Clare Davidson reports on the increasingly radical efforts of Brazil's landless millions to win long-awaited agrarian reform
Tuesday April 20, 2004 The Guardian
Antonio Carlos dos Santos was born into a farming family in north-eastern Brazil. But in 1970, when he was 13, a large landowner bought the land surrounding the family's plot, cutting it off from the road. Without road access, the land lost 90% of its value. His father sold it to the only bidder - the landowner - and the family subsequently moved to the city to seek work.
Marked by his experiences, Antonio later joined Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST) at its inception in 1984, and took up the battle for land reform. Thirty-two years after his father's land was sold, he finally obtained access to his own, which he farms and lives on with three of his six children in an MST settlement called New Hope.
Antonio is one of the luckier ones. Brazil, Latin America's largest country, has one of the most uneven distributions of land in the world. Just 1% of the population owns almost half of the country's land.
There are over four million landless families still hoping for resettlement as part of the government's agricultural reform program, and the MST has recently embarked on wide scale land occupations designed to pressurize President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to accelerate the process.
The MST wants agrarian reform to redistribute land for rural workers to live and work on. This would provide employment and the means to produce food affordably, says Delwek Matheus, a state coordinator for the group.
The wave of occupations stems from frustration with the pace of reform during the first year of Lula's government, with only 14,000 families being resettled in 2003.
On March 27 Joao Pedro Stedile, the MST's national leader, announced that the group would "raise hell" if agricultural reform didn't ensue, proclaiming a "red April" of land occupations and protests.
The government swiftly promised to settle 400,000 landless families by the end of 2006, including 115,000 this year. It also announced it would more than double the land reform ministry's planned budget for 2004 by providing a further 1.7bn real (£320m).
Occupations nevertheless continued, with six taking place over the weekend of April 17, the eighth anniversary of the Eldorado dos Carajas massacre, in which police killed 19 peasant demonstrators who were demanding land in Para state. "No one has paid for those murders," says Matheus.
Over the same weekend, some four hundred MST families also invaded land belonging to Klabin, Brazil's biggest paper producer. The move is controversial because unlike the majority of MST occupations, which it says are of unproductive land, Klabin's territory is productive.
"Such occupations are worrisome to potential investors," said Rafael Guedes, Fitch Ratings managing director for Brazil. "There are huge farms of 1,000-5,000 hectares that are sub-utilized, with only five hectares used. But Klabin is generating dollars for Brazil, and employing workers."
Occupying land is a tough process, but it is the most effective means to ensure change, says Antonio. "Occupations often involve confrontation with the police, and [families] never know if [they] will be evicted," he explains.
Families can spend years living in temporary encampments in makeshift shacks with poor facilities. Even once settled, life is far from easy. Maria do Carmen do Souza of the New Hope settlement looks after her mother-in-law and niece while her husband lives in an encampment "battling for land," and sometimes she doesn't see him for months. Maria is constantly worried about what would happen should her three-year-old niece Simone fall ill.
"There are only three buses a day to town and we don't have money to pay a doctor or buy medicine," she says. Aside from their home, which is made of a mixture of plastic, concrete and wood, their assets are water from a well and an area to grow rice.
Lula insists he is committed to agrarian reform but strictly "within the law". Speaking on Monday's Breakfast with the President radio show, he asked the MST not to lose its sense of responsibility.
But the concessions announced last week indicate the protests are paying off. The government has promised to halve the time to appropriate (unproductive) property from 14 to seven months, increase initial credit available for settled families by more than 100% to 16,100 real and provide better access to infrastructure within settlements.
Legally, land seizures are a grey area. The MST describes its actions as legal because Brazil's 1988 constitution stipulates that unoccupied and unproductive land should be appropriated by the government. But for landowning individuals and companies such seizures are illegal invasions of private property.
Though opposed to what he sees as MST "land invasions", Luiz Marcos Suplicy Hafers - former president of Brazil's largest farmers group and a large landowner - says agricultural reform is nevertheless essential.
"Those living in Brazil's countryside today are destitute, socially excluded, and living in extreme poverty," he says.
Violence is also rife. Recent figures from the pastoral land commission show that the number of land conflicts reached 1,690 in 2003 - the highest since the commission began keeping records in 1985.
"Ideally we want schools, access to roads, transport, and electricity, access to cinemas, books, sports and leisure - just like other communities," says MST's Soraia Soriano.
Land, however, is the first step, and "unless we protest nothing happens", says Soriano.
Concessions made by the government - doubtless encouraged by such protests, whatever it says officially - seem to suggest Soraia is right. There is no reason to expect the MST will stop occupations before the end of April. In fact, judging from recent events, the government could give even more.