Landless Workers' Movement - Violent Confrontations: The Cardoso Years

Violent Confrontations: The Cardoso Years

In the long history of violent land conflicts in Brazil, the emergence of the MST and its consolidation as the most prominent land reform movement acting in Brazil during the 1990s has led to what has been called a first "wave" of MST-led occupations (1995–1999), and with it the movement's involvement in various episodes of bloody clashes and ensuing conflicting claims, where government authorities, landowners and the MST charge each other for being responsible for the eventual deaths, maimings and property damages.

In a notorious example, during the 1996 incident usually called Eldorado dos Carajás massacre, 19 MST members were gunned down (another 69 wounded) by police while they were blocking a state road in Pará. In 1997 alone, similar confrontations with police and landowners' thugs accounted for two dozen internationally acknowledged deaths.

In 2002, the MST occupied the family business farm of then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the state of Minas Gerais, in a move which was publicly condemned by then Left opposition leader Lula and other preeminent members of the PT Party. The farm was damaged and looted in the occupation. Damage included the destruction of a combine harvester, a tractor and several pieces of furniture. The MST members also drank the entire stock of alcoholic beverages at the farm. Overall, 16 leaders of the MST were charged with theft, vandalism, trespassing, resisting arrest and for holding others in captivity.

In 2005, two police officers who were working under cover in the investigation of cargo truck robberies in the vicinity of an MST stead in the state of Pernambuco were assaulted by criminals, one being shot dead, and another tortured, something that raised suspicions about whether the perpetrators were MST members or not.

Throughout the early 2000s, in addition to the incidents described above and to various episodes of occupying derelict farms and public buildings, the MST occupied functioning facilities owned by large corporations whose activities it considers to be at variance with the principle of the social function of property. On March 8, 2005, the MST invaded a nursery and a research center in Barra do Ribeiro, 56 km from Porto Alegre, both owned by Aracruz Celulose. The MST members held the local guards captive while they proceeded to rip the plants from the ground. MST's president João Pedro Stédile said at the time that MST should oppose not only landowners as such but also agrobusiness, "the project of organization of agriculture by transnational capital allied to capitalist farming" - a model he deems as socially backwards and environmentally harmful. Or, in the words of an anonymous activist: "our struggle is not only to win the land...we are building a new way of life". Such a new trend had been developing since the movement's 2000 national congress, which concerned itself chiefly with the perceived threat offered by transnational corporations (Brazilian or foreign) to both small property in general as well as to Brazilian national food sovereignty, specially in the field of intellectual property. It was this principle that led to the July 2000 MST's attacking of a ship in Recife containing GM maize from Argentina. And indeed, from 2000 on, much of the movement's activism consisted in symbolic acts directed against multinational corporations as "a symbol of the intervention politics of the big monopolies operating in Brazil".

Such a change in strategy could also have corresponded to a perceived shift in government's stances as during the late 1990s and early 2000 various spokespersons for the Cardoso government tended to consider that Brazil had no need for land reform, that small property was non-competitive, unlikely to raise personal incomes in rural areas and therefore a foolhardy alternative to politics that emphasized creation of skilled wage-labor positions, as the expansion of general employment levels would eventually cause the land reform issue to "recede" into the background. The MST's actions where branded by Cardoso as aiming at a throwback to an archaic agrarian past, and therefore at variance with "modernity" - "one of the enabling myths of the neoliberal discourse".

In fact, although Cardoso offered lipservice to agrarian reform in general, he also described the movement as "a threat to democracy". Cardoso also compared the MST's demands for subsidized credit, that had led to the 1998 occupation of various bank premises in the State of Paraná by activists, to someone "who enters a bank as a robber". In a memoir written after his term, Cardoso expressed sympathy for land reform, stating that "were I not President, I would probably out marching with them", but also that "the image of mobs taking over privatly owned farms would chase away investment, both local and foreign". Cardoso, himself, however, never branded the MST as terrorist - a step taken by his Minister of Agricultural Development, who even hypothesized about an invasion of Argentine from the North by the movement as a form of blackmailing the Brazilian government into action. In July 1997, Cardoso' Chief of Military Household (Chefe da Casa Militar, i.a. a general comptroller over all issues regarding the military and police forces as armed civil servants) expressed concern about the participation of MST activists in the then ongoing police officers' strikes, as part of a supposed plot to "destabilize" the military.

As far as concrete measures were concerned, Cardoso's stance towards land reform was divided: at the same time it took steps to accelerate publics acquisitions of land for settlement and increased taxes on unused land, it also forbade public inspection of invaded land - thereby precluding future expropriation - and the disbursment of public funds to people involved in such invasions. Cardoso's chief land reform project, supported by a World Bank US$ 90 million loan, was addressed to individuals who had previous experience in farming and a maximum yearly income of US$ 15,000, and who were granted a loan of up to US$ 40,000 if they could associate with other rural producers in order to buy land from a willingly landholder - a land reform programme that catered primarily for substantial small farmers, as opposed to the MST's traditional constituency, the rural poor. Cardoso's project, Cédula da Terra ("landcard") actually offered also previously landless people the opportunity to buy land - but then, only after a negotiated process in which land would be bought directly from landowners.

In the words of an American scholar, notwithstanding its efforts in actual resettlement, the issue evaded by the Cardoso government was precisely that of contesting the hitherto ruling mode of agricultural development: concentrated, mechanized, latifundia-friendly commodity production - as well as the larger injustices produced by it. In his own words, what Cardoso could not stomach about the MST was what he saw not as a struggle for land reform, but against the capitalist system as such. Therefore the fact that Cardoso's administration tried to set on its feet various "alternative", tamer social movements which were supposed to pressure for land reform on purely negotiated terms, such as the Movement of Landless Producers (Movimento dos Agricultores Sem Terra, or MAST), organized on a local basis in the São Paulo State, around the trade union central Syndical Social Democracy, or SDS.

Opposedly, MST leaders emphasized at the time and since that their practical activity was a response to the existence of a host of destitutes whose prospects of obtaining productive, continuous employment in conventional labor markets was bleak, as admitted even by President Cardoso, who during a 1996 interview, said: "I'm not to say that my government will be of the excluded, for that it cannot be I don't know how many excluded there will be". Around the same time (2002) João Pedro Stedile admitted that in plotting the movement's politics, one had to keep in mind "that there are a great many lumpens in the country areas". - something that in his view should not be held against the working class character of the movement, as a great number of Brazilian rural working class had been "absorbed" into the outer periphery of the urban proletariat.Such a view is shared by some academic authors, who argue for the fact that, behind its avowedly "peasant" character, the MST, as far as class politics is concerned, is mostly a semi proletarian movement, congragating people trying to eke out a living, in the absence of formal wage employment, out of a range of activities across a whole section of the social division of labour.

In a certain way, the MST's activities somewhat filled the void left by the decline of the organized labor movement in the wake of Cardoso's neoliberal policies. Therefore the fact that the movement has taken steps in order to strike alliances with urban based struggles, specially those connected to housing issues. In João Pedro Stedile's words at the time, the concrete struggle for land reform would "unfold" in the countryside, but only to be eventually decided in the city, where "political power for structural change" resides.