Rural Reform in Brazil

...6) rudimentary mechanization, fertilization, and combating of crop diseases...

...In Brazil's Northeast, which has recently figured in international headlines as the most depressed underdeveloped area of its size in the Western world, the wet coastal lands (mata) are largely given over to sugar plantations...

...That is, the pressure for an agrarian reform bill on the national legislature from the short-lived Quadros Government and the regime of Joao Goulart cannot be regarded as simply a direct response to popular demands of this kind...

...True reforms will not be easily won in Brazil—even if there were complete accord on all sides as to the objectives of an agrarian reform and 3 A recent analysis of the significance for Brazil of the gradual emergence of a mass political constituency not subject to the simple manipulation of political parties or individual leaders is Alberto Guerreiro Ramos' A Crise do Poder no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Zahar Editores, 1961...

...We cannot give away land that we are not sure we own," he said...

...And the Church asks you for resignation in the name of Christ...

...According to the 1950 census, in some states more than half of the farm establishments were occupied by persons without legal title to the land...

...At a recent meeting in Rio de Janeiro well attended by Communist and nationalist leaders, intellectuals, students, union officials, and a sizable crowd of sympathizers, Juliao announced the beginning of a national campaign in behalf of a radical agrarian reform...

...5 Even within a single region there are marked variations...

...the latter position it attributed to extremists of right and left...

...1 Gilberto Freyre, Masters and Slaves, tr...

...In few cases are the squatters able to hold on to a plot for more than three years...

...Freyre's statement in the introduction to the first edition of Casa Grande e Senzala in 1933 is as valid today as it was then...

...the best ways to achieve it, the task is formidable and the outcome of many proposed measures uncertain...

...Each represents different problems of work organization and land tenure, different problems of soil technology and equipment, different requirements with respect to credit facilities, with respect to the development of markets, storage and distribution systems, and the growth of subsistence crops to supplement earnings from cash crops...

...Actually, most of such public lands are poor, inaccessible, and remote from markets and would require massive investment to colonize and develop...

...They were cordially received in the main meeting room by the newly appointed head of the agency...

...of aristocratic, individualistic, and democratizing elements...

...What democracy is this that is a cold spectator of your assassination, that sees your blood soak the land you conquered with your axe and does not come to your aid...

...This cannot be explained simply as mass apathy or fatalism, or as the incapacity of the exploited to mobilize themselves for the defense of group interests...

...You are and will be...

...Possibly, 7 Francisco Juliao, "A Alforria do Campones," 0 Semandrio (No...

...One of these men, Pompeu Accioly Borges, has served on every recent legislative and executive body designated to study the question as well as on the National Economic Commission's special committee on agrarian reform...

...this attitude is widespread, has borne up well under counter political pressures, is more than a reluctant or grudging concession to mass demands, and is supported by influential sectors of society...

...And you die of hunger...

...The situation of the new Government is precarious enough to make predictions about immediate legislation risky...

...8 The National Conference of Bishops of Brazil has mapped out a program that includes mass education via radio, unionization of rural workers, agrarian reform, and the elaboration of social legislation adapted to the rural milieu...

...Characteristically, Quadros when president announced his support of the Joffily project without waiting for the conclusions of a commission he had himself set up to study the problem...

...the sexual bonds between casa and senzala were at once an expression of and the basis for a more generalized and genuine affective solidarity between masters and slaves...

...Nevertheless, in no other country in Latin America do such staggering inequalities (material, social, political, racial, and regional) seem so little productive of individual tensions or of intransigent, regimented strife...

...before a general assembly of that organization affirmed that such an inquiry would be no less than a ruthless Inquisition, leading the assembled landholders presumably to visualize themselves under rack and torture defending their property rights...

...But despite a gradual hardening of the lines of conflict and recurrent crises, Brazil remains one of the few countries where it still seems possible to hope realistically for fundamental social changes without major violence...

...in other states, such as Minas Gerais and Parana, some distribution of state lands and colonization is programed while in Pernambuco and Rio there have been isolated expropriations of private properties as solutions to irreconcilable disputes between owners and tenants...

...vival...

...The men concerned had recently formed a farm workers association (Associacao de Lavradores) and for the first time were presenting a collective grievance to an official body...

...If professed interest, the volume of commentary, and the variety of groups outspokenly favoring the idea of agrarian reform were to be taken as signs of Brazil's readiness for a peaceful rural revolution, the country seemed more than set for the plunge by mid-1961...

...There have been more than 200 separate bills touching on agrarian problems presented in the legislature since 1947 with little concrete result beyond the formation of the National Institute for Immigration and Colonization mentioned earlier...

