Brazil’s Farmers Step Up Land Seizures

TRES MARIAS RANCH, Brazil -- On May 12, Gabriel Maciel and more than 1,000 other landless farmers knocked down the barbed-wire fences surrounding Tres Marias ranch in southern Brazil, evicted its owner and claimed the land for themselves.

“This is our land now and no one will take it away from us,” he said a few weeks later as his wife, Remy, cooked rice and beans over a fire by their hut of bamboo stakes and black plastic sheeting.

Less than 50 miles away, gunmen in masks patrol the perimeter of another ranch whose owner vows to fight back if invaded, saying on condition of anonymity: “If they invade my property, they will be met by bullets.”

Maciel and the rancher whose land he took are actors in a potentially explosive drama that pits increasingly restless landless farmers against landowners who are forming armed militias to protect their property.

Such invasions, playing out in the hilly pastureland of southern Brazil, hundreds of miles from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, are nothing new in the world’s fifth-biggest nation. Here, 90% of the land is owned by 20% of the people, while the poorest 40% of the population holds 1%.

But despite the election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as Brazil’s first leftist president and his promise of a new deal for Brazil’s poor, the 103 invasions so far this year equal the total for 2002.

Since its foundation almost 20 years ago, the Landless Rural Workers Movement, better known by its Portuguese initials MST, has resorted to this tactic to pressure governments to distribute unproductive land.

But the bloodless invasion of such a big estate as the 6,175-acre Tres Marias was a “wake-up call” for landowners, said Humberto Sa, who owns a 1,235-acre spread in fertile Parana state.

Etuino Luiz Mendes, one of the MST leaders of the Tres Marias invasion, said the farm was targeted because it was idle and had not produced any soybeans, beans or other crop in five years.

The owner, Maria Faria de Lacerda, is now living in her home in Guarapuava, a small town about 70 miles away, according to ranchers and the MST. She could not be reached for comment.

Under Brazilian law, non-producing property can be seized for agrarian reform purposes. But the government’s latest official survey does not list Tres Marias as unproductive.

Such discrepancies between MST’s data and the government’s are not uncommon, but regardless of who is right, the landowners say they are fed up.

“We are ready for what I am convinced is an imminent conflict,” Sa told Associated Press. “We will not attack, but we are more determined than ever to use our constitutional right to use weapons to defend our land.”

Brazil’s constitution gives landowners the right to bear arms to protect their property against encroachers.

Sitting on the porch of his modest yet comfortable wood-paneled house, Sa said several ranchers are forming militias and he hopes to group them into a nationwide movement called “the Breadbasket of Brazil.”

Although many ranchers keep armed guards on their property, this is the first time that landowners openly acknowledge the existence of militias with weapons.

Meanwhile, at least 60,000 families are camped by roads throughout rural Brazil, waiting to be given land or to occupy a ranch. In Teodoro Sampaio, about 135 miles north of Tres Marias Ranch, the MST has gathered more than 2,000 families in front of properties waiting for the order to invade.

“The danger of a violent confrontation is real,” said Jose Alberto de Freitas Iegas, the federal police official in charge of defusing what he sees as a “powder keg that could blow up any day.”

He said his main task was to prevent “another tragedy like that of 1996,” referring to a clash between police and 2,000 landless peasants in the Amazon town of Eldorado dos Carajas that left 19 farm workers dead and 69 wounded.

This time around, no one has been killed or hurt because “both sides are afraid of each other, like the United States and the former Soviet Union in the days of the Cold War,” Iegas said.

“That’s nonsense,” Sa said. “We have an explosive situation because they are not scared of us, nor are we scared of them.”

He accused the MST of evicting landowners at gunpoint, but Iegas said firearms had not been found on the properties occupied by the movement.

“Large numbers of landless farmers and their tools -- hoes, sickles, scythes and machetes -- are the only weapons we ever use,” said the MST’s Mendes. “That’s how we scared off some ranchers and their gunmen who recently tried to evict us.”

He said groups of armed men occasionally drive on the red dirt roads across the ranch firing in the air and shouting threats and obscenities.

“So far, their bark is worse than their bite,” Mendes said as he adjusted his black beret to keep the sun from his eyes. “But that could change any day and, if it does, we will be ready for them.”

Justifying the occupation of Tres Marias, he said that it was unproductive and that the new occupants are already preparing the rich red soil to start planting soybeans, rice, corn, potatoes and beans when the South American winter ends in late September.

Mendes knows that a court could order their eviction any time, but says no one will leave unless the government gives them other land.

The idea, he said, is to hold out long enough so that the ranch owner will eventually give up and sell the land to the government, which would then parcel it out to the invaders.

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The heat is stifling inside Maria Camelia Martins’ windowless, dirt-floor shack, which she shares with her husband and six children. Their only furnishings are some threadbare mattresses and an old gas stove on which a pot of sugary coffee is brewing.

“It won’t be easy, but I know that once I have my own piece of land, my family and I will be able to survive with some dignity,” she said.

Landowners say they favor land distribution but fear that the MST wants more than agrarian reform.

“Its ultimate goal is the establishment of a socialist regime,” said Marcos Prochet, a leader of the Democratic Ruralist Union, which represents the landowners.

Mendes readily agrees. “Agrarian reform is just the first step toward socialism,” he said.

The wave of land invasions that has swept Brazil abruptly ended a truce between MST and the new president, its longtime sympathizer.

Since Silva was sworn in Jan. 1, expectations have risen, but so have frustrations as promised land reforms fail to materialize, said Prof. Marco Antonio Mitidiero, an agrarian reform expert at the University of Sao Paulo.

“We waited and waited and so far nothing,” said Adelir de Lima, an MST leader in Parana state.

Silva says he needs time to carry out reforms that go beyond land distribution and include infrastructure improvements, technical assistance and farm credits.

“We are morally, politically and ethically committed to agrarian reform ... which is a dream that will come true,” he said in a recent speech.

Since Silva took office, 593,000 acres of unproductive land have been confiscated for redistribution to landless farmers, said Gercino Jose da Silva, the government’s agrarian ombudsman.

He would not say how much more would be seized by the end of the year, when the government expects to have settled 60,000 families on their own plots. So far, 6,000 families have received land.