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The Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil and the Record of Miguel Rossetto as Minister of Agrarian DevelopmentBy Markus Sokol In October 2002, more than 53 million Brazilians voted for a government of the Workers Party which, as stated in its founding program, calls for, "the guaranteed right to employment; a real minimum wage that responds to the basic needs of the workers and their families; equal wages for equal work; the sliding scale of wages ... ; against the privatization of health care; for free and effective medical services for the whole population ... ; a policy that assures decent housing for all workers, under the control of those same workers; the immediate recognition of the ownership of the lands occupied by the inhabitants of the favelas and the immediate legalization of the irregular housing ... ; free public education at all levels ... ; public transportation that meets the population's needs ... ; massive land reform across the board under workers' control; the fight for the land for those that are working it and for those that have driven from it ... ; against imperialist domination ... ; for respect of the right to self-determination for the peoples and for the solidarity of oppressed peoples." (Action Plan -- National Conference of the PT, May 31 and June 1, 1980, Sao Paulo) These are the policies for which 53 million workers and landless peasants voted in October 2002, thereby putting the old order into question. It is illustrative to review the one year in office of the Lula government through the prism of Miguel Rossetto, one of the main leaders of the Socialist Democracy (DS) current of the PT. Rossetto has been a member of the Lula government as Minister for Agrarian Development, in charge of land reform. What is the situation of the land in Brazil?
At the same time, it is hardly necessary to remind ourselves that:
This tragic situation didn't begin yesterday. But what has Miguel Rossetto, a member of an affiliated organization to the United Secretariat (USec), done to improve this situation? What has he done to combat the influence and role of big landowner Roberto Rodrigues, who is the Minister of Agriculture in the Lula government? Rodrigues is a direct representative of the Brazilian landowning oligarchy and an avowed enemy of agrarian reform. These big landowners have continued, under every circumstance and under each successive government, to oppose land reform by every possible means, including violence and murder. As Minister for Agrarian Development, Rossetto has implemented for over a year a policy that has had the following result: Only 10,000 “landless” peasants families have received a parcel of land on which to make a living and to raise their children, in spite of the fact that the previous government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso had pledged to grant land to 60,000 families in 2003. And that figure itself represents just half the number demanded by the Landless Peasants Movement (MST), which called for 120,000 families to be granted land as a start. Hence, during the first year of the Lula government, less than 10 percent of the settlements that were immediately and urgently required were actually carried out, when during the same period the government allocated 145 million reales to the payment of interest on the foreign debt. Ten thousand families allotted land represents less than that granted by the Cardoso government in 2002. This is the same Cardoso who declared his opposition to “radical land reform” and was thrown out to make room for the Lula government. As you and we both know, the positive solution to the land question in Brazil can be summed up in a single slogan: “Land for the landless.” For the big landowner Minister Rodrigues to refuse to take measures against his fellow big landowners is to be expected. But Rossetto, who claims to be a Trotskyist? There is more. On January 29, four officials of the Ministry of Labor (three labor inspectors and their driver) were murdered savagely near the city of Unai (Minas Gerais). They were carrying out an inspection of the region's big land estates, looking at the working conditions of the bean-pickers. Slave labor has been denounced for years by all the trade union organizations, the Workers Party, the MST and the Pastoral Commission of the Land (CPT). You all know this. According to the initial police investigations, the "most probable hypothesis" is that the crimes were committed by the big landowners and their hired killers. The Brazilian press reports that because of the lack of agrarian reform and the lack of work in the cities, many of the 2,300 workers who were freed from slavery in 2002 (out of the hundreds of thousands of workers reduced to that condition) have since fallen back into the grasp of those vultures, the pro-slavery big landowners. The Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo points out that "during the harvest of green beans, the population of the rural region of Unai increases by 150 percent.” Most of those workers are subjected to conditions of slavery. How is it possible that a minister who claims to be a Trotskyist has failed for so long to pressure the authorities in charge of this situation to carry out an investigation in order to cut out this gangrene? The Brazilian press even reports that one of the murdered officials had for several months been receiving death threats, which he reported to his superiors, but this did not result in any guarantee of protection for him or his work colleagues. The federal union of public employees affiliated to the CUT has underscored the dramatic shortage of staff and resources needed to establish labor rights for all. How is it possible for a government minister, whoever he is, to refuse taking measures to eradicate slave labor in the fields? How is it possible for a minister to accept that the government of which he is a part agrees with the IMF that there should be no delays