hydrarchist writes "
The following interview was published on the site of the New Left Review and in print in Nr.15 of their journal,(May-June 2002).
A leader of Brazil’s Sem Terra explains the history and geography of the world’s largest movement of the rural poor. How to occupy land, mobilize support, resist the media and the state under a tropical brand of the Third Way.
JOÃO PEDRO STEDILE
Landless Batallions
The Sem Terra Movement of Brazil
Which region of Brazil do you come from, and what was your family background and education?
I was born in 1953 in Rio Grande do Sul, and grew up on my parent’s farm there until I was about eighteen. There was a community of small farmers of Italian extraction in the region—it had been colonized in the nineteenth century by peasants from those parts of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My mother’s family was originally from the Veneto, and my father’s from what is today the Italian Tyrol. My grandfather came to Brazil in 1899. He was a farmer, too. My grandparents were almost certainly illiterate, but my father and mother had three years of primary school. But this was the period of industrialization, in the sixties, and my brothers and sisters already had wider horizons—they wanted to study. One of them became a metalworker. Some of the others went to the city, too.
The greatest influence on me at that stage was the Catholic Church—the Capuchin friars, in particular. In all the colonized regions of Rio Grande do Sul—Colônia, Caxias do Sul, Bento Gonçalves and the surrounding areas—the Church had a very strong presence, and the Capuchins were doing interesting work, preaching against injustice and taking up social issues. I owe my education to my uncle, a Capuchin, who helped me get a place at the Catholic grammar school where they taught the entire curriculum. I loved studying, and in the final year I applied for the advanced course. I was living at the house of an uncle by then, because my father had died. I worked on the land by day and studied by night, walking the ten kilometres to school. I knew I wanted to carry on learning so I moved to Porto Alegre. I worked in various places, still earning my living by day, reading economics by night.
I had a stroke of luck in my second year at Porto Alegre. There was a competition for posts in Rio Grande do Sul’s State Agriculture Department. I was from a farming family and I understood agriculture: I decided this was the route I should take. With the Agriculture Department, I’d travel a lot in the interior of the state and my work would still be linked to the farmers’ lives. I got the posting, and from there I became involved with the local Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workers Union), especially the grape-farmers. My first experience as a social activist was working with the Union’s members to calculate the price of grapes. Every year there was a battle with the buyers over this—the big vintners would name a sum and none of the growers could contest it, since they had no idea how to calculate what the harvest was really worth. We went round to the communities, sat down with the farmers and worked out how much it actually cost to produce a kilo of grapes, from trellising the vines to the manual labour of the harvest—since I was reading economics, I was able to help. In the process, the farmers became increasingly conscious, they got together and began to confront the wine producers. This coincided with the multinationals’ entry into the market, and we won some important victories—there was a leap in the average price the farmers got for their grapes. At the same time, I’d maintained my links with the Church, and when the Commissão Pastoral da Terra (Pastoral Commission on Land) was set up in 1975, I met with them to discuss how to organize the farmers.
In 1976, I won a bursary from the Agriculture Department to go and study in Mexico for two years. It was there that I met Francisco Julião, from whom I learned a tremendous amount. [1] I only ever had two questions for him: ‘What did you get wrong?’ and ‘What did you get right?’. It was a great privilege to be at UNAM at the same time as some of the major exiled intellectuals of the Brazilian Left such as Rui Mauro Marini, who gave courses on Das Kapital; Teotônio dos Santos himself, in sociology; Vânia Bambirra, who taught us dependency theory. I concentrated mainly on agrarian questions, but I took a few courses in economics and other disciplines. There were scholars from other Latin American countries who were also in exile in Mexico—Pedro Vuskovic, Allende’s economics minister; Jacques Chonchol, Allende’s minister for agrarian reform. I was very young, but I learnt a phenomenal amount from them. It was probably the best period of my life.
What were the origins of the Sem Terra Movement?
