The great Brazilian land grab
Powers, Arthur
THE GREAT BRAZILIAN LAND GRAB INTENTIONS THAT DID NOT BRING REFORM ARTHUR POWERS Today we buried another baby. We bury them frequently in Caseara. Babies that will never appear in the infant...
...It was not until later that I began to understand...
...The young girls — thirteen, fourteen — fun off with men...
...Most had possessory rights to their land and had been promised title by the state...
...In the city of Belem alone, thirty thousand girls aged eleven through fifteen earn their living as prostitutes...
...According to government statistics, forty-five thousand rural enterprises control nearly half the land in Brazil (a country the size of the contiguous United States...
...Fifteen-days-old, six months, a year, two years...
...The men get what day work they can on neighboring ranches, or grow a little rice on the dangerous flood lands of the Araguaia River, or cross the river to search for gold in malaria-infested Para...
...Thus Brazil continues to progress, backwards...
...As the people realize that their poverty results from the greed of the wealthy, they experience anger: but more than anger, they express humor about the wealthy (whose greed they see as ridiculous) and pity for them...
...assuming the companies paid market value for the land, or at least the price the farmer asked (to a subsistence farmer who has never had to pay for food or rent, $1000 seems like a fortune), the farmer received enough to support his family for a few months in the city...
...Only after all the papers had been signed did the officials deliver the notices...
...the nearest doctor is 150 miles away...
...Most of these large landholdings are unplanted or underplanted, and many of those that are productive grow cash crops for export, resulting in food shortages and widespread malnutrition...
...A dozen years ago, hundreds of small farmers lived in the area...
...All this in a country which is potentially as rich as the United States, and which presently is the eighth wealthiest nation in the world...
...It was when the people were about to win their suit that Jose' Freire, then State Secretary of Police and still a major figure in the governing party (PMDB), arrived in Caseara in a government plane...
...Most poor families in the area can count one or two dead among their children...
...Ignorant people are easy to keep down...
...Malnutrition is no respecter of persons...
...And we bury another baby every few weeks...
...36 million minors (27 percent of the population) live in extreme poverty, of whom 7 million are completely abandoned and living in the streets...
...With the demise of that government in 1984, the much-needed land reform began to be talked about...
...And the rest...
...It may require violence to oppress people who know their rights...
...An example was the FISET program...
...New knowledge was opened to me...
...some give up and leave their families...
...Land concentration in Brazil has reached unprecedented levels...
...13 million handicapped (10 percent of the population), of whom over half are mentally deficient and two-thirds of whom receive no treatment...
...Relations between rich and poor in the countryside used to be peaceful, they say...
...In the poorest district of town, a few families struggle toward building a base community group...
...In 1985, over two hundred posseiros, rural workers, and supporters (including a priest, two sisters, four lawyers, and fourteen rural union leaders) were killed, most murdered in cold blood by hired gunmen...
...While police and gunmen stood over the men in the police station and made them sign, the court officials stood outside and chatted...
...But it doesn't matter that the mother is a prostitute...
...Thirty families lived on a large area of rich soil...
...President Sarney, who comes from a family of large landowners, established a weak agrarian reform project which set the goal of distributing land to 1.4 million families during a five-year period (this would be a drop in a bucket...
...The people brought suit, supported by a lawyer from the church's Land Pastoral Commission (CPT...
...Cattle raising has the additional advantage that, unlike farmworkers or sharecroppers, cows do not try to assert their legal rights...
...Dead babies, sick and crippled children, desperate poverty: all were part of being an "underdeveloped" nation (for the people, they were ARTHUR POWERS is a graduate of Harvard Law School and served with the Peace Corps in Brazil from 1969 to 1973...
...Twenty miles outside of town, the last remainingposseiros in the district have formed a base community group...
...One woman can count fourteen...
...The bars thrive, the prostitutes ply their trade...
