In 11 Brazilian states, 28 large estates were occupied by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in the space of a week, as part of the traditional national day of struggles held in April in memory of the Eldorado do Carajás massacre. The number already exceeds the number of such actions carried out by the movement in 2019, 2020 and 2021, according to a survey by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). It is in this context that, under pressure from Brasília, on April 15, the Lula government launched the Terra da Gente Program.
The decree provides alternatives for the acquisition of rural properties by the federal government to be used for agrarian reform. Among the options are the use of land that already belongs to the Union, the negotiation of state debts in exchange for land, the purchase of properties from banks and public companies, the acquisition of pledged properties and adjudicated land (when landowners exchange land for settling debts).
In the opinion of the MST and the CPT, the program is important because it is a “gesture” by the government in response to the demand for progress in land reform and presents “interesting” options for improving access land in the medium term.
However, for the organizations, the measures do not affect the concentration of land in the country and do not resolve urgent short-term issues, such as reducing bureaucracy in farmers’ access to credit and the settlement of 105,000 families living in encampments in Brazil.
“It’s social compensation, not agrarian reform”
“In general, there are good ideas for [improving access to] land in our country,” observes Gilmar Mauro, from the national coordination of the MST. “But I really don’t see a solution to one of the main problems, which is the number of encamped people in Brazil, in the short term,” he says.
“Nor did the issue of funding for the settlements come up. It’s always good to remember that there are almost four million small farmers and that the amount of credit released for family farming has reached one million. These are the farmers who are economically viable,” says the MST leader.
“We have no concrete policy for the rural poor. We need a kind of ‘unwinding’ to resolve the problems and debts of this part of the population, which produces this country’s food,” proposes Gilmar Mauro.
For Isolete Wichinieski, from the CPT’s national coordination, the federal government has been tackling social problems, “but at a slow pace.” “We defend the de-concentration of land and we’re not seeing that in the Lula government,” she said. “[The government] is trying to solve hunger with a very welfare-oriented approach, without attacking the root of the problem, wherein land is one of the main issues,” he says.
“We’ve seen improvements in programs that have been re-imposed in the production line, such as the Food Acquisition Program (PAA) and credit for productive backyards. But there are still basic issues that we need to restructure in terms of an agricultural and agrarian policy for the countryside, which this government has yet to show what it’s come for,” Isolete points out.
In the same vein, Gilmar Mauro believes that Terra da Gente “is a kind of social compensation, a settlement program, the fruit of struggle. Which is obviously important. But it doesn’t tackle the concentration of land in our country. That’s why it’s not an agrarian reform program.”
Land but “without a lot of fighting”
President Lula has claimed that the ownership of rural properties can be transformed “without a lot of fighting” in a program called “Terra da Gente” which would create “land allotment shelves”.
In this new decree, the ways of acquiring these lands include expropriation (when the government buys the land from the owner in order to use it for social purposes) and expropriation (when the area is taken by the state for having failed to comply with labor or environmental laws, for example). Both tackle the concentration of land in the country. However, there are no signs that these resources will be used as a priority.
Firstly, because of the low budget for expropriations. The investment for land reform foreseen in the 2024 Annual Budget Law is Rs 659 million. This is the lowest amount planned for the area of all previous PT administrations. Between 2003 and 2016 there was no year in which this budget was below Rs 2.5 billion.
Secondly, the Minister for Agrarian Development and Family Farming, Paulo Teixeira, said on April 17 at a press conference with radio broadcasters that the strategy is to avoid conflicts and apply “more innovative” methods than expropriation.
“In the past we had the expropriation system where, after going to court, there was a whole debate, the issue went through several courts and after about 10 years you could acquire the land. We’re changing that,” said Paulo Teixeira.
“In the previous period, how did you settle families? You did it by law, because the land was unproductive. The land was expropriated for land reform purposes. But it’s a lengthy process and you’re always going to allocate unproductive land. It’s like giving those families an old car, so to speak. That’s what we’ve innovated,” said the minister.
