This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil 9780822391074

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This Land Is Ours Now

 Wendy Wolford

This Land Is Ours Now Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil



Duke University Press Durham and London

2010

∫ 2010 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Chaparral by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

 Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables Acknowledgments ix

vii

1

Mobilization within Movements

2

The Making of a Movement in Southern Brazil

3

The mst’s Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism

4

The Making of a Movement in Northeastern Brazil

5

Moral Economies of Sugarcane and Social Mobilization

6

Going Bananas: Producing for Market, State, and Movement Conclusion

Notes 227 Bibliography 245 Index 275

211

1 36 70

112 135 166

 List of Illustrations and Tables

illustrations Map of field sites in Pernambuco and Santa Catarina 15 1. mst mobilization in Água Preta 3 2. mst mobilization reaches the municipal council building 3 3. mst settlers enter the council building 4 4. The police arrive to disperse the mobilization 4 5. Crossing the river by raft 29 6. mst meeting with stage set for the mistica 89 7. Workers of the World Unite 89 8. mst National March 104 9. Sugarcane planted on the hills outside Água Preta 114 10. A plantation community 119 11. Row houses for sugarcane workers on the plantation 120 12. A small farm in the sugarcane plantation 137 13. mst settler in front of his house in Água Preta 138 14. mst meeting with demonstration 169 tables 1. Immigrants to Brazil, by Nationality, 1872–1899 40 2. Land Expropriated, by Region, 1970–1984 46 3. Settlements Created between 1927 and 1997 46 4. Land Tenure in Campos Novos, 1999 53 5. Settlers’ Initial Contacts with the mst in Campos Novos 57 6. The mst’s Increasingly Universal Approach, 1990–1999 96 7. The Changing Focus of the mst, 1990–1999 98 8. Changing Political Emphases in the mst, 1990–1999 100 9. Urban Population as a Percentage of Total Population, 1950–1980 122 10. Fuel Alcohol Production in Brazil, 1975–1982 126 11. Settlers’ Initial Contacts with the mst in Água Preta 140 12. Family Beneficiaries of Agrarian Reform, by Period and Region, 1964– 2002 212 13. Annual Budgets for the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, 1997–2005 213

 Acknowledgments

This book has been so long in the making that it has racked up an unusual number of debts. My most significant and immediate debts are to the members of the Landless Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or mst)—both those who are featured in the book and those who are not but who spent countless hours with me, driving to meetings, debating the value of collective production, introducing me to friends, and eating watermelon on hot days. My research would not have been possible without the warm welcome and generosity of mst leaders and members in both Santa Caterina and Pernambuco. Because I have tried to avoid using real names throughout the book, I will not thank individual mst members here but I feel honored to have been witness to the work being done on land reform settlements throughout Brazil. mst members put everything—often even their lives—on the line when they join the movement, and I hope they will not think that this book does them a disservice. In both Campos Novos and Água Preta, where I did most of my fieldwork, I met people who became dear friends, even if they weren’t sure what my research was about. The Michelin sisters, particularly the indomitable Helena, welcomed me into their home in Campos Novos and even found me an Internet connection when no one believed it was possible. Mana was a wonderful friend, and her extended family never got upset when I showed up every weekend for Sunday lunch. In the Northeast of Brazil, I had the luck to meet the Araujo family almost as soon as I showed up in Água Preta. Iara and her children took me in like a sister; I was coddled, scolded, put to work, and teased in fairly equal measure. I spent many, many evenings and weekends with Iara and the rest of the Araujo sisters—Ana, Ednara, Ivania, and Edvania. Doing my Ph.D. at Berkeley, I had the privilege of working with an inspirational group of scholars. I am still learning from my dissertation advisor, Michael Watts, and being reminded how much I learned from

x Acknowledgments Gillian Hart. Michael Johns and Peter Evans were exemplary committee members, providing just the right balance of criticism and interest. I was also positively challenged by working with Alain de Janvry, Linda Lewin, David Goodman, and Laura Enriquez. The friends I made while at Berkeley helped me through graduate school and are now some of the finest colleagues a person could ask for: Julie Guthman, James McCarthy, Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Sharad Chari, Diana Davis, Tegan Churcher, Jessica Teisch, Rebecca Dolhinow, Amy Ross, and Elizabeth Oglesby. I would also like to thank the Aspen Group for its support of my work. In 2001, I moved to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and formed a writing group with Andrew Perrin, Meenu Tewari, and Felicia Mebane, all of whom patiently read my work. My students at Chapel Hill remind me regularly why it is that I love my work. Brenda Baletti is responsible for much of the work coding the articles from the mst’s monthly newspaper. Adrian Wilson, Holly Worthen, and Liz Hennessy all helped with various aspects of the manuscript. In the fifteen years or so since I began working on the mst, I have had many conversations with friends and colleagues about Brazil, about social movements, and about my work. It is perhaps trite—but very true—to say that this book is embedded in a set of social relationships, without which it would not have been worth writing or reading. I met Tamara Benakouche, Valeria Gonçalves, and Peter May in Berkeley, who then made me feel welcome in their homes; they were the perfect guides to university libraries in Rio and Florianópolis, as well as to the beaches and the bars. Andy Baker was my roommate in São Paulo—something I don’t think he has forgiven me for but for which I am very glad. José Eli da Veiga and Ariovaldo Umbelino allowed me to sit in on their graduate seminars at the University of São Paulo, and I still consult my notes from their lectures. In northeastern Brazil, I worked with three people who know everything there is to know about sugarcane and land settlements: Marilda Menezes, Ivan Targino, and Emilia Moreira. And I will always remember happily the time I spent traveling around Pernambuco with Angus Wright and Mary Mackey; they are true intellects, activists, and companheiros. At the University of North Carolina, I had the great fortune of meeting Charlie Kurzman early on: he has been an invaluable mentor and friend. And Jan and John French, at the ‘‘other’’ university, are both generous and impressive scholars of Brazil; by their example and collaboration they have pushed me to think more deeply about my own work. I also thank Elisabeth Wood, who forced her graduate students at Yale to read my manuscript and then sent

Acknowledgments xi their comments on. There are many specialists on social movements, rural Brazil, and the mst whose work and collegiality I have benefited from, including Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Jeffrey Rubin, Miguel Carter, Maria Paulilo Ignez, Sergio Periera Leite, Leonilde Medeiros, Gaby Ondetti, Javier Auyero, and John Wilkinson. In 2004–2005, I had the real privilege of being a fellow at the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies. My time there was inspiring—both because I was able to work on my manuscript and because of the incredible intellect and warmth of James Scott. Kay Mansfield helped all of us—my husband, son, and me—get settled in. I was lucky to work with an excellent group of colleagues while at Yale, including Laura Lovett, Lauren Leve, Marilda Menezes, Lei Guong, Stefan Dorondel, Harriet Friedmann, and Karl Zimmerer. Writing this book would not have been possible in a more material sense without generous funding from several different agencies. As a graduate student, I was funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and a Social Science Research Council Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Institute for International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the Institute for the Study of World Politics. In 2003, I received a Junior Faculty Development Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to do additional field research. I would also like to thank Valerie Milholland and G. Neal McTighe, my editors at Duke University Press, for their patience and guidance with this project. Two anonymous reviewers also provided me with helpful feedback. My family is part of this book in many different ways. My now husband and I were engaged shortly before I left to do fieldwork in 1998, and we married soon after I returned. He has been a tireless advocate of this book and me, regardless of whether or not it was warranted. My son came with me in utero to do fieldwork in 2003 and has since returned for more. My friends in Água Preta swear that he is part Brazilian because of how much I ate while there. We have been to many wonderful places in Brazil, but it is not by accident that the child is most at ease when playing in the dirt or swinging in a hammock on a settlement. Some of the arguments and evidence in this book as well as earlier versions of various sections were published previously in the following journals: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Latin American Perspectives, Journal of Agrarian Change, Mobilization, and Qualitative Sociology, as well as in the book To Inherit the Earth (2003). I would like to thank

xii Acknowledgments anonymous reviewers for those publications as well as Javier Auyero, Henry Bernstein, Deborah Martin, and Byron Miller for their constructive editorial advice. I also had the opportunity to present arguments from the book in different student-led workshops, and I would particularly like to thank my colleagues in the dissertation writing workshop at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as David Szanton, Nancy Peluso, and Gillian Hart for their guidance. I also appreciated the chance to meet and talk with the impressive group of graduate students in Philip McMichael’s Social Movement Research Working Group at Cornell University. Finally, I have loved working with and participating in the Social Movement Working Group (smwg) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. smwg —a group of students and faculty, including Arturo Escobar, Dottie Holland, and Charles Kurzman—has been a source of intellectual inspiration, companionship, and challenge for me in my time at unc.

1 Mobilization within Movements It was an unusually warm September evening in 1999 when approximately two hundred land reform settlers marched down the main street of Água Preta, a small rural town nestled in the heart of northeastern Brazil’s sugarcane zone. The marchers were a dramatic presence. They were representing one of the most powerful grassroots social movements in Brazilian history, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the Rural Landless Workers’ Movement, commonly referred to as the mst). The mst organizes rural workers and landless farmers throughout Brazil to fight for what is an age-old demand in the country: access to land. The mst was officially founded in the southernmost states of Brazil in the mid-1980s. Its membership expanded dramatically in the years following, and by the late 1990s the mst was the most dynamic and wellorganized social movement in Brazilian history. Since its formation, the movement has used Brazilian law to argue for the right to property that is considered unproductive and not fulfilling its social function according to Article 184 of the Federal Constitution. The mst’s main tactic is large-scale land occupation, where movement activists organize recruits to enter an unproductive property (as defined by the Constitution), usually late at night to avoid preemptive violent action from landowners or the government. The activists lead the new mst members in building temporary tents and squatting there until the government comes to assess their claim to the land. If the occupation is successful, usually after many months of negotiation, the government expropriates the property and divides it among the landless poor, creating what comes to be called a land reform settlement. Today, more than twenty years after the mst first came together, more than 250,000 families have occupied land through the movement, and in 2001, the mst was directly affiliated with an estimated 1,459 settlements in twenty-three of Brazil’s twenty-seven states (including the Federal District of Brasília, the country’s capital). Many of the marchers in Água Preta that September night carried the

2 Chapter One mst’s symbolic red flag, and two of them held a long white banner between them that read ‘‘mst: A Ordem É Ninguem Passar Fome’’ (mst: Order Means No One Going Hungry). The slogan—simultaneously appropriating and recoding the words that adorn the Brazilian flag, Order and Progress—was an example of what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘‘catachresis,’’ or ‘‘reversing, displacing and seizing the apparatus of value-coding’’ (Spivak 1990: 228).∞ These marchers were rural sugarcane workers who had joined in the mst’s struggle and won access to land on former sugarcane plantations. They were headed toward Água Preta’s town council building, where councilors were holding a monthly meeting. The marchers’ intention was to demand the immediate payment of their subsidized agricultural credit, which (as was often the case) was already very late. As the season for planting had come and gone, local mst leaders had planned the march to publicize the demand for credit and pressure the local government to release the funds. With the sun quickly setting behind the short row of one- and two-story city buildings, the march was proceeding smoothly. mst members steadily swarmed up the cobblestone street to the council building. Then, suddenly, things took a bizarre turn. Armando Souto, the person leading the council meeting, urged the mst leaders to enter the council room alone to state their demands. (Souto was a high-ranking member of the Popular Party of Brazil, the ppb, and no friend of the mst’s.) As the whole crowd of marchers attempted to push into the building, Souto reconsidered his position and rushed out the back door. Souto—perhaps unaccustomed to being challenged so directly in the hierarchical political culture of the region—tried to get away from the demonstration by driving his white sedan through the crowd of marchers. He was quickly surrounded. People pulled at the car’s door handle, and Souto came storming out. Loud discussion followed, and the marchers closest to the car threatened to turn the vehicle over as Souto threatened back angrily. The local trade union leader got right next to the increasingly irate politician, and Souto punched him squarely on the nose. At that moment, a heavily armed squadron of military police showed up. The local police had called in reinforcements from a larger town nearby (later, people commented suspiciously that someone must have alerted the police beforehand because so many arrived so quickly), and things grew very tense. People began to turn away almost involuntarily and

1. mst mobilization in Água Preta, Pernambuco, September 1999. Photo by author.

2. mst mobilization reaches the municipal council building in Água Preta, Pernambuco, September 1999. Photo by author.

3. mst settlers enter the council building in Água Preta, Pernambuco, September 1999. Photo by author.

4. The police arrive to disperse the mobilization in Água Preta, Pernambuco, September 1999. Photo by author.

Mobilization within Movements 5 straggle off in the direction from which they had come. Loud music, intended to be soothing, poured out of the rusty speakers lining the main street as the marchers left the town center and regrouped back in the mst land reform settlement on the edge of town.≤ In many ways, this public demonstration represented an extraordinary moment in the politics of the sugarcane region in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. The people marching down the street were former sugarcane workers who had won access to land of their own through the efforts of the mst. And even though the mobilization was broken up by the military police before any progress could be made, the public organization of two hundred mst members was a considerable feat. Leaders of the movement pointed to that evening as indication of their success in mobilizing Pernambucano sugarcane workers to fight for agrarian reform under the movement’s national banner.≥ And they had reason to believe in their victory: from 1992 to 2000, twelve mst settlements were created in the municipality of Água Preta, providing approximately ten hectares of land each for 926 families. Although the land distributed represented only a fraction (approximately 15 percent) of the municipality’s arable land, this was a significant amount in a region dominated for almost five hundred years by large-scale monocrop sugarcane plantations.∂ The movement considered its organization of rural sugarcane workers to be significant in part because these were some of the poorest workers in the country—in one of the poorest regions in all of Latin America.∑ But the movement’s considerable success in Água Preta is not where this book begins or ends. This is not the usual account of the mst that details the story of its formation and outlines the practices, processes, and events that constitute movement identity, strategy, and ideology. Those accounts, while providing valuable information, assume and assign an ontological coherence to the category of movement—a solid ‘‘thingness’’ that is rarely tenable on the ground. The mst does have a central coordinating committee, political symbols and slogans, membership norms, and expectations. It is more than just the sum of its members—there is an mst structure that stands on its own. However, this structure is not necessarily or naturally cohesive. It is as much a deliberate attempt to create unity as it is an expression of such. Although the rural workers marched down the street that evening as members of the mst and successfully presented their demands, four years

6 Chapter One later none of them would consider themselves members of the movement. They had participated in state meetings and in demonstrations like the one described in the beginning of this chapter, but they hadn’t always understood that the movement was supposed to be composed of landless rural workers, not simply for them. In 1999, they mobilized to demand their credit for planting bananas on their land in what the mst considered an important step toward freeing them from the colonial yoke of sugarcane, but four years later they would almost all be planting sugarcane again, some on their own land and others in the local mills. And although the movement’s symbolic red flag had waved proudly at the entrance of the settlement where everyone regrouped after the demonstration, in 2003 the same settlers would request legal assistance from the federal government to prevent the mst from gaining access to physical space on the settlement. With a few exceptions, they still lived on the same settlements and saw the movement leaders regularly. The region was still presented as a stronghold of movement activity, but internally mst leaders acknowledged that the movement was in crisis. This book then, is the study of social mobilization—within a movement. I am not trying to explain any of the mst’s considerable successes per se; rather, I am trying to understand how the movement works in particular places. I do this by analyzing how the people who are called members (for however long or short a time) themselves work. This means that I focus on ordinary people, on everyday political economies, and on common sense— in other words, the banal geographies of organization and resistance. Having arrived at this point, many people reading will be asking themselves, why would someone take one of the most exciting and successful movements of the twentieth century and focus on the banal? This is a serious question, especially because the banal is often not pretty: it is gossip, it is petty power struggles, and it is storytelling—or, as a colleague recently called it—dirty laundry. Should academics be engaged in ‘‘banalizing’’ progressive social movements when those movements are fighting for causes with which we very much agree? What are the ethical bases of turning social movements inside out (as Annelise Riles did in her insightful 2000 study of international women’s networks)? The answers to these questions have considerable ethical and epistemological significance, and they are the reason why the book came out the way it did. Ultimately I argue that understanding social mobilization within movements like the mst is necessary for both political work and political

Mobilization within Movements 7 theory. Social movements are constantly reminding us—and enabling us— to keep our academic theories up with the times: as academics, we translate the creativity of social movements back into theory, just as capitalism translates the creativity of the people into profit, rather than the other way around. As Nancy Fraser (1989) said in her influential analysis of power and theory, ‘‘Historically specific, conjunctural struggles [are] the agenda setters for critical theory’’ (2). So what can a study of the mst tell us about the current moment, about the ‘‘conditions of possibility’’ for both political work and critical theory? I think there are four key lessons, which I will outline here and return to throughout the book. First, claims for justice are often central to social movements, but, as Susan Eckstein and Timothy Wickham-Crowley (2003) point out in their overview of postauthoritarian social movements in Latin America, there are many different definitions of justice. These definitions—the subjective meanings of justice/injustice—‘‘vary over time and among groups’’ (xi). This may seem like an obvious point but it is easily forgotten, ironically even in analyses of movements that seek ‘‘unity in diversity’’ by bringing together many different groups of people—urban dwellers, landless farmers, agricultural workers, and so on. We tend to recognize the different initial subject positions of these mobilized actors but then romantically imagine that these differences fall away once a movement is formed: after a critical genesis moment, it is assumed that social movement members fight for the common good. In the case of the mst, it is true that participants in the movement are fighting for very similar material goods, but what these goods mean to them—what constitutes their just appropriation and what does not—varies widely. This on-the-ground diversity often goes unrecognized but forms the basis of hegemonic and counterhegemonic positions within movements. Which positions come to dominate at any given time has very real implications for the path of social mobilization and the possibilities of progressive change within and through movements. Second, the above point highlights the importance of customs, culture, and context—or, what I refer to throughout the book as ‘‘moral economies.’’ In this case, ‘‘moral’’ is not a normative term; it is a reference to the work of the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. In his seminal work of 1971, Thompson argued that resistance—in his case, food riots—were rarely spontaneous outbursts of psychological or physical pain. Rather, protests were an indictment of changes that violated (or allowed certain

8 Chapter One groups of people to violate) traditional norms guiding the social and economic conditions and relations of production (Thompson 1971, 1993). Attention to norms and tradition means that history is important: histories of land use and labor allocation help to explain how and why people organize in the present. In the case of the mst, it would be impossible to understand the movement without understanding the diverse forms of agrarian economy throughout the country. Political cultures differ greatly in the two regions upon which this book focuses: the South and the Northeast of Brazil. And these differences shape social mobilization both within the mst and between the movement and external political actors. The third lesson we should take away from a study of mobilization within the mst is the importance of political scale. Not only is the mst different things to different people, it is different things at different political scales. The mst has a vocal and visible presence at the transnational scale, where it is the biggest social movement member of the Via Campesina, the umbrella organization for small farmer and rural worker movements around the world. The mst is also a powerful player at the national level in domestic politics where its ability to represent the rural poor throughout the country has brought the movement considerable institutional legitimacy. This claim to representation depends on what I— following others, such as David Harvey—call strategic essentialisms: intentional simplifications of an otherwise complex subject for the purposes of democratic engagement. mst leaders are masters of political negotiation at the national and transnational scales, and this has helped movement members win both resources and respect, but the essentialisms the leaders are forced to employ for political purposes have material and discursive effects on the ground. My analysis of the mst —from the inside out—suggests that we need to understand both the importance and the danger of such strategic essentialisms (rather than accepting them at face value or dismissing them as essentialist). Fourth and finally, I think that a study of the mst reminds us of the importance of conjuncture, which Lawrence Grossberg (2006) defines as a ‘‘specific articulation of the social formation as a context’’ (13). As Karl Marx rightly said of men, social movements can make history but not under circumstances of their own choosing. Placing the mst’s work within the conditions of the contemporary moment sheds new light on the apparent mobilization ‘‘booms’’ and ‘‘busts’’ of which social movement theorists write so often (see Alvarez 1998 for a summary). In the traditional

Mobilization within Movements 9 analysis, movements are thought to have formed when they mobilize a certain number of members or carry out noteworthy oppositional actions, and they are thought to generally disappear after ‘‘maturing’’ or ‘‘professionalizing’’ (McCarthy and Zald 1973), when their claims have been satisfied or they are no longer politically relevant. In many ways, this analysis seems to fit the mst: as I will describe in chapter 3, the mst formed in the 1980s, gained strength throughout the 1990s, and slowly appears to have lost its political effectiveness since the year 2000. This focus on outward appearances derives from a vision of movements as ‘‘things’’ with observable, quantifiable characteristics: numbers of members, demonstrations, opposition rallies, and so on. But movements are more than just visible entities or structures; they are— perhaps more importantly—a set of discourses, or narratives, ways of talking about justice and injustice, ways of imagining change. Participation within the mst, I will argue, has provided Brazilians with both a language and what Sonia Alvarez calls a ‘‘social movement web’’ (1997) that empower the landless poor to better control their own lives and to potentially mobilize in great numbers again during moments of conjunctural opportunity or threat. This highlights the ongoing relevance and contribution of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and his concepts of the war of maneuver and war of position. For Gramsci, the ‘‘war of maneuver’’ referred to the conventional frontal assault on the state apparatus, while the ‘‘war of position’’ referred to a more subtle war of negotiation to win positions of power, create alliances (or hegemonic blocs), and construct new revolutionary political subjectivities. Both kinds of war are necessary for a successful revolution, but they look very different. It is my hope that the work presented in this book will illustrate the ongoing war of position conducted by and within the mst. This positioning will determine whether, when, and how other wars of maneuver will be led by the movement.

