MST occupies office of the company Ferbasa and 4 estates in Rio Grande do Norte and Bahia
The movement claims that the occupied lands are unproductive, denounces the eviction suffered and the agreement breached by Ferbasa
On the morning of this Tuesday (May 2), the office of Companhia de Ferro das Ligas da Bahia (Ferbasa), a company that operates in the areas of mining, eucalyptus production and metallurgy, was occupied by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in the city of Maracás (BA).
Furthermore, this weekend before Workers’ Day, the movement occupied three large estates in Rio Grande do Norte and one in Bahia. According to the MST, the four areas were unproductive.
Occupations in Bahia
The action at Ferbasa's headquarters comes after, last Thursday (April 27), hundreds of families were evicted from an area owned by the company in the municipality of Planaltino (BA). The peasants had been on the land since March 30, in what was the third attempt to build the Estrela Vive camp there. According to the MST, the area was abandoned before being converted into a place to live and grow food.
“The MST occupies the [Ferbasa] office claiming that there be a meeting between the company and Incra, the federal government and the state government to pacify this situation, since there is an agreement in 2017 by that company to assign a number of hectares of land to settle families in the region and it was never fulfilled”, explains Abraão Brito, political articulator of the MST in Chapada Diamantina.
To Brasil de Fato, Ferbasa informed, in a note, "that it has maintained dialogue with the MST, with the purpose of resolving the issue definitively. public and the movement itself, which is why it cannot be resolved in a timely and unilateral manner by Ferbasa".
The company, which presents itself as the "only integrated producer of ferrochrome in the Americas", also says that it rejects the occupation of its headquarters and that "negotiations can be maintained in a peaceful and orderly manner".
Still in the region of Chapada Diamantina, but in the city of Boa Vista do Tupim (BA), 130 landless families occupied, in the early hours of Saturday (29), Fazenda Boa Esperança. “The area”, says a note from the movement, “has been abandoned for 18 years and has an extension of 1,300 hectares of unproductive land”.
Occupations in Rio Grande do Norte
In Macaíba (RN), in the metropolitan region of the Potiguar capital, 70 families from the Brigada Zumbi dos Palmares, from the MST, occupied an area of the city hall on Friday night (28). The land was baptized by the occupants as “Elizabeth Teixeira urban commune”, in honor of the rural worker and activist who worked in the Peasant Leagues in Paraíba and fought against the military dictatorship. Teixeira is currently 98 years old.
On Saturday (April 29), two other large estates were occupied in Rio Grande do Norte by 230 families: the Terra Nova farm, in the city of Riachuelo, and the Ubatuba farm, in the municipality of Ielmo Marinho. The latter already had a part expropriated in 2009. The landless claim that the entire area be destined for agrarian reform.
The actions are part of the day of struggles that the movement holds every year in April, in memory of the Massacre of Eldorado do Carajás. This year, the motto was “Against Hunger and Slavery: for Land, Democracy and the Environment”.