The rise and rise of the landless movement in Brazil

Tony Gosling tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Tue Jan 24 00:39:54 GMT 2012 


The rise and rise of the landless movement in Brazil

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/23/brazils-landless/
December 23rd, 2011 | by 
<http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/author/hannah-smith-and-iain-overton/>Hannah 
Smith | Published in 
<http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/all-stories/>All 
Stories, 
<http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/carousel/>Carousel, 
<http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/human-rights/>Human Rights
after-months-of-occupation-of-the-cuiaba-plantation-by-landless


The landless: no longer to be ignored.

At first sight it looks like a festival. The 
makeshift tents hung with colourful hammocks, the 
rousing Brazilian beats blaring from speakers, 
even the portaloos – like a mini Glastonbury 
sprung up in a small town in the Brazilian 
Amazon. There are stalls selling cold drinks, 
food on paper plates, even handmade jewellery.
The details give it away though. Children run 
laughing, but the adults look old, tired, tense. 
Some have brought battered electric cookers with 
them, powering them with home-made generators.

This isn’t a festival, it’s a makeshift camp 
filled with people who have fled their homes in 
fear of the powerful ranchers constantly taking land.

It is a chaotic mass of tents, huts and slightly 
more permanent structures all built in the 
rushed, unplanned nature of a shanty town. But 
this, for the people that spew out onto the dirt 
tracks and paths that weave their way in and out, is now home.

Plight of the landless
We are in Maraba, a rapidly expaning town on the 
edge of the rainforest in North East Brazil.

Over the past year Maraba has found itself on the 
frontline of a social struggle that affects millions in Brazil.
<http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Brazil-MST1-chair1.jpg>
[]


Brazil landless - MST
The people living in the camp are at the bottom 
of the Amazon’s social hierarchy. They are rural 
workers – landless, largely jobless.  They 
scratch a living collecting fruit and nuts from 
the forest, or more rarely by working on one of 
the region’s gargantuan cattle ranches.
The last twenty five years have seen an 
increasing numbers of landless workers joining 
the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, 
or Landless Workers’ Movement.  It’s a 
union-come-protest-group that fights for land 
rights for its members. It’s the largest social 
movement in Latin America. In a country where 
three percent of the population owns two thirds 
of all workable arable land, the MST claims over 
1.5 million members. Together they fight for 
permission to settle on the public land 
supposedly protected from deforestation under Brazil’s environmental laws.
Land conflicts in the Amazon are nothing new. But 
they should be becoming a thing of the past. 
Deforestation fell to its lowest-ever level in 
2010 as a result of government action and 
groundbreaking legal fights by federal 
prosecutors against companies that buy cattle from illegal ranches.
But almost overnight in April this year 
deforestation surged by 500% and has continued to 
rise ever since. Proposed changes to the Forest 
Code, the law that controls deforestation, are 
currently being debated in the Brazilian Senate. 
If passed, there will be an amnesty on all 
illegal deforestation that has already happened, 
and this says many campaigners is causing the new surge.
In Maramba, a long way from Brazilia, the fight for the forest is very real.

Violent land conflicts
In the past ten years, over four hundred landless 
settlers have been killed in and around Maraba. 
On May 23 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/24/amazon-rainforest-activist-killed>Jose 
Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria, well known 
environmental activists and spokespeople for the 
landless community, were shot dead as they left 
their settlement in Nove Ipixuna, 20 km from Maraba.

The murders proved to be an incendiary final blow 
for Maraba’s landless people: ten thousand of 
them have packed up their belongings and moved to 
the centre of the town, both in protest at the 
lack of protection they receive from the 
Brazilian authorities, and in an attempt to find 
safety in numbers. The government, for its part, has sent in the military.