...These were good programs and had some results — good enough so that the Peace Corps was eventually asked to leave Brazil...
...The most visible reaction to the proposed land reform was the formation of the UDR — Uniao Democratica Ruralista — a right-wing group of large landowners opposed to agrarian reform...
...After that, the former farmer, without trade skills and in an overburdened job market, ended up unemployed in the slums...
...In 1985, he, his wife, and two daughters became Franciscan lay missioners...
...Most of the handful of people at the funeral were prostitutes — girls, lost and looking for a way to survive...
...It was perpetuated by laws and policies which, partly through poor planning, partly through manipulation by wealthy and powerful interests, functioned so that the rich grew richer, the poor poorer...
...Wealthy interests started the process of grilhagem — getting people off the land through pressure, fraud, threats, violence...
...Then land became more valuable...
...Today the mother sat on the ground outside a palm leaf thatched shack and wailed with grief, her face buried in her skirt, as a friend stood comfortingly beside her...
...Eighteen years ago, when I first came to Brazil, the rural poor were more compliant...
...For four years my colleagues and I worked with community organization programs, encouraging selfhelp projects...
...If not, they would lose everything...
...even the government admits that 10.6 million families presently need land...
...When small farmers with possessory rights (posseiros) re8 May 1987: 289 sist efforts to push them off their land, or when rural workers with hungry families attempt to raise crops on vacant land (by which means they also become posseiros), large landowners and grilheiros often respond with violence...
...In a twisted way, the wealthy have a point...
...Meanwhile, his land, which formerly produced food for his extended family and a little extra for the local market, was taken out of food production and food shortages began to increase, shortages which remain widespread in Brazil...
...Of every ten children who die in Latin America, five are Brazilians...
...The sick try to scrape up bus passage to Para' where a saintly French woman runs a clinic for the poor...
...Many of my clients stayed at a hotel where one of the women in Brenda's group worked as a chambermaid...
...They paid $100 for a night's lodging...
...Brazilian ecologists were concerned about deforestation, so the government instituted a program under which companies received a tax break for investing in reforestation...
...He told the families they were invaders, they had no rights to the land...
...Some drink a lot...
...she earned about $70 a month — a juxtaposition I found startling, as did my clients when I told them about it...
...The CPT, founded by the Bishops' Conference in 1975, has representatives throughout rural Brazil working with small farmers, posseiros, and farm laborers, informing them of their rights, defending them in court, helping them to organize...
...Out of these groups arise schools, cooperative associations, rural workers' unions, campaigns for rural rights...
...But it is essential to realize that what is occurring here is not fundamentally reform or revolution but transformation: the change is within the group themselves, where justice, love, and unity begin to become concrete values...
...For several years a landholding company had been pressuring the people to leave — threatening them with gunmen, burning their crops and houses...
...Many of the wealthy blame the church for rural violence...
...They generally did not work in groups, had little knowledge of their socio-political setting, and did not think of joining together significantly to change their lives...
...Heavily financed by its wealthy members, the UDR purportedly has close ties to groups of private gunmen (such as Soluqdo in Goiania, a firm which hires out former soldiers and police officers as gunmen) and has been accused of smuggling sophisticated weapons into the country...
...See Arthur Powers, "Land and Violence in Brazil," America, April 18, 1987...
...Thus in place of one problem — deforestation — several were created: family displacement, unemployment, urban slum growth, food shortages, soil denutrition...
...The depth of this transformation is shown in the attitude of the people toward their oppressors...
...we have nothing, but we have God...
...As it .is not infrequent for an individual to own or control more than one rural enterprise, actual concentration is probably higher...
...Finally, the company planted trees, but varieties which it could harvest most quickly, such as Pinus Eliotus, which ruin the soil...
...The rich are wayward siblings...
...It is fashionable to blame third-world economic problems on the multinationals, but perhaps not entirely fair to do so...
