BRAZIL: No Rest During Struggle for Promised Land

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 13 2005 (IPS) - The thousands of pieces of clothing hung up to dry on ropes strung between tents reflect the hard work still being done on this “day of rest” during the National March for Agrarian Reform in Brazil.

On Thursday, the 11th day of the cross-country march, the participants stopped for a day to rest as much as possible, before heading off on the last leg that will take them to the Brazilian capital on May 17.

During this 48-hour break, they also attended “training meetings” where they addressed such subjects as the reasons for opposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and Brazil’s current economic policies.

The dozens and dozens of tents in every size and colour pitched along the side of the highway in the town of Siete Curvas, 55 km outside Brasilia, are serving as a temporary home for close to 12,000 marchers who belong to the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and other rural organisations.

There are at least one dozen giant plastic-covered tents that house hundreds of mattresses laid out one next to the other. Also scattered about are smaller tents, for couples who want at least a modicum of privacy.

Putting up and taking down this portable housing every day since May 2, when the march kicked off, has been the task of the Infrastructure Team.

Every morning, the team’s 350 members have only a few hours to dismantle all of the tents, load them with all the other equipment into trucks, drive to the next destination, roughly 15 km down the road, and have everything up and ready again by the time the marchers arrive.

The two days of rest scheduled during the 200-km trek were spent near creeks so that the participants could wash clothes. Personal hygiene is handled by filling pails from the ten tanker trucks used to supply drinking water and then bathing in improvised open-air stalls formed by sheets of black plastic.

“It’s like the heavy work involved in farming, which we’re used to,” said Tereza Ribeiro Pocaia, a 48-year-old mother of 11 who has six of her children with her on the march.

For the past three months, Ribeiro Pocaia and her children have been living with another 300 families in an MST camp in Sud Menucci, a small town in the state of Sao Paulo.

But before that, she told IPS, they had spent four years in another camp, and she has been “in the struggle” for more than ten years, “hoping to get a little piece of land to plant corn, cotton, and rice.”

According to Ribeiro Pocaia and others, the hardest part of the march is not the primitive conditions for doing laundry and bathing, but rather the frequently long wait for food. Sometimes lunch is not ready until 3:00 p.m., and “once dinner arrived at 11:00 at night,” remarked 19-year-old Cristiane de Abreu, while washing her clothes.

A daughter of peasant farmers from the northeastern Brazilian state of Sergipe, de Abreu wanted to participate in the march “because agrarian reform will be good for everyone,” even though it meant a two-day bus trip to Goiania, capital of the midwestern state of Goiás, the starting point for the long trek.

Feeding the 12,000 participants is the work of a team of 420 people who prepare the rice, beans, dried meat and other foodstuffs contributed by the delegations from the 23 states where the MST is active. There are only four states in Brazil where the movement does not have a presence.

Two enormous kitchens were set up along the route, and all of the food has to be transported to the sites where the marchers camp overnight.

These superhuman efforts will culminate with the arrival of the march in Brasilia on May 17, where the participants will stage demonstrations outside the Central Bank, the Ministry of Agriculture and the U.S. Embassy. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has also agreed to meet with a delegation representing the marchers.

The demonstrators will be protesting against the country’s current economic policy, “which makes agrarian reform impossible,” the priority placed on export-oriented agribusiness to the detriment of family farming, and the “empire” of the United States, MST national coordinator Gilmar Mauro told a group of Brazilian and foreign journalists visiting the campsite in Siete Curvas.

The main demand put forward by the MST and other groups involved in the march – including the Association of Women Rural Workers and the Movement of Families Affected by Dams, made up of people displaced by hydroelectric dams – is for the Lula administration to live up to its promise to settle 430,000 landless families on their own plots of land by the end of 2006.

The government announced that it settled 81,184 families on land of their own last year. This not only falls short of the goal of 115,000, but is also not quite true, the MST maintains, because in two-thirds of the cases, families were given plots of land to replace other, substandard ones previously offered, which they had refused to accept.

This year, the budget for land allotment has been drastically cut, which means the target will go unmet once again, says the MST.

The 15 items on the “manifesto” prepared for the march include demands for the granting of more credit to campesinos (peasant farmers) who have been settled on their own land, the demarcation of all of the country’s indigenous territories, changes in economic policy, rejection of the FTAA, and legislation allowing for plebiscites to be held by popular demand.

There is also a committee negotiating with over 20 ministries and state agencies for the creation of specific projects in areas like education.

The MST, which has an educational programme encompassing 160,000 students and 3,900 teachers in 1,800 schools, believes in the need for “schooling specifically adapted to a rural environment, as opposed to schooling that simply takes place in a rural setting,” explained Itelvina Masioli, another MST national coordinator.

The government has already pledged to build 500 new rural schools in farming settlements, indigenous lands and “quilombos”, traditional communities of descendants of African slaves, reported Mauro.

The women in the movement are also demanding more resources for daycare and pre-school education in the countryside, and want the registry of families who have applied for land deeds to include the names of wives as well. Up until now, only 12 percent of the beneficiaries of agrarian reform have been women, said Masioli.

There are around 130 children on the march, some of them quite young. Childcare services have been organised for the youngest, while an “itinerant school” has been set up for teachers to provide lessons to the school-age children who are missing their regular classes during the march.

Milton Silva, 16, is currently working on completing his primary school education. He is from the southern state of Paraná, where his family has been living in an MST camp for two and a half years, waiting to be given land, and said that he was “learning a lot” on the march.

He plans to move on to a secondary school education, and then devote himself to farming, when his family is finally settled on its own plot of land. He washes his own clothes and does not complain about any of the inconveniences involved in the march, despite the stark contrast with the climate in his home state of Paraná. “It’s much hotter and drier here,” he noted.

Joao Martiniano de Aquino, 45, also has no complaints. As far as he is concerned, any “suffering” involved in the march is nothing compared to living for two years in a camp, in a canvas tent, going hungry and taking on the occasional odd job that means back-breaking labour for only 20 reals (eight dollars) a day.

He has been fighting for land reform and living in camps since 1998, when he left behind a life of tenant farming to move first to the central province of Minas Gerais and then, two years ago, to Isla Solteira in the state of Sao Paulo. He lives there with another 220 families, surviving on the food hampers distributed to the camps by the government, while continuing to wait for a plot of land that will allow him to meet his own needs.