When we arrive at the town’s airport it is 
swarming with members of the Special Forces, the 
military division usually sent to deal with drug 
wars in the favelas of Rio and Sao Paulo. ‘The 
military arrive, settlers flee’ reads the 
headline on the front page of the local newspaper.
Ironically, the demands of small-hold farmers 
have been used as an excuse to change in the 
Forest Act. In reality, the landless movement has 
nailed itself to the same mast as international 
NGOs like Greenpeace, campaigning against the proposed reforms.
It will be the big farmers and mass agriculture 
that will gain the most from the proposed 
changes. The fear of environmentalists that 
changes will see a stampede across the forest, 
will also see small farmers increasingly thrown 
off their land and exposing the small farmers to 
the hidden menace that pervades this region – 
landless labourers working against their will in 
virtual slavery for the big agro-businesses.
The new proposals have radicalised the landless 
class, and given them an international voice. As 
land grab has steeply risen – so the families 
have come flocking out of the forest, finding a 
home here on the edge of the city.
The settlement camp is also a protest base. There 
are banners, and an information tent at the 
entrance where spokespeople are ready to speak 
with the media. ‘We are here because we have to 
take a stand,’ says a fiery looking middle aged 
woman handing out leaflets at the entrance to the 
camp. ‘Our lives are in danger but no-one is protecting us.’
It doesn’t take us long to find people who knew 
the da Silvas personally.  The leafleting woman 
leads us to a shelter made out of wood and palm 
leafs. Inside, a group of men talk and drink 
coffee while the women watch Novela, the 
ubiquitous Brazilian soap opera, on an ancient 
television. Julimar agrees to speak with us. He 
lived in the Nove Ipuixuna settlement with the da 
Silvas, and the recent violence has left him terrified for his family’s safety.
‘We know that there are people who want to move 
onto our land,’ he tells us. ‘In Nove Ipixuna 
there are wood cutters and ranchers who are 
expanding illegally. We all receive threatening 
phone calls, but the authorities don’t do anything about it.’
Julimar tells us that the da Silvas were well 
known informers for IBAMA, that Brazilian 
environmental enforcement agency responsible for 
monitoring and prosecuting illegal deforestation. 
‘They weren’t scared of the threats; they didn’t 
care. They just loved the forest, and would 
denounce anyone who cut it down illegally, no 
matter how much danger it put them in. They’d 
been threatened many times before, but they carried on.’

‘All the progress that has been made in the past 
few years is being wiped out. People are 
deforesting in anticipation of this law being 
passed, because they know that the land they have 
deforested illegally will be granted legal 
status. This latest increase in deforestation 
coincided exactly with this Bill being introduced.’
Elise de Araujo, campaigner, IMAZON

When Jose and Maria were murdered for their 
efforts to save the forest, a mood of suspicion 
grew in the Nove Ipixuna camp. ‘No-one knows who 
did this, so everyone wonders whether someone in 
the camp might have been involved. They could 
have given information to the gunmen for money. 
Now no-one can trust anyone else.’
Julimar’s words reveal the messy truth behind 
what is happening in Maraba. This is a town 
famous across Brazil for its backwater 
lawlessness. Ranchers have been deforesting here 
since the 1970s, often illegally. When landless 
settlers get in the way of their expansion plans 
they hire assassins to kills them, reportedly for 
as little as one hundred Brazilian Real (£40).
On the day we visit the camp, the local paper 
carries identikit photos of the two men believed 
to have been hired to kill the da Silvas. And in 
a town where cash talks, the promise of money for 
passing on information about the whereabouts of 
troublesome settlers like the da Silvas may prove too tempting to resist.
‘They were shot as they left the camp,’ says 
Julimar. ‘It wasn’t by chance; the killers knew their routine.’
True or not, the possibility that someone in the 
community may have betrayed the da Silvas casts a 
grim shadow over the mood here.

‘Nothing to call our own’
Away from the centre of the camp, with its 
banners and music, the living conditions become 
grimmer. Sewage runs in open channels with 
children playing around the edges. It’s here, in 
the sweltering heat of the tropical Amazonian 
sun, that we meet Francisco, a landless settler 
who was shot by a gunman hired by a rancher who 
wanted to evict him and his family from their 
settlement. He offers to take us back to his 
village, a two hour drive from Maraba.
<http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Group-in-Nove-Ipixuna-MST.jpg>
[]