...They have built a school for their children and are fighting INCRA (the Goia's branch of the National Agrarian Reform office) so as to be able to stay on their land...
...The companies bought rural land 288: Commonweal from subsistence farmers...
...They serve a sub-parish on the Araguaia River in northern Goids...
...With pastoral workers in nearly every little town in Brazil, the church has supported the formation of base community groups where the people pray together, reflect on the Word of God, look at the social reality around them, and act to move that reality closer to the Kingdom of God (there is an intense awareness of that Kingdom), closer to justice and love...
...Virtually none of the killers has been arrested or convicted, even though their identities are widely known...
...nonetheless, as one rural worker remarked, "In the countryside, steers have more rights than people do...
...With minor variations, this story has been repeated in tens of thousands of cases all over Brazil...
...The military government effectively supported large landowners...
...With the parish, they have started an alternative "little school," a headstart program to try to help their kids break out of the cycle of flunking, year after year, in the state school...
...If they signed papers and left the land, they would receive a small indemnification...
...Rich Brazilians were exploiting poor Brazilians long before the multinationals appeared and would probably continue to do so were the multinationals to disappear tomorrow...
...In our little village, two thousand miles from Rio de Janeiro, we bury a baby every several weeks, dead from the effects of malnutrition...
...The women wash clothes in the river, fish, cull what odd jobs they can...
...They have so much, but they don't have God...
...The babies' parents, farming people with no land to farm, are surrounded by thousands of unplanted acres from which they are barred by laws and gunmen...
...The most recent major incident in our district occurred in 1984...
...It is probable that more land was lost by workers in 1986 through grilhagem than was gained through land reform...
...The mother is a prostitute...
...Between 1970 and 1980, per capita production of beans (a staple of the Brazilian diet) decreased by over 30 percent, while per capita production of mandioca decreased by 37 percent...
...When a pastoral worker lightly suggested that it would be nice if a certain corrupt official's airplane fell out of the sky, she was gently reproved by the posseiros whose land that official was trying to take...
...Documented incidents of violence are legion and increasing...
...They habitually deferred to wealthy and middleclass people...
...Throughout the country, small farms have been replaced by relatively inefficient cattle production, but meat shortages continue as landowners hold back cattle from the market in order to raise the price of beef...
...The church has stirred up trouble...
...Eighty-five million Brazilians (65 percent of the population) eat less than the minimum required for sustenance...
...Working with government tax and incentive programs, I realized that the poverty I had seen as a Peace Corps volunteer did not "just happen...
...one source estimates that five thousand individuals may control half the land in the country...
...If they resisted, he would bring truckloads of police with machine guns who would shoot them...
...The landholding company transferred part of its claim to two prominent state politicians...
...the will of God...
...The kids, hungry, play in the streets...
...Meanwhile, the companies made a profit...
...290: Commonweal...
...Similar patterns occurred in the purchase of land for largescale agriculture and cattle-raising, with land concentration increasing considerably during the twenty years of military dictatorship...
...Babies that will never appear in the infant mortality statistics because no one could take two days to travel to the county seat to register them, nor had the money to pay the registration fee...
...in fact, only seven thousand received land, and almost all of these were posseiros who already occupied the areas in question...
...What does it matter...
...And our little village...
...When I first came to Brazil with the Peace Corps in 1969,1 accepted these things much as the people did...
...This is changing, and the primary catalyst of change is the church...
...In 1978 my wife, Brenda (who had also been with the Peace Corps), and I returned to Rio de Janeiro, where I worked as an international lawyer for a large American law firm and she as a community organizer in the slums...
...But the people do act, and the church supports them...
...Not all the wealthy support the UDR, but together with it they have been able to effectively block the government's lukewarm efforts at land reform...
...The president's program called for distributing land to one-hundred-fifty thousand workers during 1986...
...The day the police herded the people into town to sign away their rights, court officials arrived bringing notice that the people had won full rights to their land...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 9