Which Subaltern Speaks? I draw on an eclectic, not-always-deliberate, set of critical theories to make the arguments in this book. At various times, I have found guidance in social movement theory, Marxist political economy, agrarian studies, and critical human geography. In attempting to make sense of what I saw

10 Chapter One while doing fieldwork with members of the mst, one particularly useful guide has been the intellectual tradition of subaltern studies, a project begun in the mid-1980s by a collective of Indian scholars (Guha 1984; Prakesh 1994). Led initially by Ranajit Guha (1982), the subaltern studies scholars revisioned Indian national history from the perspective of the marginalized, impoverished classes. Their call to create a ‘‘subaltern studies’’ field was predicated on the belief that national histories had largely been written by the dominant classes, by the politically powerful national and colonial elites. Their goal was to uncover the subaltern as an agent of history, with a political consciousness influenced but not determined by the national elites. Members of the collective believed that if they could rewrite history from the margins, this would highlight the ways in which history had in fact been made by those actors who occupied the seemingly marginal positions of caste, class, and gender.∏ As the project of subaltern studies has developed, it has been applied to subaltern groups throughout the world.π In very different geographical contexts, the theoretical premise of subaltern historical agency has shed light on the relationship between domination and resistance in processes of national development. Attention to the way in which categories of ‘‘others’’ are constituted in various places and times has made it clear that a project of making others exotic undergirds Western notions of liberal modernity as universal (Coronil 1997). And although subaltern studies developed in South Asia with a Gramscian attention to specificity and context, founding member Ranajit Guha has argued that it is still relevant as an analytical lens in other places: ‘‘subalterneity’’ refers not to a territorial subject or project but to a ‘‘temporal’’ one (Guha 2001: 35–36). The temporal subject is what Akhil Gupta (1998) has called the postcolonial condition and what Guha refers to simply as postmodernity. In this book, I argue that if we are to take subaltern consciousness seriously, we have to open up one of the most privileged repositories of subaltern politics, the social movement. Academics and activists often champion social movements in ways that unintentionally exoticize the very subaltern they hope to support. Analyses of social mobilization need to be decentered, as Florencia Mallon said of nationalism in 1994. Movements should be seen not as coherent, relatively unified subaltern actors, but as sets of competing discourses negotiating for the right and ability to define who will represent the poor and how (see Burdick 1995). With its attention to representation, common sense, and hegemony, subaltern

Mobilization within Movements 11 studies provides us with a way of seeing these competing discourses as potentially politically productive rather than harmful. As John Beverley, one of the foremost Latin American subaltern studies scholars, has said, this requires a ‘‘recognition of sociocultural difference and incommensurability—a recognition, that is, of contradictions among the people, without resolving them into a transcendant or unitary cultural or political logic’’ (Beverley 2001: 58). Commitment to social movement causes ranges along a continuum, and at any given time some members of a movement may participate more energetically, some are included more easily, and some are more accurately represented than others.∫ People join movements for a number of different reasons, and the act of joining does not preclude questioning, rejecting, or even deliberately misunderstanding the organization’s ideology, tactics, and ultimate goals. But this is not the information that is presented at movement meetings or in movement newsletters. It is the stuff of mobilization, but it is not the stuff that activists generally like to talk about. To see the full continuum of mst members, one has to focus on the banal, on the everyday, and on the subalterns among subalterns. This continuum is rarely present in social movement analyses because in social movement research by activists and scholars alike, model cases and model members tend to be singled out. We tend to study the ideal members, the coherent messages, and the brightest media stars. We do not focus on the ambivalent or half-hearted members; social movements are usually read sympathetically as organizations of ideologically committed members for whom the act of joining the movement and participating in movement activities is inherently transformative. This process of subject elision (of conflating the individual with the collective) is common to both the practices and analyses of social movements, for reasons that are strategic, ideological, and analytic. For social movements, (re)presenting an organized, united front is often one of the main strategic advantages they possess, particularly movements that are poor in material resources. Social movements gain political weight when their leaders can effectively claim to speak for ‘‘the people.’’ At the same time, movement coherence is ideological: many of the people who organize, lead, and join social movements do so because they are committed to a particular vision for the future. This representation of coherence then seeps into scholarly and journalistic analyses, both of which tend to treat social movements as unified social entities once they have formed. In the

12 Chapter One case of the mst, ‘‘leaders’’ are allowed to speak for the movement as a whole, while public actions such as demonstrations and land occupations are assumed to portray the interests of mst members in general.Ω But in the mst, as in any social movement, membership is a dynamic process, not a solid category or concrete group of people. The movement is a double-sided site of hegemonic contestation, with both internal and external points of contact, and the subaltern—the ostensible ‘‘subject’’ of resistance—represented by the movement is fluid and shifts frequently. Local politicians, movement leaders, movement members, onlookers, business owners—none of these are inherently good or bad; rather, they are all individuals with personal histories embedded in relationships that are shaped by the material and discursive nature of their time, place, and social position. Aaron Bobrow-Strain (2007) has made this point recently in his nuanced study of ‘‘estate formations’’ and the subject positions of large landholders in Chiapas, Mexico. Right and wrong, as Bobrow-Strain argues and as Foucault has famously said of power, are not things wielded by people, they are characteristics of relationships between people— ‘‘contingent and changing affiliations’’ (Stoler 2002: 12) rather than essences. And therefore, they are always fluid, multiple, and subjective. The mst itself is clearly an important and subaltern actor in contemporary Brazil. It offers a vision of the future for which it is discriminated against by society, abused by the rural elite, and mistreated by the government; it is an ‘‘agent of history’’ constituted in the fissures of colonial and postcolonial plans for national development. Inside the movement, however, new hegemonies are created: negotiating for space within Brazilian political society, movement leaders have established norms of participation and belonging that do not always allow for negotiation within the movement. It is, to paraphrase a famous story of dubious origins, ‘‘subalterns all the way down.’’∞≠ All of this is to argue that presenting a coherent and unified picture of social movements means choosing some subalterns over others. If we do not pay attention to alternative or multiple subjectivities within movements, we have selected for those voices we wish to hear and, as a result, we are likely to miss (or misunderstand) broader movement trajectories. Neither academics nor movement members themselves can fully understand a movement’s trajectory (particularly not one as large and enduring as the mst) without a detailed sense of the internal workings of people within the movement. In the cases being presented in this book, the

Mobilization within Movements 13 successes and difficulties that mst activists had on the settlements in the sugarcane region were doubtlessly repeated in different ways around the country and in the medium term contributed to what the movement itself considered to be an increasingly obvious split between the movement’s base and its leaders. Ultimately, I am not convinced that the tensions and difficulties within social movements constitute anything that novel on their own. Nothing could be more ordinary than tension; it is the effort to suggest otherwise that actually creates trouble for movements. In the mst’s case, the movement has been represented (and represents itself) as a group of people without hierarchy or political ambition, motivated by a love for the land and a commitment to sustainable local farming. As a result of this simplification (which is not always or exactly untrue), the mst is criticized by outsiders (particularly the Brazilian news media) who discover that many of the movement’s members do not fit easily within this representation. Countless local and national news stories have ‘‘exposed’’ the mst with scandalized stories: there are movement squatters who live only occasionally in their encampments; there are people who receive land but continue to work in jobs off the farm; there are families who receive multiple plots of land and then farm in capital-intensive, technologically sophisticated ways; and there are people who join the mst without any previous experience in agriculture. None of these ‘‘discoveries’’ should constitute scandals. They are only scandals because they clash with the public face of the movement—that of mst members so committed to accessing land that they will spend months and years living in a ‘‘black plastic tent.’’ They clash with the idea that movement members are the poorest of the poor, that they are the marginalized, the excluded, the coitado (poor little things) who literally have no alternative—that they are the half-naked, desperate beings portrayed in Sebastião Salgado’s beautiful, heartbreaking, but ultimately misleading photographs. While this representation has won significant political and popular support, it has also opened the movement to unnecessary criticism and disillusionment. Why not instead admit that there are all sorts of people within the movement, some of whom would prefer wage labor to land ownership, some of whom have capital saved up but not enough to make a go of it, some of whom have never had any experience on the land but feel that it is has to be better than selling chewing gum in the streets of São Paulo? Would a general movement for the recuperation

14 Chapter One of dignity and livelihood be less compelling than a movement of/for access to land? This was the idea when the mst began its move to ‘‘massify’’ the struggle, to take its message and goals into the city and broaden the struggle for land. But the campaign to win the hearts and minds of those outside the movement has still relied on a fairly simplistic representation of the ‘‘Sem Terra.’’ While I do not mean to suggest that it was wrong for the mst to rely upon a simplified vision/representation, it did have certain consequences, as do all representations. That the stories described above have the power to provoke scandal is a reflection of the simplistic way in which the debate has been formed around ‘‘needs.’’ As Nancy Fraser argues, political discussion often focuses on the scientific evaluation of ‘‘needs’’ as objective ‘‘requirements’’ rather than recognizing that all claims are discourses about needs (Fraser 1989: 162). Because of this objectification, the debate around agrarian reform in Brazil has devolved into a fight to prove that the rural poor are (or are not) sufficiently needy and therefore deserving of public assistance. A focus on ‘‘needs talk’’ as discourses, however, would emphasize the constructed nature of all claims, including the claim to private property, to reduced taxes, to free markets, and so forth.

Moral Economies of Mobilization Staying true to the epistemological and political commitments of subaltern scholars, the present study of the mst highlights the ways in which two groups of people—small farmers in the southern town of Campos Novos, Santa Catarina, and rural sugarcane workers near the northeastern town of Água Preta, Pernambuco—have negotiated the political ideas, practices, and social relations represented by the mst. (See map on p. 15.) These two regions were chosen because they represented relatively distinct historical trajectories: small family farming and rural wage labor—or, as Stuart Schwartz (1992: 67) put it, the land of maize in the South and the land of manioc (cassava) in the Northeast.∞∞ The settlers in Campos Novos, in southern Brazil, had almost all been small farmers for generations before joining the mst, while the settlers in the Northeast had almost all worked on sugarcane plantations for a wage and had been out of work at the time of the expropriation. As such, the two settlements repre-

Map of field sites of Pernambuco and Santa Catarina.

16 Chapter One sented distinct political economies (small farmer versus rural worker), as well as fairly distinct regional histories. These two towns are not representative of Brazil as a whole, nor of the mst as a whole. Rather, they provide a comparative perspective that helps us to understand the dynamics of social mobilization within movements. Both regions are considered to be strongholds of mst activity, and yet their histories and dominant forms of production are very different. Because I am interested in mobilization within movements, I focus somewhat more on the mst in the Northeast. This allows me to see how movement discourses formed in the South traveled, how they were negotiated and refigured through practice. When the settlers in the South and in the Northeast joined the mst, they did so with a variety of aspirations. At an abstract level, these desires were similar and could be summed up, in Tanya Li’s words (2007), as the ‘‘will to improve’’: the dream of a better life, of ‘‘being somebody,’’ the belief that they deserved education, training, and health care—‘‘a whole bunch of things,’’ as one mst leader in Água Preta said to me when trying to define what went into a ‘‘real’’ agrarian reform. The necessity and possibility of joining the mst as a means of achieving those aspirations were shaped by a set of structural transformations. The state-led modernization of agriculture, which intensified after the military took office in 1964, made it difficult for smallholders to compete in the marketplace and many lost their land or migrated to the cities in search of work (Graziano da Silva 1982); at the same time, progressive priests affiliated with the Catholic and Lutheran Churches and often inspired by Liberation Theology helped to provide movement activists and members with crucial resources, including moral support, meeting places, material goods, and legitimacy; and the gradual withdrawal of the military from government in the early 1980s created political opportunities for organization that had not existed earlier. These structural transformations have been so widely discussed as the reason for the mst’s formation (see Stedile and Sérgio 1996: 511–512) that they constitute what I have called the movement’s ‘‘Official Genesis Story’’ (see Wolford 2003, 2004). But these structural changes do not tell the whole story: people did not leave their homes for an occupation simply because they were poor and landless; nor did they leave their homes for an occupation simply because they could. All of the people who joined the mst did so because they wanted something, but what they wanted depended on a whole set of specific meanings: what land meant to them, what family meant, what open resistance entailed,

Mobilization within Movements 17 what constituted legitimate ideas of ‘‘rights’’ and social justice. In order to understand these meanings and how they influenced people’s decisions to join the mst we need to understand how the institutions that structured their lives, the norms that shaped their ideas of appropriate behavior and the inspirations that suggested alternatives, were rooted in the articulation of particular work economies, family practices, and community traditions. In the South, small farmers joined the movement in order to continue the way of life that they had practiced for generations. The settlers in Campos Novos, Santa Catarina, confronted a land shortage caused by the demographic cycle of small-scale farming family and the nature-culture of land-based production. They were embedded in strong communities expressed through ethnic identifications and rural values. In joining the mst, they were supported by family networks, by perceptions of ‘‘squatting’’ as a legitimate and familiar form of territorial colonization, and by the historically constructed position of local leaders, who could draw in large populations by securing extensive social networks in tightly connected local communities. The settlers in southern Brazil joined the mst as a means of maintaining cultural and economic continuity. In former years they had migrated in order to maintain this continuity, and migration to new agricultural frontiers continues to be an important survival strategy for small farmers from the South. Many settlers told stories of relatives who had moved to the vast plains of Brazil’s Center West region in search of land: joining the mst was a way of creating new ‘‘political’’ frontiers. In the Northeast, the original mst members were pushed into the movement by their desperate situation and their lack of alternatives (Sigaud 2005). Latecomers were pulled into the movement by the prospect of belonging to an organization directly connected to the channels of power. Neither group joined the movement easily: mst leaders had to struggle to make political headway in the sugarcane region. It took the movement six years, from 1989 to 1995, to begin building a solid membership among rural workers in Água Preta (Moreira, Moreira, and Menezes 2003: 204– 205; Rosa 2003; Wolford 2003a, 2004). And even after the mst succeeded in articulating the struggle for land in the sugarcane region, the social relationships between people and place that characterized the difficult mobilization period have continued to shape dynamics within the movement’s membership.

18 Chapter One In Água Preta, the settlers had no tradition of small family farming— they lived in areas that had been organized into monocrop sugarcane plantations more than four hundred years ago. Their decisions to join the mst were not indicative of a desire to continue a landed way of living; indeed, those people who were most highly dependent on sugarcane for their livelihood turned to the mst, rather than those people who were most attached to the land. The ongoing crises of the sugarcane industry paved the way for acceptance of the mst because there were few alternatives in the dismal economic context of 1990s Brazil. At first glance, the decision to join the mst in Água Preta appears to be a significant departure from the norms and customs that shaped much of the workers’ social understanding. Both the ideology and the act of occupying land were generally considered incompatible with traditional understandings of work and ownership. There was no historical process legitimating land occupations in Pernambuco, as there had not been an open frontier for over two hundred years. Since the arrival of the Portuguese, land has been a commodity: it has always already belonged to someone— even if it was unproductive. Landlords who did provide their workers with land for planting did so as a dom (gift), and ‘‘workers were not—and perhaps are still not—used to considering land as a right equal to other rights’’ (Sigaud 1983: 84). In practice, however, the decision to join the mst does not represent such a departure from localized norms and customs. While some people did embrace the mst’s revolutionary message, developing a new consciousness regarding the conditions of their exploitation, most reformulated the movement’s message to fit their own understandings of right and wrong, labor, land, and family. Rural workers on former plantations joined the mst for a variety of reasons that could not be easily understood from their actions or from mst statements and slogans. A majority of people in the region gained access to their land without undergoing an occupation, the usual path to mst membership in which landless workers occupy a property and pressure the government for rights to the land. Instead, they were granted access to land because they had been associated with the plantation in some working capacity prior to its expropriation. On most mst settlements in the region, therefore, the settlers were a mix of people who had spent time in squatter encampments struggling to receive land, and former rural workers who had joined the mst only after

Mobilization within Movements 19 receiving the land. Many of the people affiliated with the movement in Água Preta disliked their new status as small farmers and resented the mst’s political activity in the region. Not everyone was happy to have land of their own, because they preferred to make their living from wage work rather than subsistence farming. In other words, not everyone who ‘‘joined’’ this landless movement did so because they wanted or valued land or because they thought they had the right to it. Even those who did want to work on the land attributed very different meanings to their work than the meanings that were promoted by movement leaders and hegemonic among members in the South of the country.

Moral Economies of Demobilization Understanding localized moral economies not only helps us to understand why people might have joined the mst, it also helps to explain the mst’s apparent failure in the sugarcane region. mst leaders in Água Preta argued that the rural workers lacked political consciousness because of ‘‘the cultural factor, the factor of general domination,’’ which led them to value independence over organization. It is common in the sugarcane region (and throughout Brazil) to argue that rural sugarcane workers in the Northeast are individualistic and that the workers’ popular culture is disruptive to collective action. These associations run through the rural workers’ self-identification, and color the mst’s own evaluations of mobilization work in the region. When the settlers left the movement, Jaime Amorim, the mst leader for the state of Pernambuco, explained their exit as an illustration of ‘‘the culture of the region—the people are individualistic; they don’t trust other people.’’ This negative interpretation of individualism comes out of the movement’s reading of the relationship between ideology and material conditions, in which self-interest is seen as a ‘‘subideology generated by private ownership of the means of production.’’ According to the mst, even though most workers—and small farmers—don’t own their means of production, this subideology permeates the popular consciousness because people are embedded in a system that sanctifies private property and prioritizes ‘‘individualism’’ (described as a vice that causes people to put themselves above the organization), as well as ‘‘spontaneity’’ and

20 Chapter One ‘‘immobility’’ (which cause a person to not ‘‘involve himself with anything’’).∞≤ The mst works to replace this ‘‘I’’ that characterizes capitalist subjectivities with the ‘‘we’’ of a ‘‘new society.’’ Instead of accepting this interpretation of the mst’s decline in Água Preta, I resituate it as one among many interpretations that interact in a highly contested process of negotiation for political control. In doing so, what is commonly seen to be a failure of mobilization has to be seen as the success of an alternate vision within the movement. I argue that the mst had a difficult time establishing and maintaining a presence in the sugarcane region precisely because the movement assumed that membership was productive of (if not always produced by) a singular subject, a subject who was in turn characterized by a singular relationship to the land. They believed that the act of joining the movement and participating in movement activities was inherently transformative: members were supposed to join the movement by participating in a land occupation, and the occupation was supposed to operate as an organic space for the construction of progressive alternatives, of the ‘‘new society’’ the mst hoped to build.∞≥ And for those who entered the movement without undergoing an occupation, access to land and organization within a new political field—the land reform settlement—were expected to be equally enabling. Once people had joined the movement they were treated as relatively unified subjects who, together, (could learn to) dream the eternal dream of the peasant: the desire for land as the basis of production and social reproduction. Indeed, this ideal subject is embodied in the small farmers turned settlers in southern Brazil. As Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (2004) point out, this romanticization of the ‘‘middle peasant’’ is common in rural politics historically. Although the self-sufficient middle peasant is the least common group in the countryside today, they ‘‘stand out in [academic] analysis as the most discrete and independent category, conceptually and socially. Perhaps for this reason, middle peasants define the concept of the peasantry as a whole in many common formulations’’ (117). These settlers from the South of Brazil became the backbone of what I call the mst’s ‘‘agrarian populism.’’ Their hegemony within the movement is fortified in important ways, through movement culture, government policies, and the very nature of land reform itself. Calling the settlers from southern Brazil hegemonic is not to criticize them or to suggest that they consciously dominate the movement; rather, they represent ideals that became hegemonic through a variety of means.

Mobilization within Movements 21 The settlers from Água Preta alternately resist, accept, negotiate, and ignore (sometimes all at once) the movement’s agrarian populist ideology, in an example of what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as ‘‘the contradictory or ‘double reality’ of conduct that is ‘intrinsically equivocal’ ’’ (Bourdieu 1977: 179). Supported by state policies and a long history of sugarcane production, the rural workers from northeastern Brazil are situated in a moral economy that has been structured by a deep history of plantation politics. As such, they envisioned access to land as a means to improving living and working conditions within the sugarcane industry, rather than as a means to leaving it. On the settlements, they challenged the mst’s idea that land reform settlers should conform to an ideal vision of politically committed small family farmers. As plantation workers, the settlers possessed a social memory of the value of land, and many expressed gratitude for the opportunity to be landowners. They built houses on their land, planted fruit trees, flowering plants, and vegetables, and, for a period, they actively engaged with the mst’s vision for their future. But the settlers’ historical relationship to the land was characterized by what came to be seen as contradictions in relation to peasant production and in this way, these members were considered ‘‘difficult’’ in comparison to a hegemonic ideal with which they were largely unfamiliar. Even as the settlers planted their fruits and vegetables, they energetically defended the dominance of sugarcane in the region as being a product of natural environmental conditions. And even as they celebrated the removal of the old plantation boss, they followed his lead in demanding control over the use of their common spaces. For the settlers, the right to own land was embedded in the political and social relations of the former plantation. This understanding was supported by contradictory state projects that simultaneously treated the settlers as rational peasant farmers who would calculate costs and benefits according to the logic of household subsistence production and as repositories of off-season plantation labor. The movement’s belief that agrarian reform meant not just the distribution of land but also the construction of alternatives to the sugarcane industry thus came up against a centuries-old moral economy of monocrop production. Whether intentional or not, the reforms that were carried out served as a moderate palliative until international sugarcane prices improved, at which point the industries that remained in business (or were able to restart quickly to take advantage of the prices) had access

22 Chapter One to a new source of labor: the recently mobilized mst members in Pernambuco. Ultimately, the settlers believed that they were forced to choose: sugarcane, wage labor, and independence or garden crops, subsistence farming, and the mst. Confronted by rapid increases in sugar prices, they somewhat reluctantly chose the former.

From Dirty Laundry to Common Sense: Incorporating Everyday Knowledge Incorporating moral economies into mobilization means focusing on everyday ‘‘common sense’’ rather than on political speeches, written texts, or interviews with movement leaders. While my analysis certainly includes these more formal aspects of the mst’s self-presentation, I argue that they are one of many data sources on the movement, and they are not definitive. Although ethnographic attention to the everyday and personal is increasingly unremarkable in academic studies, a focus on ‘‘common sense’’ needs to be explained. Common sense has a bad reputation: it is usually associated with Antonio Gramsci’s Manichean positioning of common sense versus good sense, such that good sense represented a higher order of thinking wherein intention finally matched action. The acceptance or discovery of good sense by the people (particularly by the peasants of Sardinia in Gramsci’s essay on the ‘‘southern question’’ 1980 [1957]: 28–54) would represent the historically specific formation of a revolutionary class in and for itself. In this book, however, I borrow Gramsci’s term ‘‘common sense’’ but suggest that it not be seen as the primitive/backward predecessor to the construction of good sense. Rather, I take some liberties in how I define common sense and I argue, along with the Latin American subaltern studies’ scholar José Rabasa (2001) that an appreciation for the constitution of common sense(s) provides us with ‘‘possibilities for creative political action rather than [simply paving the way] for a more mature political formation’’ (197). In this book, common sense includes unthinking reflection (‘‘it’s just common sense’’); street-smart, feet-on-the-ground savvy (‘‘you have to use your common sense’’); and popular tradition (or, ‘‘the past in the present’’), lying somewhere between (as well as being produced or maintained through) folklore and academic treatise. Attention to the takenfor-granted, often unthinking elements of political mobilization builds on

Mobilization within Movements 23 the move toward nonstructural cultural analyses of social movements (Rubin 2004). In the 1980s, social movement scholars began to challenge the ‘‘classical’’ social movement approaches (political opportunity theory, resource mobilization theory, material-grievance theories). This challenge was situated in a context characterized by the rise of ‘‘new social movements’’ (Slater 1985, 1992) that provoked a move away from MarxistLeninist readings of social mobilization toward a more nuanced Gramscian focus on cultural production (Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Casteñada 1993). The supposedly ‘‘new’’ social movements, such as the environmental movement in Europe and women’s movements in the United States, cut across class lines, defied existing political structures, and built a new sort of community based on a common identity—or ‘‘life space demands’’ (Habermas 1981)—rather than on a common goal. Theorists began to incorporate notions of hegemony and the ideological construction of consent in an age when (and a place, supposedly, where) material deprivation was increasingly unimportant. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) argued that these new actors had no clearly identifiable position that could be read off production relations. Instead, their identities were multiple, and so the political no longer occupied a particular level, but rather was expressed in all social practices. As Alberto Melucci wrote in 1989, the struggle for ‘‘the freedom to have . . . was replaced by [the struggle for] the freedom to be’’ (Melucci, Keane, et al. 1989, 177– 178). Accordingly, more attention began to focus on movements as representational mediators operating in complex fields of power: David Snow and Robert Benford (1992) coined the term ‘‘framing processes,’’ through which social movements articulated their identity positions and people interpreted their needs and desires. In trying to understand the proliferation of social movements in Latin America, David Slater (1985) argued that these organizations were responding to new forms of subordination in late capitalist society. Slater wrote that these movements were not determined by the economy because they represented a broader form of politics (than the authoritarianism of the past), were respectful of individuals, and encouraged collective participation (see also Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998). Scott Mainwaring and Eduardo Viola (1984) argued that ‘‘ ‘new’ social movements are inclined towards affective concerns, expressive relations, group orientation, and horizontal organization. Old social movements are inclined towards material concerns, instrumental relations, orientation towards the state, and vertical organization’’ (20).

