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AGRICULTURE-BRAZIL: Landless Movement Pledges Month of Protests

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 2 2004 (IPS) - Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) has announced a month full of occupations of land left idle and protests, to continue through Apr. 17, the International Day of Farmers’ Struggle, and up to May 1, International Workers’ Day.

But the threat to ”give the government hell” through demonstrations and property invasions this month led to an appearance Thursday by MST leader Joao Pedro Stédile before the parliamentary commission of inquiry into rural property questions, which called on him to explain his statements.

Stédile sought to tone down his words, explaining to the lawmakers in Brasilia that not only is the MST a peaceful movement, but its actions are keeping the Brazilian countryside from turning into ”a keg of gunpowder similar to (civil war-torn) Colombia” by providing the rural poor with a means of channeling their discontent, and real options.

The 20-year-old MST has a great capacity to mobilise landless rural workers in occupations of land and public offices to demand faster, more effective agrarian reform.

In the past few weeks, the movement has staged 14 invasions of land considered unproductive, mainly in the northeastern state of Pernambuco.

A total of 155 areas have been occupied by the movement in that state, with around 22,000 families living in the MST camps. And ”in April, we will stage another eight or nine occupations,” Edilson Barbosa, one of the members of the MST state and national leadership, told IPS.

On Apr. 17, Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, will be the destination of protesters who will march from Alianza, an old sugar mill some 80 kms away, said the activist.

Alianza is an enormous sugar mill complex that no longer operates. The land has been occupied since 1997 by landless farmers with the MST, who are demanding that the government agrarian reform programme legally settle some 1,000 families on the property.

After progress and setbacks in the justice system and the murders of some of the farmers living on the land, the case looks like it is close to being resolved, said Barbosa.

Similar mobilisations are planned by the MST in other states as well. Apr. 17 was named the International Day of Farmers’ Struggle by Via Campesina, a global movement which coordinates peasant organisations of small and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

On Apr. 17, 1996, 19 MST activists were killed in Eldorado de Carajás in the northern Brazilian state of Pará when the military police opened fire on peasant farmers who were peacefully marching along a highway to demand the distribution of idle land belonging to several estates in the region.

Since then, April has been a ”red” month – an allusion to the sea of red MST banners that marks the movement’s demonstrations and marches, occupations of land and government offices, and camps in rural as well as urban areas.

This year, the mobilisation will continue throughout April, until the May 1st demonstrations against unemployment in which the MST will take part along with the country’s other social movements, Stédile announced.

As in much of Latin America, the latifundium, or ”great landed estate with primitive agriculture, and labour often in a state of partial servitude,” dominates the Brazilian countryside.

”The concentration of land ownership in Brazil has increased in recent years,” and just 50,000 people own half of the farmland in this country of 177 million, according to Isabel Cristina Diniz with the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission.

Throughout Brazil, an estimated 200,000 rural families are living in precarious MST camps set up on occupied land or along highways, waiting to be settled on small farms of their own.

The tension is especially growing in Pernambuco due to the number of camps in that state and the local tradition of violent reactions by large landowners and their private security forces. ”For each one killed on our side, there will be 10 killed on the other side,” threatened another national MST leader who is active in that state, Jaime Amorim.

Bellicose statements like those of Amorim and Stédile have drawn an outcry from associations of landowners and agribusiness interests.

The Ruralist Democratic Union, which in the past was accused of setting up illegal armed militias to defend the property of landowners, threatened to demand that Stédile be thrown in prison.

Senator Jorge Bornhausen, president of the conservative Liberal Front Party, which is in the opposition to the leftist government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also demanded the prosecution of MST leaders who ”incite crime and violence.”

In his appearance in parliament, Stédile apologised to the legislators for the aggressive language he had used, and gave assurances that his movement is opposed to the use of violence, even in self-defence, pointing out that in the conflicts over land, ”if anyone is killed, it is always people on our side.”

He said the violence in the countryside arising from disputes over land are a result of the excessive concentration of rural property in Brazil.

The governmental National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform’s (INCRA) statistics from 2003 indicate that there are 54,781 large unproductive estates in the country, representing a combined total of 120 million hectares of idle farmland, Stédile pointed out.

At the same time, there are 23 million peasant farmers living in poverty due to the lack of a small plot of land to farm, he added.

As the tension continues to mount, President Lula announced the release of 1.7 billion reals (580 million dollars) to accelerate the land settlement and titling efforts carried out as part of the agrarian reform programme. The government has pledged to settle 115,000 families this year on small farms of their own.

”The current government is an ally, but we will keep up the pressure for it to meet its goal” of settling a total of 400,000 families by 2006, said Barbosa.

Even under the current government, the first led by a former trade unionist and leftist in Brazilian history, ”without popular mobilisation, land reform will not move forward,” he argued.