Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 09:28:25 +0100
From: Antagonism <mrnobody-AT-geocities.com>
Subject: AUT: MST[2/2]


Here's part 2

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By 1987, times were changing. Again, for the better: ‘Occupy, Resist,
Produce’ went the slogan. The important word and change here is
‘Produce’. While Sem Terra had been getting some land off the large
landowners they spent all effort on staging more invasions. However, the

transformation from starving peasant living in a bin-bag tent to farmer
was difficult for some to achieve; peasants with land were often losing
it and ending up at square one again. The major change was to invest
time and energy into keeping those with land on their land.

Co-operative farming was seen as the solution, the superior method of
production. Producers on their communal farms then pass food on to
secondary coops, run by ex-landless peasants, who pack the food off to
markets and supermarkets. It is cool to buy rice and beans with ‘LAND
REFORM NOW’ stamped on in huge letters. Sem Terra then put the icing on
the cake by getting all these secondary coops together under the name
‘Confederacao das Cooperativas de Reforma Agraria do Brasil’, providing
muscle against large companies. Even more practically, as MST
(regionally) funds itself by levying a 2% tax on all that the farmers
sell this makes MST a very circular organisation. As it grows, gets more

land and sells more food it generates more income to help those without
land, and organises even more spectacular actions.

By 1995, more land occupations were deemed not enough. A new slogan:
‘Agrarian reform—the struggle of all’ was coined. The plan now is to
take on the cities. They say Brasil has to believe, be persuaded, that
land reform is in its own interests. That the problem is central to
everyone, including the bulk of the population who live in the cities.
Not just those ‘Sem Terra’.

These strategy points are bashed out at two-yearly ‘National Meetings’,
of limited (200 people) attendance, and five-yearly ‘National
Congresses’, the last of which had over 5000 in attendance, including
those from over 20 peasant groups world-wide. The information is
broadcast by the monthly newspaper, ‘Journal dos Sem Terra’.

Sem Terra in Action

The main actions are the land occupations. However, perhaps their most
spectacular ‘action’ to date was the convergence of 120,000 people on
the Brasilian capital, Brasilia, in April 1997. To coincide with the one

year anniversary of 19 ‘Sem Terra’ being summarily executed in a highway

blockade in the state of Para, peasants marched from the North-East, the

far South and Sao Paulo areas of Brasil, for over 6 weeks, finally
converging on Brasilia. When the scale of the march became apparent the
day was hastily made a holiday for those in the capital city. Everyone
was tripping over themselves to be friendly to what they usually term
‘vagabundos’ (which my Portuguese dictionary translates as
vagrant/vagabond/of wretched quality/third rate/no-good). Four
presidents went out to meet the march (Senate, Chamber of Deputies,
Supreme Court, Republic), such is the worry that MST are causing. The
government announced measures to speed land reform, and the World Bank
stumped up loan money for land reform.

Not that money is a problem in all this. It would cost $20 billion to
settle 2 million families over 4 years. A lot. However the Brasilian
government in 1995 spent $12 billion on rescue operations for private
companies and banks, according to University of Campinas economist
Manoel Cardoso. Of course Sem Terra don’t need fancy calculations to see

what’s happening. The killings continue. Large-scale land reform remains

elusive. The politicians are ostensibly polite because everyone’s
watching. In the background they continue to plot against MST. As one
unnamed activist said on the day, “We will believe them when they put
their promises into practice. There have been thousands of promises. We
have been continually betrayed. For now, it is just the politics of
television, and the cemeteries”10.