The MST was the result of the conjunction of three basic factors. First, the economic crisis of the late seventies put an end to the industrialization cycle in Brazil, begun by Kubitschek in 1956. Young people had been leaving the farms for the city, and getting jobs quite easily. Now they had to stay in the countryside and find a living there. The second factor was the work the friars were doing. In the sixties, the Catholic Church had largely supported the military dictatorship, but with the growing ferment of liberation theology there was a change of orientation, the emergence of the CPT and a layer of progressive bishops. Before, the line had been: ‘No need to worry, you’ll have your land in heaven’. Now it was: ‘Since you’ve already got land in heaven, let’s struggle for it here as well’. The friars played a good role in stirring up the farmers and getting them organized. And the third factor was the growing climate of struggle against the military dictatorship in the late seventies, which automatically transformed even local labour conflicts into political battles against the government.
It was against this background that land occupations began to spread throughout the South, the North and the Northeast. None of them were spontaneous—all were clearly planned and organized by local activists—but there were no connexions between them. From 1978 onwards, the first great strikes began to take place in the cities: they served as a good example of how to lose your fear. In the five years from 1978 to 1983—what you could call the genesis of the movement—there was an outbreak of large-scale land occupations, and people really did begin to lose their fear of struggling against the dictatorship. The role of the CPT was of crucial importance here—the Church was the only body that had what you might call a capillary organization, across the whole country. They soon realized that these occupations were happening in different areas, and started setting up meetings between the local leaders. I’d already been involved in helping organize various actions in Rio Grande do Sul, the first one in September 1979. The CPT contacted me and other comrades and we began to hold national meetings, along the lines Julião and I had discussed. The farmers talked things over, in their own way: ‘How do you do it in the Northeast?’, ‘How do you do it in the North?’. Slowly, we realized we were facing the same problems, and attempting similar solutions. Throughout 1983 and 1984 we held big debates about how to build an organization that would spread the struggle for land—and, above all, one that could transform these localized conflicts into a major battle for agrarian reform. We knew it changed nothing just to bring a few families together, move onto unused land and think that was the end. We were well aware from the agrarian struggles of the past that if farmers don’t organize themselves, don’t fight for more than just a piece of land, they’ll never reach a wider class consciousness and be able to grapple with the underlying problems—because land in itself does not free the farmer from exploitation.
In January 1984 we held an Encontro Nacional in Cascavel, Paraná, where we analysed all these questions and resolved to set up an organization. The name was of no great importance, but the press already had a nickname for us. Every time we occupied some land the newspapers would say, ‘There go the Sem Terra again’. Fine, since they called us that, we’d be the ‘Movimento dos Sem Terra’. We were ideologically more inclined to call ourselves the ‘Movement of Workers for Agrarian Reform’, because the idea was to build a social force that would go beyond the struggle just for land itself. But history never depends entirely on people’s intentions. We got our reputation as the ‘Sem Terra’, so the name stuck; the most we did was to invent the abbreviation—MST.
Another important decision we took at the Encontro Nacional was to organize ourselves as an autonomous movement, independent of the political parties. Our analysis of the farmers’ movements of Latin America and Brazil taught us that whenever a mass movement was subordinated to a party, it was weakened by the effects of inner-party splits and factional battles. It was not that we didn’t value parties, or thought it was wrong to join them. But the movement had to be free from external political direction. It also had to be independent of the Catholic Church. Many of the farmers were strongly influenced by the Church and argued that since it had helped us so much we should form a movement of Christians for agrarian reform. Fortunately, some of the most politically aware comrades were from the Church. They had had previous experience with Ação Católica or in the JOCs, and they themselves warned us against it—the moment a bishop comes to a different decision from the mass organization, the organization is finished. We also decided then on the general tactics we would use. We were convinced that the fight for agrarian reform could only move forward if it were a mass struggle, so we had to try to involve as many people as possible. When we set out on a land occupation, we would try to take everyone along—fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, old people, children, the lot. We listed the ten or twelve objectives our movement would serve—the struggle for agrarian reform, for a different Brazil, for a society without exploiters. That was the initial framework.
So the movement didn’t start out from Rio Grande do Sul?
