The Freedom of owning its own land: dream and realities of the members of the Brazilian Landless Movement

Anne Dorothee Mercier Cointreau

From a developed-world country point of view, one might wonder how and why the access to land can be seen as the ultimate freedom. In a country like Brazil the right to land has been a privilege limited to a small percentage of the Brazilian population: the elite. For the last two decades the largest social movement in South America, the Brazilian Workers Landless Movement (MST) has struggled to help organize peasant’s access to owning land. In a country that faced decades of strong military rule and a latifundiario land system, the urge for agrarian reform has been expressed in the form of "acampamentos" or invasions of big landowners’ properties by peasants to reclaim their right to a decent life and to reject exploitation and the sad destiny of the slums of the Brazilian megapoles. This paper argues, looking at the story of the MST and land history in Brazil, that obtaining some land has constituted a choice for the less privileged to free themselves from a destiny of misery and inferiority.

The MST in Brazil embraces a condition that has plagued the country since its independence from the Portuguese crown. Today, Brazil is one of the fifteen largest economies on the planet, and is a bountiful producer of agricultural goods. Sadly it also has the most poorly distributed land and income in the world. Today, less than 50 families or companies (1 % of the population) own as much land as the area of Western Europe1, yet these lands are toiled in by tens of millions of peasants. Peasants in Brazil work their entire lives on lands that they have no claim to, often surviving at the mercy of the plantation owners, who supply them with low wages. How did this uneven distribution of land arise, and what are the issues of this situation today?

Clearly the need exists for a land policy reform and an organization to handle issues surrounding it. Hence, as signs of agrarian reform were inexistent, the MST arose as a grassroots organization of people whose job it was to reclaim unused land for peasants, develop programs of education, and lobby the federal government for land policy reforms. Today, one could argue against the MST’s practices but not against its increasing political power locally and globally. The group has become an effective arm of the population, which today can be proud of having organized the people and having helped them obtain their own land.

The legitimacy of the MST comes from the fact that they are an organization made up of the same people they seek to help, landless peasants. They are recognized by the Brazilian government as the only real recourse the nation has to properly solve unequal distribution of wealth for the benefit of the entire population. The MST has accomplished all of this despite constant and oppressive global rules and competition. It is important to understand that Brazil never had a land reform like the United States or Western European countries had, rather it was organized around an archaic system that needs to be reviewed.

To comprehend the landless situation in Brazil, one has to first look at the history of this conflict. The landless movement, as it exists today, is a result of policies that have been present in Brazil since its inception. During a brief part of the colonial period (1534-1536), wealthy families that found favor in the eyes of King John III of Portugal were granted large untouched tracts of land as payment for political aid or as gifts. Traditionally these lands were managed like the fiefdoms of Medieval Europe where farming peasants worked the land for sustenance, giving the crops that they harvested to the landowner to sell. The system was, and is still, set up so that profits do not filter back to the people who actually work the land. Another defining feature of this system was that vast tracts of land were simply unused, not farmed by anyone, and today rest as a source of future revenue in the event of national economic collapse.

Up until Brazil’s independence in 1822, all land was considered regal property, and did not have to be used for cultivation by law. After the country’s independence, it became legal for farmers to work and maintain a small piece of land up until 1850, when the Land Law, supported by wealthy coffee plantation owners2 was passed. This law stated that land was to be sold by auction, leaving countless numbers of people with no ownership to the lands they had worked for nearly a generation since Independence. From this point on, large plantation owners who would buy land from the government, or from each other, and kick out the people who had been living on the land, slowly encroached upon people who occupied homestead farms. As this process increased, from 1920 to 1950 people began to band together to discuss their rights and come up with a plan of action against forced expulsion from their lands. It was as a result of this organization that lead to the first land takeover of an estate and its sugar factory in 1956, in Engenio Galilea, in the state of Pernambuco.

The issue of land reform took a decided downturn during the years of dictatorship in Brazil beginning in 1964. During this time Brazil tried to modernize its agriculture further, by promoting large-scale agriculture and concentrating lands into the hands of even fewer people. This had the effect of sending even more people away from lands they had worked until a mass exodus from rural areas into the cities of Brazil occurred. It is estimated that during the dictator years in Brazil, the population changed from one of 75 % rural to 75 % urban, a movement of half of its population3. For those who had to leave plantation farming, or whose jobs dried up, they were condemned to live in the growing slums of the major cities of Brazil, such as Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo. Today, one can find in the slums, or favelas, countless numbers of poor families who fled the countryside to look for work in the cities, yet found little. Ravaged by crime and corruption, the favelas breed generations of poor who never leave, and are poorly educated. Thus, the landless situation in Brazil is no longer confined to the rural outback of the country, but has become a tangible problem for all socioeconomic levels in Brazil.

In response to the disproportionate distribution of land in Brazil, a large movement to organize was formed in 1984, when 1,500 representatives from 15 of Brazil’s 27 states met in the state of Parana to form the MST. The MST was founded on the "Land Status" in the Brazilian Constitution4, a law that states that land in Brazil must perform a "social function." Primarily, the MST’s agenda was to organize peasants in the task of taking over and cultivating rural land that was not being used, while supplying needed food, shelter, and healthcare for the nearly 4.8 million landless peasants at its inception. Clearly, the MST hoped to fulfill a quasi-socialist goal of land redistribution at the grassroots level as the government seemed to have left these people without adequate care.

