History




Brazil Brazil

The fifth-largest country in the world, with 150 million inhabitants, Brazil has 8,500,000 square kilometers or 3,287,000 square miles of land. When it was discovered by the Portuguese in 1500 it was left unexplored for some 30 years since neither gold nor silver were found.

However, between 1534 and 1536 John III of Portugal divided Brazil into fifteen 50-league wide strips of land from north to south, beginning from the coast till the imaginary Meridian of Tordesillas agreed upon by Spain and Portugal in 1494. These lands given (not sold) by the King to Portuguese entrepreneuring gentlemen were characteristically hereditary and the donees had absolute rights on their portion of land.

Cabral discovering Brazil Discovery of Brazil

What happened to the estimated 5 million native Brazilian Amerindians who were the real owners of the land? Being next to nothing to the conquerors and other Europeans, they were expelled from their lands, thousands were murdered or enslaved and the survivors (less than 100,000 in 1997) pushed into the hinterland. Needless to say, thousands of Amerindians and negroes died in their struggle for land from where they expected to gain a decent living as freeman.

It seems strange to us today, but in the pre-independence centuries (Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822) all land was considered regal personal property, given by the crown for development to landowners who didn´t pay anything for it and who always held it absolutely and not necessarily for crop-growing and cattle-raising. After 1822 it became legal for small farmers to occupy and cultivate a piece of land for a time and then petition the government for documents of property.

This decentralization of land property was practically impaired some years later. In 1850 the powerful landowners of the coffee plantations passed the Land Law which determined that all land should be sold by auction, payment should be in cash and the money could only be used to transport European labourers to work in their fazendas. Logically, potential but moneyless small landowners could not possess land and the great landowners enlarged furthermore their property. Concentration of land was the rule and the great majority of the people (especially after the 1888 abolition of slavery) had to work miserably on the large plantations and farms without any hope of acquiring a small farm of their own.

In Brazil in 1950, 80% of those dependent on agriculture owned 3% of the land. The other 97% of land was owned by 20% of the agricultural population, 0.6 of which owned over 50% including the best land.

Land Reform A typical camp of peasants striving for their piece of land.
Normally they live in these camps for a year or two.

This monopoly control over land permits these few owners to participate as commercial monopolists on the monopolistic structure of capitalism as a whole. From the 1920s to the 1950s the lands in the south, especially in the state of Paraná and the western portion of the state of São Paulo, which was divided into relatively small homestead properties, were concentrated into large holdings precisely when they were invaded by the capitalist expansion of coffee and the other cash crops.

As a consequence, the standard of living of a large portion of the landed population fell into the train of this development. Concentration of land increased, tenant farmers were transformed into agricultural wage workers and the level of living of the majority declined. This dark situation increased in the 1970s and 1980s when millions of coffee shrubs were cut down and soybean and wheat plantations were introduced instead. Millions of agricultural workers were laid off. They settled in the cities´ shanty towns where work is unavailabe and unemployment is rife.

Peasant Leagues Another typical camp of peasants in the south of Paraná.

As was done throughout Brazilian history, in the late 40s farm workers in the Brazilian north-east began discussing land reform and were getting organized into unions called the peasant leagues. It was in 1956 that the first modern invasion of property by landless farmers took place.

In the Engenho Galilea plantation the day-labourers took possession of the estate and the sugar factory. Armed with guns, knives and sticks, they repulsed an attack by soldiers sent by the authorities. The state of Pernambuco indemnified the owners of the plantation and distributed the land among the workers.

On the official side, the problem of agrarian reform has often been mooted in Brazil, but there has never been even the tentative beginning of a solution. One serious attempt, albeit modest and quite inadequate, was made by the Goulart government (1961-1964). It was planned to take over 9% of the agricultural land and give it to, at most, 150,000 peasants. Although the scheme was aborted by the 1964 military coup, a land statute was passed by the military government in November 1964. By 1968 census-making and surveying necessary for the application of the plan were never completed. Eventually it became a dead letter.

In the late 1970s the incipient redemocratization of Brazil produced contradictory results with a greater concentration of land in the hands of fewer people, the expelling of the poor from the rural areas, the modernization of agriculture, the inability of the towns and cities to cope with the rural exodus, the lack of industrilization in the towns and the sheer poverty of millions of Brazilians. In spite of such misery, the isolated efforts of hundreds of landless peasants living in the southern region of Brazil to have some estates to produce crops were giving results. In 1979 and 1980 the peasants began to put pressure on the great landowners through land occupations undertaken by hundreds of landless peasant families. In January 1984 the leaders of these occupations had their first meeting and the name Landless Peasants´ Movement was adopted for the first time.

Political Map of Brazil

The Constitution of the Republic of Brazil (1988) and the Agrarian Law (1993) state that unproductive estates of over 649 hectares may be taken over by the government and distributed to the landless agricultural workers. The Brazilian Land Atlas of 1996 reveals that 62% of the land is unproductive. The greatest concentration of unproductive land is in the North and Northeast of Brazil with 79% and 69% respectively. Brazil doesn´t lack the necessary land for its agrarian reform. Many unproductive estates may be distributed to its landless peasants.

The struggle to have a piece of land to work on for a decent living has produced rifes and conflicts between the landless peasants, on one hand, and the powerful landowners and the government, on the other. Historically, members of parliament and the senators in Brazil come from the landed gentry and aristocracy. Laws are practically promulgated on their behalf and nearly always "in causa propria", especially with regard to land reform and details regarding property.

Therefore, if one had to obey the present land reform laws in force today, the peasants would continue landless for many decades hereafter and land concentration would increase steadily and unmercilessly.

A family already settled on an acquired piece of land.
The husband is studying agronomy at the Maringá University
to serve the Movement´s Cooperatives.

As a proof, the increasing number of conflicts in the rural areas is astonishing. While in 1991 there were 453 conflicts with 54 murders of peasants, in 1995 the number of conflicts rose to 554 with 41 assassinations. The year 1996 became notorious especially with an increase in assassinations, principally the terrible massacre of 19 landless peasants in Eldorado dos Carajás in the state of Pará on the 17 April 1996.

Dom Jaime Luis Coelho, Archbishop of Maringá, addressing peasants celebrating the acquisition of land for thirty families.

The problem of unproductive land is extremely intriguing. The extreme western part of the state of São Paulo (its area is equivalent to that of the UK), called Pontal do Paranapanema, is about the size of Wales.

These are government lands which were encroached upon in the late 19th century by gunmen and henchmen of big landowners and occupied by them. They fenced "their" property and began scanty (not even pen-confined) cattle-raising. The inheritors of these "owners" who never planted coffee shrubs, cotton or corn are now at grips with the Landless Peasants. Millions of dollars were lent by the government to these landowners for area development. The money went into the speculative financial market and it was never returned to the government. It is interesting to know that 38% of the great landowners own the government and the Bank of Brazil billions of dollars which will never be paid.

Much the same happened in the state of Paraná where absentee landowners placed a few cattle on the extensive ranches and employed one or two henchmen. Sometimes not even cash crops were planted, while millions of families went homeless and jobless and plenty was barred off from their reach.