Landless Workers' Movement - Historical Antecedents (up To The Enactment of The Brazilian 1988 Constitution)

Historical Antecedents (up To The Enactment of The Brazilian 1988 Constitution)

The MST appeared late in the already long history of the Brazilian land question, which had already been hotly debated (as well as actually fought) into the framework of previous Brazilian politics, especially amid the Left, who generally agreed to think of it as part of a late process of Bourgeois Revolution. The novelty at the MST's emergence resided in its from the start playing the role of taking unto itself the task of achieving land reform on its own, "breaking dependent relations with parties, governments, and other institutions", at the same time dealing with the struggle for the land in purely political - instead of traditional and messianic - terms.

The first statute that regulated landed property in independent Brazil was the Landed Property Act (Lei de Terras) or Law number 601, enacted on September 18, 1850. Being drafted in a process of transition from a colonial administration based on Portuguese feudal law - in which property depended on both Crown's grants (sesmarias) and primogeniture (morgadio) - to a national bourgeois independent Brazilian state, the law established that the standard mode for acquiring landed property was to be by means of a money purchase - either from the State, or for a previous private owner. This strongly limited opportunities to exercise squatter's right, therefore favouring the historical concentration of landed property that became one of the hallmarks of modern Brazilian social history (see ). Historically, the Lei de Terras followed an already existing tendency from colonial times in favour of large landholdings by means of mammooth land grants to well-placed people, usually worked by means of slave labour.

In capitalist terms, the continuation of such a policy favoured economies of scale by means of land concentration, at the same time creating serious difficulties for small planters and peasants to have access to the land in order to practice subsistence agriculture as well as small-scale farming.

Since concentration of landed property was tied to the development of a capitalist Brazilian economy, opposition to the existing property structure by insurrectional means had, during the 19th and early 20th century, the character of a vindication of older property forms. This happened mostly by means of revitalizing ideologies centered on a fabled, millenarian return an earlier, pre-bourgeois social order, as was the case in the 1890s Canudos War and the 1910s Contestado War. Also, throughout the later Republican history of Brazil, there were various additional episodes of plain peasant resistance to evictions and land-grabbing by powerful ranchers (Teófilo Otoni, Minas Gerais, in 1948; Porecatu, Paraná, in 1951; South-west Paraná, in 1957; Trombas, Goiás, 1952–1958). But these were mostly local affairs that were repressed or settled according to local conditions and didn't give rise to an alternative ideology to "modernizing" agrobusiness.

Conversely, all later attempts at land reform by legal means, starting with the 1960s organization of peasant leagues (Ligas Camponesas) in Northeastern Brazil which opposed mostly eviction of peasants from rented plots and transformation of plantations into cattle ranches, would be nationally directed by a tendency to counter the existing landed property structure by means of a more rational appeal to the allegedly social function of property. Nowadays, it is argued that undeniable development of a highly dynamic and economically well developed agricultural business was furthered at the price of extensive social exclusion of the rural poor. According to MST's ideologues, the allgedly efficiency gained by this arrangement was by no means general, as since 1850 Brazilian landed property management was tied to the particular interests of a single class - the rural bourgeoisie. Although the MST explains its actions directly in socio-economic terms, it still points to Canudos (and its allegedly millenarism) as a legitimizing episode, a way to justify its existence in an historical perspective, as well as a means to develop a powerful mystique of its own.

As much of the driving force at the early organizing of the MST came from Catholic base communities, much of the MST ideology and actual practice are rooted on the principle, taken from the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, that private property should serve a social function - a principle developed during the 19th century, and made into Catholic official doctrine since Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum encyclical; on the eve of the 1964 military coup, that was the principle evoked by President João Goulart in his famous "Central rally" (a mammoth rally held in Rio de Janeiro, near to the city's greatest railroad station, where the president made a speech offering a blueprint for various political and social reforms) when proposing the expropriation of estates of more than 600 hectares in area situated at the vicinity of federal facilities (roads, railroads and reservatoirs as well as sanitation works)- a move that triggered the strong conservative resistance leading to Goulart's downfall. Nevertheless, this same principle would be formally acknowledged by the Brazilian Catholic hierarchy in 1980, when the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) would issue a document - Church and Land Problems - recognizing and pleading for public acknowledgement of communal rights to the land.

