From: squatter (squatter@dds.nl)
Date: 06/17/00
Making a life from the ground up
Brazil's Rural Workers Movement says its
occupation tactics
have won land and dignity for up to 400,000
families
By Alex Bellos in Novo Sarandi
The Guardian - Thursday May 20, 1999
It hardly looks like the vanguard of a
social
revolution, but the Conoal
cooperative's milk and crop depot at Novo
Sarandi is exactly that. The farmyard
buildings 200 miles inland from southern
Brazil's main city, Porto Alegre, are
the concrete result of a radical communist
movement using capitalist tools to
change people's lives all over Brazil.
In 1985, almost 10,000 hectares (24,000
acres) of unproductive land here was
invaded by 1,000 poor families, who squatted
in shacks covered with binliners,
until the government gave them land rights
three years later.
On assuming control, the ex-squatters set
about turning the area into an
agricultural cooperative. Now, they say,
Conoal has an annual turnover of £8m,
sells its products to food multinational
Parmalat, and has transformed its
inhabitants from disposessed people on the
fringes of society to moderately
prosperous farmers.
'Before, we had nothing,' says Luiz Pilatti,
39. who was part of the original
squat. 'Now [my family] has a nice house, a
milk cow, car, a tractor, 15 hectares,
a TV and a freezer.'
The Novo Sarandi squat was one of the first
actions of the Landless Rural
Workers Movement (MST), which was founded in
1982 as the result of land
rights campaigning in the southern state of
Rio Grande do Sul. The movement
has since spread through all Brazil and is
now the largest direct action
movement in Latin America.
MST says that so far 300,000 to 400,000
families have been given land rights
after squatting on unproductive land, and
75,000 are currently in rural squats
waiting for approval under a constitutional
law that asserts that unproductive
land must be handed over to the people
living
on it.
This has not been an easy process. In the
first seven years of the decade there
was an average of 46 deaths a year during
conflicts between landless and
landed, with most of the deaths on the
landless side, MST officials say.
The Marxist-run MST has succeeded in making
land reform a very big political
issue in Brazil, a country whose grossly
unfair pattern of land ownership can be
traced back to practices in the colonial era
when the Portuguese crown handed
over vast tracts to 14 'captains' in 1534.
Today,1% of all land holdings still
cover 45% of the country.
The government's own estimate of the number
of 'landless' people living in
abject poverty is 4.8m families or well over
10m people out of a national
population 160m. The MST believes the number
is much more.
Even though the process of handing over land
to occu piers has speeded up
under the centrist government of President
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the
MST is highly critical of his failure to
introduce root-and-branch land reform,
including financial help to farmers starting
up.
'Even though Cardoso has seen more [people
getting their land rights] he has
also seen 400,000 small farmers sell off
their land and move on during the
same period because they couldn't make a
living from it. He has done nothing
for proper agrarian reform,' declares Milton
Viana, the main press officer for
MST.
Novo Sarandi has prospered because the land
there is very fertile, and its
acceptance has been helped by Rio Grande do
Sul's tradition within Brazil as a
cradle of social reforms.
The year after the first seeds were planted
Novo Sarandi was already selling to
local markets.
But land in other states, particularly in
the
drought-plagued north-east where
the political oligarchy is strongest has
proved harder to farm at anything
beyond subsistence levels.
MST activists schooled in the movement in
Rio
Grande do Sul are sent to other
areas to promote the fight.
Milton Viana adds: 'Each state needs a
different solution, in terms of
organisation and technology. Some states
need
more financial help than
others. This is something the government has
never done.
'In the north-east there is lots of money
going for the drought, but this goes to
the politicians who keep it in their
pockets.
This money never reaches the
needy population.'
MST activists are still occupying land but
have also adopted new tactics that
include invading public buildings and
looting
supermarkets. These aggressive
measures have guaranteed publicity, but
eroded the wealth of public support
previously enjoyed by the movement.
In Novo Sarandi the greatest benefit to the
inhabitants goes deeper than the
material dividends of working their own land
in security. The people feel they
have gained dignity after lives on the
margins of society.
'I still feel a stigma from some people,'
says Luiz, who was recently elected a
local councillor. 'But it is changing and it
will change.'
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