Group in Nove Ipixuna - MST

As we drive along the potholed road he tells us 
about the long history of the struggles between 
ranchers and settlers around Maraba. Francisco is 
47 and father of – he claims – 20 children.  He 
tells us land conflicts have always dominated his 
life. This area was colonised by rich farming 
families in the seventies, when the Brazilian 
government decided that the Amazon needed to be 
opened up.  At the time, that was modernisation: 
it was only later that stopping deforestation became the priority.
Many ranchers were newcomers from the South, 
where land was becoming scarce. The native north 
easterners were a convenient source of cheap labour.
‘At that time the rural people were scattered 
about,’ Francisco tells us. ‘We lived on our own 
small pieces of land, we survived on the crops we 
planted. When the ranchers moved in they paid us 
some small amounts of money for the land we were 
on. At the time it seemed like a good deal, but 
then we were left with nothing to call our own.’
Most took work on the new ranches. But it was 
poorly paid, and some farmers were famed for 
their cruelty to their workers. Francisco tells 
us about one ranching family, still major 
landowners in the area, who held their workers 
captive and killed them if they tried to escape. 
‘They would throw the bodies into the river, and the piranhas would eat them.’
When the MST was set up in 1985 rural workers 
joined in their thousands. They all had nothing, 
but by having nothing together, they at least had 
a strength in numbers. In groups they began 
occupying areas of public land, starting lengthy 
legal battles for the right to stay there. 
Francisco’s settlement has just been granted 
legal status after an 11 year wait.
But though the MST has become a voice that the 
Brazilian government can’t ignore, at times it 
has appeared as though the authorities were very 
much on the side of the ranchers. As we drive 
through the village of El Dorado dos Carajas, a 
strip of ramshackle bars and grocery stores 
strung along a half mile stretch of road, 
Francisco’s eyes fill with tears. In 1996, this 
was the scene of a massacre; nineteen landless 
workers who were protesting for the right to set 
up a settlement on an unproductive ranch were 
shot dead by the Brazilian military. Today, 
nineteen tree stumps by the side of the road 
commemorate the dead. ‘I get emotional every time 
I pass through here,’ says Francisco.

‘We know that there are people who want to move 
onto our land. In Nove Ipixuna there are wood 
cutters and ranchers who are expanding illegally. 
We all receive threatening phone calls, but the 
authorities don’t do anything about it.’
Julimar, former Nove Ipixuna resident

Today the presence of the military in Maraba is a 
reassurance for the settlers. But the area’s 
sheer size and inaccessibility makes it hard for 
the authorities to control the land conflicts. 
There are three hundred IBAMA officers working in 
Para State, an area the size of France.
Sergio Noriyuki Suzuki, IBAMA’s top man in Para, 
says they need at least twice that number to be 
effective. When we reach Francisco’s settlement, 
right by the side of the road, it is clear why 
the people who live here have fled.
‘We have no way of making our homes secure,’ says 
Francisco. ‘People threaten us, they come in the 
night and burn our crops. It’s impossible for us to live here with dignity.’

Halting deforestation
Helene Palmquist is part of the prosecution team 
that pursued corporate giants like Walmart 
through the courts to stop them buying cattle 
from illegal ranchers in Para State. ‘At first we 
threatened them with legal action,’ she tells us. 
‘Then we told them, if you sign an agreement not 
to buy these cattle, then we will drop the 
action. We were negotiating for forty days, but 
in the end we got our agreement. And over the 
next twelve months, deforestation fell by 14% in Para.’
But now with the proposals to the Forest Law the 
Amazon is once again under threat, says Elise de 
Araujo at IMAZON, an NGO which monitors deforestation.
‘All the progress that has been made in the past 
few years is being wiped out. People are 
deforesting in anticipation of this law being 
passed, because they know that the land they have 
deforested illegally will be granted legal 
status. This latest increase in deforestation 
coincided exactly with this Bill being introduced.’

In Brazil three percent of the population owns 
two thirds of all workable arable land.
Francisco and Julimar know little about the 
current political tussles over the Forest Code in 
Brasilia. Nor do they care. All they want is security for their families.
‘A landless settler only needs 45 hectares to 
support his family,’ says Francisco. ‘These 
ranches are hundreds of thousands of hectares. Where’s the fairness?’
Back in the Maraba camp it’s Saturday night, and 
there’s a party underway. A makeshift DJ booth 
has been set up, a young man has taken the mic, 
and a crowd of people are doing the forra, a 
traditional north eastern dance. Everyone is 
having a good time.  Again it’s easy to imagine 
this is a festival. But tomorrow the sun will 
come up, and the details that belie the true 
desperation of the landless people’s predicament 
will become grimly obvious once more.

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/23/brazils-landless/

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