No—that’s the usual story, but it’s not completely true. It’s been characterized like that for various reasons. Firstly, because it was in Rio Grande do Sul, northeast of Porto Alegre, that we built the Encruzilhada Natalino encampment, and the press turned that into a historic event. It was based at the junction of three counties, Sarandi, Ronda Alta and Passo Fundo—hence the name, encruzilhada [crossroads]. The president, General Figueiredo, sent the Army to destroy the settlement, under the command of Major Curió. It was the dictatorship that politicized our struggle. All we wanted was land, but overnight the encampment was encircled by the Federal police, the Army and even the Air Force, to airlift the farmers to the Mato Grosso—they took over a hundred families, in the end. Curió was such a symbol of the military repression that all those who opposed the dictatorship began to sympathize with us, and Encruzilhada Natalino became a counter-symbol, like the strike at the Scania truck factory, or Lula’s imprisonment. There’s a commemorative monument there now. The encampment grew into a historic nexus for the Sem Terra—we took over several unproductive fazendas—large properties, or ranches—in the area and eventually a new municipality was set up there. It’s called Pontão, because 80 per cent of the population are squatters, including the mayor. It’s a mini-free territory, the result of agrarian reform.
That was one experience that gave the movement a southern imprint, although as I said, there were land occupations going on in the Northeast, the North, the Bico do Papagaio, and here in São Paulo, in the Andradina region, between 1979 and 83—though only a few of these became well known. The other factor that’s contributed to the impression of a southern bent to the Sem Terra Movement is that this is where many of our activists have come from—for the simple reason that, south of the Paraná, farmers’ children had a better chance of an education: a fundamental requirement if you’re going to help to articulate struggles, to get in contact with people, to establish relations with them. Dozens of militants from the South could then be sent to other regions—not because there was an ideology of wanting to teach northerners, but because of the different educational level. We adopted a method others have used before: the Brazilian Army posts officers from the South across the whole country, the Federal Savings Bank transfers its employees—so does the Catholic Church.
Could you describe a typical land occupation?
For two or three months, our activists visit the villages and communities in an area where there are lots of landless farmers, and start work on raising awareness—proselytizing, if you like. They explain to people that they have a right to land, that the constitution has a clause on agrarian reform but that the government doesn’t apply it. Next, we ask the farmers if there is a big, underused land-holding in the region, because the law is clear: where there is a large unproductive property, the government is obliged to expropriate it. They get involved in the discussion, and start to become more conscious. Then comes the decision: ‘You have a right to land. There are unused properties in the region. There is only one way to force the government to expropriate them. You think they’ll do it if we write them a letter? Asking the mayor is a waste of time, especially if he’s a landowner. You could talk to the priest, but if he’s not interested, what’s the point? We have to organize and take over that land ourselves.’
When that decision is reached, we can bring to bear all the historical experience we’ve accumulated—which, from a political point of view, is simply what the Sem Terra Movement does: our role is to pass on what we’ve learnt, as a class. As far as land occupations are concerned, we know our business—not everything, but a lot. Everyone has to go, all the families together. It has to be done during the night to avoid the police. Those who want to join in have to organize themselves into committees of 15 or 20 people. Then, each committee—there may be twenty or so of them—has to hire a truck, and set up a kitty to buy canvas and stock up on provisions. It takes three or four months to get ready. One day there’s a meeting of representatives from each of the 15-person committees to decide when the occupation will take place. The decision has to be kept secret. On the night, the hired trucks arrive, well before daybreak, and go round the communities, pick up all they can carry and then set off for the property. The families have one night to take possession of the area and build their shelters, so that early the next morning, when the proprietor realizes what’s happened, the encampment is already set up. The committee chooses a family to reconnoitre the place, to find where there are sources of water, where there are trees for shade. There are a lot of factors involved in setting up an open-air encampment. It’s better if you’re near a road, because then you don’t have to carry so much on your back. This sort of logistical experience has a big influence on how an occupation works out. But success really depends on the number of families involved—the more there are, the less favourable the balance of forces for the proprietor and the police; the fewer the families, the easier it is to evict them, and the more limited the political repercussions will be.
By morning, the settlement is established—and the basis for conflict is sprung. It will be covered in the press, and the proprietor will apply to the authorities, asking for the squatters to be evicted. Our lawyers will arrive on the scene, arguing that the property is large and unproductive, and therefore in breach of the constitution. From the Sem Terra point of view, if we win it’s because the INCRA makes an inspection of the property and decides to expropriate. [2] If we lose, it’s because the proprietor has enough force at his disposal to carry out the eviction. If the police come to evict the squatters, we always try to avoid there being violence. The encampment gets shifted—to the edge of the road, for example—and we go on from there, to occupy another unused property. But the main thing for a group, once it’s gathered in an encampment, is to stay united, to keep putting pressure on the government.