Movimento Sem Terra have tried all sorts of other tactics. These range
from the tried and tested (finding it doesn’t work is still a test)
petitioning. A cool 1,600,000 signatures calling for large-scale land
reform in 19878. In 1996, after the decision to focus on the cities was
taken, over 2000 landless would-be farmers blockaded downtown Sao Paulo
highways. Within minutes, the metro workers ground the city’s
underground transport to a halt. The third largest city ground to a
standstill. Like in the UK, office occupations can help those get what
they want, with Sem Terra often shutting down INCRA (Brasil’s National
Institute for Agrarian Reform) offices until their claims are dealt
with. Marches, hunger strikes, town hall occupations, you name it,
they’ve probably tried it. Except one thing. Armed struggle has been
absent from their repertoire of action.

The question of the use of violence is a thorny issue in the UK. Much
less so in a society where you are likely, if you make too much of an
impact, to be silenced by a bullet. On the world stage, as MST
spokesperson Joao Stedile puts it, “Many people think that a struggle is

only radical when the masses are armed” [but note armed struggle is not
necessarily radical: some Latin American radicals have dismissed the
Zapatistas as ‘armed reformists’ or ‘armed propagandists’]. He then
continues, “Our struggle has always been radical and never pacifist. But

there is a grave sullenness to joining armed struggle, with new
confrontations with the state and military police. Our only chance of
victory is to get everyone aware and participating, using whatever arms
they are able to use. In our [land] occupations women, children and old
people use what they have: wooden sticks, stones knives,
scythes...Another has a 0.38 revolver. We don’t recommended using
firearms. This tactic is certain to frighten…”9. Or as an activist told
me on my travels in Brasil: armed struggle is inherently undemocratic,
unegalitarian, as not everyone can afford a gun. This would then
marginalise the struggle to those with guns only. It then couldn’t be
mass-scale. Of course it would be the men of each family who would go
off fighting….Thus it seems clear that MST are not opposed to violence,
just opposed to having some elite armed force and being pigeon-holed as
not radical because they don’t bear (fire)arms.

Backlash

Sem Terra activists have been threatened, imprisoned, tortured and
murdered. All for wanting, and trying to get, a piece of land to use to
feed themselves. Those in power are not taking the rise of Sem Terra
lying down. Oppression comes from two major sources: the state and its
dreaded Policia Militar (military police) and the landowners who hire
gunmen and buy-off the courts.

Jovially swapping anecdotes and stores about radical protest in the UK
and Brasil, silence diffuses rapidly down the rickety old transit-style
van packed with Sem Terra activists and me. Not so far ahead is a
roadblock. Manned by the armed Policia Militar. This is Pontal da
Paranapenema, the place where Sem Terra activity is at its most
militant. The police probably merely want to monitor movements so
thousands can’t get to the same place. Conflicting thoughts jar my mind:

‘they wouldn’t shoot me, I’m a foreigner’ (arrogant but probably true),
and ‘fuck! these guys can do anything. Anything. Two cases solved out of

1,600 murders. They have nothing to fear’.

A darkly dressed man peers as we slow, but the wave of the
semi-automatic means we can pass. Audibly we collectively sigh. But the
spectre of violence lingers. Knowing these guys have no limits. They can

kill and walk away. Take the most (in)famous case of violence against
landless activists. The time was four-thirty pm, April 17th 1996 in the
state of Para near a town called Eldorado dos Carajas (some readers will

note that this is the place of the Grande Carajas project, the single
largest piece of deforestation ever, cut to smelt pig iron—part funded
by Lloyds Bank, coupled with crunching poverty as people flock to the
scheme for work, but find none). [See also: “Bound in Misery and Iron:
The Impact of the Grande Carajas Programme on the Indians of Brazil”,
Dave Treece, Survival International 1987.] One-thousand five hundred Sem

Terra activists campaigning against the government’s delay in settling
families on the Macacheira plantation, which had been occupied for
several months, blockaded the PA-150 highway. All day. In the late
afternoon 155 troops were sent in from two barracks. They surrounded the

protesters from both sides. And began to fire on the crowd with machine
guns and rifles. A chaotic melee ensued. By the time all who could had
scattered, the road was strewn with the bodies of 19 dead and 57 wounded

activists. The operations commander on the day, Coronel Mario Collares
Pantoja, was widely reported as saying, “Mission complete. Nobody saw
anything”.

