The marchers are part of the struggle in Brazil to reverse one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world: 1 percent of the population of 175 million owns 40 percent of the land, while the 40 percent of Brazilians with the lowest income own less than 1 percent.

The Workers Party (PT) government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, the winner of a landslide election in October 2002, has come under increasing pressure in recent months to fulfill its promises to provide jobs and land to workers and peasants. The new administration promised the “resettlement” of 400,000 landless peasant families during its four-year term.

The MST-led protest called on the Workers Party to make good on its campaign promises. Only about 60,000 families per year have received land since the PT came into office, fewer than were settled under the previous administration.

In fact, the social-democratic regime has based its policies on promoting the growth of the capitalist giants that dominate the economy. The Lula administration says it hopes to achieve capitalist stability in this semicolonial nation through an increase in wealth for Brazilian manufacturers and agricultural exporters that will supposedly produce a trickle down of jobs and improved conditions for workers and farmers.

The PT government has so far succeeded in carrying out measures to boost the profit margins of big business without touching off sustained mass popular protests.

“We have no doubt that Lula is our friend,” Marina Dos Santos, an organizer of the MST march, told Reuters. “We don’t want to break with him. We have to change his economic policies.”

In April the MST led a series of land occupations, as they had a year before. Early in the month, Reuters reported, landless workers launched 12 takeovers involving 5,000 families in the state of Pernambuco in the northeast of the country. “The occupations have so far been restricted to abandoned land and on only one occasion did the occupiers withdraw after a group of men with guns turned them off the land,” the news agency said.

Large landholders routinely use such gun thugs to safeguard their vast holdings. In the May 17 protest in Brasilia, PT government forces played a direct role in suppressing the fight for land. Nearly all of Brasilia’s police forces were involved in the attack on the MST demonstration. The cops injured some 30 marchers outside the Congress building.  
 
 
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