Portraits of MST Settlers
Brandford, Sue & Rocha, Jan
I was born in Redentor near Tenente Portela n the north of Rio Grande do Sul state. My father farmed a small Iplot of land_ I was only two and a half when my mother died in chidbirth. My father...
...Then six days later my mother died in the same way...
...Lots of mobilizations and marches...
...On the way to prison in the town of Sobradinho, they pulled them all out of the police van and threatened to throw them into a guily...
...We came to Petrolina 30 years ago, looking for work...
...First of all, his planes sprayed tear gas on the camp...
...they'll lose that...
...Eight years later I finally got married...
...Money got so short that we had to buy food on credit in the local shop...
...Eventually, on March 9, 1989, we occupied the Santa Elmira ranch in the northwest of the state...
...They put revolvers yn their mouths and knives under their nails They strapped off their clothes and put them on anthills There was a priest there-Frei Srgio Gorgen They broke his teeth with a blow to his mouth...
...And then the gunmen tried to take all the children away from their mothers...
...Even now I can't read or write, But I knew how to work the land...
...My older sister caught the fever first...
...Then they took all the men away...
...We never had any money for clothes, for anything So my brother-in-law decided to join the MST Three months later I joined them I was 16 or 17 years old at the time and I loved the camp...
...They treated the men like criminals in the jail, shaving their heads and beating them...
...I've spent so much of my life, looking for land...
...There was huge uproar...
...They accused the men with beards of being priests, the bigger men of being leaders...
...The mothers screamed and wouldn't let go of their children The men grabbed people by the hair, the clothes, anything...
...They lived in black plastic tents when they arrived, but soon they had built proper houses, bought furniture, got electricity We'd been tnere ali those years and we hadn't even got electicityl At first, my brother-in-law got angry...
...My sister and her husband didn't have their own land so they had to rent, They had to give half of their produce to the landowner...
...I went as white as this paper but I survived...
...By chance, I wasn't there that day...
...And she got so cold...
...And then they arrested 30 men, including Frei S&rgio...
...We had to leave the land and look for work...
...I had seven brothers and sisters...
...A lot of them had ribs broken...
...My husband died eleven years ago...
...My father married again after a year When one of my elder sisters was 21 years old, she married and I went to live with her in a nearby town...
...She suddenly had a seizure...
...That's how we got the land for our settlement, Conquista da Fronteira...
...One of my sons came too...
...They're all alive today, thanks be to God...
...They were active in the trade union We were still very poor...
...My husband came from Ceara, so we went back there, It was hard, He didn't have land either...
...from Cutting the Wire:Tne Story of the Landiess Movement in Brazil by Sue Branford and Jan Rocha, I was born in 1907 in Paraiba...
...She went yellow and she died...
...But then in 1932 came the big drought...
...After harvest, we had to pay our debts...
...He said, 'Here we are, killing ourselves with work and paying all that rent...
...She shook and she trembled...
...I remember one year we wanted to buy a chair for the house, but there wasn't enough money left for that...
...My father had a little farm...
...Since then I've been giving with my daughter...
...He kept a few head 1of cattle and we made cheese...
...It was 1986, right at the beginning, that the MST arrived in the region I was only 14 or IS at the time...
...Only me and one of my brothers survived...
...We live from my pension today But when I'm dead...
...And we're going to stay here and get settled on the land...
...It was a wonderful communal experience...
...I was in the liturgy commission and I traveled all over the state- I lost my shyness "But the owner of the estate got an eviction order from the courts and we all had to leave...
...I said, yes, we're going on this [MST) occupation...
...I caught it too...
...We got jobs on farms but we were always traveling from one place to another...
...I looked after the house, washed the clothes, made bread and looked after my nephew And soon there was another child too I went on studying for a while, but it wasn't easy...
...We were living close by an MST settlement...
...My sister had gone to town to have another baby and I was with her...
...She had a violent pain in her head and her neck...
...The state governor, Pedro Simon, had to back down He had to free the men and give land to all the families that had been in Santa Elmira...
...We saw the way tme families progressed...
...I hadn't been to school as a child...
...They made them lie down, they beat them, they trampled on them...
...But I heard all about it...
...So I was stronger than my daughter...
...I was so pleased when the MST appeared...
...The landowner was very angry He got his gunmen together and launched an attack...
...11 all hap- pened quickly, in just two weeks...
...They joined our church...
...We all shared everything...
...We lived well There was abundance in those days...
...The next year it was even worse My brother-in-law had to sell some of his dairy cows to cover the debts...
...And these vagabonds come in and get all this help from the government.' "But after a while, we started making friends with them...
...We had seven children...
...I want to leave my grandchildren something...
...They'd brought a bus to take them to a home...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 5
