LATIN AMERICA	JANUARY 19, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 2
	Brazil's Landless Rebels The radical movement Sem Terra has adopted "guerrilla capitalism" in its bid to transform the face of the nation By TIM PADGETT /SARANDI arcos Antonio Celso was just a boy when his family and hundreds of others took a desperate risk that changed the political landscape of Brazil. The group, which amounted to an infinitesimal fraction of the nation's millions of destitute landless farmers, gathered after midnight on Oct. 29, 1985, and illegally invaded 9,700 hectares of plantation land deep in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. The fertile but idle tract was being used for little more than a window view by one of Brazil's great absentee landowners, Bolivar Annoni. Once on the ground, the squatters set up a squalid camp and began planting soybeans and corn. They fended off armed attacks by police and hired gunmen--three peasants were allegedly murdered during the two-year struggle--until the federal government finally granted them title to the land in 1987 for use as an agricultural cooperative (the owner received compensation). Celso and the others began scratching out a meager livelihood. Even if they cheered for the underdogs, most Brazilians expected the radical venture to fail. They're still waiting for that to happen. The Novo Sarandi Cooperative is expected to gross $12 million this year for its 1,432 members. Celso, 26, is now the farm quality-control director; Novo Sarandi needs one because its vegetable, dairy and meat products are marketed to multinationals like Italy's Parmalat and Canada's Ceval, which deliver them throughout Brazil. The co-op also sells 10,000 kilos of smartly packaged herbal tea each month to urban Brazilians who once considered Celso's family to be communists. And families that once faced starvation on $50 a month now earn close to 10 times that amount and run their own credit union to boot. Che Guevara posters still decorate the walls at Novo Sarandi, but they are mere decor. The paperwork that matters is the profit-and-loss statements that are strewn on co-op desks. "Che is a symbol of resistance for us, but the best revolutions aren't carried out with guns," says Celso. "People see that we have money. Now we get invited to public festivities." Novo Sarandi is the advance guard of something extraordinary in Latin America: a leftist revolution that seems to work. Its shock troops are the members of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), better known by its Portuguese nickname, Sem Terra (Landless). Novo Sarandi was the first of hundreds of land takeovers orchestrated by Sem Terra across Brazil over the past 12 years, usually involving clashes with police and landowners. Such confrontations are still the organization's trademark, as it has swelled to some 500,000 adherents, making it the largest popular movement in South America. But Sem Terra has become much more than a combative juggernaut. "We aim to change Brazil into a great Novo Sarandi," Sem Terra's co-founder, Joao Pedro Stedile, told TIME. "We're a symbolic force that shows Brazilian society that it's possible to change." That force could be called "guerrilla capitalism." Stridently socialist in its public pronouncements, Sem Terra has also become a force for corporate entrepreneurship. Sem Terra factories, most of them small cooperative ventures, pump out brand-name products as diverse as rum and blue jeans. The movement's agricultural ventures are turning swaths of once unproductive soil into money spinners linked with foreign and domestic business enterprises. Says political analyst Bolivar Lamounier of Sao Paulo's prestigious Institute for Political and Economic Studies: "This movement uses violent rhetoric and tactics but implements commonsense solutions that until now have only been talked about in this country." In the process of its evolution, MST has acquired a high degree of marketing savvy that has helped it turn the issue of land reform into the most urgent debate in Brazil. And in the surest sign that its cause has gathered momentum, Sem Terra has been able to harness the local equivalent of Hollywood glitz: television stars, samba singers and other members of the glitterati trip over one another to support landless peasants. The movement has drawn fire from President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who often criticizes MST for its extralegal tactics and what he calls its outdated "opposition to the capitalist system"--including his inflation-busting, free-market reforms, which are enormously popular with most Brazilians. But top aides concede privately that Sem Terra's own popularity has made it possible for Cardoso to achieve more agrarian reform in the past four years than did any other Brazilian government before him. Now, after a decade of grass-roots organizing, Sem Terra is poised to play a more ambitious role--but one less assured of success. Among other things, the movement's leadership wants to organize urban victims like the homeless in the same way it has organized the rural peasantry, turn to new targets for popular takeovers, aid other struggling land-reform movements in Latin America and even start up ecotourism ventures on the territory it has wrested under its control. On the electoral front, Sem Terra intends to test its strength against Cardoso by mobilizing support behind Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party in next October's presidential race. The future, in short, promises confrontation and mobilization on an unprecedented scale. Already critics like Roosevelt Roque dos Santos, head of Brazil's militant landowners group, the