The biggest occupation of all was in 1996, on Fazenda Giacometti, in Paraná. The property took up 80,000 hectares—nearly 200,000 acres—of good, fertile land, covering three municipalities. It was an insult to society that that land was lying unused—all the farmers in the region were enraged about it; everybody was. We started work in the region, discussing with the farmers, and decided to set up an encampment by the side of the road where people could gather if they wanted to join the occupation, rather than going to the Fazenda Giacometti straightaway. We kept the encampment there open for a week, and more and more people turned up. When the leaders decided on the date for the occupation, we assumed it would be the traditional method—they’d hire trucks, pile everyone into them and drive to the site. But on the night, there were so many families involved that we decided not to use the lorries. We walked the twenty-one kilometres—thirteen miles—all through the night. When we reached the Fazenda the day was breaking, and the police were called out immediately. But there were so many people—ten thousand squatters, with their bundles of belongings on their heads—that all the police could do was to help the procession down the road, and make sure there were no car accidents. The sheer scale of numbers transformed the balance of forces. That was our biggest victory, and since we knew it would be a historic event, we invited Sebastião Salgado to take photographs of the march. It was an epic, the greatest of all the land occupations we’ve carried out to this day.
What is the structure of the MST—how many are involved? How are decisions taken, at local and national level?
We are a mass social movement, whose principal objective is to gather people for the struggle. How do you join the Sem Terra Movement? There is no membership, no cards, and it’s not enough just to declare that one wants to be in the MST. The only way to join is to take part in one of the land occupations, to be active on the ground. That’s how we get members. It’s very hard to pin down statistically. We wanted to get away from party or union-style bureaucracy—filling in forms, and subscription fees. When your base is poor, illiterate farmers, you have to develop ways of going about things that are as open as possible, drawing people in rather than putting up barriers or bureaucratic hiccups.
To describe the MST’s structure: our base is the mass of those who would benefit from agrarian reform—according to the last IBGE census, around four million landless families. [3] This is the layer we’re working with. Many of them will come along on some sort of action—protest marches, for example—but not all will dare to occupy land. That’s a very radical form of struggle, and you need to have been through several previous stages first. Recently the government tried out a little test on us. They started putting out propaganda saying that it wasn’t true that there are so many landless farmers in Brazil, that the MST had invented it. Raul Jungman, Cardoso’s minister for Agrarian Development, went on TV to launch a programme calling for the landless to register by post with the INCRA, promising the government would allocate them land. He thought there would be a tiny response, and we’d be demoralized. We took up the challenge. We went to our base and campaigned for postal registration. We said: ‘You see this government propaganda saying, whoever wants land should write in for it? Come on, let’s reply en masse. Let’s organize and do it collectively, instead of on our own’. During 2001, 857,000 families registered, and the government found themselves in a pickle—they couldn’t give land to any of them, because that would have meant allocating it to all. It was a simple, effective way of proving the existence of the millions of landless in Brazil.
Many of these people have been mobilized during the eighteen years of the Sem Terra Movement. Some 350,000 families have taken over land. In February 2002, we had 80,000 families camped on roadsides or on unused properties, their problems unresolved—they’re in the frontline in the battle against the government. There have been about 20,000 activists involved in this—the comrades with the greatest ideological clarity, who’ve helped to organize the rest. The activists come on courses, they take part in the regional and state-level meetings, where our leading bodies are elected—these consist of between fifteen and twenty-one comrades. Every two years we hold national meetings, where a national commission is elected, with representatives from each state. Every five years we hold a nationwide congress, which is always massive—a moment of real political debate. At the last congress—the fourth at national level—in August 2000, in Brasília, we spent five days in a sports hall with 11,750 delegates. From what I know of farmers’ movements, this was the largest farmers’ congress in Latin America, and maybe in the world. Though we could be beaten by the Indians and the Chinese. You can get ten thousand people there easily—click your fingers and you get more. But it was certainly the biggest in Latin America.
