been adopted by the Mutirao.

The first national People’s Assembly was held in Brasilia in October 2005, and drew 8,000 participants from over 40 organisations. It closed with an open letter to the Brazilian people which described the causes of the reigning “inequality and oppression” and said that the Assemblies would work “to build a free, multiethnic, autonomous, sovereign and socialist Brazil.”

Since then, several Assemblies have been held in different settings, and the World Social Forum contributed to this process, Andreoli acknowledged.

But the national Mutirao movement had its origin in initiatives of the Catholic Church, particularly the Brazilian Social Awareness Weeks, campaigns for reflection and action that started in 1991.

The fourth Awareness Weeks programme, a three-year process which ended two months ago with a seminar in Brasilia, defined the Mutirao’s principles and demands.

Some of the priorities are: strengthening the Assemblies and other social forums; networking; promoting alternative communications media; and stimulating new agents for change and young people in the cities.

The “country project” to be carried out jointly with other social movements will include mechanisms for exercising direct democracy, such as plebiscites and referendums, so that the people can decide key issues.

Education, culture and health as “rights for all,” agrarian reform and democratisation of the media are other aspirations in the “country project.”

The Social Pastoral Services of the Catholic Church “kept the dream alive,” continuing to seek alternatives in the midst of the governmental and party crises in the 1990s, and creating opportunities for the development of social movements, said Dirceu Fumagalli, coordinator of the Pastoral Land Commission, which did outstanding work in defending the agrarian reform and denouncing violence in the countryside.

The Mutirao for a New Brazil is partly people’s response to the frustration of the hopes and expectations they had when President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva started his first term in 2003. The leader of the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) began his second four-year term as president on Jan. 1.

It became obvious that “the government alone” could not solve the country’s problems, and that a strong social movement was essential to achieve the desired changes, Fumagalli told IPS.

“Many people had illusions, now we are more realistic,” but mobilising a large part of society takes time, years of debate and preparation, since the means of communication available to society “are fragile,” he acknowledged. He predicted, therefore, that popular pressure on Lula will be greater during his second term.

The Catholic Church played an important part in stimulating social movements when they were in a state of inertia, because “it has the patience born of 2,000 years of history,” he said.

Vatican support for a more conservative clergy in the last few decades has not prevented the work of progressive Catholic sectors with and for the poor, facilitated by the Church’s credibility and extensive presence in Brazil.

Church-related bodies lend their services and support, but “they are not social movements,” so the People’s Assembly has ceased to be merely an initiative of the Social Pastoral Services to become a much wider forum, Fumagalli explained.

As part of the same process, the Pastoral Services, which formerly acted in separate areas such as health, children and migration, widened their vision and began to propose and demand comprehensive public policies addressing all of those needs, thus overcoming the limitations of offering specific assistance only, he commented.

The People’s Assembly “brings our strengths and our struggles together,” understanding, for instance, that agrarian reform is not only a rural issue but “needs urban support,” said Nelson Bison of the Pastoral Service for Migrants.

This year the forces united in the “Mutirao for a New Brazil” will again take part in large rallies. In March, women’s struggles will be the focus, and in September, the demonstrations of the “Cry of the Excluded” (a group publicising the effects of, and alternatives to, social exclusion), said Bison.

In Andreoli’s opinion, one of the forthcoming actions that will mobilise most people is the informal plebiscite planned by the Mutirao, for ordinary people to give their views on the renationalisation of the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, one of the largest mining companies in the world, which was privatised in 1997 for a derisory sum, according to critics of the deal.

Another campaign with potential to connect to ordinary people is the fight to bring down electricity prices, which are very high for domestic use but are subsidised for large industries with enormous consumption. The people are paying to subsidise large companies, Andreoli said.

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