Democratic Ruralist Union (U.D.R.), have charged that the movement "doesn't want agrarian reform as much as it wants power." Even leftist pol Lula recently criticized Sem Terra leader Stedile for using radical rhetoric "that makes sense for a social movement but not for a political party." But Sem Terra is still riding a big wave of popular sympathy. The main reason is that Brazil may be the most unjust country in the world in terms of the gap between its small, rich elite and its poor rural masses. Ever since a handful of privateering "captains" were granted chunks of territory the size of small nations after the Portuguese conquest, Brazil has suffered from radically skewed land distribution. Today less than 3% of the population holds nearly two-thirds of the nation's half a billion arable hectares. Some 4.8 million Brazilian rural families--roughly 25 million people--eke out a meager existence as temporary laborers or slash-and-burn farmers in the interior. At the same time, more than 60% of that land is unplanted--used, if at all, for ranching or tax write-offs. Landless rural workers suffer under conditions of appalling poverty and, often, of cruelty at the hands of local landlords and labor bosses. "Many of them don't experience animal rights, let alone human rights," argues Sem Terra's charismatic co-leader, Gilmar Mauro, 30. Those problems have been the subject of reformist anguish for centuries, and in fact, Sem Terra is a spin-off of the Roman Catholic Church's efforts in the 1960s and '70s to tackle the problem. When many of Brazil's priests became preoccupied with the leftist dogma of liberation theology, more pragmatic young Catholics formed MST in 1984. Among them were Stedile, 44, an agrarian economist who is considered the brains behind the Sao Paulo-based movement. He was joined by fiery Jose Rainha, 37, a land-invasion commander whose conviction last June for the 1989 murder of a landowner and his bodyguard is being appealed.They and Mauro are most responsible for forming what Bernardo Fernandes, a geography professor at the State University of Sao Paulo, calls "the most organized movement in Brazil." Sem Terra is also one of the most unorthodox, demanding a high degree of self-reliance from its members. Landless farmers who want to take part in Sem Terra land invasions are expected to ante up for necessities: food, transportation, tarpaulins for encampments. "If MST paid for everything, what do you think would happen when the first problem arose?" asks Stedile. "They'd say, 'You brought me here, you solve it.' " The commitment to personal investments by its followers is a major reason why MST land takeovers prove to be tenacious. Sem Terra has successfully settled 200,000 landless families on 7 million hectares of forcibly sequestered land. More than 50,000 other families are currently camped outside idle plantations around Brazil, waiting their turn. Chances are usually high that it won't be peaceful when their turn comes. Bloody clashes between MST squatters and police are regular fare on Brazil's nightly newscasts. The Catholic church estimates that almost 1,000 land-related killings have taken place since 1985. One of the most notorious is known as the Eldorado dos Carajas massacre of April 1996, when 153 state troopers gunned down 19 squatters in the northern state of Para. (Trials for the cops are pending.) Landowners point to Rainha's murder conviction as proof that the peasants are no more than criminals themselves. But the rate of bloodshed is starting to slow down. So far this year, MST has invaded two ranches and a bankrupt sugar mill without incident. In a recent poll by the Sao Paulo firm IBOPE, 85% of Brazilians said they back the invasions so long as they're nonviolent. They may not feel the same way about Sem Terra's next planned target: government-owned banks. MST leaders say occupation of the institutions is the only way to get Brazil's sclerotic financial bureaucracy to free up promised government funds for agricultural projects. Last month MST militants armed with spades and scythes stormed a branch of the Banco do Brasil in the remote southern town of Teodoro Sampaio, demanding the release of $3.5 million in funds. The bank had to close its doors a week before Christmas, which angered many residents. "This is one reason why people have strong reservations about Sem Terra's long-term sustainability," says an analyst at the World Bank, which is involved in a $120 million pilot land-redistribution program with Cardoso's government. Nonetheless, Sem Terra's approval rating remains high for now, largely because of the growing business benefits of the land grabs. An array of taxpaying MST enterprises last year produced revenues of at least $50 million, comparable to those of many midsize corporations. At Novo Sarandi, revenues were expected to leap from $8 million to $12 million in 1997. Sem Terra's flagship co-op, Coagri, in southerly Parana state, earns more than $20 million a year; another, Coperjus, in Santa Catarina state, has even begun exporting its Terra Viva brand herb tea to countries like Spain and Germany. Sem Terra also boasts an underground national radio network called Rede Camponesa and runs a rum distillery in northern Bahia state that sells 700 bottles a day and has helped revive the local sugarcane industry. Brand-name jams and pickled vegetables from a Sem Terra factory in Rio Grande do Sul have become so popular that the small plant is set to double production. Stedile attributes Sem Terra's success to its earnest emphasis on education. The movement has set up its own college in the quaint southern town of Veranopolis. Built in 1995 and state certified last year, it has