In the years since its founding, the main activities of the MST have been rural land take-overs. To date the MST has staged over 5,000 takeovers, and overseen the placement of 250,000 families onto unoccupied land5. These occupations may seem harsh, but are the only way to get unoccupied land productive and to give a place to live to the millions of landless farmers in Brazil. Often undertaken with the use of small arms, these takeovers are targeted against landowners who are seen as either not efficiently using their lands or are enslaving people on the lands as indentured servants. By the mandate of the MST, they are following the Brazilian constitution, bringing use to land which has been laid to waste. These occupations are often met with force from police, or local landowners who return the aggression that they perceive with a kind of quasi-justice that they see fit. Indeed, many MST activists have been assassinated over the years, like Chico Mendes, the famous rubber taper who was killed by land owners for reforming the forest-use policies in the 1980s. This situation actually represents another problem plaguing the Brazilian society: The rule of law is not enforced and groups often exact their own justice on each other, bypassing any role for the government. To the credit of the federal government, they have allowed these land takeovers to occur, perhaps taking the side of inaction over action.

Land takeovers are frightening to the general Brazilian population, as they are seen as taking on a kind of uncontrolled justice, or maybe it can be seen as the ultimate expression of freedom for those who have nothing to loose. Indeed rebellions do not go through the legitimate means of the federal government; one could say that they are a manifestation of anarchy and revolution, and that this represents a dangerous trend, that if it grows larger, could disrupt the fragile economic stability of the Brazilian society.

When one takes a closer look at the whole picture of the MST, it begins to look less sensationalistic. The plight of the landless farmer is not properly appreciated by those in power, and certainly not painted properly by the popular Brazilian media. A recent article in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo, written by Joao Mellao Neto, called the agrarian reform a joke ("A farsa da reforma agraria")6 arguing that after President Cardoso’s agrarian policies there is no more need for obtaining and distributing land to those that lack it. The article also argues that what peasants need are jobs and that the unemployment rates are mainly due to the lack of productivity. Moreover, Mellao insists on the fact that owning land is not the answer to the problem (the author and the newspaper are well known in Brazil for being conservative).

Indeed one can also view freedom as the access to a job and ignore how possessing your land is a very different condition than working for someone. The problem is that with globalization and increasing competition, wages in developing countries are extremely low, and people cannot have a decent life on a minimum salary, which is even more true if living in the city. Rosineide, a MST member tells about her experience living in the city: "O salario da cidade nao e grande coisa a pessoa come o que ganha"7 (City wages are not a big thing and the person ends eating what it earns). By ignoring this Brazilian social disparity, the elite neglects the right of human beings to lead a life in which peasants can hope to escape their miserable, unbearable existence and finally feel free. Mellao also claims that the landless are, in fact, poor urban people that have no idea how to cultivate the piece of land they have obtained and often end selling the land they have obtained. Indeed, there are some low income members from the MST that lack this knowledge, but they do not constitute a majority, most of them are rural landless peasants. Hence, one has to wonder if this problem is not due to the previously mentioned lack of productivity and trading partners rather than the new landowners desire to give up what they have struggled so hard to obtain. This is where the MST plays an essential role in the independence process: It provides the opportunity for small farmers to organize themselves in cooperatives and to receive technical, agricultural assistance to adapt to today’s agricultural reality.

Indeed there is in Brazil a misconception of peasants among the urban upper and middle classes because they cannot understand the needs of a population who live way out in the countryside. They are only aware of the mass exodus of people towards the cities over the last 30 years, the majority of whom came because of expulsions from agricultural lands that they once tilled. If land reform is not in the interest of the urban population simply for humanitarian reasons, it should be for security reasons. The slums of Rio, Sao Paulo, and other cities are jammed with millions of poor people who are victims of the bad national land policies and that contribute to a downgrading of the international image of Brazil. For the landless peasants themselves, their perspective is that the price of inaction on their part has already shown to lead to no change. The federal government has been relatively inactive until this point, and promises of relocation by several presidents, including a promise by former president Henrique Cardoso to repopulate 40,000 peasants, has only led to about 3,900 8.

Today the issue of landlessness and land reform are coming to a head, as overpopulation begins to take its toll on Brazil. About one half of Brazilian farmers work on just 2% of the arable land in Brazil, while huge tracts of land remain uncultivated. These pieces, which today consist of over 90,000 acres, are being used by only about 63,000 people. This amount has been estimated to have the potential to employ over 1 million people if it were properly redistributed9. At the same time 25-50 % of the population of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo live in sprawling ghettos10. One can then understand why the acquisition of your own land constitutes—for peasants in Brazil—the freedom of their condition and the hope for a better life. If globalization suggests the spread of financial and trade markets without barriers, it should also promote the notion of a decent life for all. Therefore, property rights should be equally accessible to both poor and rich alike.