...Most rural Latin Americans have a standard of living no better than that of the Indians who were found on the land by the European colonizers or of the slaves that subsequently were imported into parts of the continent...

...The symposium was held from April 17 to 22, 1961...

...The first edition of this basic work on Brazil appeared in 1933...

...The opinions of the majority of the clergy in Brazil, though generally skirting the issue of expropriation, are liberal...

...6 Manuel Diegues, Jr., Populacdo e Propriedade da Terra no Brasil (Washington, D. C., Uniao Pan Americana, 1959), p. 63...

...The Associacoes are as yet precarious organizations without resources and lacking capable leadership...

...The major reform proposals that have been seriously considered and debated in the legislature place great emphasis on productivity and the rationalization of the use of land while taking account of the need to raise rural levels of living through a variety of measures including the breaking up of existing tenure patterns...

...It is you who clothe us...

...4 Pompeu Accioly Borges, Fundarnentos e Caracteristicas de Uma Reforma Agrdria (1961, mimeo...

...9) the lack of legal protection, security, and opportunities for the person who works the land...

...s Recomendacoes sobre Reforma Agrdria (Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Brasileiro de Acao Democratica, 1961...

...Within the general framework outlined above, there exist both a primitive subsistence agriculture and a capitalist, export-oriented though also technologically low-level, single crop system...

...A more ambitious recent attempt to characterize areas alternatively on the basis of the chief activity, topography, climate, ethnicity, and other cultural factors distinguished ten major regions in Brazil...

...While for some the law was clearly subversive and confiscatory, others felt that it failed to take account of the situation of the large numbers of sharecroppers, tenants and farm workers who would not be touched by the limited expropriations or land distribution that would take place under the law...

...A Jornal do Brasil editorial in late July remarked, "The impression one gets is that the country is ripe for agrarian reform since the conservatives, the Communists, the fidelistas, the clergy, industry, the Brazilian authorities, and the Americans are all demanding it...

...All of them were victorious because they were with you and you with them...

...You give the hired killer to the latifundio...

...Gilberto Freyre, who organized his search for fundamental truths about Brazilian culture and social organization around the big house and the senzala, saw most Brazilians as psychologically only a few steps away from one or another of these symbiotic social worlds.' Whether or not the individual remained directly enmeshed in the extensive survivals of the plantation economy or had moved into more modern sectors of the national society, Freyre affirmed, the background of slavery and the one crop system were a persistent influence on conduct, ideas and morality...

...Some economists seem inclined to abandon the geographical delimitation altogether, preferring to talk about developed, underdeveloped, and undeveloped areas...

...And you live in rags...

...Alternatively, it is argued that ]and distribution is a romantic, socialist scheme, that only private initiative and the supervision by the fazendeiro, who knows how to handle the lazy, unlettered, improvident rural worker, can maintain production...

...The growing presence of the leagues is a new element that for some is a strong argument in favor of decisive, immediate action and for others only conclusive evidence of the greater evils to come if further agitation and socialistic reforms are allowed...

...You were and are...

...In the most recent pronouncement a group of bishops from the area proposed to undertake a campaign to organize rural workers in defense of their liberty...

...In broad outline, Brazil's agrarian situation parallels that of many other Latin American countries...

...Italics in the original.] In its final conclusions the symposium affirmed unequivocally: "It is not possible to rehabilitate rural man in Brazil, that is 65% of the population, without giving him the instrument par excellence which is the ownership of land...

...It is you who kill our hunger...

...8) a minuscule rural per-capita income (on the order of about 30,000 cruzeiros...

...Whether or not Freyre's thesis is a faithful depiction of Brazilian slave society, few persons who know Brazil will deny that the forms of domination elaborated by the groups who have traditionally held power have been singularly effective in mitigating and controlling violent social conflict...

...12 Still there is a consciousness abroad that this may be the last chance for Brazil to move forward democratically, that the new Government cannot capitulate on the reforms promised Brazilians in the last election even though in the October voting most Brazilians put their faith not in the men now in office but in their opponent now gone...

...In July 1961 the writer accompanied a small delegation of squatters, who had been forcibly evicted from what they believed to be government land in Rio State, to the offices of the National Institute for Immigration and Colonization (INIC...

...6 The howl of alarm provoked by a recent reform bill providing for an examination of the legitimacy of land titles for all rural establishments of more than 500 hectares as well as any others of doubtful legality is thus understandable...

...cit., footnote five, p. 6. 11 Article 1 of the legislative project approved by the Special Commission on Agrarian Reform of the Federal Chamber of Deputies in August 1961...