so far graduated 150 students who were recruited from the movement's camps and co-ops. They are expected to return there as teachers and agro-administrators. Despite the college's computer-literate business-studies program, many deride it as a Marx-cum-M.B.A. "school for radicals." Each morning students pledge allegiance beneath red-and-green MST flags, as well as posters listing the qualities of a revolutionary. Students raise their fists as they belt out the movement's anthem: "We will wake up this sleeping nation, we will plant the world." Most of the profits from Sem Terra ventures are re-invested or used to pay peasant workers' salaries. Contributions from the more affluent MST rank and file, in turn, account for about 60% of Sem Terra's more than $20 million estimated annual operating budget. Other money comes from taxes MST levies on its businesses, plus a controversial but voluntary contribution by most Sem Terra farmers: 2% of the federal agriculture loans they receive once they have title to invaded land. The rest is donations by city governments, nongovernmental organizations like churches, and even the Brussels-based European Union, which last year gave $130,000 to the MST legal fund. MST leaders insist, somewhat cagily, that because their state chapters are financially autonomous, they can't offer precise national budget figures. This is despite the fact that all money is supposed to move through the National Association of Agricultural Cooperation, or ANCA, the legal entity created to receive MST funds. That has left the door open for critics like the landowner organizations, which charge that MST leaders illegally funnel federal loan contributions into personal accounts. "They use public money to buy tractors to invade private property," says the U.D.R.'s Roque. Landowners also accuse MST of extorting money guerrilla-style from local governments. But less partisan observers are unconcerned. Says Manoel Cordeiro, an accountant hired by the Lutheran Church to audit Novo Sarandi's use of an $80,000 donation: "They have receipts for everything." MST leaders say that much of the revolutionary rhetoric is motivational window dressing. "Any struggle has to be linked to the heart," says one. And the group's success certainly helps draw sympathy from abroad. Last March, Belgium awarded the movement its King Baudouin Award for development. The paradox is that it would seem Cardoso should be Sem Terra's dream President. Since taking office in 1994, the onetime Marxist sociologist turned neoliberal has placed more than 170,000 landless families on expropriated plots, and plans to settle 300,000 families on the land by the end of his term next Dec. 31. Cardoso last year pushed through an unprecedented tax on idle land. At a land-reform ceremony last month, he declared that "today, the landowner's power is not what it was in the past." For Sem Terra that is not enough. Like many leftists, Stedile & Co. cannot forgive Cardoso, once one of the country's most brilliant socialist thinkers, for turning rightward in the '90s. MST insists that Cardoso's sweeping free-market reforms and privatization of state industry have cost rural peasants more than a million jobs. On the other hand, Sem Terra may fear that Cardoso's land-reform triumphs could make the movement obsolete. That will not happen soon, however. Sitting with her three kids on the porch of their small wooden house in Novo Sarandi--the first home anyone in her family has ever owned--soy farmer Salete Grasselli, 35, recalls life before the 1985 invasion. "There were a dozen of us living in my father-in-law's wooden shack, always worried we'd have to leave and work somewhere else." The risk they took 13 years ago, she insists, "was better than dying of hunger." Whether their new life is communist, capitalist or a strange mix of both doesn't matter to her. What she knows is that she now owns a little piece of the Brazilian dream. --With reporting by Jack Epstein/Veranopolis and Sarandi SEM TERRA, INC. WHERE SEM TERRA'S MONEY GOES Precise figures are hard to come by, but Sem Terra is estimated to have an annual nationwide budget of more than $120 million, all channeled through ANCA (National Association of Agriculture Cooperation), its legal entity. In 1996, for example, the money went to finance 167 land invasions, publish newspapers and pay for travel, education benefits and salaries for some 800 activists WHERE THE MONEY COMES FROM --80% Each encampment, settlement and cooperative family makes varying contributions, mostly from its MST-generated income. Meanwhile, most MST families that receive a government Agrarian Reform Credit Program loan to work newly settled land voluntarily hand 2% of that loan over to MST coffers, and most MST cooperatives and businesses pay varying fees from their profits --15% Contributions are received from the Roman Catholic Church-sponsored Pastoral Land Commission, local churches, city governments, political parties and unions, as well as proceeds from merchandising such items as caps, T shirts and celebrity productions, including CDs and photo books --5% Donations come from other nongovernmental organizations, mostly international religious groups and the European Union, for education projects and legal fees MST'S ENTERPRISES They include radio stations, a blue-jeans factory, a distillery, credit unions, Sem Terra food products (such as tea, dairy and meat), a monthly newspaper, a glossy magazine, a rural-tourism agency and miscellaneous products: MST caps, T shirts, agenda books, calendars, posters and key chains. MST also has its own Internet home page (http://www.sanet.com.br/~semterra)
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