The Coronel was wrong. A home-movie video camera has most of the action
on it. This caused a public outcry. Immediately Nelson Massini,
professor of forensic pathology at the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro, was dispatched by the Senate Human Rights Committee. He
confirmed that at least 10 of the dead had been removed from the road
and were summarily executed via bullets in the back of the head and
neck. With powder burns showing the bullets were discharged at very
close range. Seven of the other bodies had been hacked to pieces with a
scythe or machete.

Events took an uglier twist a week later, when a landowner went on the
radio anonymously, to allege that the local landowners had paid police
US$100,000 to remove known ‘ringleaders’ and halt protest in the area.
In the usual Brasilian tactic, of waiting until the media-circus blows
over then do what you were going to do anyway, after 3 months the Para
state police appointed itself judge in the case, declaring publicly the
innocence of its 155 troops. They alleged all acts were in self defence.

If that were not enough: they also brought charges against activists for

contempt, causing injuries to police and illegal possession of weapons.
The weapons amounted to rocks, farm tools like scythes, and the huge
arsenal of three pistols. Over a year after the killings 155 police are
still on active duty.

The other main architect of violence against MST are the jaguncos, the
big landowners’ hired gunmen. In the mid-1990’s there were, on average,
about 40-50 murders in land disputes a year, mostly carried out by hired

gunmen. Though this is only the extreme end of the problem. There were,
in 1995, over 500 land conflicts involving about 381,000 people.
Thousands of families were on the receiving end of violence against
their property and possessions. The landowners link together in the
‘Rural Democratic Union’ (Uniao Demorcratica Ruralista—UDR), a plain
misnomer. They used membership fees to buy and distribute guns to
intimidate activists. These were behind the killing of Chico Mendes
along with several prominent MST workers11.

The backlash against MST is not just violence. Activists have been
imprisoned under a system of ‘prisao preventitiva’ (preventative prison)

designed to get prominent activists out of the way for a while and
intimidate them. Every year without fail many activists are imprisoned.
Several activists have been ‘fitted up’ on bogus charges. And, of
course, the media are used to distort the picture of Sem Terra. This is
particularly relevant to the international view of MST as the few media
items in Europe seem to be biased toward reporting when landless
peasants chop a piece of rainforest to grow food.

Life on the farm

The goal of the landless peasants is control over their own lives.
Speaking with either those with land, or those on camps, the word
‘dignity’ keeps surfacing. The prospect of a dignified life is what
drives. Not that once the landless get land life becomes suddenly easy.
It has been shown from surveys that for the first 3 to 5 years after
getting land life is still tough due to combining food production with
building your house while growing enough to sell to pay off the credit
to get farm tools and the like. However after this period the farms
generate a good income. Sem Terra use technology if it helps them get
what they need. As they live in a harsh economic world they use the
tricks of capitalism as needed. For example, an inland co-operative I
visited was toying with an experimental fish farming scheme, as fish
could command high prices.

The da Silva family seem typical, mother, father, and three children.
All the children were born in bin-bag plastic MST tents. His family
lived on, and got thrown off, land and roadsides for 11 years before
finally getting 20 hectares of land, as part of a group of 15 other
families in the southern Brasilian state of Parana. The houses are all
in a small group planted with fruit trees. The houses differ
considerably from two-room wooden cabins, to the da Silva’s
multi-bedroom brick affair. I arrive at night and we eat the usual
simple meal of rice and beans, but with a good green salad and meat
which is unusual. I decline the meat, but as the vegetarianism
discussion has already been broached we settle, with wife and children,
to that cross-cultural barometer of working-class taste: football on the

TV.

