Brazil Launches Program for Landless Peasants

President Jose Sarney launched a national agrarian reform program Friday aimed at settling millions of landless peasants on family farms.

The controversial program, opposed by armed landowner associations and backed by rural trade unions and Roman Catholic bishops, has been delayed for nearly a year since Sarney first told an assembly of peasant leaders that he would undertake major land reform.

During that year, Catholic activists in a so-called “land pastoral” movement say that more than 150 people have been killed in conflicts over land, mainly involving invasions of property by peasants.

In many areas of Brazil, particularly in the Amazon Basin and in the western colonization lands of Mato Grosso and Rondonia states, land conflicts and invasions of gold and tin mines are viewed as a major security problem.

Priority Issue

In their annual meeting last month, the National Bishops Conference gave top priority to the land issue and sent a message to Sarney urging action.

In the Araguaia River valley of Para state, in the ranch lands of northern Goiaz state and in western Mato Grosso, where land conflicts are widespread, the big landowners have formed armed associations to resist land invasions. A Catholic priest and a nun who helped organize peasant unions are among the victims of rural gunmen. Bishops who promote agrarian reform have received death threats.

After lengthy discussions with state governors, leaders in Congress, and military advisers, Sarney decided to move by stages on agrarian reform. The government wants to avoid radical moves that could have an adverse impact on food production by the big commercial farmers or create political tensions in hundreds of rural communities.

Sarney signed decrees Friday putting into motion seven of the 26 regional plans for agrarian reform that have been prepared by the federal Agrarian Reform and Colonization Institute.

Redistribution to Begin

These projects will begin land expropriations and distribution in states, such as Para, Maranhao, Mato Grosso and Parana, where conflicts have recently erupted into armed violence.

The initial seven regional plans call for settlement of 43,000 families by the middle of next year. The full national program is supposed to create more than 1.2 million new land owners.

The land for the peasants is supposed to come from state-owned properties or from expropriation of privately owned land where production falls below land-use standards set by government agronomists.

Private farmers and ranchers who are fulfilling the production norms are supposed to be exempt from expropriation. This would exclude most of the best land from redistribution.

The agrarian reform institute was created in 1965 and has carried out a major land ownership survey that confirmed titles for about 1 million small and medium farmers.

Delayed Under Military

But, under the military regimes that ruled Brazil until last year, land redistribution was limited to colonization projects in new state-owned lands, particularly in western Rondonia. Privately owned land remained virtually untouched.

Sarney, leader of a center-left political coalition, has said that the main thrust of agrarian reform should be in the northeast region. This nine-state area, subject to chronic drought, is where more than 5 million landless peasants and their families form the most impoverished part of Brazil’s population of 135 million.