In his speech launching the program at the Planalto Palace, Lula stressed that the survey of land available for settlements “does not invalidate the continuity of the agrarian reform struggle, but we want to show Brazil what we can use without a lot of fighting. This is without asking anyone to stop fighting.”
In Gilmar’s opinion, the government has been trying to “appease conflicts” since the beginning of the administration. “As if, if there was no pressure from the popular movements, the landowners would stay quiet, right? That doesn’t happen, of course. You have to put pressure on them. If the MST were to fall for the ‘now sit down and we’ll do something about it’ line, it would mean settling for a historically archaic land tenure structure,” he points out.
MST intensifies occupations
On April 17, the MST totaled 28 occupations of unproductive land in Brazil in one week. The occupations in 10 states plus the Federal District involve around 20,000 families and are part of the traditional National Days of Struggle organized by the MST in April. This year, the slogan is “Occupy to feed Brazil”.
The most recent encampment was set up by 200 families in the early hours of Wednesday morning at Coqueirinho Farm, in the municipality of São Mateus.
In a “letter to the Brazilian people” on “the milestone of April 17, 2024”, World Day of Struggle for Land, the MST explains the main demands of the national day, with criticism of what they consider to be insufficient agrarian reform policies of the Lula government.
“We are fighting because 105,000 families are encamped and we demand that the federal government comply with article 184 of the Federal Constitution, expropriate unproductive estates and democratize access to land,” says the MST letter, stressing that “settling is more than distributing or regularizing land”, but also guaranteeing access to policies that “allow for the full development of people and communities in the countryside”.
The movement is also demanding basic infrastructure and technical assistance in the settlements, a new budget for public policies such as the Food Acquisition Program (PAA), the formation of food stocks, price regulation and resources to “make the 42 courses already approved in the National Education Program for Agrarian Reform (Pronera) viable”.
“Patience is the enemy of hunger and abandonment for those under a black tarp,” the MST said in the letter. Last Monday, while dozens of large estates were being taken over by landless people, the federal government launched the Terra da Gente program in Brasilia.
At the event, President Lula and Agrarian Development Minister Paulo Teixeira announced 17 legal ways to obtain and make land available for agrarian reform, the so-called “land allotment shelves”.
Among the options are the allocation of federal land for agrarian reform, the purchase of properties from banks and public companies and the negotiation of state debts with the federal government in exchange for land.
“The government bringing agrarian reform onto the agenda was an important step,” says Ceres Hadich, from the movement’s national coordination, “but it will only be consolidated if we fight hard.” The days of struggle, which also involves actions such as marches, encampments, vigils at Incra and food donations in 17 states, runs until next Friday.
“The occupation is a necessary condition to show society that one, there are people who need land. Two, there is unproductive land. Three, it is in the struggle that one conquers [land]. It is therefore also an instrument of communication,” says Gilmar Mauro, from the MST’s national coordination.
“If someone says there’s no more land for expropriation, we show them ‘look at this [piece of land] that doesn’t fulfill its social function, look at this one with slave labor, this one with environmental degradation, this vacant public land’,” he points out. “It’s a powerful instrument of struggle that obviously wasn’t created in a cabinet. It was created by the people,” he says.
“So these days of struggle were and are fundamental and it was great, it was good. Almost all the states have mobilized. And we’re not finished, the struggle continues,” says Gilmar Mauro.
13 occupations in Pernambuco alone
So far, Pernambuco is the state with the highest number of land occupations this Red April. From Sunday 14 to Wednesday 17 there were 13, involving 5,301 families, according to the MST.
These include the occupation of land belonging to the Farm Fruit company in Santa Maria da Boa Vista (PE), the National Department for Works against Droughts (DNOCS) in Serra Talhada and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in Petrolina (PE).
The latter was occupied by the MST twice last year. “In 2023 we left Embrapa with a commitment to settle the 1,316 families who were camped there. But that wasn’t fulfilled and now we’re coming back to demand it,” explained Jaime Amorim, from the national coordination of the MST in Pernambuco.
