Organized Squatters Stake Claims on Brazil Land : Latin America: Poverty-stricken families are making grabs for state-owned parcels.

Sebastiao Ponciano, 49, hadn’t had a steady job for four years. When he heard in April that the Movement of Landless Rural Workers was seizing and occupying big ranches in the western tip of Sao Paulo state, he joined the squatters.

Makeshift camps of plastic-covered huts sprang up like mushrooms, sheltering the more than 2,000 families who rushed in to claim a piece of land.

“It was almost the same as when the prospectors learned about gold in the West of the United States,” said Ponciano, a wiry man with long hair and a scraggly mustache.

Brazil is boiling with land fever. Dozens of land invasions are under way across the huge country, from long-settled areas like Sao Paulo state in the south to more recently settled regions in the west and Amazon states in the north.

Sometimes, violence flares. In August, the land issue made headlines when police rushed squatters during a confrontation on a ranch in the Amazon state of Rondonia, killing 10 of them. Early last month, squatters clashed with police in the southern state of Parana, and 23 people were hurt.

So far this year, 22,000 families have seized and occupied land at 59 sites, including a dozen in the Sandovalina area, according to the Brazilian news magazine IstoE. Most of the invasions have been organized by leftist groups that say radical agrarian reform is long overdue in Brazil, where more than 4 million landless peasants live in rural poverty.

Urban residents have also joined the land rush--people like Ponciano, who comes from a provincial city. “Without work in the city, I had to come to the country,” he said. “This is my last hope.”

Ponciano sat in the shade of a beach umbrella outside his hut, one of hundreds made of black plastic sheeting that flank a country highway several miles from Sandovalina. He was dressed for the tropical heat in red shorts and a T-shirt. The T-shirt read: “Wake up, Brazil. The time has come to fight for what is yours.”

Many landowners feel the same way. Some ranchers are said to be preparing armed resistance against invasions.

But in the rolling hills of the Sandovalina area, along the Paranapanema River, the land occupations have been peaceful. The Movement of Landless Rural Workers--called Movement Without Land for short--has been careful to seize only ranches that it says belong to the state of Sao Paulo because of defective titles.

Gilberto de Biasi, a local coordinator of the movement, said ranches without legal land titles occupy nearly a million acres in the “Paranapanema Corner” of the state. He said a 1958 court ruling authorized the state to take possession of 163,000 acres but that the state never did. The movement has been seizing that land.

Many ranchers are willing to leave if the state will compensate them for improvements to the land. In one case, the state already has agreed to pay a rancher $5 million--an amount Biasi called exorbitant.

“It’s a fantastic sum,” he said. “It’s enough to buy two ranches like that in [the state of] Mato Grosso.”

Sao Paulo state Gov. Mario Covas promised movement leaders recently that the state will take over enough land in the Paranapanema River area to settle 2,100 families by mid-1996 if the invasions are halted. The leaders agreed.

“We were always open to agreements,” said Gilmar Mauro, a national coordinator of the movement. He argued that the movement is only helping the government carry out a legal land reform.

But a local judge apparently regards the movement’s leadership as criminals. In October, the judge ordered the arrest of Jose Rainha, its most prominent local leader, and other local coordinators. Police arrested Rainha’s wife, Deolinda Alves de Souza, and another coordinator, while Rainha went into hiding. All were charged with forming a gang to commit crimes.

Movement leaders say the arrests were political, aimed at weakening the organization. They accuse judicial authorities of siding with powerful landowners against rural workers.

Mauro, the national coordinator, said that despite the agreement in the Paranapanema area, the movement will not stop seizing land in other parts of Brazil. “We are a social movement, and so we are going to keep pressuring,” he said. “We are at a high point in the struggle for agrarian reform.”

But he said the movement will try to avoid violent clashes with police or landowners. “We don’t want to provoke anyone,” he said.

Mauro’s movement, with more than 20,000 families, is the largest and most moderate of the three major organizations for landless peasants. It has its origins in Roman Catholic social activism, while the two other groups are openly Marxist-oriented.

Dozens of Brazilians die each year in disputes over land. In a 1995 report, a Catholic group called the Pastoral Land Commission said 49 people were killed in land conflicts in 1991, 35 in 1992, 42 in 1993 and 36 in 1994.

The 10 squatters killed by police Aug. 8 at a ranch called Santa Elina in Rondonia included a 7-year-old girl. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has condemned the killings as a “massacre” and called for “exemplary punishment” of those responsible.

Since then, tension has been high in many areas. Roberto Rodrigues, president of a ranchers federation called the Brazilian Rural Society, said the danger of violence is undeniable. “That’s what part of the landless movement wants,” he said in a telephone interview from Sao Paulo.

Rodrigues said he strongly advises ranchers against reacting violently to land invasions. He said he tells them: “Don’t do anything. Don’t react. If you do, we become the aggressors. We are really the victims. It is the invader who is the aggressor.”

But, he added, some ranchers argue, “Why can’t I defend my property?”

Land reform has long been a touchy subject in this country. Just 18 days after populist President Joao Goulart began expropriating properties for an agrarian reform in 1964, a coup toppled his government and began two decades of right-wing military rule.

But the military now seems to accept land redistribution. “The army supports the government in agrarian reform,” Gen. Luciano Casales, the regional commander in the capital, Brasilia, assured reporters recently.

The administration of Cardoso, a Social Democrat who took office Jan. 1, says it has redistributed land to 18,000 families so far and promises to speed up agrarian reform. But the administration opposes land invasions.

Cardoso said in a recent radio speech that the invasions run the risk of violence. “We are determined to end violence in the countryside,” he said. “We know that many Brazilians depend on land to survive. But land invasions and police violence are only making the problem worse.”

Still, the Movement Without Land knows that invasions have been effective in focusing government attention on the problem. Since the invasions began near Sandovalina in April, this remote area has been making frequent headlines.

A squatter camp called First of April has become famous. Elizio Pereira, who lives in a plastic hut at the camp with his wife, told a visitor how it all started: On April 1, buses and trucks provided by the movement began bringing hundreds of people to a cattle ranch, including Pereira and his wife, Encarnacion Segura.

“That night almost 2,000 people came,” said Pereira, 57. “More came the next day.”

The couple joined the movement after the owner of a farm they had been renting decided to take it back. “I didn’t have another one to rent, and I didn’t have a job in the city,” Pereira said.

He said he expects to be farming his own plot of land by planting season early next year--”God willing. If not, we can’t hold out.”

Paulo Fernando dos Santos, a neighbor, is making his second attempt at homesteading. He had a farm in Rondonia, but he gave it up after suffering 48 malaria attacks.

“I left the land there in exchange for malaria treatment,” Dos Santos said. At 59, he is determined to start over. “I want land to work. I can’t retire, because I never worked as an employee.”

Since the ranch was seized April 1, the number of squatter families has fallen to 350. Others have moved to a camp on a nearby road to wait for other lands.

Sergio Ferreira Lima, 33, has been living in one of the roadside huts with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. They used to live with his parents in Sandovalina, but after his father died in August, his mother could no longer put them up.

Lima was making about $7 a day as a farm laborer. “I couldn’t support my family,” he said. So he joined the Movement Without Land.

“I’m waiting for them to cut out our lot so we can plant,” he said confidently. “The governor is going to come and legalize the lots here.”