...More was involved here than the sexual exploitation of slave women by white masters...

...Any reform program has to take into account the vastly different needs of each of these forms of land exploitation...

...And the fatherland forgets you...

...Quadros' support of the law was reputedly an element in the growing dissatisfaction with his Government among conservatives, but the bill was nevertheless criticized as incomplete and unrealistic by the left...

...by Samuel Putnam (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1946...

...Brazilians are aware as well that their position as leaders in the continent hinges not only on maintaining an independent position in foreign policy but also on a demonstrated capacity to achieve genuine social progress at home...

...One does not have to go along with any mystique about the Portuguese capacity to absorb and assimilate diverse racial elements into a happy social balance—Angola gives the lie to that theory...

...Brazil is not ever likely to get an agrarian reform bill that defines its objectives as simply and directly as the Cuban decree whose first article opens with the declaration, "The latifundium is forbidden" (Se proscribe el latifundio), but the country also does not face the intransigent resistance to any modifications of agrarian organization that dominant groups in other Latin American countries continue to show...

...In July 1961 the Associac5es de Lavradores in Rio, Guanabara, Minas Gerais, and Espirito Santo claimed some 35,000 members in 43 municipalities...

...There have been repeated statements in favor of rural reform by prelates, especially those from the Northeastern states, where the situation is most desperate...

...Economists, geographers, and anthropologists vie with one another in thinking up useful ways to cut up for analysis the sprawling Brazilian land mass...

...it could hope to win approval for a bill as advanced as the Joffily project and it will find resistance to even a more moderate formula...

...And the hired killer tyrannizes you...

...The enormousness of the problem is magnified by the fact that 63% of the total population depend on agriculture, that two thirds of this rural population are illiterate and therefore have no vote, that only 4% of the rural homes have electricity, and only 1% have running water...

...The fact that the Federal Government and the several states have considerable unoccupied landholdings is put forth as making unnecessary any redistribution of present properties...

...And like Christ and the good St...

...Rumors about contraband in weapons, the circulation of guerrillatraining pamphlets printed in China and Cuba, and the presence of well-known Communists in the ranks of Juliao's collaborators have added to the general alarm...

...There is practically no commercial agriculture among these squatters, who work small plots for subsistence...

...it enumerated a substantial number of situations that would justify expropriation in the social interest and specified that indemnization would be on the basis of declared tax value, provided for temporary as well as permanent expropriation, and proclaimed that the Federal Government would make land grants to all squatters occupying public lands on the date of the passage of the law...

...a latifundiary monoculture even after the abolition of slavery found a means of subsisting in certain parts of the country with a more absorptive and sterilizing effect than under the old regime and with abuses that were still more feudal in character, through the creation of a proletariat under conditions of life less favorable than those of the mass of slaves...

...New hopes were raised by the first message to the Congress from the new Cabinet which initiated Brazil's experiment with parliamentary government, the compromise solution that permitted Joao Goulart, Quadros' legal successor, to take office despite strong military opposition...

...And two who are still alive, Mao Tse-tung of China and Fidel Castro of Cuba...

...That democracy is not yet yours...

...The almost unlimited powers of the plantation senhor that gave free rein to an individualism sometimes bordering on anarchy were presumably tempered and humanized by an amalgam of love, sex, and mutual indulgence that transcended the barriers of class and race...

...Agrarian reform," declared the gathering of specialists in rural problems, "is a set of measures directed immediately toward the elevation and dignification of rural populations, and in the long run toward improving the political, social, and economic level of the Brazilian people...

...it creates the Federal Commission for Agrarian Reform, regulates the distribution of lands and institutes the National Agrarian Fund with the goal of developing production, increasing productivity, and ensuring social stability...

...The tenants, cobnos, and sharecroppers are no better off than the squatters...

...Accioly Borges has been a member of most of the official bodies designated to investigate rural problems and recommend legislation...

...Much of the argument is basically irrelevant since no one has seriously proposed in Brazil an across-the-board expropriation of landholdings above a certain size nor promoted expropriation as in itself a solution...

...12 Several states have moved ahead with local agrarian reform programs in the absence of federal action...

...The liberal Catholic position, spelled out in considerable detail in a recent symposium, recognizes the de facto enslavement of the rural worker in Brazil as a consequence of existing patterns of tenure.9 The group therefore defined agrarian reform as primarily a human problem rather than simply one of economics or productivity...

...11 The Joffily bill was radical enough to be given small chance of successfully getting through the legislature...