Camps were also set up in Sergipe, São Paulo, Goiás, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraná, the Federal District, Ceará, Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and Bahia.
Conflicts and evictions
Two of the occupations carried out by the MST this Red April were violently evicted by police forces without a court order. One of them in Vila Boa de Goiás (GO), on the outskirts of the Federal District; the other in Campinas (SP).
The Military Police of Ronaldo Caiado’s government (União Brasil) forcibly removed around 1,000 families who had occupied a bankrupt 8,000-hectare area of the Companhia Bioenergética Brasileira (CBB) plant.
The area of around 8,000 hectares is under embargo for environmental crimes, according to the Ministry of the Environment. According to the MST, the occupation took place to press for the expropriation of the plant, which was offered to the Union as a way of paying off tax and labor debts of around Rs 300 million.
“They arrived with a police force of 15 vehicles,” describes Marco Baratto, state leader of the MST in the Federal District. He and four other activists were arrested and later released. “There’s no law here, it’s lawless,” he says. “But we’re standing firm, the families are mobilized,” he adds.
The other eviction was carried out by the Campinas Municipal Civil Guard (GCM) against around 200 families in an unproductive area owned by a real estate company, Zezito Empreendimentos Ltda.
The mayor of Dário Saadi deployed guards to carry out the eviction with bombs and rubber bullets and even a German shepherd, relying on Decree No. 16,920, which creates a “Group for the Control and Containment of Occupations, Clandestine Land Parcels and Environmental Damage”. The provision, however, was not even respected. Among the requirements for the repossession, for example, is the registration of the families, which did not take place.
The report witnessed that, acting in the name of a decree whose function is, among other things, to “prevent environmental damage”, the guards set fire to part of the land’s degraded pasture with their bombs. They had to reposition themselves to stop inhaling the enormous amount of smoke they produced.
On the road, in front of the entrance to the land, the families chanted slogans at the GCM riot police, who stood in defense of the property whose owner had not even called the public authorities. “You are children of the landless, just like us. When this turns into a condominium, none of you will be able to buy a house here. The reality is harsh,” shouted one of the occupiers.
On Wednesday night, another repossession took place in the state of São Paulo. This time with a court order and without violence. The 300 or so families left the Globo Suinã farm, in Agudos, after two days of occupation with intimidation from the Military Police, when Judge Mauricio Martines Chiado, of the 1st Judicial Court, granted the repossession.
“In an assembly and in agreement with the families, we decided to back down,” explained Marcio Santos, from the MST’s national coordination. “We agreed that as soon as we are not satisfied with our objectives, we will resume the process of struggle and new occupations,” he said.
Land occupations on an upward curve
“The struggle continues and, of course, that’s not all the mobilizations will be about. There will be new work, new perspectives. It’s possible that many more occupations will take place over the course of the year,” said Gilmar Mauro.
Monitoring by the CPT’s Dom Tomás Balduíno Documentation Center shows that in the last 20 years, the number of land occupations carried out by popular movements in the countryside peaked in 2004, with 511. After a subtle downward curve over the following decade, the lowest number of occupations took place between 2019 and 2021, with no more than 50.
Looking specifically at MST occupations, the numbers follow the national trend, with the main drop in the context of the pandemic and increased violence in the countryside under the Bolsonaro government. Since 2021, however, the curve has been rising again.
“After that period, even though the current conditions are not easy, there is a resumption of mobilization. And this has now been shown on this day. It’s not just because they want to, it’s because the people have also realized that it’s necessary,” says Gilmar Mauro, citing the fact that, according to the Zero Hunger Institute, 20 million people are starving and 100 million are not adequately nourished in Brazil.
“Although there is economic growth, it is extremely difficult for a large part of the population to earn enough income to live on,” the MST leader observes. “It’s possible – I’m not trying to predict – that some of these working classes who live in small towns, who have links to agricultural production, will want to join the struggles for land. It’s possible. It smells like it,” says Gilmar Mauro.
This article was translated and adapted from two articles originally published in Portuguese on Brasil de Fato.