In Brazilian constitutional history, land reform – understood in terms of public management of natural resources - was first explicitly mentioned as a guiding principle for government action in the text of the Constitution of 1967 (Article 157, III), which wanted to institutionalize a political authoritarian consensus in the wake of the 1964 coup. It was the intention of the military dictatorship to use land reform as a policy tool in order to develop a layer of conservative small farmers as a buffer between latifundia owners and the rural proletariat. Therefore the fact that in 1969, during the most repressive phase of the military dictatorship, the 1967 constitutional text was amended by a decree (ato institucional) of the military junta that held interim power during the last illness of the military President Arthur da Costa e Silva, in order to authorize government compensation for land expropriated for purposes of land reform to be made in government bonds, instead of cash, as had been formerly the only legally admitted practice (Art.157, § 1º, as amended by Institucional Act no.9, 1969).

Following the same principles, the present Brazilian 1988 constitution also requires that land serve a social function. (Article 5, XXIII.) As such, the constitution requires the Brazilian government to "expropriate for the purpose of agrarian reform, rural property that is not performing its social function." (Article 184)

According to Article 186 of the constitution, the social function is performed when rural property simultaneously meets the following requirements:

• Rational and adequate use.
• Adequate use of available natural resources and preservation of the environment.
• Compliance with the provisions which regulate labor relations.
• Exploitation which favors the well-being of the owners and workers.

Since such requirements are vague and not objectively defined, however, the acceptance of the "social interest" principle for land reform into the Constitution was seen as a mixed blessing. Notwithstanding the fact that the "social interest" principle was accepted in general, it had to cope with landowners' lobbying, organized since 1985 through the landowners' organization named União Democrática Ruralista (Democratic Union of Rural People, or UDR for short). UDR's rise and organization paralleled that of the MST, and the organization, even after avowedly self-dissolving in the early 1990s, is believed to still exist in the form of informal regional ties between landowners. UDR lobbying over the constitutional text is believed to have watered down the "social interest" principle as far as concrete enforcement was at stake.

In the absence of a clear commitment of the government to land reform as a policy goal, concrete proceedings for land reform are left to the initiative of the social movements concerned, thorough legal procedures that are onerous and time consuming. Therefore the incentive for all parts concerned to resort to more "informal" means: "while the large landowners try to evacuate squatters from their land, squatters might use violence to force institutional intervention favoring them with the land expropriation afterwards violence is mandatory for both sides to achieve their goals".Something that raises controversies about the dubious legality of the MST's actions, as the movement tries to ensure social justice by itself.

The MST identifies what it believes to be unproductive rural land that does not meet its social function and occupies it, through a strategy of continuous and massive occupations throughout the entire national territory, afterwards moving to ascertain the legality of the occupations. The MST is represented in these activities by public interest legal counsel, including their own lawyers, sons and daughters of MST families, as well as organizations such as Terra de Direitos, a human rights organization of civil society co-founded by Darci Frigo, the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award Laureate. The courts might eventually issue a warrant requiring the occupiers' families to leave, or to refuse the landowners' request and allow the families to stay and engage provisionally in subsistence farming until the federal agency responsible for agrarian reform, Brazil's National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian reform (INCRA), is able to determine if the occupied property is, indeed, unproductive. The MST's legal activity bases itself on the idea that, since property rights are in a continuous process of social construction, engaging in litigation and trying to striking sympathies among members of the judiciary are essential to the legitimacy of the movement and to have its claims for citizenship granted. Traditionally, Brazilian courts tend to side with the landowners and charge MST members with offences quoted by some as "frivolous and bizarre"; for instance, in the particular case of a 2004 land occupation in Pernambuco, a judge issued an order of arrest for various MST members by describing them as highly dangerous criminals. Nevertheless, there are also many cases of individual judges who have shown themselves sympathetic to the movement. Brazilian higher courts have usually regarded the MST with reserve: in February 2009, for instance, the then President of the Brazilian Supreme Court, Gilmar Mendes, declared the MST to engage in "illicit" activities, opposed granting of public monies to it, and supported an "adequate" judicial response towards land occupation.