24 Chapter One But simply introducing the concept of culture into social movement analyses did not resolve the debate between structure and agency. Cultural traits and processes can become so overwhelmingly influential and static (where ‘‘culture’’ becomes ‘‘tradition’’) that they are structural in their effect; alternatively, if ‘‘actors’’ and ‘‘agency’’ are allowed to stand in for culture, then social action becomes understood as voluntaristic, as perpetuated primarily by ‘‘great men’’ (and, occasionally, women). Furthermore, the use of ‘‘culture’’ itself risks becoming tautological (culture matters because culture matters) unless we move on to explain not only that culture matters, and how, but also ask, so what? How do cultural norms and practices shape the interaction between representation and that or those who are being represented? How do culturally specific understandings inform the making of categories (race, class, gender) through which people know their social universe and mobilize against injustice? While theorists of new social movements led the way in reintroducing culture into social movement studies, the desire to transcend the economism and structuralism of earlier studies led them to define culture as somehow separate from economic practice (Canel 1992).∞∂ Culture ended up being understood as everything that could not be neatly shoved into economic categories, the superstructure to a material base. A focus on common sense could help us avoid unnecessary distinctions between structure and agency, and culture and economy, in analyses of social mobilization. Following others, I conceive of culture as a continuum running from informal to formalized expressions—ranging from ideology, which is expressed in (and demonstrated by) highly developed, wellthought-out declarations (textual and oral), and common sense, which is ‘‘the simple truth of things artlessly apprehended’’ (Geertz 1973: 10).∞∑ Common sense provides the ‘‘toolkit’’ through which people perceive the world, and with which they make decisions. It is, in the Gramscian sense, contradictory, fragmented, and never autonomous from hegemonic ideologies. Departing from the understanding of culture as rooted in tradition and contained within a recognizable group of people, ‘‘common sense’’ allows us to think of culture as being fluid, fraught with internal difference, and readily adaptable to understanding and exploiting new situations. The move to incorporate common sense complicates neat stories of ‘‘why social movements form,’’ but it does not mean that explanation should be abandoned in studies of social movements.∞∏ Rather, our ability to explain movement trajectories over time depends on our ability to

Mobilization within Movements 25 incorporate cultures of common sense into our analyses.∞π Without common sense, I argue, we are forced either to give up explanation or to equate consciousness with intentionality (cf. Agrawal 2005): in this latter view, people join and leave social movements because they want to, usually because they decide it is in their best interests (they get fed up, they want to maintain their reputation, they believe in the cause), or because they are manipulated or swept away against their will by people who decide it is in their best interests.∞∫ Both of these positions, in turn, assume a marketplace of ideas and decision making that brings together the liberal (from classical to Marxist) concept of subjectivity: believing in agency and the importance of subaltern actors as ‘‘agents of history’’ has come to mean believing in intentionality.∞Ω In other words, the path to social mobilization has been paved with (usually good) intentions. Whether the focus is on the ‘‘people’’ who engage in collective action or on some set of hegemonic actors who manipulate others (in the case of this book, the sugarcane elites), someone with access to perfect information in competitive political markets is making decisions.≤≠ When we come across ‘‘informants’’ who contradict themselves, or who can’t explain their own motivations, we think of these contradictions as ‘‘noise’’ and edit them out: nonsense, by definition, does not make sense. And it certainly does not make revolutions. Instead of editing out these ‘‘unreasonable’’ answers, I argue that we need to consider what Lila Abu-Lughod calls ‘‘counter-discourse’’—where people are ‘‘confused, life is complicated, emotional and uncertain’’ (2000: 263)—in our analyses of social change and mobilization.≤∞ In Água Preta, when I asked people why the movement no longer seemed to be part of settlement politics, they often began with, ‘‘I don’t even know what to tell you about the movement . . . .’’ Such answers suggested that politics were messy, uncertain, changeable, and not entirely knowable.≤≤ People couldn’t always say why they did what they did; sometimes they couldn’t even remember what it was that they did. And very often, their memories of engagement with the mst (whether with the leaders or the practices or the policies) were contradictory: they would say one thing and, not long after, say it again but with an entirely different meaning. Did they still participate? No, they didn’t; yes, they were still members, participated whenever they could. Was agrarian reform still viable in the region? Yes, it was; no, they couldn’t make a living working on their own land. These messy answers are not signs of addled minds; they are not indica-

26 Chapter One tive of ignorance or insecurity (though they are sometimes all of that). To the contrary, they are the stuff of politics, the noise that only drops out when we use hindsight to comb back over the pile of actions, events, and ideas, pulling out the narratives that seem to logically lead from A to B. But the settlers in Água Preta did not always know what to say because their actions did not follow a predetermined script that had emerged fully formed. What they did and thought reflected a combination of decisions, mistakes, whimsy, and improvisation, illustrating that ‘‘ ‘consciousness’ need not be essential to [the] constitution [of resistance]’’ (Haynes and Prakash 1992: 30). As I suggested earlier in this chapter, the rural workers in Água Preta had not always been sure why they joined the mst; why should they be more certain of the reasons why they left? Some of them paid their dues to the movement because they thought they had to, and then stopped when it became clear that others were not paying. Some of them didn’t choose to leave the movement at all, but the mst leaders stopped coming by the settlement and so ‘‘they didn’t even know what to say. . . .’’ In 1999, the rural workers were ‘‘part of’’ the mst, and in 2003, they were not. And they didn’t always know how to explain why. Attention to what the settlers could not explain and to the contradictions in their explanations highlights the importance of contingency in understanding the fate of the mst in Água Preta. Incorporating this ‘‘noise’’ into my analysis helps me explain that the question I asked myself in returning to the sugarcane region in 2003, ‘‘Why did the mst fail in Água Preta?’’ was too black and white. In fact, the mst did not fail entirely (just as it did not succeed entirely), and the movement may even have planted some of the necessary conditions for it to rebuild its presence. There was enough uncertainty and mixed emotion among the land reform settlers to suggest that if the movement becomes a strong political actor again in the region, at least some settlers would swear they never left (and perhaps they never did).

The Stranger among Us: Methodological Considerations The research for this book was undertaken between 1998 and 2003, but I began working with the mst in 1993, as a volunteer with an organization based in Holland (with a U.S. base in Worcester, Massachusetts) called

Mobilization within Movements 27 the Institute for International Cooperation and Development (iicd).≤≥ In 1993, very few Brazilians knew about the mst, and even fewer supported the movement. The mst had yet to establish itself as an important national movement, and as a result, it seemed less like what social movement scholars might call a ‘‘professionalized’’ organization (McCarthy and Zald 1973) and more like a ‘‘group of people.’’ Seeing the mst in such an unguarded moment provided important insights, leading eventually to the belief that practices of representation hide as much as they present. With a cohort of twelve people, I sold postcards on city streets from Washington, D.C., New York, to Trenton, New Jersey. We raised money to buy building supplies and were sent, per the mst’s request, to help repair old agricultural buildings on a relatively young settlement called Quissamá in the northeastern state of Sergipe. After a brief introduction to national mst leaders, we had very little contact with anyone outside of the settlement. But Quissamá was (and still is) an important mst site in northeastern Brazil. In 1993, the settlement was preparing to become a ‘‘model collective,’’ in which settlers would own and work the property together, demonstrating to other settlers and to outsiders the benefits of collective action in production. Buildings were being renovated that would house the first educational classes for regional movement activists. Amid all of these plans for Quissamá, we discovered completely by accident that not all of the settlers were pleased with the new form of organization, or with their political position within the mst. As the settlers became more comfortable with us—demonstrated for better or for worse, as Geertz (1973) suggested, by a willingness to make fun of us—some pulled us aside and complained bitterly of being forced to join the collective when they would have preferred to work their own piece of land individually. One person even suggested that the settlers were afraid for their lives if they spoke out against the project. We did not spend enough time in Quissamá to have a sense for the relationships between the settlers and the movement leaders, but our experiences there made it clear that even subaltern narratives of dispossession and mobilization are complicated and themselves have to be read ‘‘against the grain.’’ In 1997, I returned to Brazil and spent one year in the city of São Paulo. Funded by a predissertation grant from the Social Science Research Council, I worked at the mst headquarters in a flat, nondescript building on the outskirts of the city; from the outside the building had the dull look of a psychiatric institution, but inside it was an excited blur of action. This was

28 Chapter One perhaps the biggest year of pro-mst mobilization. Two massacres of landless workers in 1995 and 1996 had generated broad societal support for the movement, and movement leaders were planning a national march to the capital city, Brasília. Although the media covered the march with some derision in the first weeks, as the settlers made their way to the capitol, marching twenty kilometers a day, the national papers and weekly magazine Veja began describing the movement in increasingly triumphant terms.≤∂ Just as living in Quissamá had given me an appreciation for diversity and counterdiscourses within the movement, organizing for (and briefly participating in) the march helped me to see the incredible power of organization, representation, and unity. In the months following the march, the mst was able to win important concessions—some of which were even seen as rights—from the government. In 1998–1999, I conducted fourteen months of field research in Brazil. My research incorporated both qualitative and quantitative methods but focused on ethnographies of settlements in the two different regions of Brazil. With my research assistants, I conducted approximately one hundred interviews with mst settlers and leaders in each region, covering topics such as the settlers’ background, participation in the mst, and experiences on the settlements. I also applied approximately 70 surveys to small farmers, large farmers, politicians, and educators in each region (for a total of 140). The interviews in the South lasted roughly one day each, which allowed me to work with the settler during the morning and conduct the interview in the afternoon. The interviews in the Northeast were shorter because it was not considered entirely appropriate for me to be working in the fields with the men. In both places, I was overwhelmed with the generosity and friendship of the mst leaders and settlers. It cannot be an altogether comfortable experience, having someone come to live among you and analyze the intimacies of your life. But people were unfailingly warm—they found time in their busy days to talk to me and dressed the children up for pictures, many of which are still proudly displayed on the wall of their homes. I came away from Brazil with a sense of beauty: the people and land are amazingly beautiful. In the Northeast, there was a poignancy to this beauty: the burnt red soil planted with fresh green cane on rolling hills made for a stark contrast with the region’s poverty and desperation. Being able to work on mst settlements helped, though, because here—as in both regions—there was always a sense of hope, of optimism, and of potential.

Mobilization within Movements 29

5. Crossing the river by raft outside Água Preta, Pernambuco, August 1999. Photo by author.

In presenting the interviews as data here, I have hidden the identity of the settlers, as agreed to prior to the interview. I do not actually think that anyone would be hurt by the statements presented here, and I know that some of the settlers would prefer to see their names in writing. To avoid complications and further ethical dilemmas, however, I do not openly identify any of the people in the book, with the exception of high-ranking mst leaders or public officials. I also loosely disguise the identity of the settlements on which I worked. All interviews were conducted by myself or my research assistants; I provide interview details when quoting long passages or multiple segments. In each research site, I had an assistant who accompanied me to the settlements and conducted separate interviews, following a series of questions I outlined beforehand. The questions each assistant had were the same as the ones I had, but the answers they received were always different—sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes in more obvious ways. In Santa Catarina, my research assistant was a young mst activist, Paulinho, who had left home at the age of seventeen to join the movement. Paulinho was the son of small farmers from western Santa Catarina. His parents still had five hectares in the countryside that were sitting idle because Paulinho had decided to join the movement and Paulinho’s

30 Chapter One younger brother had little attachment to the land. Paulinho was dedicated and energetic, and he appreciated hearing about the experiences that had led people to join the mst. The movement chose him as my assistant, and at first his obvious membership in the movement (he wore his mst shirt and cap until I convinced him not to) worried me, because it seemed evident that people would tell him only things they wanted an activist to hear. However, I soon realized that this in itself was valuable information: observing the differences in the way the settlers talked to Paulinho helped me to get a better understanding of how movement membership and hierarchies played out in daily interactions. In northeastern Brazil, my research assistant was a very different person. He had just graduated from college in São Paulo and headed to the Northeast for an adventure. I met him before my move to Água Preta, and he agreed to join me on a lark. Together, we traveled miles every day to interview different families, sometimes walking through six inches of mud, sometimes riding on a squirrelly moped that almost got us both killed several times. With his clearly urban attitude and southern accent, he found it difficult to adapt to life on the rural settlement. Several weeks after we arrived in Água Preta, I learned that the children were afraid of him because of the tattoos that covered parts of his arms and back. They associated tattoos with bandit gangs that had terrorized the town a few years back. In the Northeast, as a result, I was forced to do a majority of the interviews myself, while my assistant worked in the local archives and applied more straightforward surveys in the town center. With the information we gathered in interviews and participant observation, I analyzed individual and community-level decisions regarding mst participation.

Banal Epistemologies—or, Field Work the Morning After I chose to do my work with the mst through ethnography because I am drawn to good stories. The first time I interviewed Jaime Amorim, the state leader of the mst in Pernambuco, he told me a story about a local leader named Caio (not his real name). Everyone else called Caio ‘‘avó,’’ meaning grandfather, because he had been working in the movement since the early days of its organization in the Northeast. Caio, Jaime said, had been a semiurban marginalizado before he became an mst leader in the sugarcane region. Caio’s parents had lived in the interior of the state

Mobilization within Movements 31 but brought him to the coast when he was young. They came to work in the sugarcane fields, but Caio never found proper work, and he bummed around on the beach until he met an mst activist who convinced him to do organizing work with the movement. Caio, Jaime said conspiratorially, had never even seen a head of lettuce before he joined the movement. According to Jaime, a group of mst activists including himself and Caio, were all out one day and someone put lettuce on the table. Caio tried to pretend he knew what it was, but everyone soon realized that he didn’t know what to do with it. And they watched him as he tried to figure out how to eat the big green leaves. Now, Jaime said fondly, Caio will eat a whole head of lettuce at one sitting, he loves it so much. Later on during my stay in Pernambuco, I commented on this story to Caio. He and I spent a fair bit of time traveling together (partly because I had a car), and so one day I recounted Jaime’s story back to him, saying sympathetically how sad it was that he had never had lettuce when he was young. Caio burst out laughing. That Jaime, he said, he tells a good story. And it was a good story, a harmless one—it made us both laugh out loud, me especially, when I realized that Jaime had been taking considerable liberties with the truth. The story illustrates the constant work that social movement leaders do, representing their members and ‘‘framing’’ their positions. Capturing this work between members—of representation and counterrepresentation—is the reason that ethnography is the method used in this book: because if you are trying to understand how movements work, you have to ask the people who join them. This requires an attention to location rather than the local (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 39), to lived experiences rather than rhetoric (see Burdick 1995; Edelman 2001: 309–310) and to (un)intentions as opposed to simply action (see Ortner 1995; Wolford 2003a). This is what Gillian Hart calls ‘‘advancing to the concrete’’ through ‘‘critical ethnographies’’ (2004: 97–98) and what Abu-Lughod calls an ‘‘ethnography of the particular’’ (2000: 262) which is simultaneously localized and global. In other words, finding out why people do what they do means paying particular attention to the way lived experiences are shaped by symbolic and material spatial relationships. Locating resistance in people and places highlights the incredible diversity of agrarian settings that gives rise to multiple experiences of capitalism and democracy. People in both Santa Catarina and Pernambuco joined the mst, but in Santa Catarina, the expansive nature and culture of small family farming provided the main impetus to the search for new land,

32 Chapter One while in Pernambuco, economic crisis and the chance for political representation were primarily responsible for pushing and pulling people into the movement. Ethnography’s work does not stop there, however. Even though our representation of lived experiences is necessarily static when captured as text, the representation needs to be understood (and treated) as implicitly and explicitly dynamic. Constructions of the past are a process even (or especially) when focused on particular events such as acts of resistance. For a variety of reasons, people’s understandings of ‘‘why they did what they did’’ are fluid—they change in relation to their current situations and in relation to their expectations of what the future holds. This is best illustrated in concrete terms with the example of my return trip to Flora in northeast Brazil. I returned to Flora twice soon after having conducted my dissertation work.≤∑ Four years may seem like a relatively short period of time, but conditions in the community were quite different in 2001 and in 2003 than when I had left, in ways that illustrated the saying that the fate of northeastern Brazil is closely tied to the price of sugarcane. In 1999, when I conducted my original research, the price of sugarcane was at an all-time low and the settlers on Flora were actively engaging with elements of mst’s suggestions for the future. Many had plans to plant a diversified series of crops that would provide for their families’ subsistence and allow them some market access. Banana trees were central to the project for small-scale industrialization, and plans were being drafted for an mst-run factory that would process banana meat into value-added products such as (surprisingly addictive) candies. Collective fish ponds were also being dug in 1999 as part of a project developed by an Italian ngo in conjunction with the movement. The mst hoped that the settlers would work with the fish collectively, although the settlers mostly intended to take fish eggs from the large ponds to small ponds dug on their own property. When I returned to Flora in 2001, a severe drought in southern Brazil had pushed up national sugarcane prices and production was gearing up again in the plantation region of the Northeast. Sugarcane distilleries that had sat quiet during my first field trip were planning on processing the next harvest, and everywhere cane was being planted again. The banana factory had been abandoned, and most of the settlers’ banana trees looked like they had been abandoned as well. The fish ponds had been completed, but few of the settlers had continued with plans to commodify their small-

Mobilization within Movements 33 scale production. Instead, throughout the settlement, the settlers were excitedly discussing the rising price of sugarcane in anticipation of the money they would earn from their harvest. Sugarcane has very little place in the mst’s vision of either agrarian reform or community, and movement leaders tried to persuade the settlers that they should make a stand against the exploitative crop. But sugarcane is seductive—the settlers know how to plant it (in fact, the stalks can be found all over their land so they often do not need to purchase new seeds) and care for it, and marketing routes are easily established by the distilleries so the settlers know that as long as the price is right they will never be stuck with a harvest. As I spoke with the settlers in 2001 and again in 2003, I realized that it was not just the present that had changed—or, rather, the fluctuating price of sugarcane had not only changed the present, it had also changed the settlers’ memories of the past. The settlers looked surprised when I brought up the mst —they seemed to have little memory of actively participating in the movement (and here participating means both paying dues and attending mst-led meetings or demonstrations). Even those who had joined the settlement by occupying land seemed to have forgotten that they had spoken so fiercely against sugarcane in the early years of the settlement. It was not simply that the settlers had moved on, that the mst no longer played an important role in their future. Planting sugarcane in the present—and expecting to continue doing so—necessitated a revisioning (sometimes slight, sometimes extreme) of the past in order to deemphasize the role that the mst had played in securing the settlement and to delegitimate mst’s claims to settlement authority. The settlers talked about the settlement association, but no longer explicitly linked the association to the movement. A meeting held to discuss the conclusions of my dissertation turned into a spirited discussion of how much each settler expected to earn from the sugarcane harvest. There were, of course, still people who wanted nothing to do with sugarcane, but they were no longer indicative of the direction the settlement was going. Had a researcher entered the settlement in 2003, looking for stories of why the settlers joined the movement, he or she would have collected stories that were remarkably different from those I collected in 1998– 1999. This does not delegitimate ethnographic work, nor does it suggest a Latourian shift toward new genesis stories with every new version con-

34 Chapter One structed by the settlers. What it does suggest is that ethnography must be situated in deep time as well as in deep place (‘‘deep time’’ meaning that the present colors the past as well as the present). Situated ethnography highlights the fluidity and multiplicity of interests that go into memory making. In the case of Flora, the settlers’ willingness to buy into a historical community based on traditions very different than their own was shaped by memories that were constantly changing to keep up with the present. Situated ethnographies (collecting lived experiences/oral histories) are perhaps the only way to move past the attenuated subject-use that characterizes so many of the ‘‘classic’’ works on resistance (Ortner 1995). Ethnographic research conducted over time shows how memories of the past are negotiated in ways that reflect current situations and expectations of the future. Few people remember their experiences ‘‘objectively’’; instead, perceptions of the past are refracted through changing understandings of where they stand at the moment of remembering and where they imagine they are going in the future. This observation has important implications for the construction of collective identity among groups engaging in resistance. Collective identities are based on (among other things) a particular remembering of past events/processes/traditions (see, for example, Benedict Anderson’s treatment of ‘‘imagined communities’’ [1983] or Habermas’s treatment of communicative action [1981]). But even though history appears to happen in a linear way (with past preceding present, followed by future), historical traditions do not—people will fall in and out of collective identities depending on whether (and when) their version of past events resonates with that version supported by the collectivity.

Organization of the Book This has not been an easy book to organize. The neat academic convention of structuring a theoretically and empirically round object, in which concepts are interrelated, into a hierarchical sequence of chapters of roughly equivalent length, in which concepts follow each other, always feels somewhat arbitrary. The complicated, messy relations of social life and experiences of mobilization do not necessarily follow a historical narrative, nor do they fit tidily into discrete arguments. As a result, the chapters in this

Mobilization within Movements 35 book may not always end (or begin) where one thinks they should. They do not necessarily have to be read in order, but they will make more sense if read together. In chapter 2, I present the first of several ‘‘genesis stories’’ or stories of the mst’s formation—this one is the more standard one, explaining how the mst originated in the contradictory peasant politics of southern Brazil. In chapter 3, I describe the powerful and important influence of the mst on national and transnational politics. I argue that the movement has successfully scaled up its struggle for land and generated a global campaign for citizenship and social justice. In doing so, however, I suggest that movement politics have unwittingly constructed an ‘‘ideal member’’ from the peasant households in southern Brazil. This ideal became hegemonic in ways that helps to explain the movement’s trajectory in the sugarcane region of the Northeast. In chapter 4, I present a second genesis story—this time of the mst in northeastern Brazil, specifically in the sugarcane region of Pernambuco. In this chapter, I argue that the mst had a difficult time establishing its presence in this region because the moral economies of sugarcane plantations were so different from the moral economies of small family farms in southern Brazil. In chapter 5, I deepen the meaning of movement formation or genesis by providing testimony from several movement members. I analyze their stories and illustrate the diversity of membership within the movement. In the last chapter of the book, chapter 6, I situate the movement’s eventual (though perhaps temporary) decline in Água Preta through an analysis of three key issues: production, property, and politics. Following this chapter, in a brief conclusion, I return to the national political scene and assess the new relationship between the mst and the government of Luis Inácio ‘‘Lula’’ da Silva and discuss the implications of the current conjuncture for agrarian reform.

2 The Making of a Movement in Southern Brazil Peasants have been cut a raw deal in Brazil. On the one hand, it has been suggested that they don’t exist. Scholars such as the prominent rural sociologist José de Souza Martins (2003) and Stuart Schwartz (2004) argue that Brazil has no peasantry because a small farming class never developed organically in the Portuguese colony. What small farmers did exist were transplants from Europe: migrants, primarily from Italy and Germany, who came to Brazil to escape the demographic squeeze on land resources. On the other hand, whether or not the small farmers in Brazil were actually peasants, modern development in the country depended on the extraction of their labor: small farmers looking for land were lured into the coffee and sugar plantations in the hopes of eventually purchasing their own properties. Their offspring were lured into the city generations later to look for work in the newly industrializing cities of the South. The debate over the empirical status of the peasantry—did Brazil have one or not—seems purely academic, but it is in fact intensely political, and it matters. If Brazil has no ‘‘real’’ peasantry, then peasant organizing—or organizing in the name of the peasantry, as the mst does—has little material or symbolic legitimacy. Arguing along these lines, Martins (2003) concludes that members of movements like the mst have been manipulated by peasant nostalgia and savvy middle-class leaders (activists from the trade unions, the Catholic Church, and the intelligentsia). In this chapter, I contribute to this debate. I argue that historical property relations in Brazil have simultaneously allowed for and denied the possibility of a peasantry, generating poor conditions for peasant survival but optimal conditions for peasant political organization. This ‘‘original contradiction’’ of peasant existence is constitutive of a wider set of contradictions: (1) Brazil has an extensive territory—it is the fifth largest country in the world—and yet land is scarce: official estimates put the number of landless families (defined as people who would like land but are unable to access it) at approximately 3.8 million. (2) The promise of land for

The Movement in Southern Brazil 37 smallholder cultivation and colonization has been part of the nationmaking imaginary, which has been replete with declarations of ‘‘manifest destiny’’ in the westward march toward the interior of the country even as the means through which poorer, small-scale farmers could access land have been ambiguous and fraught with conflict. The legal system governing landed property contains generous provisions for squatting and ‘‘productive use,’’ even as it maintains the sanctity of private property. The desire for land was thus encouraged and partially accommodated (particularly in southern Brazil), but never adequately satisfied. (3) Partly as a result of these two contradictions, Brazil is one of the world’s most powerful agricultural producers and exporters even as an estimated 44 million people suffer from chronic hunger. These are the contradictions of the not-peasantry in Brazil: peasant mobilization occurs throughout Brazilian history and into the contemporary period because the peasantry has historically been both encouraged and thwarted.