I also want to stress how much we’ve learnt from earlier farmers’ movements in Brazil and throughout Latin America. It was this that taught us we should organize in collective bodies, that we should have committees to govern political decision-making and the allocation of tasks—that we shouldn’t have a president. Even the encampments run themselves and resolve their problems through committees—an encampment doesn’t have a president. It’s the same at regional, state and national levels—I’m one of twenty-one national directors, but decisions are taken by the whole committee, and tasks divided between us. Some are better known than others, because the press always go for the chatter-boxes. But the best known aren’t the most vital for the organization. The most important are those who stay quiet but take decisive actions for the movement to grow and spread.
How many Brazilian states do these delegates come from?
Of the twenty-seven states, our movement has a presence in twenty-three. We’re strongest where there are most farmers, in the South and Northeast—or, in order of importance: the Northeast and the South. The Southeast is highly urbanized, there aren’t many poor people left on the land—they’re either rural wage-earners, who dream of going to the big city, or else the lumpens,who live on the city outskirts. In the North and West-Central areas there aren’t many landless farmers. It’s the agricultural frontier—even if there was a big settler movement in these parts, there’d still be a good deal of land available. The most common form of action there is individual initiatives. A tenant moves onto a patch, and for a few years he can delude himself he has land of his own, until someone takes it away from him. In Amazonas, Acre, Roraima and Amapá, the MST doesn’t exist, because there is no mass base of farmers. Sometimes sectors of the Catholic Church and the rural unions try to tempt us to work there. The PT runs Acre now, and every time we meet the governor he asks when we’re going to come there and organize. [4] The answer is: when you have some farmers. There’s no point us going there, putting up banners and opening an office—our problem is not lack of branch offices. If there aren’t large numbers who will organize to occupy land, there is not going to be a farmers’ movement. That’s why we prefer to concentrate our work in regions where there is a real base of landless farmers—hence the priority of the South and Northeast.
How is the MST financed, and by whom? Does the greater part of your funding come from your own activities, or are there other sources?
In terms of the land occupations themselves, we have a principle: all the costs have to be borne by those who participate. Otherwise things get confused: ‘I don’t know who’ buys the tents, ‘I don’t know who’ pays for the transport; the farmers end up depending on ‘I don’t know who’. At the first sign of trouble they’d say, ‘No, I didn’t come here on my own, so-and-so brought me’ and they’d leave, because they wouldn’t see the struggle as a personal sacrifice. We could carry out much larger actions if we asked for money from outside—but it would have a disastrous ideological effect. Instead, every family taking part in an occupation spends months working, to get materials for shelter, to get food—they know that they’ll be surrounded by police, that they’ll have no food, that they’ll have to hold out for weeks until there are political repercussions, and solidarity begins to bring in resources. On a lot of occupations we’ve had to reduce the number of families taking part because some were so poor, we would have had to pay for their transport and shelter. We’ve been faced with this dilemma many times.
Secondly, there is a great deal of solidarity at a local level. Trade unions and churches help us with training courses and funds, which we use to develop the movement. But another of our principles is that everything must be decentralized—we don’t have a national treasury, or any centralized state-level ones. Thirdly, when we occupy land, every farmer—if he wants to be in the MST—agrees to give 2 per cent of the encampment’s production to the movement. This doesn’t go to some far-off authority, but to help the people camped in the region, to organize the movement and train activists. Sometimes a settlement produces very little, and the comrades say: ‘We can’t give you 2 per cent, we’re working like dogs just to feed ourselves. But we can release two of our people, and we’ll support their families, so that those two can go to train other landless farmers.’ This is a very important contribution, although money doesn’t enter into it.
Fourthly, when we help set up an encampment we provide for the community’s basic needs: housing, electricity, school, teacher-training, and so on. But these should be the responsibility of the State, so we try to force the government to make the local authorities pay for these. We get further where the state governments are more progressive; where they are more conservative, it’s harder for us. For example, we have agreements with the universities for training seven hundred MST teachers a year. The government bears the cost, but we decide on the curriculum and the orientation. It’s the same when we need an agronomist—the state should supply one, it’s their responsibility. To those who say ‘Ah, the government’s paying to train your teachers, you’ve been co-opted’, we reply: ‘No, we want to train seven thousand, but they won’t give us the money’.