...10 The Projeto Joffily, which had been approved in principle by President Janio Quadros and was being debated in the legislature at the time of his unexpected resignation, largely paraphrases the definition just given in its first article, "This law defines expropriation in the social interest and disposes with regard to other means of access to farming and cattle raising...

...3) the large proportion of farm workers who own no land (nearly 10 million of a total of 12 million...

...The problem, of course, is that each of them wants a different agrarian reform...

...To the north in the coastal palm forests carnatiba and babacu cultivation take over...

...Freyre's theme is that the felicitous fusion of races and cultures worked out in Brazil and brought to its highest expression in the 18th- and 19th-century plantation constituted a unique synthesis NOTE: This article is a revision of an article originally published as an American Universities Field Staff Report, and is reprinted here with permission...

...7) semifeudal work relations with the prevalence of sharecropping and unpaid labor...

...It is rather doubtful that 10 Pompeu Accioly Borges, op...

...production, to increase productivity, and to ensure a better distribution of income...

...Francis of Italy, I also stand by your side...

...As they gain strength they attract the attention of politicians, and efforts are being made to consolidate effectively the Associacoes with the Ligas of the Northeast led by the Social ist deputy, Francisco Juliao...

...Even a moderate success in rural reform, at a moment when the problem is at stage center, would enormously strengthen national prestige and give a more solid footing to Brazilian aspirations to leadership within the underdeveloped world community...

...How many rivers of blood will yet run through this immense Brazil before democracy realizes that no grileiro's claim, should prevail over your title which is your own life...

...10) the absence of incentives to new investment as much for the landowner as for the sharecropper or the person renting land...

...The chief instruments of reform in the hands of the states are the distribution of state lands and progressive taxation designed to penalize the proprietors of large, unproductive landholdings...

...There is an element of civility, a capacity and a disposition to work out disputes peaceably in Brazilian political life that one would hardly expect to find in conjunction with such harsh inequities, the generally low cultural level, the sad record of corrupt and irresponsible government, and the vulnerability and rudimentary organization of political institutions...

...5) harmful and outmoded farming techniques with the primitive burning and rotation of lands still prevailing...

...Inland in the semiarid agreste zone cotton growing is combined with cattle raising giving way in the interior sertao to a precarious subsistence agriculture in combination with cattle raising...

...You give to the Church...

...The symposium repeatedly hammered away at the idea that it is the fundamental structure of social relationships in rural areas that needs to be changed...

...They have no form of legal protection or work contract and are entirely at the mercy of employers...

...Accioly Borges defines agrarian reform as "essentially the revision, through diverse procedures, of the juridical and economic relations among those who work and own rural property, with a view to modifying the dominion and use of the land to achieve the development of agricultural 8 Dom Jose Tavora, Archbishop of Tracaju, quoted in the Jornal do Brasil (October 5, 1961...

...The "big house" and the senzala (slave quarters), the social poles of Brazilian plantation society, remain richly symbolic of a past that extends in subtle ways into the present...

...By starting with the premise that any bill that touches on expropriation is aimed at the confiscation and fractioning of private lands into minuscule, unproductive holdings, attention has been drawn away from the concrete question of just how present systems of tenure can be modified to satisfy both productivity objectives and the need to relieve the intolerable situation of the landless farm workers...

...But Christ was a rebel...

...The Associacoes de Lavradores rapidly growing up in Rio and adjacent states are primarily defensive organizations against the arbitrariness of landowners and the rural judicial and police officials whom the landowners often control and against the destructiveness of the hired and independent thugs who roam the countryside...

...The chronic problems of export crops (especially coffee), despite wasteful and inefficient levels of productivity, have been overproduction, the instability and steady decline of export prices, the lag in the expansion of new markets, and increasing competition from abroad...

...The attacks on the bills that attempted to define conditions and measures for the expropriation of private lands have tended to set up a false dichotomy between the desire to break up large and inefficiently exploited concentrations of land and productivity goals...

...4 Brazil's rural problem is not only massive in scale by comparison with other Latin American countries but immensely more complex...

...I speak of liberation," said the spokesman for the group, "because our rural population has endured the drama of two centuries of darkness: one of slave labor and the second of work without the protection of law...

...Brazil may never get a true rural reform until the Ligas or some equivalent organization gains the strength to make effective demands on the parties and the government...

...Considerable effort has thus been spent attempting to prove that expropriation is neither necessary nor useful, that it is probably unconstitutional and certainly immoral, and that whatever the just basis of compensation might be for such expropriation it is beyond the means of the state...

...The Vice President of the Brazilian Rural Confederation speaking 5 Manuel Diegues, Jr., Regioes Culturais do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Educacionais, 1960...

