"The Landless Workers Movement organizes Brazil’s poor to
take land from the rich. It is perhaps the largest — and most polarizing —
social movement in Latin America.
They arrived just before midnight, carrying machetes and
hoes, hammers and sickles, with plans to seize the land.
When the 200 activists and farm workers got there, the ranch
was vacant, overgrown with weeds, and the farm headquarters empty, except for a
stray cow.
Now, three months later, it is a bustling village. On a
recent Sunday, children rode bicycles on new dirt paths, women tilled soil for
gardens and men pulled tarps onto shelters. About 530 families live at the encampment
in Itabela, a town in northeast Brazil, and they have already joined together
to plow and plant the field with beans, corn and cassava.
The siblings who inherited the 370-acre ranch want the
squatters gone. The new tenants say they aren’t going anywhere.
“Occupation is a process of struggle and confrontation,”
said Alcione Manthay, 38, the effective leader of the encampment, who grew up
on several like it. “And there is no settlement if there is no occupation.”
Ms. Manthay and the other uninvited settlers are part of the
Landless Workers Movement, perhaps the world’s largest Marxist-inspired
movement operating within a democracy and, after 40 years of sometimes bloody
land occupations, a major political, social and cultural force in Brazil.
The movement, led by activists who call themselves
militants, organizes hundreds of thousands of Brazil’s poor to take unused land
from the rich, settle it and farm it, often as large collectives. They are
reversing, they say, the deep inequality fed by Brazil’s historically uneven
distribution of land.
While leftists embrace the cause — the movement’s red hats
depicting a couple holding a machete aloft have become commonplace at hipster
bars — many Brazilians view it as communist and criminal. That has created a
dilemma for the new leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a longtime
movement supporter who is now trying to build bridges in Congress and the
powerful agriculture industry.
Across Latin America, other movements inspired by the tenets
of Marxism — workers rising up in a class struggle against capitalism — have
sought to tackle systemic inequities, but none have ever approached the size,
ambition or sophistication of Brazil’s landless movement.
Group organizers and outside researchers estimate that
460,000 families now live in encampments and settlements started by the
movement, suggesting an informal membership approaching nearly two million
people, or almost 1 percent of Brazil’s population. It is, by some measures,
Latin America’s largest social movement.
Under Brazil’s former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro,
the movement lost steam. Occupations largely stopped during the pandemic and
then returned slowly in the face of opposition from Mr. Bolsonaro and farmers
who became more heavily armed under his more permissive gun policies.
But now, emboldened by the election of Mr. Lula, a longtime
political ally, the movement’s followers are ratcheting up their land seizures.
“We elected Lula, but that’s not enough,” João Pedro
Stédile, a movement co-founder, said in a message broadcast to members on
Easter Sunday, announcing a “Red April” push to invade new land.
There have been 33 occupations in less than four months of
Mr. Lula’s presidency, including eight in one weekend this month. Under Mr.
Bolsonaro, there were about 15 occupations a year, according to government
statistics. (About two decades ago, when land was even less equally
distributed, there were hundreds of invasions a year.)
Mr. Lula has said little about the new invasions, though two
of his cabinet ministers have criticized them.
The new occupations have given rise to a countermovement:
“Invasion Zero.” Thousands of farmers who say they do not trust the government
to protect their land are organizing to confront squatters and remove them,
though so far, there has been little violence.
“No one wants to go into battle, but no one wants to lose
their property either,” said Everaldo Santos, 72, a cattle rancher who leads a
local farmers’ union and owns a 1,000-acre ranch near the Itabela encampment.
“You bought it, paid for it, have the documents, pay the taxes. So you don’t
let people invade and leave it at that,” he said. “You defend what’s yours.”
Despite the landless movement’s aggressive tactics, the
Brazilian courts and government have recognized thousands of settlements as
legal under laws that say farmland must be productive.
The proliferation of legal settlements has turned the
movement into a major food producer, selling hundreds of thousands of tons of
milk, beans, coffee and other commodities each year, much of it organic after
the movement pushed members to ditch pesticides and fertilizers years ago. The
movement is now Latin America’s largest supplier of organic rice, according to
a large rice producers’ union.
