Working people in Brazil’s countryside are resisting the consequences of a contracting economy and rising unemployment. While millions remain landless, a tiny number of capitalist families control the bulk of the country’s arable land. The MST has called on the government to carry out a thoroughgoing land reform to meet the needs of peasants and workers.

In face of the land occupations, government officials have pledged funding for settling landless peasants. On the other hand, the big landowners, some of whom own tracts of territory as large as some European countries, are calling on the government to crack down on the MST and the more than 10,000 families who have joined the recent occupations.

Over the course of last year, Brazilian peasants carried out twice as many land takeovers as the previous year. The large landowners in Brazil responded by expanding their use of private militias to try to terrorize working people. They killed 63 of those who organized and joined the land takeovers last year, according to Catholic Church investigations.

“We want agrarian reform to create jobs and dignity,” said MST leader Gilmar Mauro.

In the state of Bahia the MST organized 2,500 families on April 3-4 to take over the Veracel eucalyptus tree plantation, which is half-owned by Stora-Enso, a Swedish-Finnish paper company. The peasants converted 25 hectares of tree saplings into vegetable gardens. Veracel president Vitor Costa called the action “a very bad sign for investors. The government can’t lose control like this.”

While the land directly involved is tiny compared to the 140,000 hectares under company control, the Veracel owners demanded the government drive off the landless workers because of the example they are setting. The courts had ruled in the company’s favor in response to an earlier occupation.

Costa told the Reuters news agency that even a small land takeover “could and certainly is making foreign investors in Brazil apprehensive. What they can expect after investing their money here is seeing someone occupy their land.”

Aracruz, a Brazilian company that in partnership with Veracel has built a giant pulp mill on the property, saw its stock dive 23 percent in the days after the land occupation. Representing one of the largest private investments in the country, the $1.2 billion mill—designed to process 900,000 tons of pulp a year—is due to begin production in July 2005.

Another focal point of struggle has been the bordering state of Pernambuco, the terrain of at least half the land takeovers organized over recent weeks. On April 6, more than 1,000 rural workers blockaded roads in the northeastern state to dramatize their fight, while others occupied offices of the government’s land ministry.

Brazilian agricultural minister Roberto Rodrigues called the actions by thousands of landless rural workers “worrisome and embarrassing,” while speaking at a business seminar on investment prospects in agribusiness.

Brazil is the world’s top producer of sugar, oranges, and coffee, and the second-largest grower of soybeans after the United States.

Rodrigues told reporters, “We can’t stand by and just accept our farmers’ lives are being made hell.” The “farmers” he was referring to, however, were not working farmers but rather the superwealthy 1 percent of the population of 175 million who own more than 40 percent of the land.

The MST is demanding land for 1 million families by 2006 as a first step toward a genuine agrarian reform.

In addition to facing one of the most unequal land distributions in the world, working people in Brazil have felt the consequences of a 0.2 percent contraction last year, the economy’s worst performance in 11 years. Official unemployment figures rose to almost 12 percent, while household consumption dropped by a record 3 percent, fueled by a 6 percent decline in the buying power of the average wage.

In late March the Workers Party government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which took office in January of last year, announced a doubling in spending on the “resettlement” of landless peasants. Government ministers have promised funds to settle 115,000 families in 2004. Officials say that since the beginning of the year some 11,000 families—about 50,000 people—have been settled.

The October 2002 landslide victory for Da Silva registered the rising expectations among working people that they will finally obtain some relief from the devastating effects of the depression conditions and the attacks by the capitalists and the outgoing government and its predecessors.

Da Silva has spoken in favor of land reform, while distancing himself from the MST-led land occupations. “Agrarian reform in this country will be carried out because of social justice and better distribution of productive land so our people have the opportunity to work,” he said. “But it won’t be carried out by force—neither of the workers nor of those that are against it.”

Meanwhile, the government has been hit by a corruption scandal involving Waldomiro Diniz, a senior Workers Party official who acted as Lula’s liaison with Congress. In February, Diniz was shown on videotape soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the boss of a numbers game.

The administration has fired Diniz while promoting more traditional capitalist political figures. One of them is José Sarney of the Liberal Front Party, who was president of Brazil from 1985 to 1990. “Today, Sarney is the center of gravity and ‘the strongman of the presidential palace,’” wrote a columnist in the daily Jornal do Brasil.

The government’s efforts to maintain payments on Brazil’s $400 billion debt, much of it owed to imperialist investors, have brought it into conflict with 900,000 public workers. In the first week of April the Confederation of Federal Employees rejected the government’s wage offer as insufficient to keep up with inflation, and called for it to be doubled.

Luiz Marinho, the president of Brazil’s largest union, the United Federation of Workers, indicated he would endorse a public workers’ strike if the government failed to raise their pay and hire more workers.  
 
 
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