The Historical Construction of Contradictory Peasants The contradiction of land availability and scarcity in Brazil goes back to the fourteenth-century Portuguese feudal system. On June 26, 1375, Dom Fernando I of Portugal instituted a land tenure system of sesmarias. A sesmaria was a hereditary land grant, at that time equivalent to one square league of land.∞ The sesmaria system was intended to reduce the level of unproductive land in the country: if land was not used, it would revert to the Portuguese crown (Panini 1990: 22; Wright 2001; Wright and Wolford 2003). In 1500, when the Portuguese crown claimed the new colony of Brazil, the land along the coast was carved up into fourteen captaincies, and the rights to develop and govern these lands were granted to twelve men.≤ These men—friends and servants of the crown—were vested with the right to oversee distribution and everyday governance in their captaincies, although they were not themselves technically allowed to take more than ten leagues of land without paying for it (Panini 1990: 22). Within the captaincies, land was distributed according to the Lei de Sesmarias (Law of Land Grants): grants were distributed to persons connected to the Portuguese crown (often as a reward for military or administrative service), who were explicitly enjoined to utilize the land profitably within six years

38 Chapter Two of receiving it; otherwise, all rights would revert to the crown (as terra devoluta). During the colonial period, the only access to property title was through this sesmaria system. To have the right to a sesmaria, the candidate needed to be a person of business: for example, he would be ‘‘well-endowed and capable of leading and administering a sugar mill’’ (Panini 1990: 23). The Portuguese authorities were largely unwilling and unable to enforce the productivity clause, however. As late as 1795, the Portuguese monarchy attempted to bring its territory under control by demanding that Brazilian landowners measure and demarcate their land, but legal efforts were suspended because there were not enough trained professionals available to survey the properties (Varella 1997: 193). Colonial officials bemoaned the wasteful attitude of the landed elite, but little was or could be done to reverse it (Sodero 1982; Wright 2001). Other colonists who were not so well connected as to merit a sesmaria did access land, but these were generally poor migrants who squatted on the outskirts of large plantation—the so-called backlands. These migrants generally did not have the social or economic standing to merit a royal grant, and their squats were not legally recognized (Viotti da Costa 2000: 81). In 1822, Brazil became an independent nation, and in 1824 a new Constitution was adopted, but the details of a new land law were debated in Congress for almost thirty years. The debate turned on alternative visions of Brazil’s development: if the country was to strengthen its plantation economy, land should be available only to those who could successfully produce export commodities. If the country was to develop an alternative internal market, however, then land had to be available to those who could work it for themselves and their families—land for those who work it as a means of colonizing the country (Viotti da Costa 2000: 84–85). As the land law was debated, the Portuguese Law of Sesmarias was suspended (resolution number 76, signed by Dom Pedro I), and a new regime de posses (or ‘‘squatters’ regime’’) was instituted. Squatters had first been recognized as juridical persons by the Portuguese crown in 1767, when they were declared to have rights to land they had personally cultivated (Varella 1997: 196); a ruling from 1795 had defined squatters as ‘‘those who possess land without title other than the benefit of their possessions’’ (Sodero 1982). The new land law finally established in 1850 (Lei de Terras)≥ illustrated the power of the plantation: plantation owners needed free laborers in

The Movement in Southern Brazil 39 order to replace their increasingly emancipated slaves, and this required prioritizing the ‘‘right to work’’ over the ‘‘right to property.’’ Accordingly, the Lei de Terras made land available only through purchase, stating in Article 1 that ‘‘acquisition of land by any other means than purchase is prohibited.’’ The law also authorized the government ‘‘to send for a certain number of free colonists every year’’ (Article 18). These colonists would replace the slaves who worked in the coffee and sugar plantations. The government charged itself with assisting new immigrants to ‘‘find work soon after they disembark.’’ Through the legalization of land titles, hectares began to replace laborers as the most valuable form of property: land, instead of slaves, was now accepted by the banks as collateral for loans (Panini 1990: 29).∂ The commodification of land and the rapid construction of a land market favored the constitution of large-scale properties, as the 1850 law privileged economies of scale in land purchases: ‘‘Those who possess land on which they are planting or raising livestock, no matter what the manner of their acquisition, will have preference in purchasing neighboring public land, as long as they can prove that they have the means necessary to take advantage of it’’ (Article 15). The law also tightened restrictions on squatting: Article 2 stated that squatters would be kicked off of public land (although later articles stated that persons currently squatting on land would be exempted as long as they immediately applied for title) and forced to pay a fine as well as spend two to six months in jail. The law required the regularization of titles through surveys, established rules for legitimating possession, and forced the government to sell rather than give away land (in order to prevent the abuse of land exchanges for political reasons). These legal changes notwithstanding, force remained a major avenue for obtaining land ‘‘rights’’:∑ possession was often equivalent to ownership only when the possessor was powerful enough. Individuals, as well as corporations, managed to grab extensive properties by falsifying legal documents and having their lands guarded by private police. To work the land, the Brazilian government encouraged international migration. The planters were ill disposed toward ‘‘national labor’’ (freed slaves and people of mixed origins) because they did not think that ‘‘Brazilians’’ would work hard enough.∏ After considerable debate, the government dismissed the Chinese as ‘‘backward,’’ and Puerto Ricans as ‘‘too African,’’ and in the end encouraged emigration from Germany and Italy, both countries with strong peasant traditions and a ‘‘civilized’’ nature

40 Chapter Two Table 1. Immigrants to Brazil, by Nationality, 1872–1899

Italian Portuguese Spanish German Other Total (persons)

1872–1879 (%)

1880–1889 (%)

1890–1899 (%)

25.80 31.2 1.9 8.1 33.0 22,042

61.80 23.3 6.7 4.2 4.0 369,511

57.60 18.3 13.7 1.4 8.9 1,198,327

Source: Figures cited in Skidmore 1999: 72–73.

(Lesser 1999). The Brazilian government supported the search for plantation labor because most officials at that time were wealthy landowners; they had a stake in finding workers who would be less expensive and ‘‘whiter’’ than slaves or coolies (Skidmore 1974). The Brazilian government was also interested in settling the far South of the country, and hoped to entice small farmers from Europe with the promise of owning their own land in Brazil. In 1886, planters from the state of São Paulo organized the Sociedade Promotora de Imigração (Society for Promoting Immigration), and the number of immigrants to Brazil increased from 33,000 in 1886 to 132,000 two years later (figures cited in Skidmore 1999: 72; see table 1). The high level of immigration was a product of both government subsidization and economic depression in parts of Europe. Immigrants received some private and public subsidization of travel costs, but the conditions they found in Brazil were not quite the paradise they were promised. The Brazilian elite—unaccustomed to a ‘‘wage contract,’’ and unable to conceive of the labor contract as an agreement between two legally equal, ‘‘free’’ parties—fought the workers for control over the labor process and access to land (Stein 1985). The planters placed labor demands on the colonos (as these workers were called in the coffee plantations) that made it difficult for migrants to repay the costs of their trip to Brazil. As Verena Stolcke has argued, plantation owners benefited from tying a family to cultivation rights: families were more reliable and more productive than wage workers, because many family members would work without technically receiving a wage (Stolcke 1988). Ultimately, planters hoped to

The Movement in Southern Brazil 41 respond to increasing commercial incentives by extracting more labor from their workers, and they worried that if the workers were allowed to accumulate any surplus, they might try and buy land for themselves (Dean 1976). In 1902, the Italian government officially prohibited its citizens from accepting subsidies for travel to Brazil, and the Swiss consul in Brazil was investigating several accounts of persecution (Lesser 1999). In 1911, the Spanish government also prohibited emigration to Brazil. The experience with immigrant labor suggests that while the rhetoric of the Enlightenment and French liberalism pervaded official documents such as the Federal Constitution, Brazilian elites were highly resistant to fundamental components of liberal society, such as equality and progress (Viotti da Costa 2000). In 1890, new labor legislation was created to legally reinforce the wage relationship as a legal contract signed between equals (Stolcke 1988). The new labor statute obligated the employer to pay for the upkeep of each family member working on a plantation, making it more difficult to profit from unremunerated household labor. The immediate result of the legislation was the summary eviction of thousands of immigrants and other traditional laborers from the plantations. Families who were evicted from the plantations had three main choices: they could move to the growing urban areas, particularly the city of São Paulo; they could migrate south in search of land of their own; or they could return to their native country. Many of the former colonos chose to migrate south, as their original purpose in going to Brazil was to find land of their own. There is academic debate over how many of the colonos did receive land in southern Brazil; enough families were able to buy land, however, that the three southernmost states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná are considered strongholds of small family farming to this day.π The existence of open frontiers well into the postcolonial period—combined with high levels of mobility among small farmers and a practice of land grabbing among large farmers—made the posseiro (squatter) a familiar figure in southern Brazil. Although the planters themselves largely stayed in the countryside and did not diversify production into manufacturing or industrial concerns, coffee production pioneered industrialization in Brazil. Coffee production expanded rapidly in the late 1800s with the construction of a railroad system (Dean 1976). The processing, packaging, and sale of coffee domi-

42 Chapter Two nated the home market, and brought in a flow of monetary capital for the first time in the country’s history. The coffee industry also created a domestic market by forcing plantation workers to grow only coffee and purchase all other goods (Dean 1969). As coffee production in São Paulo and Paraná increased and money flowed into the government coffers, the economy was modernized and capital investment plunged deeper into the South. New railroads and paved roads were built to integrate the southern agricultural regions with the metropolitan areas of São Paulo and Rio de Janiero. The effects of this modernization on rural workers were contradictory, and led to what was arguably the beginning of peasant political action. In 1902, the government awarded development rights to a North American entity, the Brazil Railway Company, for construction of a railroad system between São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. The company was awarded ownership of an area spreading fifteen kilometers out from either side of the railroad (Renk 1997: 42). This area passed directly through a region in which political control was being contested by the states of Paraná and Santa Catarina. In 1910, the company finished its work on the railroad and turned to territorial exploration. Ironically, even as small farmers living in the area around the railroad were dispossessed by the company’s claim on the lands, the government was developing plans to follow the construction of the railroad with small-scale colonization. Plans were made to settle small farmers in the area, although the government did not begin distributing small plots until 1915, and from 1915 to 1917 the great majority of land titles disbursed by the government were for farms larger than one thousand hectares (Renk 1997: 44–45). The primary small-scale colonization settlement—which was to be named Irani—was never implemented. The actions of the national government articulated with local-level disputes over the political allegiance of the territory, and fueled a war between landless migrants and the state governments of Santa Catarina and Paraná. Landless farmers gathered around the charismatic figure of the monk José Maria, who was killed in 1912 during a clash with the government army.∫ The war, referred to as the ‘‘Contestado’’ because it took place in the contested region between the two states, grew in size and in violence. Landless farmers and religious seekers joined the movement as a means of protesting the intrusion of both state and private capital onto

The Movement in Southern Brazil 43 their land. At the height of the rebellion, there were between 20,000 and 30,000 people living on approximately 28,000 hectares of land in the border region between Santa Catarina and Paraná. The rebels organized themselves into communal societies and established ideals of egalitarianism and need-based exchange. And as they waited for José Maria’s resurrection, the rebels demanded land from the government, arguing that the land along the railroad belonged to Brazil and not to foreigners. It was not until 1915 that the government’s ‘‘war of attrition’’ (siege and starvation) succeeded in destroying the rebel camps (Diacon 1991: 3–4). In the 1940s, rural unrest generated by contradictory land and labor laws and practices began to expand, becoming a national concern. New communist-organized Peasant Leagues were forming throughout the country, especially in the Northeast (fifteen years prior to the Peasant Leagues led by Francisco Julião). These leagues were organized by the Brazilian Communist Party, as a means of protesting the difficulty of organizing rural trade unions—which, at that time, were required to have presidents who could prove a history of good conduct, work specialization, and ideological correctness, all of which were difficult for rural workers to prove (Panini 1990: 55; also Pereira 1997; Maybury-Lewis 1994). In 1946, the Brazilian Constitution was rewritten for the fifth time.Ω Although little formal change had occurred in land law from 1850 until this point, in 1946 the Communist Party and the affiliated peasant leagues were able to exert sufficient pressure to insert a clause (Chapter 2, Article 141, section 16) stating that ‘‘property rights are guaranteed except in the case of expropriation for necessity or public use, or for social interest mediated by prior and just monetary indemnification. In cases of imminent danger, such as war or internal commotion [comoção intestina], the competent authorities may use private property if it is in the interests of public good and if, in every case, indemnification is assured’’ (see Deere and Medeiros 2005). Although the law provided for state expropriation, the stipulation that compensation be prior, just, and monetary effectively neutralized its application (Meszaros 2001). But the idea that all individuals had a right to own property also fueled dangerous political unrest that, as in many Latin American countries, was distinctly communist. Agrarian reform became an increasingly heated political issue in Brazil in the 1950s. Social movements, political parties, leftleaning intellectuals, trade unions, and international observers argued for

44 Chapter Two property and land expropriation to be legalized. Although the Communist Party was outlawed in 1947, activists and trade unionists—along with members of the Catholic Church—continued to organize around the demand for land. By the early 1960s, rural organizations such as the Peasant Leagues and the Union of Brazilian Agricultural Workers were organized throughout the country and pressed for radical reforms in both land and labor rights. For the first time in Brazilian history, the Left became a ‘‘movement for agrarian reform that strengthened the radical forces within the working class and inspired a new wave of nationalism’’ (Quartim 1971: 44). In 1961, 1,400 delegates attended the National Peasants’ Congress in Belo Horizonte (Moraes 1970: 482–483). This represented the first mass meeting of rural workers in Brazil. As a sign of his growing support for the ‘‘radical’’ Left, then President João Goulart himself sponsored the Congress. In 1962, Goulart created the Superintendência da Reforma Agrária (Superintendency of Agrarian Reform) (Supra) to work with the growing peasant movement. As early as 1963, five hundred unions had been created under the National Confederation of Rural Workers, and a year later Peasant League marches were reportedly being held nearly every day (Bacchus 1990: 9). In 1964, President Goulart announced his famous assembly of reforms (comício das reformas). In front of a crowd of 200,000, Goulart announced that he would nationalize oil refineries and expropriate all land within a hundred kilometers of federal roads and railways. In a country characterized by highly unequal land tenure and a powerful rural elite—and in the international context of the cold war—such mobilization for reform incited concerns among both the Brazilian military and the international community of a communist uprising. The United States, in particular, was extremely worried about the possibility of communist rule in Brazil. In 1964, a right-wing military elite took power. Two days after the coup, on April 3, 1964, the New York Times reported that Lyndon Johnson sent his ‘‘warmest good wishes’’ to the military leaders who had saved Brazil from the radical threat (Skidmore 1967: 329). The years following the coup were characterized—in both Brazil and in Latin America more generally— by a conservative project of agricultural modernization. Instead of modernizing the agricultural sector by revising property and social relations, the Brazilian government focused on modernizing production relations, particularly through the use of capital-intensive industrial technology

The Movement in Southern Brazil 45 (Graziano da Silva 1982). This strategy was a deliberate attempt to mimic the classic British path to development, in which ‘‘underemployed’’ rural workers were drawn out of the countryside to serve as an industrial labor force. This, then, was to be the end of the peasantry in Brazil and more generally (e.g., de Janvry 1981: 221–223). Soon after taking power, the military government wrote a new Estatuto da Terra (Land Statute) (Law 4,504, November 30, 1964), which emphasized the commitment to land as a social good. Prompted by President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress and international concerns over land distribution, the law was extremely progressive on paper. Article 2 of the statute states that ‘‘everyone is assured of the opportunity to access landed property, conditioned by its social function, in the form provided for by this law’’ (quoted in Panini 1990: 81); here, the use of the term ‘‘opportunity’’ instead of ‘‘right’’ is important. Article 16 states that ‘‘agrarian reform is intended to establish a system of relations between men, rural property and land use, which is capable of promoting social justice, progress, the well-being of the rural workers, and the country’s economic development, with the gradual extinction of the minifúndio and the latifúndio.’’ Despite its progressive tone, conditions for the implementation of the statute (particularly the legal definition of productivity) were left vague enough to avoid any real responsibility for expropriation. Over the next ten years, the military introduced new laws that made the Land Statute more specific: Amendment 10 replaced the need for cash and instituted payment by government land bonds, and Institutional Act 9, in 1969, eliminated the need for prior payment for the land. But as George Meszaros (2000, 2002) has written, the Land Statute was never actually implemented in the manner in which it was written, because the law in Brazil was largely an ideological structure, not a reflection of collective interests. As a result, the military government’s main focus was on relocation: 200,000 families from northeastern and southern Brazil were settled in the sparsely populated savannahs of the Center West and the Amazon Basin. Between 1970 and 1984, 84.14 percent of the land expropriated by the government was in the north of the country (see table 2). The military awarded one-hundred-hectare plots of lands to the new settlers, hoping both to disperse rural unrest and to explore the country’s northern border. The planned colonization projects largely failed: they did not provide

46 Chapter Two Table 2. Land Expropriated, by Region, 1970–1984 Region

Land Expropriated (%)

North Northeast South Southeast Center West

84.14 4.22 4.94 4.43 2.28

Source: Ministério do Desenvolvimento Agrário 2000: 19.

Table 3. Settlements Created between 1927 and 1997 Period

Settlements

1927–1963 1964–1984 1985–1989 1990–1992 1993–1994 1995–1997

2 43 506 229 111 1,355

Source: Figures cited in Guanziroli 1999: 13.

the necessary infrastructure, and basic services such as health and sanitation services were never offered (Schmink and Wood 1984: 1–5). The military managed to create only forty-three settlements for 8,000 of the 100,000 people expected to benefit from its plan (see table 3). The military’s experiment with colonization also brought international condemnation because of the difficult conditions experienced by the settlers, and because of the environmental impact on the delicate Amazon region.∞≠ Some of the people drawn to the Amazon by government promises of land and work would return home and become mst members in the early years of the movement’s mobilization. After twenty-one years of military dictatorship, a civilian president was elected in 1985. As the military government withdrew from the executive office, popular demand for agrarian reform again became an important political issue. New social movements—like the mst —were formed, and political parties emphasized the land issue as a priority for the democratic government. The irony of agrarian mobilization in a country that had just

The Movement in Southern Brazil 47 gone through an intensive process of industrialization has to be understood as one of the ongoing contradictions of land policy in Brazil.

Without Agrarian Reform, There Is No Democracy: The Formation of the MST In January 1984, representatives from the increasingly numerous squatter camps, rural trade unions, and the Catholic Church met and formed the mst. They called for the movement’s first National Congress to be held in the southern state of Paraná a year later, the same year that civilian elections would be held in Brazil for the first time since the military coup in 1964. In January 1985, 1,500 delegates from twenty-three states attended the first mst National Congress. The delegates established a short-term goal of securing land for the landless and a long-term goal of creating a just, socialist society. The slogan that emerged from the movement’s first National Congress was ‘‘Without agrarian reform, there is no democracy.’’ At this time, the movement’s primary objectives were the following: 1. The movement demanded that the government (a) give land to those who work it, (b) give settlers the necessary resources and conditions to produce on their land, and (c) that expropriations for the purposes of agrarian reform be in the settlers’ area of origin. 2. The movement demanded that all land owned by foreign companies be expropriated, and that foreigners be prohibited from owning land ever again within Brazil. 3. The members decided that (a) they should immediately occupy all unproductive land, (b) occupied land should be worked cooperatively, and (c) new laws should be devised to change the whole political system of the country. (Stedile 2005: 177–80)

It was at this time that the new president-elect of Brazil, Tancredo Neves, appointed a left-leaning intellectual, José Gomes da Silva (founder and director of the Brazilian Association of Agrarian Reform), to lead the formulation of a Plano Nacional de Reforma Agrária (National Plan for Agrarian Reform) (pnra). The pnra began as a progressive project, in large part because of the social backing for agrarian reform: popular

48 Chapter Two amendments for reform were supported by 1.2 million signatories, while amendments opposed to reform presented only 46,000 signatures (Meszaros 2002). The pnra proposed the settlement of 7.1 million families (of an estimated 10.5 million families at that time) between 1985 and 2000 on over 480 million hectares of redistributed land. Of the total, 85 percent of the land was to be private (roughly 409.5 million hectares of land) and 15 percent was to be public (71.1 million hectares of land). The plan promised to revise the practice of making land concessions to economic groups, and provided the legal means for the state to disarm private militias employed by large landowners. The pnra did not become a legal reality in its original form, however. The battle over the new constitution lasted three years (1985–1988), and the struggle over land reform was the most bitterly contested element (Lisboa 1988: 60–62). The pnra provoked a vigorous backlash: a rightwing group of rural landowners, the Uniâo Democratica Rural (Rural Democratic Union) (udr), formed in defense of ‘‘Property, Tradition, and Family’’ (see Payne 2000). In order to protect ‘‘stability and peace’’ in the countryside, members of the udr were prepared to use ‘‘any means available’’ to destroy organization among the rural poor (Oliveira and del Campo 1985: 13).∞∞ Between 1986 and 1988, the newly created udr recruited over 200,000 new members (Hall 1990). It is estimated that approximately 360 people died in clashes between landless Brazilians and the udr (Peritore and Peritore 1990: 379).∞≤ Furthermore, the landowners collected money ‘‘to influence deputies and guarantee that they impede agrarian reform’’ (Zupinoli 1993: 10). The conservative mobilization was ultimately successful when the new constitution was ratified in October 1988, provisions for agrarian reform were significantly weaker than originally proposed (Ondetti 2008: 104–106). From its inception, the mst worked with the relatively conservative language of the Constitution to occupy land and pressure the government to recognize a social need for distribution. The process by which the outcome of an occupation is negotiated is extremely complex, and involves regular recourse to the legal system. The participants in an occupation generally select one or two representatives to meet with the government and the landowner (if the land was privately held). These representatives are sometimes joined by official mst lawyers, or are offered legal services by ngos such as Amnesty International. After an occupation takes place, the owner of the land has the right to file a revindicação de posse (claim

The Movement in Southern Brazil 49 of possession) with the local courts, which are expected to determine whether the squatters have a legal case against the landowner. If there is no legal case, the squatters can be expelled with police or military force. If there is a legal case, the occupation becomes a matter for either the state government or the federal government. After the government evaluates the land and determines who will be settled, negotiations with the owner begin. The landowner has to accept the government’s monetary offer before the land can be officially expropriated. Legislation passed under the Cardoso administration has expedited the negotiation process by enabling agency officials to access funds for purchase within twenty-four hours of filing a claim for expropriation.∞≥ Legislation has also made it possible to pay the landowners for their land in cash rather than in treasury bonds, which has made expropriation much more attractive to landowners.∞∂ If the federal government takes the case, the government agrarian reform agency, incra (the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, or National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) evaluates the land and surveys the squatters. The squatters are ranked according to criteria such as marital status, age, and previous occupation; there are often too many people to be settled in a given area, and these criteria establish priority for settlement. In general, squatters who are older and have a large family with experience in agriculture will be given priority. This system is part of what pushes young men into more militant activism: after spending several months in an occupation camp and being turned down for land several times, they will often decide to join the movement as activists. In theory, the federal government could be involved in taking the initiative to find land that is eligible for expropriation and settlement. Most regional agrarian reform agencies, however, find that they do not have the staff or the resources to keep up with the demand generated by social movements, let alone to look for other properties for expropriation. As one incra official said, ‘‘We are always just one step behind the movement.’’∞∑ Despite the apparent effectiveness of the social movements, however, agrarian reform officials also argue that occupations hurt the distribution process: ‘‘mst’s occupations only hurt us. They paralyze everything. We have to sit and talk and everything stops. They reduce our ability to work by about 50 percent. And they hurt our relationship with the large farmers, it creates enemies.’’∞∏

50 Chapter Two

Joining the Movement: Family Farmers in Southern Brazil Although the mst is a nationwide movement today, its origins were in southern Brazil. This matters, as I argue throughout the book, because it is in southern Brazil that the movement’s first members and leaders developed a particular repertoire of action and ideology. Research for this book was conducted in Santa Catarina, which is considered the breadbasket of Brazil. Soy, wheat, and poultry have all been produced and processed there for export since the 1970s. The state has a highly modernized capitalist agricultural sector articulated through labor contracts with a significant peasant population. Santa Catarina has the highest number of small farms as a ratio of total properties in the country. Agricultural capitals have penetrated, appropriated, and subsumed small farm activities in a process of agroindustrialization that began in the 1930s and sped up rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. Although there is not necessarily a tension between peasant and capitalist agriculture, the claims that development, urbanization, and industrialization make on land do conflict with the claims that subsistence producers make. Santa Catarina’s history is marked by conflicts between these different claims to the land. The Catholic Church has played a particularly prominent role in the formation of an organized landless movement in Santa Catarina. This is largely due to the active presence of Dom José Gomes, head of the diocese in the central plains town of Chapecó. Members of the diocese mobilized radical sentiment among the peasantry throughout the rural communities in the western part of the state. During the 1970s, the Pastoral da Terra (Catholic Land Pastoral) (cpt) and the Pastoral da Juventude (Catholic Youth Pastoral) were important religious organizations that brought people together and provided a forum for discussing the rights of the rural poor. The cpt and the Youth Pastoral gained momentum in the early 1980s with the increasing activism of the opposition trade unions and Movement of People Affected by Dams (Movimento dos Atingidos das Barragens). The latter movement was formed after a series of dams in southern Brazil left thousands of people without access to land. Many of these people would form the ranks of mst’s early membership. The first occupation linked (backward in time) to the mst in the state

The Movement in Southern Brazil 51 took place in May 1980. The occupation of an estate in western Santa Catarina called Burro Branco was the isolated act of five laborers, all from the same family. The family members had discovered that incra was going to expropriate a farm in the area, and they hoped to force their own settlement by occupying that area. After setting up camp, the family realized that they were on the wrong farm. They decided to stay, however, as they could see that the land was unproductive. Within five months, the encampment had grown to over three hundred families. Both the Catholic Church, primarily the diocese of Chapecó, and the Lutheran Church supported the squatters and advocated their cause with the state government. In November 1980, the federal government stepped in and expropriated the area. Burro Branco was an important settlement for the rise of mst in Santa Catarina: the settlement proved that the struggle could be victorious even as it failed to adequately address the demand for land. The state created a space for the movement by establishing the settlement, but because the underlying reasons for landlessness and poverty were ignored, more occupations were inevitable.