Still, opinion surveys have shown that many Brazilians
oppose the movement’s land occupations. Some of the movement’s more militant
members have invaded active farms run by large agribusinesses, destroyed crops
and even briefly occupied the family farm of a former Brazilian president.
On the ground, the conflict pits hundreds of thousands of
impoverished farm laborers and a network of leftist activists against wealthy
families, large corporations and many small family farms.
Conservative lawmakers accused Mr. Stédile, the movement
co-organizer, of inciting crimes with his call for new occupations, and have
opened a congressional investigation.
The day after Mr. Stédile called for invasions, he joined
Mr. Lula on a state visit to China. (The government brought representatives of
several large food producers.)
Mr. Lula has long had close ties to the movement. Brazil’s
first working-class president, he supported it in his first administration two
decades ago. Later, while he was imprisoned on corruption charges that were
later thrown out, movement activists camped outside the jailhouse for his
entire 580-day incarceration.
The inequity over land ownership in Brazil is rooted in
colonial-era land-distribution policies that consolidated land in the hands of
powerful white men.
The government has sought to tilt the balance by essentially
confiscating arable, unused land and giving it to people who need it. The
landless movement has sought to force such reallocations by occupying
unproductive land.
Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, a São Paulo State University
professor who has studied the movement for decades, said the government has
legalized about 60 percent of the movement’s occupations, a rate he attributed
to organizers’ success at identifying unused land.
But critics say the government is encouraging invasions by
rewarding squatters with land, instead of forcing them to get in line, like
others who must go through bureaucratic channels to apply for property.
Movement leaders say they seize land because the government does not act unless
pressured.
That is what the people camped in Itabela are hoping for.
The encampment’s residents had varied paths but all shared
the same goal: their own slice of land. A homeless man arrived with his
belongings in a wheelbarrow. A middle-aged couple abandoned a shack on the farm
where they worked, for a chance at their own. And newlyweds making minimum wage
decided to squat because they thought they would never be able to afford to buy
land.
“The city is not good for us,” said Marclésio Teles, 35, a
coffee picker standing outside the shack he built for his family of five, his
disabled daughter in a wheelchair beside him. “A place like this is a place of
peace.”
That peace nearly ended a few weeks ago.
The siblings who inherited the land from their father in
2020 successfully petitioned a local judge to order the encampment dismantled.
They argued that the land was productive and therefore should not be turned
over to the occupiers. Movement activists admitted there were still some cattle
on the land, which they were trying to keep away from their new crops.
The police went to evict the settlers, joined by dozens of
angry farmers, and were met by about 60 encampment residents, some carrying
farm tools.
Instead of a fight, however, the residents resisted by
singing landless movement hymns, Ms. Manthay said. The police, worried about a
clash, paused the eviction.
The movement’s lawyers have since appealed and asked for a
permanent settlement on more than 2,000 acres the siblings own. A state agency
has said the government should analyze the movement’s claims. The case is still
pending.
“If they remove us, we’ll occupy again,” Mr. Teles said.
“The struggle is constant.”
About 90 minutes down the road, there is a window into what
the future could be: a 5,000-acre settlement that was ruled legal in 2016 after
six years of occupation. The 227 families there each have 20 to 25 acres,
spread across rolling hills of farmland and grazing cattle. They share tractors
and plows, but otherwise farm their own parcel. Together they produce roughly
two tons of food a month.
Daniel Alves, 54, used to work in someone else’s fields
before he began squatting on this land in 2010. Now he grows 27 different crops
on 20 acres, showing off bananas, peppercorns, bright pink dragon fruit and the
Amazonian fruit cupuaçu — all organic. He sells the produce at local fairs.
He said he remained poor — his shack was lined with tarps —
but was happy.
“This movement takes people out of misery,” he said.
His granddaughter, Esterfany Alves, 11, followed him around
the farm, petting their donkey and picking ripe fruit. She attends a public
school on the settlement partly run by the movement, one of roughly 2,000
movement schools across Brazil.
The schools make protests part of the curriculum and teach
students about farming, land rights and inequality.
In other words, Esterfany said, the school had taught her
“about the struggle.””
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