...The overweening importance of coffee and other key export commodities to the national capacity to import multiplies conflicts between special interests and national objectives...

...You give the soldier to defend the fatherland...

...That message reaffirmed the determination of the new Government to carry out the many reforms promised and in part begun by Quadros...

...The current situation with respect to agrarian reform is difficult to understand without some grasp of this special quality in Brazilian political life...

...The country is now in fact in the grips of a great political struggle in which popular groups (o povo) are more than passive or docile spectators.3 There is nevertheless an almost exasperating blandness underlying the public facade of combativity affected by politicians and a bewildering lack of rational connections among apparent interests, organized political groups, and points of view espoused...

...The crisis created by the resignation of President Quadros late in August 1961 cast a cloud over all the projects for basic reforms that had been in discussion in the seven months that he held office...

...Juliao's pronouncements, often couched in an apocalyptic rhetoric, are also not calculated to induce complacence among landowners...

...And for that reason he ascended the cross...

...In Brazil the evocation of the slave society provides more than a dramatic yardstick of the absence of material progress for the nation's rural population...

...4) the small proportion of the farm area actually in cultivation (10% on the average...

...253, April 1961...

...The government is as embarrassed as the private landowners by the reigning confusion regarding titles to land...

...The reform was to be financed by a 3% allotment of the national tax income, a billion-cruzeiro issue of rural bonds, and income from the sale and lease of government and expropriated lands...

...For us," stated the group at another point, "agrarian reform is not essentially a change in the regime of property, but it cannot be achieved without such a change...

...It belongs to the grileiro...

...A great majority of the members are squatters working unoccupied lands whose ownership is dubious...

...Juliao is seeking as well to build up support for the Ligas within the cities...

...As an outcome of a centuries-old history of land-grabbing and seminomadic land-squatting no one knows who owns much of the land in Brazil, including much of that now occupied and in cultivation...

...One noted economist, Pompeu Accioly Borges has summarized it in this fashion: 1) the prevalence of farm properties of vast extention (more than half with an area larger than 500 hectares);* 2) a high and increasing concentration of farm properties (8% of the proprietors control 75% of the area in farm properties...

...A complete reform bill, they asserted, had to regulate contracts for sharecropping, establish ceilings on the rents of rural properties, and extend social legislation covering conditions of work to the thousands of rural wage workers...

...Each of these has a distinctive terrain and climate, differing ratios of land to people, populations that differ in age, ethnic origin, education, a distinct occupational structure and economic organization, sharply variant levels and styles of living...

...But for the moment, there is a fairly generalized disposition to consider possible reforms...

...7 The Ligas and the other incipient mass organizations of rural workers, sharecroppers, and squatters cannot yet be regarded as having a decisive weight in the current drive for basic reforms in the countryside...

...All of these are factors in the avoidance up to the present of more violent internal conflict, but the nation is not inert politically...

...The long-established pattern of squatting and nomadism has made a climate of violence and insecurity a commonplace aspect of rural life in Brazil...

...After complaining that he was new to his job, still unacquainted with his subordinates, and strapped with a laughably inadequate budget, the director went on to observe that one great obstacle to the land distribution and colonization work of his agency was the fact that less than 10% of the land that was theoretically in their control had been legally cleared as to title...

...2 Ibid., p. xlviii...

...Legal problems of tenure are no less complex than the technical problems of organization and land exploitation...

...The Associacoes have been taking on a slightly more political cast as they are being pulled into the orbit of the better-known Ligas Cam ponesas (Rural Leagues) originating in Pernambuco...

...Their chief enemies are the grileiros—rural gangsters who falsely claim title to lands and often in combination with the police extort rent or shares of crops from squatters...

...Nevertheless, the line taken in support of these contentions runs about as follows...

...Sao Paulo has the only full-scale legislation on the problem...

...A seminomadic subsistence agriculture exists throughout the country, relying on simple slash and burn techniques and providing no more than a slender margin of sur * A hectare is about two and a half acres...

...The quotations are from pages xvii, 61, and 294...

...The apprehensions of conservatives focus on the figure of Juliao and his following among farm workers in the explosive Northeast, where he is reputed to have some 100 farm leagues with nearly 40,000 members...

...The fact that the system, long ago shorn of many of those features that once cushioned the harsh exploitativeness of the master-slave relationships, has survived for so long with no material change in the situation of the exploited and with only recent serious signs of restiveness lends weight to Freyre's argument about the enduring influence of traditional social relationships...

...The remarks that follow are excerpted from a recent manifesto by Juliao directed to all who work the land: You and your brothers make up almost all of Brazil...