The MST in Campos Novos On May 25, 1985, the mst organized a day of occupations throughout the state. As national politicians debated the National Plan for Agrarian Reform (prna), over two thousand people occupied idle farms in western Santa Catarina. The day, May 25, was chosen for a number of reasons. The month of May signaled the termination of land rental contracts in the region and, as a result, many small farm tenants discovered that they could not find land to rent and were effectively landless (Lisboa 1988: 73). Some of the people who occupied land in May 1985 were settled in the municipality of Campos Novos. Campos Novos sits in the central plains of Santa Catarina (the region where the 1912 Contestado war occurred). The town originally began as a way station for cattle drivers traveling from the far South of the country to the booming markets in the city of São Paulo. In 1881, the town was recognized as an autonomous municipality, and its population continued to increase—particularly with the construction of the São Paulo–Rio Grande do Sul railroad, begun in 1910. Many of the early settlers of the state were Europeans who had migrated to Brazil in

52 Chapter Two search of land. The European character of colonization is a source of pride for most local people. A popular book on early Campos Novos history distinguishes these European colonists from the ‘‘locals,’’ noting that the early settlers ‘‘were smallholder colonists, cultivators or industrialists, integrated into Brazilian ways. They developed their activities while adhering to the law and educating their children in the municipal schools. They conserved their religious beliefs without hurting the town’s interests and they maintained good relations with the other local inhabitants [caboclos, or people of mixed race]’’ (Blasi 1994: 69). The primary economic activities in Campos Novos at the beginning of the twentieth century were large-scale ranching and agricultural production. Cattle ranchers regularly drove their herds from Campos Novos to São Paulo, roughly nine hundred kilometers away. As the municipal anthem poetically states: ‘‘Campos Novos, of such great beauty, vibrant and full of life, with its soybeans as its wealth, and its cattle as its bounty.’’ Campos Novos is distinguished from the rest of Santa Catarina by its relatively high proportion of large, modernized farms: in 1999, there were 3,874 properties covering 178,500 hectares throughout the municipality.∞π Only 2.5 percent of the property holders owned farms larger than 500 hectares, but their land covered the same area as the 75 percent of farmers who owned farms smaller than 50 hectares (see table 4). By the 1990s, the maldistribution of land in the municipality, combined with the lack of industry, generated high levels of impoverishment. In a study that compiled figures from 1990–1995, the municipality was ranked number 233 out of 258 municipalities in the state, according to an index of social development. Campos Novos was found to have high levels of illiteracy and infant mortality, as well as low levels of income per capita and poor sanitation services. mst squatters were sent to an area that would become a settlement I call Vento. Vento covered roughly two thousand hectares (five thousand acres) of land previously belonging to a farmer named Francisco Moraes (or, Chico as everyone called him).∞∫ Under Chico, part of the land was used as pasture for extensive cattle grazing and part of the land was rented by twelve families who paid him 15 percent of their income in exchange for usufruct rights to the land. At the time of the expropriation, Chico’s land sustained only fifty head of cattle, forty-eight hectares of corn, and nineteen hectares of soy (Baumann 1997: 19). Chico had other properties in Santa Catarina, and by all accounts he was pleased to sell the

The Movement in Southern Brazil 53 Table 4. Land Tenure in Campos Novos, Santa Catarina, 1999 Farms According to Size (ha) [10 10–50 50–100 100–1,000 1,000–10,000 ]10,000 Total

Percent of Total Establishments

Percent of Total Farming Area

31.97 43.42 12.04 5.85 4.19 2.52 100

4.39 16.72 14.22 18.31 21.12 25.25 100

Source: Figures provided by the mayor’s office of Campos Novos, 1999.

land when incra approached him. incra paid Chico 24,773 agrarian debt bonds worth approximately 246 million cruzeiros, or 33 million dollars, at the time, for the land.∞Ω Vento was originally created for ninety-seven families. Ten years later, in 1998, there were eighty-eight families on Vento. Fifty-seven of the original beneficiaries had given up their land.≤≠ Twenty-five of the fiftyfive families who had left their land did so within the first two years of the settlement. The settlers who came to Vento after 1989 arrived on the settlement in various ways. Some of them bought land in Vento from settlers who had decided to sell. Although both the mst and incra discouraged this practice, it was fairly common for people to sell their usufruct rights to the land, as well as their house and even their claim to future government credit. incra officials usually found out about these arrangements after they had been completed, and simply made a note in their books. Other settlers who had arrived in Vento over the previous ten years had traded their land on a different settlement for land in Vento, usually so they could be nearer to their family or because they heard that the land in Vento was better than where they were. A final group of new settlers consisted of families brought in by the mst to replace settlers who had decided to leave. With the exception of those who bought land in Vento, all of the settlers had participated in an occupation in order to win land. Their stories, while unique to each person, were at the same time remarkably similar.≤∞ One settler, Wilson, recounted the details of his occupation. Wilson camped out for a total of six years with 460 families.≤≤ The families first

54 Chapter Two occupied an area in Irani, a small town in western Santa Catarina. Both the community and incra sent food and medical supplies to help the settlers: the community provided food through the church and through collections made by the mst militants, and incra sent cesta basicas, monthly food baskets that included staple goods such as pasta, rice, beans, and cooking oil. The unusual generosity of providing government food to people ostensibly engaged in ‘‘illegal’’ behavior was explained by the settlers as an attempt to poison them with the worst possible quality food that was rotted and leftover from months past. After several days camped out in Irani, the squatters found out that an armed force was being organized to kick them out, so they planned an evacuation in the middle of the night. They left for the town of Abelardo Luz, where land had already been set aside for settlements. They could not get land there, though, because the plots had already been distributed, so they camped out on the settlement land while they decided what to do. They spent over three months there. Wilson remembered that in the beginning there was sufficient food, but after three months, incra stopped sending the cesta basicas and there was little work or food available. The families then went to another town, Garuvas, and camped near the town center.≤≥ They were expecting to stay there for only two months, because the land had already been marked for expropriation, but they waited for a year and the land was never distributed. The families sent delegates and committees to the state and federal capitals, Florianópolis and Brasília, but they were unable to make any headway. The families decided to force the issue and occupy the area. They occupied at night, and at seven o’clock the next morning, the landowner’s sons showed up and tried to get the squatters to leave.≤∂ During the commotion that followed, one of the landowner’s sons was killed. No one, including Wilson, seemed to know how it had happened. ‘‘Who killed him, no one knew, no one saw it. There were a lot of people there, there were even people with us who we didn’t know.’’ The families left the occupation site and did not return for ten months. They went back to their home communities or joined other occupations. When they did return to Garuvas, they tried to occupy the land again. This time they were turned back by the police, who were waiting for them. The families left, but returned again the next night and spent six months camped out on the land. They brought with them ‘‘tractors and everything to begin planting on the land.’’ Then the police arrived, ‘‘One hundred and

The Movement in Southern Brazil 55 fifty police, but they weren’t able to kick us out because we went into the city and convinced them not to.’’ Later, 1,500 police arrived at the encampment, and Wilson and twenty-nine other families were relocated and settled in Campos Novos. When incra first expropriated land for the Vento settlement in Campos Novos, it was decided that the settlers should organize themselves into a large-scale cooperative. Based on a report generated by a team of government and private scientists, the area was declared inappropriate for division into small plots. The land was extremely hilly and prone to soil loss. Overall, more than half of the settlement’s land area was characterized as inadequate for agriculture. This pessimistic assessment was based on the slope of the land, water penetration, and presence of rocks. Because it would be impossible to divide the settlement in such a way as to give each of the families sufficient land, incra decided that the settlers should work collectively, forming one large ‘‘company’’ that would reap the benefits of scale and require less land than individual families. Both incra and the mst hoped the cooperative would be a model project for agrarian reform. The plan was explained to the settlers during a general assembly and the proposal was enthusiastically accepted.≤∑ The settlers were divided up into work groups, with the different sectors covering the vegetable garden (with tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, and peppers), basic crops (corn and beans), childcare, aviaries (with little hens), reforestation, pigs, and dairy. The project coordinators expected the dairy sector to be the primary income-generator as the settlement lands were most conducive to extensive cattle grazing.≤∏ Although the cooperative did not last long in its original form, the settlers’ experiences working with the group would have an important effect on their future within the movement and as settlers. In 1998, of the eighty-eight families on Vento, only twenty-four of them were still involved in cooperative production. The eighteen families who worked in the cooperative (Cooperativa de Produçáo Agropecuária) (Copagro) all lived in concrete houses built in a common area called the agrovila. These houses ran along two sides of a main road in the agrovila, with a school and a community center at one end, where the settlers held meetings and occasional Friday night dances. The agrovila was situated parallel to the highway and most of its agricultural and pasture land lay on the other side of the busy road. Beyond the agrovila were the houses of farmers who had chosen to work individually. Most of the people on the

56 Chapter Two settlement planted corn, beans, and a few vegetables, and raised several cattle as they had always done. At the end of a long, winding dirt road a smaller agrovila was situated. This agrovila was the center of a six-family association that shared stables, a large barn for drying tobacco, and fields of planted corn and beans. They had originally belonged to the central cooperative but left to form their own organization after problems with the former surfaced.

The Articulation of Family, Work, and Community in Southern Brazil It was not by chance that the mst was started in southern Brazil. Although pieces of the ‘‘Official Genesis Story’’—the capital-intensive modernization of agriculture, the return to democracy after years of authoritarian control, and the support of progressive priests within the Catholic and Lutheran Churches—were in evidence throughout Brazil, it was in the South that localized forms of family, work, and community created a group of people both willing and able to join the mst. In western Santa Catarina, which provided some of the first mst members and most of the settlers on Vento, farming communities were characterized by strong family and community ties, all based on using the land for production and reproduction. Perhaps the most important characteristic of small family farming in the region was its fundamentally extensive and expansive nature. Children needed new land in order to set up a household. Entire families often had to pick up and find new land because the old had become exhausted and was no longer capable of producing full harvests. The settlers in Santa Catarina joined the mst because they needed new land to maintain both family production and reproduction, and because they were rooted in strong ethnic communities that valued agricultural production (see table 5). The settlers’ extensive family networks facilitated individuals’ decisions to join the mst: entire extended families and local communities often left together for occupations, reproducing historical ties on their new settlements. The periodic need to migrate in search of new land created an understanding of the frontier as ‘‘empty.’’ ‘‘Squatting’’ was a method of colonization legitimated by previous generations

The Movement in Southern Brazil 57 Table 5. Settlers’ Initial Contacts with the mst on Vento, Campos Novos, Santa Catarina Discovery of mst

20% through neighbors 30% through family 6% through the Church 16% through the union 20% through mst activists 8% through a local occupation

Reason for Joining mst

12% new land (old land was bad) 54% to own land 14% out of desperation 6% because the family did

Source: Fieldwork, 1998–1999.

who had created homes out of the forest. Dense community networks also facilitated the settlers’ decision to join the movement. The mst’s message and methods were channeled through church meetings, and through community leaders who spread word of the occupations. These leaders were crucially important in a region with a long tradition of strong, personalistic leadership. To provide a window onto that articulation of moral economy, personality, and context, I use an interview I conducted with an mst settler named Adalberto. I interviewed Adalberto in May 1998 in Curitibanos, Santa Catarina. At thirty-five, Adalberto had been married almost fourteen years and had three young children still living at home. The children studied at the school on the settlement and helped their parents on the farm on weekends and holidays. Adalberto’s grandparents had moved to the area years earlier to find land: ‘‘My grandfather was one of the founders of the community where I was born. He was the first to cut down the woods and start the community.’’ When his mother and father met, they helped to found another small community nearby that would come to be called Quilombo. It was here that Adalberto was born, in the municipality of Quilombo, in the far western reaches of Santa Catarina. Adalberto was proud of this history of colonizing new land: ‘‘So my father is one of the founders of that community too, he was the first to begin placing the wooden structure for

58 Chapter Two the community church. And then the community became a village with two sawmills and factories, furniture builders, mechanics, several stores. There were 160 families that lived in this community.’’ For small farmers like Adalberto, this sort of geographic mobility was considered a ‘‘right,’’ a legitimate solution to the problems of limited land, degraded soil, and usufruct impositions conceived of as unfair. Because access to land is considered critical for ensuring the reproduction of the family, generations of rural Brazilians have been forced to look for new land as the earlier settled areas have become densely populated or ecologically damaged (Paulilo 1996). Alexander Chayanov (Chayanov, Thorner, et al. 1986; Chayanov 1966) has argued that peasants operate in an economy distinct from capitalism because the factors motivating production are based not on profit but rather on household needs and the desire to avoid drudgery. Chayanov’s analysis turns on the so-called demographic cycle, whereby a household’s access to land was determined by the number of people that needed to produce and consume within the household. As a peasant couple had children, the family would acquire more and more land, such that a large family would seemingly have a considerable amount of land. As the children grew older, however, they would gradually leave their parents’ land to begin households of their own. This demographic cycle has been among the most contested—and the most enduring— component of Chayanov’s theory of peasant economy.≤π In the Brazilian context, this Chayanovian migratory search for land had led previous generations from Europe to the southernmost end of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, and from there into western Santa Catarina. Most of the settlers I interviewed remembered having migrated in search of land two or three times prior to joining the mst. They were continuing a tradition begun by their ancestors, who migrated to Brazil in the 1800s and colonized the southern part of the country (Da Costa 2000; Dean 1969). The so-called colonos (colonists) were awarded land on the condition that they carve productive areas out of the forested areas. The settlers passed on this historical legacy in stories that portrayed their grandparents and parents as brave colonizers who turned the woods into productive lands. This tradition and culture of colonization had a strong populist bent to it: the settlers defended their own right to land even as they disparaged the land claims made by wealthy squatters. The historical ambiguity surrounding land titles in Brazil led to the contradictory situation that pos-

The Movement in Southern Brazil 59 session was regarded as equivalent to ownership only when the possessor was powerful enough. Individuals, as well as corporations, managed to grab extensive properties by falsifying legal documents and having their lands guarded by private police. The existence of open frontiers well into the mid-1900s, combined with high levels of mobility among small farmers and a practice of land-grabbing among large farmers, made the figure of the posseiro (squatter) a familiar one in southern Brazil. In 1995, the Brazilian government instituted a program called Projeto Latifúndio (Large Farm Project), which was intended to research the legality of titles held by large landowners. In its first four years, Projeto Latifúndio found that 80 percent of the land claims held by large farmers were fraudulent (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária 2000: 10). Because of the history of illegal land claims, the mst’s characterization of wealthy squatters as thieves resonates with the small farmers’ sense of justice. For those without claims to extensive lands, property was private only insomuch as it belonged to the people who worked it. Embodied in this sense of justice was a rejection of the idea that the landlord is the ‘‘natural’’ owner of the land, which fit well with the ‘‘land for those who work it’’ message that the mst promoted.≤∫ The small farmers of western Santa Catarina interpreted and legitimated the mst’s concepts of occupation and resettlement through these traditional ideas of mobility, legalized squatting, and the open frontier. All of these were integral to the ways in which small family farming has developed in southern Brazil. Quilombo, where Adalberto was born, was one of the ‘‘hotspots’’ of early mst activity; Adalberto estimated that more than half of the families who lived there when he was a boy had left for mst occupations: ‘‘When the occupation of ’85 came, the movement took a lot of people away with them to help. Then there was the occupation of ’87 and after that ’88 or ’89—well, since 1990, the community has emptied out. When I was fifteen years old, the community [of Quilombo] had 160 families who went to church and made their living there. When I left for the occupation, there were 60 or 70 families. . . . Today the community may have approximately 30 or 35 families.’’ Like most of the settlers on Vento, Adalberto defined community as ‘‘families who went to church and made their living there.’’ Communities were farms, churches, schools, and soccer fields—places that brought together those who lived in an area as wide as twenty to thirty miles. Community centers were important sites for socializing and exchanging

60 Chapter Two information, as families often met and exchanged news on Sundays in church or during a game of soccer. Community centers also represented a familiar public forum for discussing ideas that were often considered dangerous. According to the settlers on Vento, their community centers provided the only meeting places where the families came together at the end of the week. The need to cooperate periodically reinforced the feeling of relative equality between community members. Most of the settlers remembered taking part in mutirões (shared workdays) during the harvest, when everybody’s crops needed to be brought in as quickly as possible. The communities were not necessarily idyllic, nor were they free from conflict, but they were places where the families came together after a week of work. The mst expanded throughout western Santa Catarina by building on these strong community networks. Local churches and schools often hosted the movement’s informational meetings. Such settings provided familiar environments for local families interested in land reform. Whole blocks of community members often left together for an occupation, and on most settlements in the South, large groups can be identified that were originally part of agricultural communities in other areas of the state. Adalberto’s rural community of Quilombo provided most of the state’s active leaders, as well as several of the families living in Vento: ‘‘We were organized by the community. The militants of the movement came to the meetings in the church. There were eighteen families in the community, and all of them came to the meeting in the church.’’ Communities were rarely so unanimous in either supporting or rejecting the mst, but neighboring families often created networks of people who supported or rejected the movement. As one settler on Vento said: ‘‘At that time, no one knew anything about the movement and these occupations. Then it began with some people who lived there, and they were the first. And then one person began to pull on the other and pretty soon everyone went.’’ The more people in any given community who supported the mst, the easier it was for them to join an occupation: familiarity made it possible to withstand the uncertainty and fear involved in an occupation, and large groups facilitated logistical preparations. The more people participating in an occupation, the easier it was to send a truck around the night before to collect everyone and their belongings. Adalberto ended up joining the movement with seven other families. All seven of them did well for themselves through the struggle. Out of the

The Movement in Southern Brazil 61 seven who joined the occupation together, three had returned to Quilombo and four were living in mst settlements near Adalberto. ‘‘So you see that of our seven families, two are part of the mst state leadership— there’s my brother and [another leader]—and there was another, but his mother died and he went back to Quilombo. Today he is a city councilor. So the struggle for land had good results. . . . Another comrade also went back to Quilombo and he [and the city councilor] created an association. They have a hog-slaughtering industry and they work with homemade yogurt and cheese, and they run their properties; it’s a group of brothers, but they are running their business.’’ The presence of a familiar figure— the local leader—in the history of many rural communities played an important role in many settlers’ decisions to join the mst: ‘‘In the beginning, it wasn’t the mst, it was just community leaders.’’ These leaders provided an important link between the radical ideas of mobilization and resistance and the settlers’ own desire for change. Local leaders were able to tap into social networks among neighbors and friends in part because they came to the movement from important institutions that were widely regarded as legitimate, such as the church and rural unions. Many of the settlers heard about the mst through familiar members of the community working with the movement. Furthermore, in southern Brazil, large family networks not only made it imperative to join the mst, they also made it easier. Sometimes, one person from the family joined an occupation and would call his or her family when it looked like they might receive land. In other cases, the whole family—wife, husband, and children—would pack up their belongings and head off to an occupation together. Nuclear families usually joined in occupations together, and called upon their extended families to follow. In this way, several brothers and sisters, mothers, fathers, and children often ended up on the same settlement. Eventually Adalberto and his wife left for an occupation in Campo Erê, another municipality in western Santa Catarina, near the border with Paraná. Adalberto and his wife occupied the property with two thousand other families: ‘‘We stayed for four days in the area. Then we were kicked out, and we returned to Quilombo. There we gathered part of the families from São Lourenço and some from Quilombo, and we built an occupation camp with two hundred families. We stayed there for two months, camped right next to the pavement without any future in sight.’’ From the encampment, the mst organized a march that traveled all the way to Brasília

62 Chapter Two to demand that the federal government settle the families, and they were awarded a temporary settlement in Irani. The settlement could only hold about seventy-five families, though, and there were more than six hundred in the encampment, so Adalberto and his wife moved to another encampment in the center of the state. ‘‘We left the camp to go to Chapecó, and from Chapecó we got a bus to Florianópolis, to Brasília, where we got an area in Abelardo Luz, a [total] area bigger than 1,000, an area of 1,300 hectares.’’ Each of the families who left a farming community to join the mst had a different reason for doing so—reasons connected with particular places, people, and circumstances—but almost all of the families had reached the limit of their land’s capacity when they decided to join the movement. In leaving their homes for an occupation, they were continuing the tradition of migrating to provide land for future generations. By the 1960s, however, the frontier lands in municipalities like Quilombo of western Santa Catarina were fully occupied. The settlers joined the movement because their families had grown too big for the land they were working on at the time. The youngest generation of small farmers had to look elsewhere for new land. In addition to the demographic cycle, an environmental cycle also pushed small farmers to look for new land by joining the mst. When small farmers originally colonized western Santa Catarina, the region boasted excellent natural soil fertility and ample trees for construction and sale. By 1990, a government-sponsored report, Sustainable Development in Western Santa Catarina, judged that 41.5 percent of the land was totally inappropriate for agriculture due to soil loss, hillside slope, and prevalence of rocks. The report classified 25.7 percent of the land as ‘‘restricted’’ (only good for certain annual crops) and 31 percent of the land as ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘regular’’ for agricultural production (Testa et al. 1996: 102–103). According to the same government report, seventy thousand people left rural western Santa Catarina between 1980 and 1991 because of the closing of the territorial frontier, high demographic density, and the decreasing size of smallholdings—inevitably situated on the worst land in the region (Testa et al. 1996: 26). Adalberto remembered his community as consisting mostly of small farmers who couldn’t accumulate sufficient good land for agriculture: ‘‘There weren’t any large-scale farmers in the municipality, there were just small properties. . . . Today there are some farmers accumulating land, but it is not good for agriculture because the

The Movement in Southern Brazil 63 land is too hilly, and there was so much erosion in the past.’’ Adalberto said that the farmers ‘‘didn’t prepare the land properly, they only plowed it.’’ The settlers on Vento often repeated this concern over the quality of the land: ‘‘Our situation was bad. In western Santa Catarina, the land has been abandoned because it is so bad. Full of insects, little beasts.’’ The combination of a moving frontier with unlimited land and relative isolation from state agricultural development agencies helped to perpetuate traditional farming techniques among these farmers. These traditional techniques relied on burning forests to clear farmland. While this practice was sustainable on the edge of a new frontier, it became less sustainable as the old frontiers closed up. Although several farming extension programs existed in the state, most of them were geared toward medium and large farms, whose owners had the capital to experiment with new crops and were easier to reach than the owners of smaller farms. A survey of agricultural producers in 1995 showed that only 55 percent of smallholders received any kind of technical assistance, while 76 percent of large landholders received assistance.≤Ω Financial assistance was even more biased toward the large farmers: between 1965 and 1985, the vast majority of government assistance was targeted toward three crops—corn, wheat, and soy. Few of the settlers on Vento had had any experience with intensive, mechanized production that might have enabled more people to work on smaller plots of land or target specialty markets. As one researcher wrote of the settlers in Vento: ‘‘When they were landless, [they] lived at the margins of economic progress. As people excluded from the production process, they never had the opportunity to go to school and work in jobs that required a greater administrative contribution. They still have little technical expertise in terms of modern agricultural production’’ (Baumann 1997: 41). For most of the settlers, contact with the market had generally involved the sale of subsistence goods to a limited number of buyers. The profit realized from the sale was usually reinvested directly into the household or into the land. Monetary income generally supplemented what the family grew on the land, rather than the other way round, and there was generally little left over for investment in production technology. Adalberto studied in Quilombo until the ninth grade and helped his father on the land. His father had two and a half alqueires of land (approximately six hectares), and they rented more from their neighbor. It was

