LANDLESS, JOBLESS, BUT NOT HOPELESS.
A report from Brazil
By TOM HAYDEN
"It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accomodation...I reject the notion that nothing can be done about the consequences of economic globalization and refuse to bow my head gently because nothing can be done against the unavoidable.”
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart
The day after the World Social Forum dialogues, I visited an encampment of landless people squatting in garbage-wrap tents alongside the road an hour from Porto Alegre Alegre. Having tramped through miserable shantytowns from Rio to Manila, I was prepared for hopeless gazes and wrenching odors of decay. Indeed, the flies were thick, the heat a burden, and the 200 families suffered the daily deprivations of the poor. But there was a difference. There was purpose and hope.
I noticed the spirit it first at the friendly, makeshift pharmacy where herbal medicines were dispensed for coughs and colds. It was most apparent in the dirt-floor classrooms where 20 or more children engaged in the participatory educational format designed by the world-renowned Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and formerly the education secretary of San Paolo. The students laughed and waved at their visitors, sitting at desks under large sweeping photographs of their communities by Sebastiao Salgado with textbooks by Freire scattered around.
This community growing by the ditch is called Acampamento Oziel Alves, after a young man killed by the police in Para state in 1986. The squatters have been here since May, 2002. They came as landless people, many with substance abuse problems and aimless children. They are preparing themselves for a dawn in the near future when, tools in hand, they will seize and occupy nearby fallow land and begin to grow food and build a community of their own.
Under the green plastic sheets one finds ground zero of the anti-globalization movement. All the panels, pamphlets, and pronouncements at the World Social Forum would weigh for little without being anchored by real social movements among the dispossessed. Perhaps none have succeeded in recent years on the scale of the MST (for Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra).
The landless people at this encampment face enormous barriers, including repression, but they are buoyed by successes over the past decade. For example, a few miles up the road, we visit an impressive example of their progress, the Centro Filho de Sepe, named for an Indian who, our guides say simply, fought for the land. This vast place, which is 25 kilometers across, was occupied eight years ago. The government finally chose to compensate the private owner rather than send the army against the jobless campesinos. The owner bought himself a hacienda with on 12000 hectares in Uraguay and the landless workers settled in. Today 376 families operate a school, produce rice, grow everything organic, experiment in permaculture, feed themselves, and live in tiny “agro-villas” sprinkled around a kind of laboratory in Eden.
This is not an isolated example. Since their origin in 1984, the occupations have resulted in land titles for 250,000 families on some 1,600 settlements. Another 70, 000 people squat and wait for government recognition. One thousand schools have arisen, alongside new medical clinics. Agricultural cooperatives generate $50 million annually for the families and social services. The MST is involved in the ecological production of coffee, rice, and medicinal herbs. It has staged the first festival of “agrarian reform music”. The mesmerizing black-and-white photos of Salgado have been seen at 800 exhibitions across the world, and the MST is linked to Via Campesina, a network of 90 campesino organizations in 60 countries. On the day I visited Filho de Sepe, there were a dozen family farmers from Massachusetts, Wisconsin and California exchanging views with the Brazilians on drip irrigation, soil and wetlands restoration, and the varieties of wheatgrass.
More often than not, the land seizures have met with a fierce police and paramilitary response on behalf of absentee landowners, with an estimated death toll of 1,517 campesinos since 1988. The movement is a direct challenge to neo-liberal policies that uproot campesinos in favor of export-based agribusiness plantations and World Bank plans to privatize land reform. Under the Bank’s proposal, campesinos would seek loans to purchase land at market prices with no obligation by rich landowners to sell. Brazil has perhaps the greatest gaps between wealth and poverty in the Americas, with three percent of the population controlling two-thirds of the arable land. About 25 million people are landless campesinos no different than the Irish and other famine victims in centuries past.
The MST has been associated with the Workers Party (PT) which successfully elected Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva to Brazil’s presidency last October. Lula is expected to encourage land reform and curb police repression. In the runup to October’s election and even at the Porto Alegre social forum, the MST lowered its profile as a gesture to the Workers Party, but the land occupations are expected to resume in the future.
The MST has been the vanguard of similar movements all over Latin America as people, sensing the utter failure of institutions, take matters into their own hands. Not only is there widespread direct action on the continent to implement land reform, but in next-door Argentina, where the economy has collapsed for the middle class, workers have taken over 19 abandoned factories in Buenos Aires unemployed people known as piqueteros are blocking roads to bargain collectively for jobs, many thousands have established a barter economy, and the popular cry is “que se vayan de todos” (they all must go), which is not an idle chant since five presidents were forced to resign in a two week period in December 2001. While fostering dreams of an anarchist’s utopia, these actions simply reflect a powerful desire of ordinary people to survive the disintegration of the state and economy. Argentina was the poster child of corporate globalization only three years ago, but last week the government’s official figures showed a poverty rate of 58.7 percent.
While Electoral politics in Argentina and in many places seems bankrupt and clueless at the moment. While Argentina stumbles towards a national election that many people will boycott this April, independent trade unionists are organizing towards a political party along the lines of the Workers Party to contest for power in the election after this. The unique difference in Brazil is that the social movements of the disenfranchised have helped propel Lula and the Workers Party to an astonishing national victory despite the financial, corporate and cultural forces of globalization. What is the lesson? Can revolutionary direct action at the most grass roots level bolster a mass political movement? Can Lula and the Workers Party remain closely linked with social movements like the MST and still maintain middle class and small business support? Does a serious electoral strategy mean that resources and people-power are diverted away from social movements? Above all, how can Lula’s coalition challenge and reshape the official debate on globalization from the property rights of absentee investors to the needs of landless laborers who talk of land, bread and freedom?
At this point, the MST and social movements are likely to benefit from Lula’s triumph, not least from the surge of hope that an alternative to neo-liberalism has been endorsed by a 61 percent democratic majority. But George Bush is not going to invade Iraq and abandon the Monroe Doctrine towards Brazil. The US trade representative, Robert Zoellick, already has warned that if Lula opposes Washington’s “free trade” plans he can go trade with Antarctica. If Lula’s government is isolated and destabilized, the more likely it is that the World Bank will have its way in blocking serious land reform. But if Lula’s government gradually advances, it will mean greater protection for millions of landless people taking radical action, and will accelerate similar political challenges in Argentina and elsewhere on the continent.
Solidarity with Lula and the social movements in Brazil is thus an important challenge before the anti-globalization movement. Lula’s image is surprisingly favorable, or not unfavorable, among many Americans. However, there already are those on the Republican right beginning to paint Lula as a menace linked with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Before they dominate the radio talk shows with talk warnings of a second “axis of evil”, it is important that progressives undertake a campaign to understand, explain, and defend these hopeful developments emerging in Brazil among the poorest of the poor. The last time anything this stirring politically has happened in Latin America was perhaps the 1973 election of Salvador Allende in Chile. That alone should remind us that if another world is possible, as the anti-globalization movement asserts, its sudden appearance in Brazil cannot be taken for granted. |
Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