Early morning sees the two younger children off to school and the eldest

off to agricultural college. Probably to get some farming tips for his
fellow MSTers. I tour the farm. They grow lots of rice and vegetables,
but not beans as their area is not so good for that. They have pigs,
cows and chickens. All free range. Unfortunately, the first Monday in
the month is chicken day. I am not prepared for this really. This
squeamish veggie Brit was forced to watch and video  a field of chickens

being: hung by their legs from a washing line, necks sliced, stillness,
passed indoors, feather removal, head removal, foot removal, innards
removal, thorough wash (of bird), into a bag, and into a chest freezer.
I’m sure it’s better than what happens in the UK. But it still doesn’t
look nice, though apparently the profit is larger if you sell the
finished clean item, not a whole live chicken (some grumble that the
young Brazilians don’t know how to cook properly). We spend lunch
discussing the problems of co-operative living. What happens if someone
doesn’t pull their weight and the like. This group have a system whereby

a core number of hours are to be worked which keeps the farm running.
For this the family gets all its food from the coop and a sum of cash.
Extra hours can be done for more cash. It had not happened there but
those not doing the prerequisite hours without excuses would be asked to

leave. After this its off to town to check out the local co-operative.

In each settlement one person is often liberated from farming to allow
them to be a political activist full-time and force on the Sem Terra
agenda. This fulfils the vital function of getting ‘off-farm’ stuff
done, like the organisation of new occupations and secondary coops. It
importantly keeps those with and without land together. Fighting the
same battle. The secondary coop is a hive of political activity, as
those liberated from farming from about 10 communities gather to swap
politico-gossip. The system seems impressive. These people seem happy.

The Future—for Us and Them

The MST of five years in the future is impossible to predict with
accuracy. While they have consolidated and captured a few hard-won
gains, at its most basic level they have so far failed to secure
large-scale land redistribution. But Sem Terra are at the top of the
political agenda. If the current strategy of linking with the voluminous

urban poor takes effect things could spiral up and into MST’s lap.

There are some things we in the UK can do. We could do solidarity
actions. Sem Terra have called for April 17th to be ‘International Day
of the Struggle for Land’. In the UK, where we have the 5th worst land
concentration record in the world, it would be cool to have a major
militant action drawing what is happening in the UK, with the struggles
in Brasil, Mexico and other regions of the world.

Perhaps most importantly (third world activists often say this) is that
those in the South need to see similar agendas to theirs being pushed in

the North. This is an extremely important aspect to solidarity. Not only

campaigning ‘for’ them and their efforts, but ‘with’ them and against
the common enemy. Activists in Brasil were genuinely enthused and
excited (even though I was embarrassed) when I said we now, as of 1995,
have a land rights campaign in the UK, and that there were people
planning to live on their land and grow food, who were poor and not
agribusiness. In times of suffering and doubt, this can really help
those in the South ‘legitimise’ their struggle and take strength that
they are part of something even bigger.

The radical environmental movement in the UK could learn lots from Sem
Terra, as in many ways they have got much further than we have in the
direction we want to go. They have built a large-scale mass movement
rooted in the people in a decentralised way. They have worked around
potential problems like violence (and at present are in a phase of
confronting the problems of sexism within the movement) coming up with
often clever, novel, ways around conflicts. Everything, even to being a
national spokesperson, has been carefully kept within the reach and
skill of peasants who may never have attended school. That is a
seriously ‘everything open to all’ policy. While Western academics have
failed to study Sem Terra it is up to activists to learn about them and
their tricks. How do they inspire people? How do people stay active when

they have land? How exactly do they come to decisions such as ‘let’s
focus on getting the cities and urban poor involved in our struggle’? To

this end some of us are getting hold of some MST literature and getting
it translated into English.
Whether it’s our radical environmental movement doing Sem Terra style
land invasions in the future, the latest atrocity read about in the
Guardian, or the BBC with footage of half a million armed peasants
attacking the Brasilian congress. Or thousands more than the 140,000
families now living a dignified life, we’ll be hearing a lot more about
Movimento Sem Terra I’m sure.
Notes and references
 1. Anon (1988). The World in 1998. Economist Intelligence Unit.
 2. Thirty million people excluded from land have migrated to large
cities over the last 20 years. This is well reported in the Brasilian
press. Source: Tribuna Popular: Os Fluxos Migratorios Para a Cidadge de
Sao Paulo e a Reforma Agraria. Camara Municipal de Sao Paulo.
 3. Salgado, S. (1997). Terra: Struggle for Land, pp 141. Phaidon Press,

