Landless Workers' Movement - Present General Situation

Present General Situation

Although the MST wholeheartedly declared support for the candicacy of Dilma Roussef to the Presidency, her declarations after being elected offered the movement very qualified support: in a declaration on national broadcast in November 2010, she declared the land reform issue to be a question "of human rights", i.e., a purely humanitarian one. Dilma's previous record as Chief of Staff to the Presidency was one of support for economic growth targets in variance with ecological as well as land reform concerns. And actually, it was Dilma herself who, in a radio interview before her election, repeated the old conservative hope that economic growth in general could act so as to make the poignancy of Brazilian land issues recede into oblivion: "What we are doing is doing away with the real basis for the instabilities of the landless. They are losing reasons to fight".

Nevertheless, the process of concentration of landed property in Brazil continues unabated: in 2006, according to the latest landed property census, the Gini index of land concentration stood at 0.854, while at the beginning of military regime, in 1967, it was at 0.836- meaning by that that land concentration actually increased. The fact that current Brazilian economic policy - specially as far as foreign exchange is concerned - banks on the existence of trade surpluses generated by the agro-export sector means that "the correlation of forces moves against agrarian reform" as a government policy. Also, with the resumption of sustained general economic growth rates during the Lula years, social demand for land reform -especially on the part of informal and/or underemployed urban workers that form most of the movements' later levies might have been greatly diminished. In a recent interview the member of the MST national caucus Joaquim Pinheiro declared that the recent increase in Welfare spending and employment levels had a "sobering" influence in Brazilian agrarian activism, but declared himself for government spending in social programs, adding the proviso that the MST feared for people to become "hostages" to such programs. Neverthless, as of 2006 there existed, according to the MST itself, 150,000 families in the various movement's encampments, as against 12,805 families as of 1990.

Repression to the movement's activities continues unabated as of today: on 16th. February 2012, 80 families were evicted from an occupation in Alagoas, at a farm rented to a sugarmill and awash in unpaid debts.

On April the 16th. 2012, a group of MST activists invaded and occupied the Brasília HQ building of the Ministry for Agrarian Development, as part of the movement's regular "Red April" campaign, a yearly nation-wide effort at achieving occupations, intended as remembrance of the April 1996 Eldorado dos Carajás Massacre anniversary. Something that prompted Minister Pepe Vargas to declare that ongoing talks between the government and the MST were to be considered as suspended for the duration of the Ministry's HQ occupation. Coming after various expressions of land activists' dissatisfaction with the slowing up of official projects for land reform during the Roussef government (2011 seeing the lowest number of officially settled families in 16 years), the occupation could be seem as parts of the widespread accusations of "selling out" thrown at Ms. Roussef from the Workers' Party support basis.