These are our usual sources of funds, although we also get some help from organizations in Europe and the States. Incredible as it seems, there’s a group of US businessmen who send us funds every so often, without us even asking. In general the money from Europe goes for training activists. We’re building a school—the National Florestan Fernandes School, here on the Via Dutra—as a joint project with the EU. We wanted it to be near São Paulo, where there’s a concentration of well-qualified leftist teachers and intellectuals—it’s much easier to get them to come 50 kilometres out of São Paulo than to resettle them in the Normandia encampment in the interior of Pernambuco. It will be a school for training cadres, true to the spirit of Florestan Fernandes. [5] We see no contradiction in going to the EU with a construction project, because the European countries have already stolen so much from Brazil—it’s high time some of it was paid back. There are other projects, too—for instance, one with a European human-rights organization, to help us get legal representation.
How would you characterize the MST’s social base—not only in terms of class, but also of gender and ‘race’? Does it have specific sectors for work with indigenous peoples?
The indigenous peoples are a minority in Brazil and here, unlike in Andean or Aztec America, they were traditionally hunters and gatherers, not farmers as they are in Ecuador, Peru or Mexico, where they work inside the farmers’ organizations. Our relations with the indigenous peoples start from the recognition that they are the original inhabitants of Brazil. There is no discussion about that—all the land they claim as theirs is theirs, and they should do with it as they wish.
In terms of ethnic composition, it depends on the situation of the farmers in each state. There are very few blacks in the MST, and very few Sem Terra farmers in the areas where they mainly live—Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranhão. Pedro II’s Law 601 of 1850 was designed to prevent freed black slaves from becoming landowners; as soon as they got their formal freedom, they had to migrate to the ports, and work in the docks. Blacks were excluded from the formation of the Brazilian farming classes, and that’s had a lasting influence. To this day, the farming layers are composed mainly of mestizos in the Northeast,and European immigrants in the South. This is clearly reflected in the composition of the MST.
As far as gender goes, because our form of struggle involves whole families, there’s been a break with the traditional model of men-only farmers’ movements. This is not to say there’s not still a strong macho culture among the men in the countryside—on the contrary. But the way our movement is organized means the women are bound to play a role. In an encampment there are as many women as men—and even more children. In general, the women are very active in the committees set up to solve everyday problems, but they’re much less represented at higher levels—which is where the influence of machismo comes in. A male comrade will often object to his partner travelling so much, or going to meetings in the capital. Family life imposes restrictions that impede women’s broader participation at state and national level. All the same, even though we haven’t adopted a quota system, 40 per cent of the 21 comrades on the national executive committee are women—and they got there by contesting elections against men, and not just because we’d saved places for them.
In terms of class, the rural population has been classified in many ways—structuralists say one thing, ECLA-types another, Marxists a third. In our movement, we try to use terminologies that take account of the fact that there are a great many lumpens in the country areas—the numbers living in misery there have risen with the economic crisis. The agrarian proletariat constitutes around a third of the rural population, but their numbers are dropping sharply with mechanization. They’re still a strong force in sugar-cane production, in São Paulo and Pernambuco, but in cacao farming the organized workforce has virtually been destroyed. There are a lot of wage-workers in cattle-rearing, but they’re widely scattered, which makes it difficult for them to organize. The same goes for large-scale agribusiness—soya or orange production, for instance: a ranch of 10,000 hectares, or 25,000 acres, with ten tractors, will produce a lot; but there will only be ten employees, who will never be able to provide a solid basis for a union. Then there is the classically defined layer of small farmers, the campesinato—those who work with their families on a little bit of land, whether it belongs to them or not. Of this fraction, a third are landless—our base of four million families. They work as share-croppers, or tenants; or they could be farmers’ children, who need to earn a wage. Another third—again, around four million families—are small farmer-proprietors, owning up to 50 hectares, about 120 acres. There is also an agrarian petty bourgeoisie, whose properties can vary from 50 hectares in some regions to 500, or 1,200 acres. Over that—the big ranchers and landowners—we’d consider as part of the agrarian bourgeoisie.
According to the Gini index, Brazil has the highest concentration of land ownership in the world. One per cent of the proprietors—around 40,000 of the biggest ranchers, or latifundiários—own 46 per cent of the land, some 360 million hectares, in fazendas of over 2,000 hectares, more than 5,000 acres each. In general, these are either occupied by livestock or entirely unproductive. Below them, the agrarian bourgeoisie own another 30 million hec
