Taking by force

Wherever you go in Latin America, most farms are huge and most peasants are landless. In the 1970s and 1980s the half-continent's big farms grew bigger, its small farms shrunk and its landless laborers multiplied. There has been talk of land reform throughout Latin America but with few positive results. Brazil is no different. Since colonial days, Brazil's countryside has been a parquetry of privilege, where a handful of barons rule over rambling estates the size of counties, even countries, while millions of peasants scratch a living from meager patches.

In the mid 1980s, nearly half the farmland in Brazil was owned by one percent of farmers. The Sarney administration promised to settle 1.4 million families by the end of 1989 but by mid 1987 (two and a half years after taking office) only 15,000 families had been settled -- only five percent of those the government had wanted to help by then. In the late 1980s, Brazilian landowners delayed expropriation by filing interminable law suits and lobbying friendly politicians.

When frustrated peasants invaded estates earmarked for expropriation, the landlords hired armed gangs to defend them. In 1986 they killed at least 260 people. Legislation passed in 1993 to spur reform along instead has helped the landholders. According to the law, landholders must be notified of expropriations. Landowners stop the processes in court by claiming to have never received the notification. The law also excludes medium-size estates, which benefits landholders who simply divide up their land into smaller portions making them no longer subject to expropriation.

At the one year anniversary of the current administration, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso claimed a substantial victory in the area of land reform, declaring in an interview with Veja (a weekly Brazilian magazine) that under his administration over 40,000 families were given land in 1995, twice as much as former president José Sarney gave out per year during his tenure in office (1985-1990).

However, much more was expected from Cardoso, whose ideological background (not to mention his campaign promises) suggested he would have placed even more emphasis on this issue. In addition, the number of landless families and jobless workers has increased since the early 1990s with the opening of Brazil's commercial borders to agricultural goods from abroad -- at least 500,000 countryside jobs have disappeared since 1990.

This increase has placed tremendous pressure on the President and Congress to push ahead with land reform that will distribute uncultivated land to those in need. The absence of significant improvement in dealing with the issue has led to greater number of land invasions and loss of life. Over the past 10 years 961 peasants and supporters have been killed in land disputes. In the first six months of 1996 alone violence in the countryside has produced 30 deaths.

The inability (or unwillingness) of the government to move ahead on this delicate issue has led social movements to rely less and less on the government and instead to take matters into their own hands. Protests and demonstrations, even in large urban areas, have become more frequent. In April, 10 thousand landless workers and peasants (in Portuguese they are simply called sem terra, which means without land) organized protests in 20 states.

Land invasions also took place throughout Brazil. In the southern state of Paraná three thousand landless families occupied over 200 thousand acres of land. In São Paulo state 1,700 families occupied land in a county where President Cardoso has co-ownership of a large farm. In Pará, a state in northern Brazil, more than 3,000 landless peasants and workers demanded the settlement of vast tracts of unused land in the state.

The breaking point occurred in Pará, where at the beginning of April the state's military police were called in to break up the road blockade set by the sem terra, and this eventually led to one of the worst massacres in Brazilian history. The military police gunned down over 20 mostly unarmed peasants from close range, and tortured and injured scores of others. The massacre in Pará was broadcast around the world and placed the issue of land reform squarely on the government's shoulders.

The increase in the numbers of land invasions is due not only to the lackadaisical efforts of the government or the national legislature's repeated successes in blocking reform but also because of the social organization behind most of the land invasions: the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (Movement of Landless Workers), or simply MST.

Prior to 1996, the organization that most promoted and defended the interests of the landless workers and peasants in the countryside was the Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura or CONTAG (National Confederation of Agricultural Workers). CONTAG comprises both the formal and informal sector and is the most encompassing organization in Brazilian society. The strategy pursued by CONTAG is non-confrontational.

The MST, founded in the late 1970s, pursues a more radical strategy, especially on the crucial question of agrarian reform. Up until very recently, MST found support mainly in the south of Brazil. This picture has changed dramatically and now the MST has supporters across the country, thus challenging the position of CONTAG as the principal representative of rural labor. The greater presence of MST throughout Brazil has translated into more violent confrontations with landowners and the government (state and national).

In late June, President Cardoso warned the MST that future land invasions would be treated as a national security problem, and that the armed forces would be used to help the police with eviction. Cardoso lost his patience after 700 MST members blocked one of the main access roads to Brasília (the nation's capital), causing a six mile tailback, and 200 others occupied buildings in Vitória, capital of Espírito Santo state.

Despite the president's threat, MST leader Gilmar Moura stated that land occupations would continue as long as the government failed to carry out a massive land distribution program. Land invasions continue to occur (as in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul in July), the sem terra are becoming more restless (in the state of Bahia, for example), and the MST continues to organize future land invasions, demonstrations and other forms of protest to put pressure on the government.

It would be inaccurate to claim that the Brazilian government has done absolutely nothing to promote agrarian reform. Although funds to the official land reform agency, the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agrária (National Institute for Land Reform) or INCRA, have been cut, the government has created the Ministry of Agrarian Reform, headed by Raul Jungmann, acquired over one million acres of land to distribute to 11,340 families, and introduced legislation in Congress that would make the sale of uncultivated land more attractive to large landholders. With this in mind the government proposed an increase in land taxes, for example.

One of the main difficulties the executive faces, however, is the passage of pro-land reform legislation in the national legislature. The bancada ruralista (the landowners' lobby in Congress) has repeatedly voted down legislation that hurts rural interests. In early June, the president made a short-lived alliance with the PT (the socialist Workers Party) to block a maneuver promoted by the bancada ruralista that would have led to legislation allowing landowners to evict peasants found camping out on their lands. This leftist strategy was quickly abandoned when the executive accused the PT of inciting a conflict in the northeastern state of Maranhão that led to four deaths.

Not surprisingly, the main presidential foe is Congress. The lower house of Congress (the Chamber of Deputies) especially presents problems because it is where conservative forces are stronger. Despite persistent difficulties with Congress, on July 12 the president unilaterally expropriated just under 55 thousand acres of land in six states, enough to settle roughly 400 families. On July 27, the Minister of Agrarian Reform presented a land reform package to state governors that the executive will introduce in Congress. The central feature of the reform package is the decentralization of power to state and local levels to carry out the necessary reforms.

The increased efforts of the government (mainly the executive) occurred simultaneously with a sizable land donation by the armed forces and promises by the Catholic church also to donate unused land it owns. In May, the Brazilian Army donated 15.3 million acres of land from seven states in the rural Center-West and North and in late July the National Council of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) announced that it is sending out surveys to its 250 dioceses and 900 plus congregations spread across Brazil to find out what land could be used for settling landless peasants. According to a CNBB spokesperson, "If there is land available, the CNBB will ask the local diocese to give up the properties to help in the process of land reform."

Poverty is a serious issue in Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America. The inequality in the distribution of income has long been a salient feature of Latin American economies. In the late 1970s, the percentage of income received by the poorest 20 percent was lower in Latin America than in any other part of the developing world. The distribution of wealth is especially acute in Brazil. The settlement of landless peasants and workers in Brazil, with technical and financial assistance provided by all three levels of government, is one way of reducing poverty.

The failure of the government to enact significant reform in land distribution over the past decade is unfortunate but not surprising. According to American political scientist Kurt Weyland, government institutions are partly to blame for the absence of equity-enhancing agrarian reform. As long as the institutional structure of government remains intact, agrarian reform that benefits the sem terra will be long in coming.