64 Chapter Two only as he got older that he thought about leaving: ‘‘When we got older and got married, we realized we didn’t have the means to stay in that place.’’ He found out about the mst through community leaders who worked with the cpt: ‘‘The people who first joined the mst, they were in the community and took part in the cpt. These people started to meet, and at the time [this other mst leader from the community] was there— he is part of the state board and central cooperative today and he also belongs to the national board—he was our neighbor and we went to school together. We were friends and all. He also invited us to attend the meetings.’’ Adalberto decided to join in an occupation when he was twentythree. Because of his father’s limited land resources, Adalberto had been working on rented land: ‘‘I wanted to have my own piece of land—that was always my dream. And we realized that we would never be able to buy the land, and if we did, we would probably take the land away from another person. We couldn’t do that, so we had a motto ‘We don’t buy land, we conquer it.’ ’’ As more and more people in Adalberto’s community became interested, they began to hold bigger meetings, and eventually planned their own occupation. While the historical search for new land was motivated largely by productive and reproductive concerns, the desire to continue farming was embedded in deeply held cultural ideals of a simple, honest life. The settlers had a real love for the land—land was a tradition in and of itself, and a means for continuing a life that many found extremely valuable. Having land means having ‘‘citizenship, and the dignity to be able to produce. Land is life.’’ A sort of rural idealism ran through much of the settlers’ interpretation of the benefits of living on the land versus living in the city: for many of the settlers, the city meant chaos, insecurity, and violence as opposed to the stability, security, and peace of the countryside. ‘‘Living on the land means not having to live in the city, which is full of commotion and it is difficult to bring up a family. In the country you work the whole day, rest at night, and it’s calm. The country is free of a lot of bad things. It’s easier to survive because you plant everything you need and don’t buy very much on the market.’’ For many of the settlers, living in the city meant living in favelas (urban slums), which were consistently associated with high levels of crime and hopelessness: ‘‘On the land you don’t go hungry but, in the city, if you’re hungry, you have to steal.’’ Even settlers who had never lived in the city had seen enough images on television that they rejected urban life as being somehow unproductive: ‘‘I wanted to be

The Movement in Southern Brazil 65 able to produce, survive in the countryside. I would never live in a slum or be unemployed.’’ Adalberto remained committed to the movement, even after he moved onto his own land with his young family. He believed in the mst’s message of ‘‘Land for those who work it’’ and in many ways he personified the ‘‘ideal member’’ of the mst: he was committed to continuing agrarian reform, to sustainable local farming, and to fighting actively for the ‘‘right to have rights.’’ He continued to be active in meetings and mobilizations, although less frequently than when he first began: ‘‘This past year I took part in just a few meetings. I attended only the two regional meetings, and I didn’t attend our state meeting this past year. I had health problems at the end of the year, and I didn’t take part in the state meeting. . . . I was quiet.’’ Adalberto did not participate in the group of settlers who went to the state capital to occupy the central plaza and demand access to the governor. It was decided during settlement meetings that other settlers would go, but he was ready to go on the road again: ‘‘My turn will be coming again soon.’’ He wanted to go to the state-level meeting that was held once a year, but even if he couldn’t be there, he said that the information would be brought back by whoever was delegated to attend: ‘‘If I am not in it, I am sure there will be someone from this settlement at the national meeting this year. . . . When he comes back he will share all the discussion and he will bring the guidebook and bring the list of things we are supposed to discuss [as linhas].’’ Adalberto was nervous about the future of small-scale farming in Brazil, and he situated his own prospects for success within the future of family farming in general: ‘‘Look, the truth is that the way the government organizes its agricultural policies makes it difficult to keep the property. The small farmer today has to work with alternatives [to traditional farming]. He has to work with agroecological products, not only with chemicals because today the agroecological product has more value-added. Unfortunately, only rich people eat it—the poor will have to continue eating their food with chemicals because it is cheaper—but I believe the small farmer has to produce for the rich to eat. This is what the bourgeois are saying. It is against my ideals, but it is what we will have to do. So we—I include myself in the category of small property owner, because I am a small farmer—I believe we have to search for alternatives in agroecological products. And we need to take care of our property just like technicians. We have to improve: if we raise pigs, we will have to know about pigs. We have

66 Chapter Two to produce every little thing for us to eat: we can’t buy lard, we can’t buy soap, and we can’t buy beans or rice—we have to produce everything for us to eat. The meat, we have to produce our meat on our own property. . . . It is suicide, it is against the ideals of small property, for a small farmer to not produce the minimum for his survival. He would be ruined. . . . I think the small property must be self-sufficient, because what you sell will become your profit. The small property has to produce for the person’s survival: I believe it is everything. If the person doesn’t produce for his survival he invalidates the small property.’’ Adalberto argued that he could never leave the mst because agrarian reform could only go forward with the movement: ‘‘The proof is that we started here in the South with a half dozen people and today we are organized at the national level. And we don’t think about stopping, we think about expanding—probably there are only two or three states where the movement is not present. . . . The tendency is for us to tighten the circle. The government wants to municipalize [decentralize] agrarian reform, and we are still thinking about globalizing it.’’ Adalberto believed that the movement should expand its struggle into other countries, because ‘‘if it is bad in Brazil, in other countries it is worse.’’ I asked Adalberto whether he thought that the movement continued to help him as a settler. He replied in a way that showed he believed that the movement was composed of settlers, not simply for them. He had faith in the movement’s ability to represent his interests, which he defined as rights. Perhaps the most important right for Adalberto was the right of small farmers to work (not necessarily own) their property: ‘‘Ah, no doubt about it. Today, if we have any credit from the government, if we are able to pay for our investments with resources we acquired, it has all been through our fight with the mst. . . . The government is trying to do away with the rights we have won, and so we are fighting hard and starting everything all over again. Like I was saying, we—as in the landless movement—. . . we are going to build an encampment in Brasília, and we are going to say to the government that it has to tell us where it is heading to, and what it is going to do. We are not going to give up the rights that we acquired with a lot of struggle, even with death. We’re not going to give up our rights. We believe that the land should not be paid for; we believe that the land should continue in the government’s hand and not be privatized, in private control. We are against privatization of the land, and we do not support [titling the land on the settlements]. The idea the govern-

The Movement in Southern Brazil 67 ment had—to purchase the land and give away the title—this is not going to resolve the problem, it is going to create a problem. Because if it is possible, I buy a title, then yours, then hers, then that guy’s—and soon I am the sole owner of an area that used to belong to several owners.’’

Inequality and Opposition in Rural Brazil In their struggle for access to land, mst members encountered opposition from many groups, including the government, middle-class urban society, and large landowners. Of all of these, it was the large landowners who were the fiercest enemies. The historical irony is clear: large landowners created the conditions of possibility for a small-scale peasantry in the 1800s, and they are still fighting against the awkward existence of those not-quite peasants. For the mst, the latifúndia (large farms) were the source of agrarian maldevelopment worldwide. And for the large farmers, the mst seemed to violate everything they believed in: hard work, individualism, and a reliance on the market instead of the state. In many ways, the moral economy of large-scale farmers was very similar to that of the mst members: both came from agricultural backgrounds, and situated themselves within strongly religious communities bound together by a love for the land (Wolford 2007). But scale and history matter: the large farmers were wealthy, they had become wealthy on the land, and they developed their own narratives to justify their situations. Although many of them supported agrarian reform in theory, at the individual level (when it came to their land), they adopted a dualistic logic: large farmers were productive (because rich), hard-working, and market-oriented, while the mst settlers were unproductive (because poor), vagabonds, and ‘‘politics’’-oriented because they sought the assistance of the state in unsanctioned ways. On May 18, 1999, I interviewed a large farmer who lived in the center of Campos Novos, about five miles from Vento. He and his family had been farming in the region since 1954. They had two properties, which he called small—one was 800 hectares, and the other was 1,400 hectares. He grew wheat, soy, corn, and beans and raised beef cattle. His production methods were highly mechanized: his land was worked with the help of seven tractors, two reapers, and eleven people. He was eager to talk about the mst, although not about himself. One of his farms was in the middle

68 Chapter Two of a court process with the mst —it had been occupied by squatters but he seemed confident he would get the land back. He explained: ‘‘I am a productive farmer and the accusation that my land is unproductive is just a way out for people from the city who can’t find work. In my opinion, I don’t think land reform will ever be successful in Brazil.’’ The large farmer attributed the failure of reform to the impossibility of making it in today’s market with a small-scale farm: ‘‘Well, [here on this farm] there are seven partners, we have our employees, we have two thousand hectares—people should consider that we support one hundred people with our resources, we are a company! Now, if one person has ten to twelve hectares and doesn’t know how to use it and has no technical support, what will he do? They have help from the government, which costs a lot for the nation; it would be easier to leave those people in the city where they can cause a commotion. Nowadays to survive from agriculture a person should be efficient and must have a good organization, structure, land, knowledge, and a lot more.’’ Given that small farming couldn’t be productive, the large farmer argued that the mst’s mobilization was just for show, just for ‘‘politics’’: ‘‘I think the kind of politics of land reform the leaders want to make here is not about agriculture. They want to cause a disturbance, take over, upset people. If the government really wanted to do agrarian reform, it would buy land from people who wanted to sell. So, if someone wants the land— the children of a farmer, a carpenter, a vagabond, even a prisoner—they could get it. A clear procedure like that could work well. This way [the mst’s way] takes a lot of politics, with the situation like that, with all the invasions, I can’t take it; this is a political land reform.’’ The suggestion that the mst was ‘‘political’’ was intended to invalidate its motives. Politics was contrasted with hard work and success because success through hard work ought—in this farmer’s reasoning—to manifest itself in the market through economic success. ‘‘If an mst person is given the land, it is no use. He is going to spend the money and then he will sell his rights to the land. He can’t sell the land, but he can sell the rights he has to work on the land. Then he invades someone else’s land.’’ Ultimately, this farmer—like many I interviewed in Campos Novos— believed that the landless question in Brazil could only be addressed through the market or through the iron laws of supply and demand. Small farmers who wanted land should go where there is land available: ‘‘If you travel throughout Central Brazil, there is a lot of land. There is more than

The Movement in Southern Brazil 69 200 million hectares to cut clear. Why don’t they go there? They want it here because it is good soil, with electricity, near paved roads. So I think everything is wrong.’’ In these narratives, the large farmer was echoing the sentiments of those who have land and resources in this very unevenly divided country. These sentiments also underlie the government’s rationale for implementing a new sort of land reform, what is called market-led land reform. These are the ideas that the mst settlers go up against when they organize their occupations and land reform settlements. It is inequality that has created the dichotomies of everyday life in rural Brazil. By way of concluding this chapter and introducing the next, I want to stress three main points. First, this discussion of the condition of peasant existence in Brazil shows that whether peasants existed as a class (with all the analytical specifics that entails) is less relevant than the fact that historical circumstance and conditions have produced a smallholder farm-based politics in southern Brazil that emerged in the 1980s as a new form and space of political mobilization. These historical conditions have everything to do with the simultaneous frustration of peasant development by large-scale farming and urban development and the construction of a language that gives voice to the desire for land, a desire manifested in previous moments of mobilization but never fulfilled. Second, the Official Genesis Story that I describe in chapter 1 covers important aspects of the rise of the mst but is incomplete without an accounting of how the structural factors—agricultural modernization, religious activism, and political democratization—articulated with localized moral economies, or the norms and customs of production and social reproduction on the land. And third, the settlers from Santa Catarina that I highlighted in this chapter represent some of the most important and visible voices in the movement. The mst is a national movement but its ideals, strategies, and cultures are heavily influenced by the moral economies of smallholders from southern Brazil.

3 The MST’s Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism The rise of an organized peasant movement in Brazil has paralleled the rise of a so-called new revolutionary peasantry (Petras 1998) across the globe (Chase 2002; Gupta 1999; McMichael 2006; Rossett 2006). Social movements and rural trade unions—such as the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Indigenous Peoples of Ecuador, the National Peasant Federation of Paraguay, the Cocaleros of highland Bolivia, the Armed Revolutionary Front of Colombia, the Confédération Paysanne in France, and the Karnataka Farmers’ Union in India—are increasingly at the forefront of broader global movements for social justice. They have influenced national policies in areas ranging from agricultural production to human rights; they have created transnational networks, such as Via Campesina; and they have organized international counterglobalization events such as the World Social Forum—attended by tens of thousands of people every year since 2001. Peasant leaders link global inequities in agriculture to the depredations of neoliberal capitalism. Through direct action tactics as well as negotiation and public demonstration, rural actors have politicized transnational ‘‘politics as usual,’’ critiquing exclusionary agricultural policies—especially export production and large-scale commodity crops as the basis for rural neglect and poverty more generally. Just as in the Brazilian case, however, the transnational peasantry as a group and as individuals needs to be explained, rather than assumed and generalized (Edelman 2005; Baletti, Johnson, and Wolford 2008). We cannot fully understand the importance of contemporary campaigns for land redistribution, food sovereignty, and sustainable small-scale agriculture without explaining why our theoretical frameworks have consistently suggested that the peasantry was dead, and that the struggle for land was a thing of the past.∞ Peasants are—and have always been—Capital’s true subaltern, the ‘‘other’’ that both legitimated and enabled industrialization, colonization, and postwar development. Contemporary peasant

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 71 political mobilization needs to be situated in historical conditions of production and social reproduction because peasants themselves are rooted in these conditions (Edelman 1999). The ‘‘peasantry’’ is not a ‘‘thing,’’ an objective category with essential, unchanging elements. Rather, peasantness is a relationship, an identity that exists not in any organic, a priori sense, but rather in relation to people who are not peasants. The long debate from the 1950s to the 1980s over who exactly was or was not a ‘‘peasant’’ (de Janvry and Deere 1979) is a testament to the constructed nature of the category. All of this is not to say, of course, that something identifiable or definable as a peasantry does not exist—peasants do exist, both concretely in various places around the world, and abstractly as a coherent global actor. The historiographical awkwardness of the peasant is partly a result of teleological theoretical frameworks that assume the superiority of largescale production and producers. Peasants are seen as backward not for any essential reason, but because ‘‘their time’’ is assumed to have passed—they are theoretically relegated to a time when they did not have to compete with large-scale agroindustrial producers. Thus, surprise at the recurring strength of peasant economy and politics has been an enduring theme of the modern age. The fact that the peasantry has been ‘‘discovered’’ at various points during the past century—in the early 1900s, the mid-1960s, and today—suggests that both the peasantry and peasant mobilization should be seen as a modern relation, one repeatedly destroyed and recreated through processes of primitive accumulation that are ongoing, rather than ‘‘previous’’ to or outside of the dominant economy. Just as in Brazil, the construction of the modern economy more generally was predicated on the transformation of peasant or small farm producers who constituted—and still constitute—a majority of the world’s population; however, this transformation has never been completed. In the classical case of England, the process that Adam Smith first referred to as previous accumulation (Smith 1997 [1776]: 371–372) took place through the famous land enclosures, in which nobles and capitalist tenant farmers appropriated common property for private production (Moore 1966: 20–29). Karl Marx (1990 [1867]) later described this as a history dripping in blood: direct producers were separated from the means of production, common property rights were privatized, and noncapitalist modes of production were either subsumed or destroyed. Primitive accumulation provided industrial capitalism with a labor force

72 Chapter Three drawn from the land: subsistence producers were increasingly alienated from the means of production and forced to look for work in rural cottage industries and urban factories (Perelman 2000: 13–25; Polanyi 1957 [1944]). Land became the basis of the modern nation-state: the controlled organization of land was integral to national projects, from territorial development and food production and provisioning, to spatial allocation and management of the population (Scott 1998). The transformation of land into a commodity has also been necessary for industrial development, where territorial claims assigned parameters to both material and markets, making capitalism a fundamentally different economic system than any that had come before (Polanyi 1957 [1944]: 178–192; see also Gupta 2000: 42–44). Even as the land was to be central for national development, however, the peasantry was valuable primarily if it was eliminated as an independent class, and commodified as a labor source for urban industrial production (Chatterjee 1993: 158–172). European colonization was also in large part a project of integrating subsistence producers into the state and market. Across the colonies, taxes were imposed that had to be paid regularly and in cash, and indigenous populations were resettled closer to industrial and administrative centers (Bourdieu and Sayad 2004; Moore 1997). Subaltern scholars such as Partha Chatterjee (1988: 386–390) have argued that colonization was morally and socially acceptable in Western Europe because the peasant population of the colonies allowed them to be dismissed as both other and inferior. Peasants were characterized as a ‘‘homologous magnitude, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes’’ (Marx 1998 [1852]: 124), and as subservient to their immediate needs (Hegel, cited in Chatterjee 1993: 158–159; also see Gramsci 1926: 28–55). Likewise, just as the transformation of the peasantry was key to the colonial project, it was also key to the postcolonial project. Development economics—the new ideology to replace the ‘‘old imperialism,’’ as President Truman said in his inauguration speech on January 20, 1949— became the science of the transition from rural, predominantly agricultural peasant societies to urbanized, industrial capitalist economies centered on ‘‘high mass consumption’’ (Rostow 1960). The development project came at a time when access to land and land reform were explosive political and economic issues throughout Latin America. From 1950 to 1970, almost every Latin American country engaged in some sort of land

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 73 redistribution program as part of its overall modernization strategy. In Peru and El Salvador, approximately 20 percent of farm households received land; in Bolivia (1952), 75 percent, and in Nicaragua (1963), 50 percent (de Janvry, Sadoulet, and Wolford 2001: 4; see also De Janvry 1981; Grindle 1986; Thiesenhusen 1995). Land reform was advocated by political leaders on both ends of the ideological spectrum. Agrarian reforms constituted economic tools intended to bring both property and individual property-holders into the market realm (de Janvry 1981: 211–228; Grindle 1986: 158–159; Thiesenhusen 1995: 171–176; Grandin 2004: 54–59). Technical advisors from the United States were intimately involved in outlining and overseeing the development of new, ‘‘modern’’ relationships among property rights, agricultural production, and economic progress. Walt William Rostow, an American economic historian who would go on to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work, lectured Brazilian industrialists in São Paulo in 1955 about the need to distribute large landholdings and break the monopoly of the feudal elite. When President Kennedy launched the hemispheric Alliance for Progress in 1963, he rhetorically addressed the ‘‘campesino in the fields,’’ pledging U.S. support for ‘‘attack[ing] the archaic land tenure structures’’ in Latin America.≤ Land reforms were also supported by leftist dependista political leaders, as a means of incorporating the rural poor into national politics and attacking foreign or corporate control over property and natural resources. Agrarian reforms announced in Guatemala (1954) and in Cuba (1959) were key elements of socially radical or progressive political revolutions, and they threatened the balance of power in the hemisphere (Thiesenhusen 1995: 76–80; Thomas 1985: 435–455; De Janvry 1981: 199). Land distribution increasingly came to be associated with peasant radicalism and communism. In this context, the so-called Green Revolution was intended at least in part to counter the potential for a red revolution. And it was remarkably successful. Advanced technologies disseminated through the Green Revolution were intended both to modernize agricultural production, and to liberate ‘‘underemployed’’ rural labor for wage work (Perkins 1997: 113– 115). The rapid modernization of agriculture appeared to make small family farming economically obsolete. In just three decades, from 1960 to 1990, the proportion of Latin Americans living in cities grew from 44 per-

74 Chapter Three cent to 72 percent (Gilbert 1994: 26). The economically active population transferred out of agriculture and into industrial, service, and petty commodity production sectors. Small farmers were marginalized by the increasing dominance of transnational agroindustrial giants such as Bunge, Cargill, and Nestlé.≥ Mechanization, industrialization of inputs, and increasingly sophisticated modification of crops’ basic genetic structures fed into a political and economic demand for large-scale commodity export production. In 1994, Eric Hobsbawm could self-confidently write that more than anything else, the postwar ‘‘death of the peasantry cuts us off irrevocably from the world of the past’’ (289). The success of the Green Revolution may have marginalized the peasantry as an economic group, but revolutions in geopolitical hotspots such as Vietnam, China, and Cuba revived political and scholarly interest in the alignment of peasant groups. Agricultural day laborers, small farmers, and plantation workers were all important sources of revolutionary political participation (Shanin 1987 [1971]: 1–11), and peasants were ‘‘discovered’’ as active—albeit ‘‘awkward’’ (Shanin 1972)—political agents in the 1970s by a number of different theoretical groups: scholars such as Alain de Janvry (1981) reintroduced the Marxist treatment of the ‘‘agrarian question’’ to analyze the economic and political role of peasants and peasant agriculture in national development (see also Roseberry 1993); critical work on history ‘‘from below’’ and alternative nationalisms developed within the school of subaltern studies (Guha 1984); scholars studying peasant livelihoods and resistance debated the relevance of ‘‘moral economies’’ and ‘‘weapons of the weak’’ in shaping everyday social relations within rural communities (Scott 1976, 1985; Watts 1983); historians and historical sociologists revised popular understandings of the transition from feudalism to capitalism by investigating class relations between lord and peasant (Brenner 1977; Moore 1966; Skocpol 1979a); and scholars such as Jeffrey Paige (1975) and Eric Wolf (1969) debated the role (past and future) played by peasants and rural workers in both reform and revolution. During the 1980s, as interest in peasant or agrarian studies appeared to wane (paralleling the crisis in development studies more generally), the continued mobilization of rural groups has forced observers to recognize that processes of primitive accumulation are ongoing. As David Harvey (2003) argues, in the current, postdevelopment phase of neoliberal global-

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 75 ization, primitive accumulation continues to be tied to capitalist expansion through commodification, juridical individualism, and alienation, as outlined in classical Marxian political economy. Contemporary accumulation foregrounds new dispossessions, though—new separations of producers from the means of production—including the patenting of genetic codes, the regulation of intellectual property rights, massive privatization, and the erosion of state protections such as welfare programs and labor rights, and the pollution and depletion of the global environmental commons. In previous phases of capitalism, peasants were key political actors in part just because of their sheer numbers.∂ Today, however, peasants are key political actors because of the nature of their incorporation into the economy and society (see especially Chaturvedi 2000). International industrial capital has broken through new ‘‘barriers’’ to accumulation: when land ownership became politically dangerous in the 1960s and 1970s, companies turned to contract production, allowing small farmers to remain on their land even as they were forced to follow strict production guidelines and timetables—including purchasing their inputs from vertically integrated agribusinesses. When hybrid crops began to generate decreasing returns, seed companies turned to interspecial crossvariation to create irreproducible specialty crops with specific production mandates. Even financial capital has found new avenues of entry into agricultural production, through company credit lines, localized microcredit projects, and World Bank titling and finance programs. There is a sense in which the current period—dating back as far as the 1970s—differs from previous moments of modernization and development because it is characterized by an economic and political crisis that has both closed and opened possibilities for peasant movements. On the one hand, there has been a general discursive shift in approaches to development over the past fifty years, and one could argue that the widespread sense of optimism or flexibility that characterized both the Left and the Right in the early postwar period no longer exists. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were national public debates in countries like Brazil over the correct development path to take. Politicians and academics argued over whether third world countries were fundamentally feudal (traditional) or modern and capitalist, a distinction that was important because different conceptions of the past could shape alternative development policies and trajectories (Guimarães 1981 [1963]; Prado 1967; Furtado

76 Chapter Three 1964). Today there is a sense that history has ‘‘ended’’ (Fukuyama 1989), that options have been foreclosed, and that, to quote Margaret Thatcher, there are no real alternatives (Martins 2003). The sense of historical closure—however inaccurate—places the burden of proof on today’s peasants and today’s social movements: they are the ones who must justify swimming against the tide of increased liberalization and privatization. At the same time, this discursive shift has taken place in a material context of massive rural and urban poverty, along with the growth of the informal economy and violence-ridden urban slums. This comprehensive marginalization of the rural and urban poor means that membership in peasant movements is more numerous and more diverse than those of previous times. In Brazil, the people willing to take up the struggle for land include small farmers, day laborers, plantation workers, petty commodity producers, itinerant peddlers, unemployed schoolteachers, and more. Many of these people left their land decades ago and moved to urban centers such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Recife. Their peasant identities and sensibilities may have stayed with them, but in very different contexts than in the past. Throughout this history of conflict and erasure, the continued mobilization of peasants—and in the name of peasants—forces us to consider people’s relations to the land on their own terms. The two aspects of contemporary development referenced in the introduction to this chapter —the historical shift in the debate over development, and the diversification of people engaged in the struggle for land—are produced in part by conditions of accumulation by dispossession, and these aspects alter the political landscape for collective action.∑ Explaining and situating the historical construction of the peasantry— in Brazil as elsewhere—highlights the fact that both nostalgia for and political action of the peasantry have existed for centuries (pace Raymond Williams’s 1973 contribution). The mst is a case in point, drawing on this historical production to generate its own identity—what I call an ‘‘imagined community’’ (see Wolford 2003b). I suggest that this identity relies on a politics of scale and that the movement has privileged scale over place in an effort to (trans)nationalize the struggle for land. This has allowed the movement to achieve significant success at the national and transnational levels, but it has also generated contradictions in particular places.