in the payment of the debt to the bankers in New York? How is it possible that Minister Rossetto did not announce immediately and publicly the expropriation of the lands of those landowners who use slave labor, and then proceed to allocate those lands to the landless peasants? This is unbelievable. Tired of waiting for what would only be the beginning of a land reform process that has not come more than a year after Rossetto became Minister, tens of thousands of landless peasants have invaded and are still invading the big estates belonging to the big landowners, the banks and the multinationals. ... Between January and December 2003, there have been 209 land occupations, compared to 102 under the previous government. In this fight, the landless peasants have since time immemorial paid a heavy price in activists murdered by killers hired by the big landowners, and are continuing to do so. Is it not revolting that in 2003, the year in which Rossetto was Minister, the number of murders of landless workers acutally increased? The figure is 60, according to the Pastoral Land Commission, twice as many as the previous year under Cardoso. And 2004 has begun with more murders: in addition to the officials from the Ministry of Labor, the last few days have witnessed the murder of José Ribamar Pereira, 47 years old, leader of the rural workers' union of Rondon, Pará. Faced with this, what does Minister Rossetto say? “Of the 42 murders carried out last year (official figures that are far lower than those published by the Pastoral Land Commission), many are not the result of conflicts over land.” Rossetto even dares to declare that those figures “are perceived as an increase in the number of conflicts, which is not the case” (quoted in the Brazilian financial newspaper Valor, Feb. 2, 2004). This is exactly the same line given by all the ministers of the right-wing governments up to and including the last one, that of Cardoso. In 2003, under Minister Rossetto, repression was unleashed on José Rainha, one of the main leaders of the MST, and on his wife, Diolinda Alvez de Souza, mother of two children aged 10 and 12, as well as on several dozen other leaders of the MST who like him have been thrown into prison? How it is possible that Minister Rossetto could declare the following, in a situation where the landless peasants are trying desperately to defend themselves against the hired goons of the big landowners: “We will not tolerate any violent demonstrations, regardless of where they come from, either from the landless peasants or from the armed militias of the big landowners” (O Estado, July 4, 2003)? The alliance between Minister Rossetto (and hence the DS current in the PT) and the big landowner Minister Rodrigues not only leads to abandoning the struggle for the demands for which 53 million Brazilians, including millions of landless peasants, brought the current government to power, but even further, it leads to accepting and legitimizing the repression against those who are struggling for those demands. The proof: Last May, the Supreme Federal Tribunal (SFT) issued the following ruling: “By eight votes to two, the STF judges have overturned the expropriation of five fazendas [large estates] in the Sao Gabriel region, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The expropriation ... had been considered the biggest ever carried out in that State. It covered an area of 13,100 hectares” (O Estado, August 15, 2003). The newspaper gave the following comment on this news: “The result of the SFT verdict ... was received with euphoria by the rural landowners and with outrage by the landless peasants.” What did Minister Rossetto reply? “We will respect the ruling of the Tribunal.” This earned him the following satisfied comment from the right-wing newspaper O Estado on August 16: “Rossetto has stated unambiguously that the government will not fight to maintain the expropriations.” One more fact: On October 15, a “national plan for agrarian reform,” drawn up by a commission of the Ministry for Agrarian Development itself, was presented to Minister Rossetto by Plinio de Arruda Sampaio, a leader of the PT’s Agrarian Commission. This plan proposed the distribution of land to one million families over four years. What did Minister Rossetto say and do? He rejected the plan. He had a counter-plan drafted and approved by the government, which proposed reducing to just one-third the land distributions provided for in the Sampaio plan -- that is, 355,000 families to be benefitted over four years instead of one million. And even after so doing, he declared that there would not be enough funds available to make the first 115,000 allocations in 2004! And with good reason: his counter-plan involved the “purchase” of a third of the lands he planned to redistribute. This is an incredible gift for the big landowners and the banks that are monopolizing hundreds of thousands of hectares of land, which they keep uncultivated and unproductive. Plinio de Arruda Sampaio, who opposed this counter-plan, declared: “The decisive question that lay at the heart of the government's plan were the absolute restrictions imposed by the IMF and the international financial community. Our plan was prudent and reasonable. There was nothing radical about it. If our objective is agrarian reform, it is necessary to affirm the nation’s sovereignty and to confront the problem of the primary budget surplus, which has been imposed precisely to guarantee the prompt payment of the debt. The government's plan does not respond to the gravity of the situation in the Brazilian countryside. We consider that Brazil has the means to go forward. The government doesn't!” Clearly, in Brazil, as in every country around the world, improving the living conditions of the working masses in the cities and the countryside is only possible by taking the road of breaking politically with the exploiters and the oppressors who, like Rodrigues, are sitting in government.
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