Jose Carlos Sebe Bom Mehy collected a series of testimony from landless MST members peasants11 that explains why this struggle for land has been so essential for in their lives. One of them, Mazinha, says that her adherence to the MST happened as the only way to escape from social exclusion and absolute misery12. With the MST most of them have found a way to fight for a decent life. For the MST members there is today a huge difference between life excluded from society and finally feeling that you belong to society. The MST has this power, to give to simple people hope, the power of feeling powerful and to stand for their rights.

As Jose de Souza Martins writes: "Ha uma verdade nos juizos de valor, muitas vezes mais significativa do que a que podem nos reveler os juizos da realidade" (There is truth in a system of values, sometimes even more significant than those revealed by reality)13. It is indeed, why this promise of free access to land might seem so unreal and unobtainable for those that do not experience the necessity or desire of emancipating themselves from their condition. The system of values proposed by the MST is definitely one that is more significant than the reality imposed to the lower social class in Brazil.

The first elected Labor Party government of Lula has pledged to address the landless movement, as have others before him14. The MST has submitted a proposition to Lula, which outlines desires regarding the placement of 1 million families on unused land by 2006, allowing a program of cooperative export and profit-sharing to exist among the farms. The MST has promoted and implemented in the "assentamentos"15 education, human rights, and the prevention of multinationalized business to impose their product market on the farmers16. By educating new landowners the MST is ensuring that this dream remains reality. Lucia, a MST member says about the MST that it has allowed her to have a better vision of what she has: "um privilegio de estar no Movimento Sem Terra e de ter uma visao melhor do que eu tinha…Acho que, ate agora, a etapa mais emocionante da minha vida foi a conquista da terra"17 (one of the privileges from being a MST member is to have a better vision of what I have…I think that until the acquisition of the land has been the most exiting moment of my life). These desires are hardly belligerent and are the outgrowth of many years of careful analysis and planning, international support, and input representing the needs of thousands of rural peasants. Lula has pledged to address these issues, even meeting with the MST to give them a formal opportunity to voice their woes18. He has also stated that he does not want to just "repeat the same policies of the past", which have left the problem to fester. Hopefully this will represent a change in attitude for the federal government toward landless Brazilians.

As Brazil moves into the 21^st century, and the strength of international business increases, Brazil has a unique opportunity to reform its issue of landless farmers into one of cooperative benefit for all. Hopefully, they will accept this challenge with open minds, cooperating with the MST organization, which has proven its legitimacy in freeing from their destiny those that deserve the right to be. As the MST member Marlene says: " O assentamento em que estou da para sustentar a gente sem precisar ficar se sacrificando…Isso e uma grande conquista! Nunca tivemos nada! E assim o comeco da realizacao de um grande sonho!"19 (The settlement in which I am in gives me the opportunity to sustain us without having to sacrifice my family…This is a great acquisition? We never had anything! This is how great dreams start!).

Notes

¹ Diane Jean Schemo. "Brazil Grapples With Land Reform." New York Times, April 1997.

² Plummer, Dawn. Ranun Bets, "Brazil’s Anti-Globalization Squad" www.Brazzil.com, 2002.

³ Caruana, Fr. John and Bonnici, Thomas, "Landless Peasants Movement in Brazil", http://198.62.75.1/www2/mst/mst2.html, July 1999.

⁴ Constitution of Brazil, Paragraph 1st of article 191

⁵ www.mstbrazil.org

⁶ Mellao Neto, Joao. A Farsa Da Reforma Agraria. O Estado De Sao Paulo, April 23, 2004.

⁷ Sebe Bom Mehy, Jose Carlos. "Vozes Da Marcha Pela Terra". Ed. Loyola. Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1998, p:58.

⁸ "Um Velho Desafio Brasilero", Veja-Online, 2003.

⁹ Schemo. Diane Jean "Brazil's Chief Acts to Take Land to Give To the Poor", New York Times. November 13, 1995.

¹⁰ Espinoza, Rodolfo. "Slum Dunk" Brazil Magazine, June 1997.

¹¹ Sebe Bom Mehy, Jose Carlos. "Vozes Da Marcha Pela Terra". Ed. Loyola. Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1998.

¹² Sebe Bom Mehy, Jose Carlos. "Vozes Da Marcha Pela Terra". Ed. Loyola. Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1998. p: 215.

¹³ De Souza Martins, Jose. «Reforma Agraria O Impossivel Dialogo ». Ed. USP. Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2000 p.165.

¹⁴ "Pide Lula Paciencia para Reforma Agraria", Associated Press, 2003.

¹⁵ Land obtained by the MST members.

¹⁶ MST Informa, "Brasil, proposta apresentada polo MST ao presidente Lula" July 16, 2003

¹⁷ Sebe Bom Mehy, Jose Carlos. "Vozes Da Marcha Pela Terra". Ed. Loyola. Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1998, p:27.

¹⁸ "Lula Reteira Reforma Agraria al MST", BBC World Service, July 2, 2003.

¹⁹ Sebe Bom Mehy, Jose Carlos. "Vozes Da Marcha Pela Terra". Ed. Loyola. Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1998, p.116.