London.
 4. Salgado, ibid.
 5. “There was another constituency that the (post-coup development)
strategy sought to satisfy: the generals’ security concerns. On the maps

in their offices the Araguaia and Tocantins valley, running south from
the mouth of the Amazon at Belem had special significance. Here, in the
estimation of the generals, was an artery which could carry the toxins
of subversion from the north to the heartland.” From: “The Fate of the
Forest”, Susaana Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, Verso 1989, p.105.
 6. Veltmeyer, H., Petra, J & Vieux, S. (1997). Neoliberalism and Class
Conflict in Latin America: a comparative perspective on the political
economy of structural adjustment. Macmillan Press Ltd., London.
 7. Commisao Pastoral da Terra (1996). Conflictos no Campo Brasil 1995.
Booklet produced yearly by the religious monitoring group which collates

information on violence against the landless.
 8. Anonymous (no date). Elementos fundamentais da Historia do MST.
MST-produced document explaining historical roots and current state
(1994-ish) of the movement.
  9. Altman, B, Brener J. & Arbex, J (1996). Joao Sem Terra. Atencao!,
June, p. 7-13. Brasilian magazine interview with Joao Pebro Stedile, a
named MST spokesperson.
10. Vidal, J. (1997). The Long March Home. The Guardian Weekend
Magazine. April 26th, p. 14-20.
11. “Green Backlash”, Andrew Rowell, Routledge 1996, p.214.

BOX:
Fate of the Amazon
The fate of the Amazon rainforest is intimately tied to the quest of MST

for land redistribution. The Amazon has and is used as Brasil's social
pressure release valve. Land reform would stem the tide of those
relocating to the Amazon to escape dire poverty in the north and
south-east of Brasil. In addition, those that are already in the Amazon
can make a positive contribution by getting land off the large
fazendeiros who own the cattle ranches. If peasants had these lands they

would have a stake (eating) to make these areas into long-term
sustainable enterprises.
This is not what cattle ranchers or most loggers have in mind. It would
be the peasants’ permanent home, not a playground as it is for the
rich.  This would have the added benefit of producing food within
Amazonia for Amazonians, and not relying on expensive imports from the
South of Brasil. [“Outside the Amazon but within Brazil, an area of
farmland the size of India lies uncultivated, as its owners treat it
simply as a financial investment.”
- George Monbiot, Guardian Earth Summit supplement, June 1992.]

BOX:
Scale of MST Activity
To show what Sem Terra do here is everything that happened in July 1995:

MORI style poll shows MST are more credible than the police or
politicians; Leading Brasilian sociologist backs Sem Terra struggle; New

co-operative starts in Parana; MST hold seminar about the mess of
Rondonia; Seminar about teaching basic numeracy in camps and
assentamentoes; 300 families invade 480 ha estate in Sao Paulo state;
1000+ celebrate in a ‘The Land Lives’ march; food from those with land
handed to poor in Dionisio, Santa Catarina; 200 families invade 217 ha
property of Ministry of Agriculture (used by only 4 horses!) including
students from Santa Catarina University; Daily TV soap opera continues
to feature MST; UN lobby Brasilian government for enquiry into April
1996 Eldorado massacre; MST activist sent to prison; Indigenous people
from 34 tribes protest in Brasilia against new laws; Articulacao
National de Mulheres (National Women’s Articulation) have national
meeting about violence and women living on camps.

END

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