by Holly Wren Sapulding

We’ve been in the country for just one week, but by way of some fortunate contacts, we have seen and experienced a lot. In particular we have learned about the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Peasant Movement, or MST), which seeks to create a more dignified and sustainable life for the displaced people of this country.

In Sao Paulo we met with people (unionists and intellectuals mostly) who could give us a little bit of a context for understanding the political and social situation in Brazil, and this led to our being able to go visit an actual MST camp not far from the city. Here, in a project that reminds me of, and is inspired by, the Zapatista autonomous zones, families of rural farm workers (some who have recently come back from the city) are presently fighting for the right to live on, and work the land.

The MST organizes people to know their rights to leave apathy behind. They are deeply influenced by Liberation Theology, and are explicitly non-violent in their tactics. With hoes and sickles they can plant and harvest food for their familles who might otherwise be hungry. Using organic farming techniques, they produce cleaner, healthier food for the masses, which they sell in local markets, not to international distributors. With few exceptions, they do this without "venom," as they call pesticides, and are committed to traditional techniques which allow them to work without expensive heavy equipment for which they would otherwise need loans from the government.

They work to help people to "remember" how to work the land, to grow food both for their own subsistence and for sale, since, as Aranja told us (when asked how it is that so many people seem able to take up farming with some success, it is because "it is in our roots, we just know how to do this." According to Aranja, people only need to be reminded.

The MST is also involved in setting up and running cooperative schools. In addition, they are in the process of building a "national school" in Sao Jose dos Campos (northeast of Sao Paulo) where people from various backgrounds and affinities can come to get a training in both agriculture and politics. It is the only project of its sort in the country, and is coming together as a result of work groups from each state around the country, coming here once a month to help build the school.

The MST began in 1985 as a response to the uneven distribution of land in a country where 46% it is owned by just 1% of the population. The Brazilian constitution, written in 1988, decrees that land must fulfill a "social function," and 80% has to be productive. If no food is being grown on the land, if drugs are in cultivation, if slave labor is being used (as we have been told it still is upon occasion in Brazil); or if the land has been taken illegally from the government, then the people have the explicit right (according to the constitution) to reappropriate the land for settlement. It is under these terms that the MST has managed to acquire land for so many landless peasants in Brazil.

Occupations have been an effective way of obliging the government to enact much needed land reform. In fact, the majority of people in Brazil say they are in favor of land reform. "Occupy! Resist! Produce!" is their cry.

Despite this, since 1997 when it became apparent that the MST was making some progress with their aims, the movement has been increasingly criminalized in the media. When it became clear that the poor were gaining some power through MST strategies for land redistribution, the government made an agreement with the media that only negative stories about the MST would be portrayed. The television and radio are concessions of the state, so there are conditions on what they can broadcast, and these are abided by. Not unlike the mediamonopoly in the U.S., in Brazil, 7 families own all of the media.

We are told of cases in which local MST organizers have been murdered, as were 19 campesinos in the El Dorado massacre several years ago. No one is yet serving time for these killings; the few that were charged were acquitted. Our MST contacts in Sao Jose dos Campos said that it is not just killings, but "mutilations" and "barbarisms" that have befallen some of those in the movement. And yet the Brazilian Minister of Agriculture, known by some as "Raoul the Thief" claims that Brazil has the best land reform in the world.

This is ultimately a matter that stretches beyond Brazil’s borders as much of the land belongs to U.S. corporations. When the owners aren’t foreign, they are at least wealthy and among the powerful elite of the country. In the state of Bahia, for example, one man, a senator, owns fully one half of the state.

Much of the privately held land in this country lies fallow while 4.8 million Brazilians have been expelled from the land and are living around the cities in Favelas, shanty town communities built of refuse and lacking in the most basic human needs such as clean water and appropriate waste disposal.

These must also be some of the same people that we see trawling the city in all kinds of heat, picking through trash in search of items (mainly metal and cardboard) which may be sold for a few Reals. In Sao Paulo, the minimum wage is 108 Reais (pronounced "Hay-eis") which is equivalent to around US$80.00. This is not enough to live on.

These must also be the children whom we hear are shot by police and shopkeepers alike, for begging on the streets of Rio and Sao Paulo.

Much of this information came to us by way of Aranja, a nickname meaning "Spider" or "Spiderman" for an animated, middle aged man with more energy than my two companions and I have, put together. At the end of a long conversation in a local pub know as a "leftist hangout" he says "I cultivate joy. You have to play. When a situation is serious, I am serious. When there needs to be some fun, I make some fun —because we are human beings."

Aranja cooked us dinner that night. Later, a small band of us from the MST office rambled out into the street in an impromptu tour of the neighborhood music schools that were preparing ensembles of samba players for the upcoming Carneval parade in Sao Paulo, for which we have been invited to participate (dressed as international campesinos). Streets were blocked off and chairs were set out for beer drinkers and mothers with young children to sit and listen to the irresistible sound of the drums.

There seems to be a much higher level of organization and coordination among the left here than I have seen at home in the States. Besides having active unions (50% of the "official" workforce is unionized, and there is a general strike being planned for March) there are several established political parties that are left-leaning, and although they fail to really create true and radical change (despite what we had heard about the PT, or Workers Party) they do, in my opinion, contribute to an atmosphere of struggle toward that end. We hear, of course, of corruption and "robbing" the people’s resources and money, and no one we have talked to holds much hope for the system as it exists. This all serves to show us how tragically lacking in options our own political system is.

In any case, when change does come about, it is through social movements that are born of the people’s desire for another alternative , and not by way of the political system which too often sanctions the oppression of the very people it is meant to provide for.

As ever, I see potential for some very positive things amidst all of this activity. And yet, history is too often that of the conquerors (or at least this is what we are taught and come to know), and as a result, there are many moments in which I find myself lacking the vision and perhaps also faith, that other stories will be made and told.