“Brazilian Landless Workers Movement Occupies Land, Sees Widespread Support

From Issueonline.org, Issue 9 magazine, June 2005

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement) is a mass movement of landless workers. Generally speaking, the MST undertakes land occupations to create settlements of landless and poor people. The MST feels that idle land holdings should be used to produce food and provide housing to the displaced and marginalized of Brazil’s poor. This is a transcript of a recording of an encounter with a member of the MST, Judite Stronzake, during the Taco Bell Truth Tour of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers - a farmworker organization based in Immokalee, Florida. We met in a church. The talk was translated from Portuguese to English, so keep in mind some things may have been lost in translation. The questions were asked by multiple attendees. The first section is a general description of the MST, their goals, strategy, and organizational pattern.

Judite Stronzake has been in the MST for 20 years, since its founding, and is part of the national leadership team. Stephen Bartlett, who interpreted for Judite, works for Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI) whose organization helped bring Judite for the mobilization of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Louisville, Kentucky. Stephen proof-edited the transcript as it came to him from Austin Indy Media, adjusting slightly according to his memory of the content of the talk. The talk took place on March 12, 2005.

Judite: The thing that [the MST] came to decide was that the movement had to maintain its autonomy...Also that the primary action that this movement wanted to take was land occupations.

...Three main goals were set for the movement. One was to acquire land, but having land was not enough. We have to seek agrarian reforms. Agrarian reforms are all those elements of life: education, health care, sanitation and basic services in the countryside...

But, even then those two [goals] were not enough to make this a successful movement. We realized we couldn’t achieve those two things, if it were just the countryside people struggling.
We needed to transform the society to make those first two things possible. We needed to bring in people from the city: the unemployed, the homeless, etc...

Our social base of our movement is about 350,000 families who have settled on land and are farming and living in rural communities. And 250,000 families who are camped out are in the process of organizing themselves in order to get access to land. If you take about eight persons per family you can figure out how big the movement is.

Occupation of land was the way we forced the issue of agrarian reform. We forced the idea that private property is not the only value that should be looked at...

...Our movement is a mass movement and it’s the quantity of people we organize that gets the attention of society and makes them think, ‘Oh, these people really have something to say...’

We have a constitutional clause that says that land must serve its social function or be turned over for agrarian reform. For that reason, we occupy land and consider it to be a legal action.

QUESTION: What is the MST relationship with Lula? [Note: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the president of Brazil. The MST was born at the same time as the Workers’ Party.]

We came out of the same conditions; we are like brother or sister organizations...There is a historical commitment between the two movements.

However, we have also maintained our autonomy as a social movement from the Workers’ Party. More and more, the Worker’s Party followed the institutional path...

What has happened is the leader of the Workers’ Party has taken the administrative power. But, the government in Brazil doesn’t really have power. The real power resides here in the United States and with the international institutions.

So, it’s a centrist government taken as a whole, which tries to resolve social problems through negotiation. But, their hands are very tied by the agreements Brazil has come into with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, etc...

We have maintained the strategy and tactics we always have, which is to pressure with social mobilization and negotiate. We occupy and then we negotiate.

Q: Could you talk about the political and violent repression of the MST?

There is an organization called the UDR (Uniao Democrático Rural, Rural Democratic Union), which is an association of the principal landholders in Brazil. These people are senators, large businessmen, people who own large newspapers. They are the richest people of the country. They hold all the power, the land, the reigns of political power, they are lawyers and judges. They contract paramilitaries. For example, the recent killing of the American Nun, Sister Dorothy Stang, cost about $50,000 reales (about $15,000 US)...

It depends on which state if the police will get involved or not. So, in Paraná, it’s a center-left government and they don’t use the police to repress the camps. Up the state where Dorothy was killed it’s a right wing government and they send in the police...

In the case of the 1996 massacre of 19 MST members in El Dorado Carajás there have been no convictions. But, in [the state of] Minas Gerais five of our members were killed and the intellectual author of the crimes is in jail. In Mina Gerais, there was a lot of social pressure to bring justice to the killers and they were bought to trail.

The only justice we ever get and the only way we stop impunity is massive social pressure. We could say as a generality about 92% of all cases are never convicted.

Q: What’s the relationship with the environmental organizations and what can people in the states do to support this?

First of all, as the MST our principles are to look upon land as sacred and belonging to all people. Based on that principle, we have relationships and alliances with environmental groups...

Even if we have settled on land that has been completely deforested we set aside 20% for forestation. We also protect the waterways and recover local seed varieties in agriculture. Together with Via Campesina we have waged a very strong campaign against genetically modified organisms.
It is something we’ve learned especially from the indigenous people who have taught us how to respect nature.

Q: Can you describe the motivations and goals for the big march coming up?

...We are in the middle of a big fight between two visions of what the countryside should look like: the agro-business model, which is displacing people on the one hand, and our social movement’s vision of the countryside...We want to involve the whole Brazilian society in the debate about what the future of the countryside should be...

The main demand is for the government to fulfill the promises that it has made about the speed that agrarian reform will be untaken. The government agreed to settle 450,000 families in the first 4 years of the term. That should have been a 150,000 families settled each year. Last year they had only settled 27,000. This year the IMF forced the government to cut its agrarian reform budget by 50%.
About five years ago some right-wing groups decided to do a survey to see whether the MST was really supported by the society. They wanted to prove that the MST was not supported. The result, however, was that 87% of the population supported the MST.

Q: Can you describe the process of a land occupation?

(Laughter.) Imagine that we all here are landless people. The only difference would be that there would be a lot of children and older people here. Our style of work is that the whole family participates...

Suppose you had about 200 families like that all together. After some education about how the MST works and what it is. People from that group would go visit settlements that have been establish...In coordination with the other groups in the region they decide which land idle land holding to occupy. It is not a hard thing to find these idle land holdings because 1% of the population controls 47% of the land...

On the day that been decided, we’ll have trucks go to door to door and load up the families and meet in one central place...You are talking about groups of 500, 1000, 2000 families all together.
When they arrive at the large landholding, they will get out of the vehicles and break the gate or whatever they have to do to get into the ranch. With their hats, and flags, and farming tools they will march into the land.

People feel very emotional at this time. Some will kneel and kiss the ground and say this is saving our lives. They start to sing and have a party. Then they start to build little shelters...Once it is light, they’ll have a big meeting including allies. We are talking about 10,000 or 15,000 people. Every 50 families is considered a base unit. They are organized into 50 families. In each base group, everyone in the group will be given an assignment of health, security, finances, etc. Then they will begin to discuss how we are going to govern this base unit and the settlement; how are we going to function, etc? For us, these are small meetings. In each of these sectors or workgroups, each person will belong and have a role to play. We start to turn the ground and prepare the ground for planting immediately. That gives you a picture of the initial phase.

The people become more and more empowered as they learn to work in the workgroups, carry out their functions and gradually you will progress in the way you organize and how well things are functioning.

Q: You spoke a lot about self-organization, but also demanding the government fulfill certain needs. I wonder if this a practical appropriation of state resources or a contradiction within the movement?

We want to hold the government responsible for undertaking agrarian reform because it is part of the constitution. We feel it is the government’s responsibility to provide those basic things...

We rely on organizing ourselves to apply that pressure so the government will fulfill its basic responsibilities to the people in general and in this case the people of the countryside.

And in that case is not a very extreme thing, it is within the framework of reform. We are not yet up to the stage of agrarian revolution...