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 77

Imagined Communities: The Formation of a Collective Identity The details of the mst’s new identity are presented here in discursive form. What it actually looks like and how its fluid form is maintained is much more complicated and contested. As I have suggested, the mst’s membership is remarkably diverse and new ideas are interpreted and reinterpreted to mean different things in different places at different times. The creation of identity is an ongoing process heavily enmeshed in local power struggles, particular personalities, and regional norms. Moral economies steeped in the past shape the way people participate in the movement such that the settlers’ interpretation of the community varies significantly in different places. Despite the differences, mst leaders have generated a relatively coherent mst identity analogous to Benedict Anderson’s (1983) ‘‘imagined community.’’ In what follows, I draw on Anderson’s work to show how the mst has created a historical tradition with elite notions of membership, horizontal ties between members, and a sense of autonomy. Anderson’s work on nationalism is particularly relevant to the mst as the movement sees itself fighting to reclaim the Brazilian nation, replacing it with a ‘‘new society.’’ Just as in Anderson’s nation-state, the mst’s imagined community reaches back in time, in their case five hundred years to injustices that are depicted as a direct consequence of the way in which Brazil was colonized.∏ mst documents bring together time and space by invoking the past to explain, and justify, the present. In one piece produced and distributed for discussion on mst settlements and occupation sites, an mst leader argues: ‘‘If agrarian reform was originally justified because it was necessary for overcoming feudal relations in the countryside . . . in ‘modern Brazil’ it is justified for even more important reasons, given that feudal social relations remain, and production relations that are effectively slavery are still common in Brazilian agriculture’’ (Teixeira 1999: 17). The mst argues that it is only the most recent expression of discontent in the rural areas. In both published and oral accounts of mst’s history, rural uprisings such as the Contestado and the Peasant Leagues (see chapter 2) are presented as examples of the way in which capitalism has traditionally ex-

78 Chapter Three ploited labor and forced fairly isolated communities to mobilize resistance. The resistance that resulted in the formation of an autonomous community at Canudos is considered particularly relevant. In 1839, an itinerant lay priest named Antonio Vincente Mendes Maciel, later known as Antonio Conselheiro (the Councilor), led a revolt against the newly formed Brazilian Empire (see Da Cunha 1902). Disputing the empire’s right to legislate marriage, the priest and his followers founded a city in the desert interior of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil. The establishment of the city attracted attention as it grew in size and became the second largest city in the state. The Brazilian government was enjoined to put down the ‘‘revolt,’’ but this required four battalions from the empire’s capital in Rio de Janeiro. The organization and resistance of supposedly unorganized, illiterate, and backward peasants has become a symbol of strength for rural groups throughout the country. According to the mst, ‘‘Canudos did not die in vain because it is born again in the hopes of every exploited peasant’’ (mst 1993: 11). The mst honors Canudos as an exemplary community of ‘‘sons and daughters of God’’ living and working in common, ‘‘prospering economically and counteracting the poverty of the northeast latifundiario [large landowner]’’ (Jornal Sem Terra, October 1993, 130: 8–9).π The movement emphasizes the communal nature of the new society formed at Canudos. The example of Canudos is combined with examples of revolutionary socialism to demonstrate ‘‘how only this radicalism can reformulate the poles of power and oppression that are secularly entrenched in the history of Brazil’’ (Jornal Sem Terra, October 1993, 130: 9). During meetings, the mst creatively emphasizes the links between itself and past rural movements. In 1993, the mst published an informational document about Canudos, arguing: ‘‘The organization of Canudos was a concrete example of superexploited peasants fleeing from their bosses and freely organizing a new life. Canudos was an example, a way out for all peasants’’ (4). This informational document is intended to be read aloud by members followed by a discussion focusing on two questions: first, what does the history of Canudos mean for us, today? and second, what can we do in our municipality during the month of October to celebrate ‘‘100 years of struggle for the land’’ since Canudos? During one of the 1998 year-end mst meetings in the state of Santa Catarina, a theater piece was presented that featured settlers dressed up as victims of the Contestado and Canudos, the quilombos (escaped slave communities),

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 79 and the Peasant Leagues all holding up the mst’s flag and symbolically supporting their 1990s counterpart. As the mst says: ‘‘The struggle for land and social justice began many years ago and it cannot stop now. We need to place it within the history of our people’s struggle. And [we need to] tread firmly, participating in the construction of a new society—a dream that becomes a little more real with each small victory through the organization of workers’’ (mst 1998b: preface). The belief that peasants have fought—and died—for causes similar to the mst’s plays an important part in the movement’s imagined community. When the government or national media ridicules mst members, calling them vagabonds and bandits, they are reminded that Antonio Conselheiro’s followers suffered the same ill treatment and that one day they may also be considered heroes. To paraphrase Benedict Anderson, it is through such emotional linkages to a heroic past that ‘‘pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined and futures dreamed’’ (1983: 154). The historical tradition of resistance legitimates mobilization in presentday Brazil because it helps to construct resistance as inevitable and timeless. The sense of historical justification lends itself to the idea that membership in the mst is a privilege that should only be extended to those who fulfill the appropriate criteria. Settlers are expected to be a combination of the traditional peasant and the conscientious socialist/citizen. The mst argues: ‘‘The rural worker justifies an anticapitalist stance because his only alternative under capitalism is the ‘inevitable proletarianization’ ’’ (Jornal Sem Terra, March 1990, 92: 6). The movement has turned this traditional link to the countryside into an element of membership.∫ In material distributed throughout the settlements, the mst encourages its members to cultivate their love for the land by satisfying most of the household’s needs with their farm production. At the same time, members are warned of the dangers of urban attractions and urged to stay on the settlement. Pursuing outside employment in the nearby town or city is discouraged. Membership in the mst also requires demonstration of commitment to the Luta (struggle) and creation of a new society. Settlers are encouraged to uphold socialist ideals because the mst sees itself fighting a revolution that will put the countryside in the hands of the rural lower classes. There is an ‘‘us against them’’ sense to ‘‘who’s in and who’s out.’’ During one interview with an mst settler on Vento, I asked, ‘‘What do you like best about the movement?’’ The settler answered: ‘‘That we are united here. We are all to-

80 Chapter Three gether—you can already see how different someone is who isn’t in the movement.’’ Adherence to the ideology and behavior appropriate to membership in the mst is continually assessed from within. Any individual can be kicked out of the group (expulso) for violating the rules of conduct. These rules range from guidelines for behavior to production imperatives. The early editions of the mst’s monthly newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra (Landless Newspaper), were filled with discussions of the new ‘‘social citizen’’ that the mst wished to create, as well as imaginative ways of encouraging settlers to willingly conform to this image. The vices that mst members are warned against are ‘‘reflexes of a subideology generated by the private ownership of the means of production.’’ The vices range from individualism (‘‘the individualist is the type of opportunist who only believes in the individual and always puts himself above the organization’’) to spontaneity (‘‘the spontaneous person resists planning’’) and immobility (‘‘the immobilist is a type of opportunist who deliberately doesn’t involve himself with anything’’)Ω (Jornal Sem Terra, Jan./Feb. 1991, 100: 3). Activists are encouraged to promote discussion so that people will ‘‘know the vices [in order] to overcome them’’ (ibid). The practice of peer evaluation is supported by government legislation on the land reform settlements. Section 5, part (e), of the Settlement Contract states that land reform beneficiaries can be evicted from their land if they ‘‘become disruptive elements [that negatively affect] the development of the workers in the project area either due to poor conduct or inability to adapt to community life.’’ Sufficient agreement among mst members can result in a settler losing rights to his or her land as well as membership in the movement. During a 1997 demonstration, two supposed mst members were expelled from the movement because they were believed to be outsiders—government or landlord spies. Whether or not they really were spies is less important than the fact that discriminatory membership is an important component of community—there would be little appeal to sacrificing everything for a movement that anyone could join. The elite quality of membership in mst is expressed symbolically by clothes bearing the movement’s motto or designs, by signs mounted at the entrance of a settlement declaring it an mst settlement, and by the movement’s chosen tools—a scythe and long-handled hoe. There is a feeling among mst members that a person wearing a red hat with the move-

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 81 ment’s flag has certain qualities that are universal within—and specific to—the community. For many mst members, belonging to an elite organization that screens applicants is a source of great pride. As one member of the movement said: ‘‘A person who doesn’t have the movement in their house doesn’t have anything.’’ Perhaps one of the most important aspects of a coherent community is the presence of horizontal ties—or equality—among members. In a survey conducted in Campinas, Brazil, in 1993, Dagnino (1998: 53–54) argues that a majority of survey respondents considered ‘‘equal treatment’’ to be the most important component of democracy. Of all the characteristics associated with democratic societies, equality is the least evident in Brazil as a whole. In a country with the second highest inequality of land ownership in the world and an infamous record of corruption, power is associated with those who have access to resources and the powerless have little recourse to sanctioned opposition. Within the mst, however, the movement’s search for a new society is based on the socialist ideal of egalitarianism. This sense of equality is embodied in the concept of ‘‘union,’’ or unity. As a cartoon figure in one of the mst’s educational booklets (1986) explains: ‘‘Companheiros! We have to stay together—in all of brazil, you know how it is! Unity brings Strength.’’ Membership in the movement is theoretically horizontal—officially, all members are on the same level because there are no ‘‘leaders.’’ All participants in national-level decision making are selected on a rotating basis or are elected by the members of their specific community. Although the logistics of communication in rural Brazil are complicated, mst activists try hard to carry out the nearly impossible task of finding out what the settlers in their region are thinking.∞≠ Within the movement, the settlers are expected to unite against a new enemy—the state. The state is the enemy for many reasons—because it doesn’t disburse agricultural credit during the appropriate season or because it doesn’t fulfill its promises to settle groups camped out awaiting resolution. As one settler said: ‘‘The federal government is obligated to settle us, to structure the settlement and to give us credit. Unfortunately, it takes too long to do this—you only get [these things] through pressure, we only receive something after the government has been pressured and this is done by the movement.’’ On the ground, horizontal ties—or unity—among members are theoretically embodied in the creation of production collectives. Collectives are

82 Chapter Three intended to fortify the movement both by making agricultural production more successful, and by intensifying the participants’ commitment to the struggle. Once they have been settled, mst members are expected to remain actively involved in the struggle for agrarian reform and a new society. At this time, mst leaders promote the formation of production collectives. One month, in the biweekly small group meetings held on Vento, the topic of discussion was ‘‘cooperative farm projects in China.’’ A prepared text was faxed to the settlement from the mst headquarters in São Paulo for distribution and discussion. According to the document, collectives in China show ‘‘how the force of a fundamentally peasant people can confront historical challenges and organize a society where poverty, inequality and injustice are eliminated with the important role played by cooperation among workers’’ (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra 1998a: preface). The collective ideology is the logical extension of the movement’s class politics. It is not only the official production goal of the movement—in theory, it is a Luta (Struggle) brought home, inside the farm gate. mst leaders argue that collectives serve to promote the struggle for agrarian reform both instrumentally and ideologically: ‘‘The cooperatives should put their infrastructure, resources and people at the disposition of the mobilizations and political struggles for agrarian reform and social transformation’’ (Jornal Sem Terra, July 1997, 170: 6). Economically, the mst argues that small farmers will only be able to compete in Brazil’s hypermodern agricultural market through cooperation. By organizing large-scale farms, the settlers will be able to pool their resources and invest in mechanizing production on the land. Through specialization, collective production facilitates the rational social and spatial division of labor. Individual settlers are encouraged to take educational classes provided by the movement and by extension agents so that they will be able to apply new techniques to their tasks. As the collective farms market their products, the members can use the profits to build small agroindustries and internalize the processing, packaging, and marketing of specific products. Agroindustrialization is seen as a way to add value to the settler’s products and, with little labor, earn a higher price in the marketplace. Politically, collectives are a key resource for the movement. A profitable collective is a demonstration to the outside world that mst’s alternative organization is feasible and making a positive difference in people’s lives.

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 83 Internally, the collectives serve as positive demonstrations of the socialist ideology. Members from other settlements and from occupation sites visit healthy collectives called ‘‘laboratories’’ to learn about the rewards that come from group work. Collectives also provide political benefits through peer supervision and encouragement. The organization of a community center and common housing area, such as on Vento, make it easier for mst activists and leaders to get in touch with their members. When the activists request food and clothing for people living in the temporary camps, the collectives provide the bulk of the contributions. In many ways, the settlers who live in production collectives form the front line, the ‘‘vanguard’’ of the movement. This aspect is strengthened by the presence of mst activists who use the collectives as their home base. Socially, the collectives are an important component of the movement’s plan to ‘‘urbanize’’—or, civilize—rural life (mst 1998a). The mst envisions bringing civilization to its people instead of forcing them to go to the cities for it. The urban environment afforded by the concentration of housing into a central area (called an agrovila) strengthens community ties by allowing settlers to meet regularly rather than just once a week, as was often the case in the traditional farming communities. The agrovila also facilitates the implementation of infrastructural amenities that are less common in the countryside than in the cities. Electricity, running water, paved roads, and educational facilities are all easier to provide for a large group concentrated in one area than for individual farmers spread out over a road that runs sixteen kilometers and can be impassable for large parts of the year. Once a collective has been established, it plays an important part in the continual process of resocialization among mst members. Settlers learn more about the movement’s vision for a new society—and their role in it— every day as they work side by side with their colleagues. They pass around the Jornal Sem Terra, where they see pictures of other cooperatives being praised by mst leaders and by outside experts. The movement awards special consideration to families organized into collectives, and the settlers are encouraged to take pride in being part of something new. The mst’s vision of collective production has developed over the years since the movement was founded. Between 1985 and 1989, mst leaders prioritized the struggle for land rather than the struggle on the land. It was not until after the battle over the 1988 Brazilian Constitution that mst began to focus inward, with particular emphasis on production.

84 Chapter Three There was a gradual recognition that it was necessary to improve the individual settler’s comparative advantage in the marketplace. By 1990, the movement’s official cooperative system (sca) was introduced. The system was to consist of three levels. At the bottom were the settlement production collectives. In the middle were the regional cooperatives made up of at least three local collectives. And at the top was the national organization that would coordinate production policies throughout the country. By 1992, there were five regional cooperatives and the supraorganization—the Confederation of Brazilian Agrarian Reform Cooperatives (Concrab)—was founded. Concrab is a state-funded organization that oversees all of the administrative work for individual cooperatives as well as establishing guidelines for production, marketing and credit. The mst has been forced to be increasingly flexible in encouraging the development of alternative forms of cooperation.∞∞ Alternatives have developed that are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the full-scale collectives. For example, associations are common quantitative alternatives. They are essentially small collectives that perform all of the same functions but do not have the twenty members required to legally qualify as a full collective. Associations may also provide qualitative alternatives by serving a different purpose and addressing only certain areas of production, such as marketing, mechanization, or credit. Other qualitative alternatives to full-scale collectives are credit and service cooperatives. Credit cooperatives bring together settlers who apply for bank loans as a group. Service cooperatives perform targeted functions such as processing or marketing. Service cooperatives are involved in industrializing production at the processing and marketing stage. A regional service cooperative in Santa Catarina, where Vento is a member, was established in 1998 to make jam out of fruits supplied by the settlers. The jam is packaged in jars labeled with the mst’s product brand name, Terra Viva, and sold as far away as São Paulo.∞≤ Perhaps the most awkward component of the mst’s ‘‘imagined community’’ is the creation of autonomy, which Benedict Anderson argued was essential for the development of the modern nation-state. The mst needs the state, but for contradictory reasons that underlie the complexity of the mst’s ambitious (and confusing) attempt to retain its own autonomy. On the one hand, the movement exists because the state has historically refused to incorporate particular demands and mst members have organized to fill the void. On the other hand, the movement only exists be-

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 85 cause the state has accommodated some of the mst’s demands, thereby legitimating the process of organization. One example that characterizes the contradictory relationship between the mst and the state is that people involved in supposedly ‘‘illegal’’ invasions of private property often receive cesta basicas (monthly food donations) from the government. In a sense, the mst has sidestepped the issue of autonomy by presenting itself as a guardian of democracy. As Maria Conceição d’Incão argues: ‘‘The mst, with its incredible capacity for organization and mobilization, has been giving force and continuity to the still-weak process of democratic negotiation over questions tied to the restructuring of the Brazilian society’’ (d’Incão and Roy 1995: 210). Because the government is considered a pawn in the hands of the international and domestic elite, the mst is able to ‘‘legitimately’’ violate the state’s rules. The movement creates its own internal guidelines and interpretations of Brazilian law, which are dictated by a self-consciously different interpretation of justice, liberty, and freedom than those practiced every day in the country. For example, when mst members occupy an area that is considered private property under traditional rules, it is called an ‘‘invasion’’ and defined as illegal by the Brazilian state. The mst itself, however, refers to this action as an ‘‘occupation,’’ one that allows land to fulfill its social responsibility.∞≥ Because the state is seen as invalid, the mst has to publicly distance itself and establish its own mode of conduct and behavior, as well as to repress those who do not comply, and distribute resources to its members. The geographic spread of the mst is due primarily to the willingness of mst activists to travel to new areas of the country and organize support for the movement. In the mid-1980s, the mst sent twenty young activists to the Northeast and since then only one has returned to the South. Many of those who remained in the Northeast continue to play key roles in the movement’s leadership at the state levels. In Pernambuco, for example, the state leader is Jaime Amorim, the son of Italian immigrants and born in Santa Catarina.∞∂ In 1987, Jaime was sent to Pernambuco to organize, and he has been there ever since, perhaps partly because he married a woman from Pernambuco who also works in the movement. Jaime is now one of the twenty-three members in mst’s national leadership, and his background, combined with his participation in the national leadership, bring a high degree of uniformity to the way mst officially operates in Pernambuco.

86 Chapter Three The mst’s educational system also contributes to the nationalization of the collective identity shared by mst members. As one researcher wrote: ‘‘Education became the primary vehicle for reconstruction of the subject, always tied to a particular political project and conception of the world’’ (Gohn 1997: 147). Through creative primary educational projects, mst activists try to incorporate settlement children back into the community and into the movement. If the movement’s past is laid at the feet of fallen heroes, hopes for the future are placed in the children. As one mst document says to the children of its settlements: This year mst is 15 years old. Many of you were born and grew up underneath black plastic tents, protected by the courage and resistance of your parents and by the flag of our struggle. Many still live in occupation camps, others are already settled and now share the challenge of transforming the conquered land into a place where families work with good cheer and plant the seeds of a new life in the countryside. mst believes that you can be the continuation of the struggle led by your parents and companheiros, a chore that will only end when there are no longer any Sem Terra in our country, when agrarian reform, de facto, is a reality. This will be an important step in helping to build the Brazil that we want. (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra 1999: 3)

Education has been a priority for the mst since it first organized in the struggle for land reform. The lack of education on the average settlement is acute. Although precise numbers are difficult to secure, there are settlements on which illiteracy reaches levels of 80 to 90 percent. Even on the settlements that are fortunate enough to have a teacher for the elementary school, 90 percent of the teachers had only a primary education (Jornal Sem Terra, Dec. 1990, 99: 9). Those settlements that do have a teacher, however, are the lucky ones. In 1990, there were only 500 teachers for 15,000 children (ibid.). By 1999, however, the mst had put 1,200 of its own teachers into the settlements for basic literacy classes; 150,000 children were registered with an mst school in 2000, with 3,800 teachers in seventeen states.∞∑ The basis of the mst’s pedagogical approach is the unity of practice and theory. In most mst schools, small garden plots are as prominently displayed as the practice alphabets. The mst has regular meetings that bring together as many teachers as possible in order to discuss educational approaches and material. At the high school level, there are mst-operated

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 87 schools that certify settlers in the administration and technical guidance of cooperative production as well as ‘‘formational’’ programs that train the activists in the movement’s ideology and methods. The mst has won several prizes for its educational program, including a 1995 unicef award for alternative education. In addition to education, land occupations remain key to the mst’s ongoing organization: they are the principal means through which the movement recruits new members and maintains its public visibility (Fernandes 2000: 286–297; Martin 2002). By organizing these land takeovers, the movement creates a spectacle out of the mundane: mst activists publicly radicalize a strategy that had previously been deliberately invisible. Land occupations have been a regular feature of the negotiation over political control of resources in rural Brazil. Squatting is a common response to the desire for land in a country where land has historically been physically available but politically occupied. The movement turns both the event and the process of land occupation into a ritual, intended both to signify a set of intentions to the public and to knit together the people taking part. The occupation period provides an important reference point for the settlers, who attribute their success in winning land to the act of occupation, rather than to the decisions and actions that led up to their decision to join the movement. As the squatters endure frightening, uncertain conditions, they put their faith in the power and legitimacy of the mst. This period provides an excellent opportunity for the activists coordinating each occupation to begin the project of ‘‘intellectual and moral reform.’’ The act of occupation articulates disparate identities—unemployed workers, school teachers, peasants, day laborers, and so on—and constructs a common identity of sem terra (landless) (Martin 2002). The mst argues that agrarian reform is crucial to the creation of a new, socially just Brazil, a ‘‘new society,’’ and a ‘‘new man and woman.’’ This theme is developed in the occupation camps and settlements, through what the movement calls mística (mysticism). Drawing on the charismatic tradition of liberation theology and on the pre-1964 animation committees commonly found in Catholic student groups, particularly in southern Brazil, mysticism allows the mst to both celebrate the movement and educate its members through song, dance, theater, chants, and symbols: ‘‘The more that the masses attach themselves to their symbols, their leaders, and the organization, the more they fight, the more they mobilize, and the more they organize themselves.’’

88 Chapter Three Symbols of the struggle for land that characterize mysticism are the movement’s flag and national hymn, and, commonly, dramatic representations of joyful harvests conducted in the name of the Brazilian nation (see figure 6). It is through this symbolism that the mst constructs the symbolic political spaces of a new Brazil, and weaves a utopian dialectic between the present and the future. According to the movement, mysticism ‘‘reduces the distance between the present and the future, helping us to anticipate the good things that are coming.’’ Today, mysticism is a regular part of the movement’s political repertoire of organization and resistance. Most meetings open and end with mysticism, and activists are trained in the art of executing an inspiring theater skit or leading a rousing chant. The Brazilian flag is almost always displayed at movement meetings, illustrating the fact that the mst is attempting to replace the Brazilian liberal notion of land as property with a new, collectivist notion of land as community and sustenance (Wolford 2003b). Soil, water, rocks, and plants signify the fatherland: terra and patria. The mst’s solemn movement hymn has this refrain: Vem, lutemos, punho erguido

Come let us fight, fists raised,

Nossa Forca, nos leva a edificar

Our Strength will help us build,

Nossa Patria, livre e forte

Our Fatherland, strong and free,

Construida pelo poder popular

Constructed through popular power.

Revolutionary leaders from around the world are also incorporated into the mst’s mysticism, in a conscious attempt to create a historical tradition that unites and unifies different times and spaces: pictures of Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg, and Vladimir Lenin are regularly displayed in life-size posters at meetings, along with general figures of third world struggle such as Nelson Mandela, all of whom are portrayed as calling on ‘‘proletariats of the world’’ to unite in the struggle for land.∞∏ As the mst has grown, the movement has made urban outreach a critical component of its mobilization strategy. According to João Pedro Stedile, the intellectual leader of the mst: ‘‘The fight for agrarian reform takes place in the countryside but will be won in the cities’’ (Stedile, quoted in Linhares and Teixeira de Silva 1999: 232). The mst has created an urban presence by accessing media channels and informing the public about the details of an occupation in order to gain their support and

6. mst meeting with stage set for the mistica, Chapecó, Santa Catarina, December 1999. Photo by author.

7. Workers of the World Unite, Caruarú, Pernambuco, September 1999. Photo by author.

90 Chapter Three generate further pressure on government. The mst’s activities generally receive substantial media coverage, both national and international, which has created a widespread awareness of the plight of the landless in the countryside and the possibilities for redistribution. Representatives of the movement are interviewed regularly in the national newspapers and television. The mst also operates its own newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra, which carries information about recent occupations, the progress of affiliated settlements, and various legal negotiations to approximately 3,500 people. Informed popular support is an important means of creating a critical mass of social pressure for reform.

Agrarian Populism—or, the Return of the Peasant Through the elements of this collective identity, the mst has constructed ‘‘chains of equivalences’’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) that expand the question or meaning of land into a discussion of citizenship rights, social justice, democracy, human rights, sustainability, and so on. The content of the mst’s ‘‘chain of equivalences’’ can best be understood as a modern form of peasant populism, although not in the common political and rhetorical meaning of the word. I draw here on the understandings of populism outlined by both Ernesto Laclau (1977, 2004) and by Gavin Kitching (1982) in his overview of historical forms of peasant populism (see also Gupta 1998).∞π The main elements of the mst’s populist framework are land, community, and opposition to the state and capital. These aspects of peasant populism are not always overt or specified; as will become clear in later chapters, they are often only visible at the margins of what is considered acceptable behavior (Wolford 2003b). 1. The land—or, specifically, small-scale land ownership—is seen as the key to both production and social reproduction. Farmers are considered the natural stewards of the environment and bodily health. The family is viewed as the appropriate unit for maintaining the farm—for example, the national government allocates land according to the number of hectares that are required, in a given region, to support a family of four. Families are expected to work on the land together in order to reap the benefits of a larger labor pool, and to provide a ‘‘country lifestyle’’ for the children. This presentation of the meaning of land is deeply embedded in the

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 91 mst’s justification for building a national movement. As one rural leader from southern Brazil said when I asked him how the mst was able to build a national movement: ‘‘We picked an issue that united everyone—the land. Land is a necessity. ‘Land’ is the word that unifies. Land became the element of the struggle. You offer the workers the opportunity to have land—but through an occupation [that they participate in].’’ 2. In the mst’s populist framework, community is both local and organic: people are tied to the land and to each other through noncommercial bonds of solidarity—a ‘‘moral economy’’ (Thompson 1971; Scott 1985) in which precapitalist notions of responsibility and reciprocity exist alongside a liberal discourse of the ‘‘right to have rights’’ (Wolford 2005). Local communities—as the repositories of an alternative social structure (the moral economy)—are the sites within which the mst intends to develop a ‘‘new society.’’ The mst has fought from the beginning to have agrarian reform carried out in the localities where farmers are accustomed to working. In other words, they believe that settlements should be created ‘‘close to home,’’ rather than as part of the relocation/colonization schemes practiced under the military. Settlements are required by federal law to form associations that meet regularly to negotiate group business, and the mst works in and through these association meetings to develop the strength of community bonds. 3. The mst’s discursive framework incorporates an essential and clearly defined opposition between o povo (the people) and the ‘‘enemy.’’ This discursive ‘‘enemy’’ is a dynamic, shifting configuration of capitalism, transnational capitalism, the latifundio, and the state.∞∫ This ‘‘elite-mass distinction’’ has been a common part of political discourse in Brazil, in part because ‘‘relations of power and privilege have so frequently crosscut the state and society rather than differentiating neatly into these two discrete categories’’ (Davis 1999: 597). I refer to these elements as populist, in the Laclauian sense, because they are produced through and against what Laclau calls a ‘‘frontier’’ (2004)—essentially, social and economic inequality and they are organized around an opposition between ‘‘the people’’ and ‘‘the enemy.’’ Agrarian populism is both a product of, and productive of, a society divided by an internal frontier, in which series of unfulfilled demands become more important for their equivalence—for the fact of being unfulfilled—than for the differential content of the demands themselves. The work of tying together claims and demands into a chain of equivalences is ‘‘generative’’

92 Chapter Three or productive work, creating new, commonly held claims and demands rather than simply ‘‘bringing together different movements around ‘common interests’ ’’ (Featherstone 2003: 405). The mst now brings together a wide range of concerns in the struggle for ‘‘land.’’

Scalar Dynamics of Representation: Successes and Pitfalls It is by now widely recognized by human geographers that ‘‘geographic scale’’ is socially (and politically, economically, and culturally) constructed (Delaney and Leitner 1997; Marston 2000; Smith 2000). Geographical scales have no essential quality: their relationship to social justice will always be determined by the temporal and spatial context. As Noel Castree (2003) says: ‘‘There is nothing, ipso facto, progressive about making translocal connections, just as there is nothing necessarily regressive about all forms of localism that are defined against a putative exterior’’ (150). There continues to be debate, however, about the best scale at which to locate the struggle for social justice. Some have argued that the transnational scale— and by extension, the support of militant particularisms—is the scale at which resistance can best match the predatory globalizations of capitalism (Harvey 1996: 32). Social movements that are able to ‘‘jump scales’’ (to shift their struggles from a lower to a higher scale) can therefore counter the parochial tendency of place-based justice claims. As Neil Smith says, ‘‘This suggests that a central means of political power comes from a process of ‘jumping scales’ whereby political claims and power established at one geographical scale can be expanded to another’’ (Smith 2000: 726). The construction of transnational activist networks allows local actors to bypass the state (against which they battle) and tap into relationships that can generate solidarity, legitimacy, and financial resources (Adams 1996; Keck and Sikkink 1998). As Lynn Staeheli says, ‘‘To the extent that oppositional movements can move across scales—that is, to the extent that they can take advantage of the resources at one scale to overcome the constraints encountered at different scales in the way that more powerful actors can do—they may have greater potential for pressing their claims’’ (cited in Marston 2000: 222). Place is still privileged in this discussion as the site of ‘‘subaltern strategies of localization’’ (Escobar 2001), alternative economic practices (Gibson-Graham 1993), civil society participa-

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 93 tion, decentralization, and community, but a progressive politics is tied to the ability of place-based actors to articulate with progressive transnationalisms, generating what Cindi Katz calls ‘‘rooted translocalisms’’ (2001: 724). An analysis of mobilization among mst members suggests that we need to carefully differentiate between a politics of scale and a politics of place. At the transnational level, the mst’s peasant populism has enabled the movement to make connections to organizations around the world that are concerned not only with peasant livelihoods, but with social justice, with counterglobalization, with the environment, with indigenous land rights, and with many more struggles for social justice. At the national level, the movement’s ability to speak with a fairly unified voice allows it to be seen as a powerful representative of the rural poor. Its use of ‘‘the local’’ as a focus for radical social justice is less an a priori assumption of scalar character than an analytical recognition that within the Brazilian context of large-scale, industrial modernization, focusing on the local is a counterhegemonic strategy. At the level of internal organization, the mst’s coherent message has enabled the movement to organize its members efficiently for public demonstrations and support networks. In particular places, however, the mst’s construction of the ‘‘local’’ struggle for land has conflicted with place-based understandings of social justice. The discourses constituted in the peasant-based realities of southern Brazil do not translate perfectly to other regions of Brazil, particularly the northeastern sugarcane region in which I situate the rest of this book.

Success: The Struggle for Land and Transnational Network Construction The mst’s transformation from a small movement in the south of Brazil to a leader of the global peasant movement can be seen (and read) in the pages of its own publication, the Jornal Sem Terra.∞Ω Because this newspaper is primarily intended for internal circulation, it necessarily engages in the complicated work of both articulation and representation. The newspaper articulates in the double sense, of bringing people together into a community and also expressing a philosophy of action and subject. It then represents both itself (the movement) and the state/market to its own membership. Through an analysis of the shifting composition of the

94 Chapter Three journal across the 1990s, the decade in which the mst made its most spectacular transformation, it is possible to see some of the changing themes in the movement’s struggle to represent the rural poor in the country while simultaneously working to ‘‘scale up’’ the struggle. The Jornal Sem Terra is particularly important for understanding the way that the mst self-consciously positions itself both in the struggle for power within Brazil and as a member of the international community. It is a site where movement activists and leaders actively engage in the production of meaning and movement discourse, ‘‘framing’’ the movement for both its members and the outside world (Snow and Benford 1992). Many of the mst’s contentions in the newspaper are strategic and presented as much more simplistic then they play out in practice; however, these representations are important to the movement’s image, representation, and ability to maneuver. Although the image of the mst portrayed in the Jornal Sem Terra is not representative of the movement as a whole, an analysis of the newspaper provides insight into the way that the mst has constructed its hegemony in Brazil and in the transnational peasant network more broadly. For this study, my graduate student Brenda Baletti (a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and I analyzed newspaper issues beginning in 1990, when the movement had just come through a difficult five-year period, fighting for constitutional reform between 1985 and 1988 and undergoing severe counterattacks by Brazil’s rural elite. The newspaper reflected the movement’s two primary concerns at this juncture: organizing the struggle for land through nonviolent occupations and creating an ideologically coherent internal membership. The content of the newspaper reflects these ‘‘movement-centered’’ concerns, with regular columns about how to organize the movement, and detailed reporting of confrontations on the ground, in the states. Over the course of ten years, the total number of subscribers rose dramatically, and the Jornal came to be published by a medium-sized independent publisher rather than inhouse. The newspaper was linked with the movement’s Web page (sister organizations for the movement run Web pages in English, Spanish, French, and other languages) and portrayed the movement’s concerns as broader than just the struggle for land. The new struggle included a concern for transnational articulation, human rights, anticonsumerism, and cultural genocide. The ‘‘how to organize a movement’’ articles disappeared. All of this seemed to be an attempt to appeal to a broader

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 95 audience, as the newspaper’s main readership (and, to a certain extent, its membership) was increasingly urban rather than rural. These differences in what I am calling ‘‘early’’ and ‘‘mature’’ mst (see table 6), and which are detailed in the discussion below, demonstrate changes in the mst’s self-representation as it scaled up, situating itself consciously within the transnational networks. The time period between 1990 and 1999 spans a pivotal moment in Brazilian history, from the immediate postauthoritarian conditions of democratic possibility and confusion to a point when people declared democracy in Brazil ‘‘consolidated.’’ The first president in Brazilian history to win reelection (Fernando Henrique Cardoso) was filling out his second term by 2000, and the political landscape offered very different opportunities and challenges than it had just ten years earlier. From its localized position within Brazilian politics, the mst increasingly expressed the struggle for land in universal terms: access to land became less a matter of simple material acquisition and more a matter of the ‘‘right to have rights’’ and a dignified, culturally appropriate living. This universalization was articulated with a self-conscious ‘‘massification’’ of the struggle, where massification meant expanding the movement’s reach among the masses: although the movement began as a largely rural organization led by the sons and daughters of small farmers, it increasingly came to include a broader circle of social actors including the urban poor, politicians, and academics. This universalization and massification helped the mst to step into the international scene: from 1990 to 1999, the movement takes the struggle from national politics to a global campaign against neoliberalism, in which outside leaders, intellectuals and politicians are called upon as authorities. For example, in an early issue of the movement’s newspaper (Jornal Sem Terra, June 1990, 94: 11), the movement listed its demands in a section titled ‘‘Jornada de Luta’’ (Day of Struggle). The demands included: 1. Immediate negotiations by state and federal governments to resolve all conflicts over land through expropriation and without violence. 2. Regularization of all settlements that had been created thus far. 3. Immediate lines of credit for settlers. 4. An adjustment for inflation of minimum prices of rural products and of the rural minimum wage. 5. Punishment for all violence against rural workers.

96 Chapter Three Table 6. The mst’s Increasingly Universal Approach to the Struggle for Land, as Presented in the Jornal Sem Terra, 1990–1999 Features of the Jornal

Early 1990s

Late 1990s

International content

Minimal, and when present, focused on alliances with other movements or examples of other movements or socialist projects

Greater proportion of articles about international issues with a focus on the international politics and economics of neoliberalism and globalization

Design

Font militaristic and blunt; articles have a more militant Leninist slant that focuses on call to action to force land reform and socialism; articles focus on how to build a movement and happenings ‘‘on the ground’’ in the states

Font is refined, reader friendly, and artistic; articles focus more on building consensus around broad issues than the specific demand for land reform; fewer articles about struggles ‘‘on the ground’’ and more about national and international politics and culture including ‘‘secular culture’’ such as poetry, suggested reading lists; there are more consistent monthly columns

Authorship

Authors unnamed or, if named, are movement leaders

Several articles per issue are written by, or are interviews with, external ‘‘experts’’

Main call to arms

Struggle for land in Brazil

Struggle for basic human rights (including land) in Brazil and the world; antineoliberalism

Agents of change

Primarily landless workers

Primarily social movements or simply ‘‘the people’’

Treatment of the state

Tentative alliances with ‘‘good state’’ possible

Increasingly hostile

Source: Analysis of issues of the mst’s monthly newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra, 1990–1999.

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 97 Much of the newspaper during this time dwelt on local expressions of land conflict, primarily occupations, expropriations, and harvests in particular states. The sections that discussed happenings in particular states were almost exclusively about land conflicts, and the international section was about international struggles for land. By the end of the 1990s, however, the mst was bringing together a much wider range of concerns in the struggle for ‘‘land.’’ A document distributed in 1999 presented a much more inclusive—and vague—set of goals for the movement than those established earlier: 1. Build a society without exploiters, where work has supremacy over capital. 2. Remember that land is a good that belongs to everyone. 3. Guarantee work for everyone, with a just distribution of land, income, and wealth. 4. Always search for social justice. 5. Combat all forms of social discrimination and look for equal participation of women and men. 6. Deepen the humanist and social values in social relations.

The mst did not abandon the struggle for land of course—in the later issues of the Jornal Sem Terra, there were still articles about land conflict in the states—but the sections dedicated to on-the-ground struggles in various Brazilian states drops significantly. In 1990, there were usually ten pages dedicated to activities going on in specific states but in the 1999 issues there were only three. By 1999, many more articles were dedicated to expansive issues in domestic and international politics (see table 7). Other, more general subjects were also more frequently addressed, including critiques of neoliberal policies and U.S. imperialism, discussions of the popular movement in Brazil, the antiglobalization movement worldwide, and the international peasant movement, Via Campesina. The newspaper added a lutadores (fighters) section in 1998, each month profiling a different leader from movements for human rights across the world and throughout history. The massification of the movement’s struggle worked to broaden its appeal to a greater number of people. Oppression of the landless was depicted as intimately tied to the neoliberal policies of Cardoso, such as market-led land reform—the Free Trade Association of the Americas, specifically, and market liberalization in general. Opponents to neoliberalism existed worldwide, and by reframing the struggle for land as part of a

98 Chapter Three Table 7. The Changing Focus of the mst: A Study of Articles Published in the Jornal Sem Terra, 1990–1999 Article Topics, as Percentage of Annual Total

Year

Domestic Politics

International Politics

Neoliberalism

Free Market

imf or World Bank

mst Base as Workers

mst Base as Landless

mst Base as o povo

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

23.11 21.45 30.90 24.22 33.88 37.80 39.18 46.84 43.97 50.35

9.78 16.71 1.39 7.81 10.10 7.87 12.69 19.33 14.24 14.44

1.78 0.84 2.08 1.95 5.86 11.02 10.82 9.29 8.19 10.21

0 0 0 0.39 2.93 4.72 2.99 7.81 6.47 11.97

0 0 0.34 1.95 2.93 1.57 0.37 1.11 3.88 11.61

45.33 76.56 39.23 35.16 28.34 25.99 16.04 21.19 25.86 21.13

38.67 53.52 44.44 45.31 43.32 51.97 58.58 50.19 38.79 38.73

0.02 0.04 0.34 5.08 6.51 5.12 7.46 12.27 14.22 15.85

Source: Numbers based on analysis of articles in issues of the mst’s monthly newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra, 1990–1999.

broader program against neoliberal policies, the mst situated a somewhat narrow struggle for land within a broader network. The struggle, for instance, of mst members in an encampment in Santa Catarina was also the struggle of the medium-scale soy farmer in Matto Grosso whose prices could not compete in a global market against subsidized American soy, or that of the Mexican farm worker who had to migrate to the United States for work after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or that of American auto workers who lost their jobs when the factory they worked in closed its doors and moved overseas. A grassroots plurality was constructed by bringing together different groups of individuals with some common interests: women, the descendants of African slaves, and indigenous people, along with landless and people in antiglobalization movements worldwide. The movement subsequently changed the way in which it referred to its base in the newspaper: in the earlier years, members were referred to almost exclusively as ‘‘landless’’ and/or ‘‘workers,’’ but as time progressed, the label broadened to include not only the landless workers, but also other social movements, popular classes, or simply ‘‘the people’’ (o povo). Paralleling the massification of the movement was a changing aesthetic

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 99 in the newspaper itself, which, in addition to adopting a more sophisticated layout, also included more cartoons, poetry, longer and more coherent articles dedicated to a particular topic, and more consistent monthly columns. The style of the newspaper shifted from a Leninist, militant demand for socialist reform to a more Gramscian focus on building community and consensus. The focus on building movement consciousness never wavered (see table 8), but its presentation did. There were fewer didactic pieces such as those by Ademar Bogo concerning rules and norms for building a movement, and more discussions of politics, articles about ‘‘secular’’ culture, discussions of broad international issues, and so on. Calls for socialism and socialist-style organization such as producer collectives nearly disappeared after 1993. There was a greater focus on the shared struggle of multiple social movements in building the popular project (projeto popular) against Cardoso, and combating evils such as inequality through the search for new models for economic and social development. There was more discussion of the roles of various groups, such as women, indigenous groups, even children (sem terrinha) in contributing to this larger struggle. Over the course of the 1990s, the articles about the struggle on the ground for agrarian reform also change from a singular focus on land conflict to a broader discussion about life in the settlements. Articles with titles such as ‘‘5th Agrarian Reform Fair Is a Success,’’ ‘‘The mst Implements Pasteurized Milk Industry,’’ ‘‘The mst Launches a National Campaign to Plant Trees,’’ and ‘‘Festival of Musicians for Agrarian Reform,’’ are interspersed with the more traditional ‘‘Occupation in Area of Wood Exploration,’’ or ‘‘Encampments in Giacomet Follow the Fight.’’ Poetry and suggested reading lists start to appear regularly in 1998. Much of this change was a product of (and productive of ) the movement’s changing relationship with the international community. Through this changing relationship, there was, as I have already mentioned, a progressive ‘‘professionalization’’ of the movement (see McCarthy and Zald 1973). In the early years of the newspaper, the authors of articles were unnamed—or, when named, tended to be movement activists. As seen in table 8, over the course of the 1990s, articles were increasingly interviews with external leaders or were written by external leaders, often foreign intellectuals such as Gabriel García Marquéz. External leaders writing for the movement accomplished two things. On the one hand, they helped to expand the newspaper’s appeal, presenting the movement’s struggle to a wider audience such as, for instance, Gabriel García Mar-

100 Chapter Three Table 8. Changing Political Emphases in the mst: A Study of the Articles Published in the Jornal Sem Terra, 1990–1999 Article Characteristics, as Percentage of Annual Total Interview Written by with External External Consciousness Secular International Leader Year Building Culture Issues Socialism Collectives Leader 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

10.22 7.80 9.72 10.54 9.45 9.84 10.82 8.55 9.48 8.10

0.44 0.11 0.35 5.08 0.04 10.24 6.34 5.95 6.47 11.62

10.98 19.22 18.06 8.59 10.75 10.63 10.07 23.04 20.25 17.96

4 7.80 4.51 1.17 0.33 1.97 1.49 1.49 0.86 1.76

8.89 10.31 6.94 0.39 1.95 0.79 0 0 0 0.70

10.22 6.13 2.43 0.39 4.23 7.48 7.09 7.06 4.74 3.87

2.66 3.06 0.69 7.03 5.54 7.48 5.22 5.58 8.62 9.50

Source: Numbers based on analysis of articles in issues of the mst’s monthly newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra, 1990–1999.

quéz’s readership (which was probably not largely illiterate, landless, agricultural workers). On the other, they demonstrated that the movement’s politics, and its struggle, were in line with, and sanctioned by, internationally respected leftist leaders such as Noam Chomsky, thereby broadening the struggle. The focus on internationalization was also evident in the increasing number of articles that addressed international issues, as seen in table 8. In the early 1990s, when the movement was attempting to establish legitimacy, there was a spike in the number of articles with an international focus. These articles tended to discuss international landlessness or to present international examples of socialism and socialist struggle. From 1993 to 1995, there was a notable drop in international focus, as the movement turned inward and focused on building grassroots support within Brazil. In the late 1990s, the number of international articles increased again, and is correlated with the growing strength of antineoliberalism in Brazil and abroad. The 1990s was arguably the decade of neoliberalism in Brazil. During the 1990s, President Fernando Collor de Mello and then Cardoso opened Brazil’s markets to external investment by

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 101 reducing import tariffs and establishing free-trade agreements, privatized public enterprises, and prioritized fiscal discipline in order to reduce the national debt. The mst universalized and internationalized its struggle for land by associating rural poverty and hunger with these aspects of neoliberalism. In the pages of the Jornal Sem Terra, neoliberalism becomes an ‘‘empty signifier,’’ a term whose significance was so broad that different groups and persons were able to ascribe their own definitions to it (see table 8). Some scholars have argued that this ambiguity invalidates neoliberalism as an analytical category (e.g., Clarke 2007), but it is precisely the ambiguous nature of the term that makes it an important rallying point for Latin American social movements and for transnational networks that self-identify as being ‘‘antiglobal.’’ The focus on neoliberalism paralleled the movement’s internationalization while controversial neoliberal policies that facilitated globalization, particularly globalization of the market, were proliferating on a world scale in the 1990s, becoming a target of worldwide protest. The mst’s increasingly general framework has been very successful at the national and international levels (which seems to have surprised movement activists, Brazilian politicians, and academics alike). James Petras (1997a) referred to the mst as the most effective and organized movement of the so-called new social movements in Latin America’s third wave of democracy. And in a speech at the 2003 World Social Forum, Noam Chomsky referred to the mst as ‘‘the most important and exciting popular movement in the world,’’ and Michael Hardt (of Empire) has suggested that the mst may be the long-awaited, much-anticipated ‘‘multitude.’’ This praise is both recognition of and constitutive of the mst’s success in building ties with other social movements, ngos, academics, and politicians. And although the media has largely covered the sensational aspects of the movement, such as the violent occupations and the member-turnedPlayboy model, the mst has received an astonishing level of respect and support within the Brazilian middle class. A study in 1997 showed that over 85 percent of those polled supported both the need for redistribution and the mst’s methods in pursuing reform (cited in Ondetti 2008: 167). Groups as diverse as teachers, bus drivers, students, and political parties all support agrarian reform as one of the most legitimate expressions of opposition to the status quo. Support for mst in Brazil is, in some ways, expression of discontent with both ‘‘politics as usual’’ and the political Left in Brazil, both of which have had difficulty responding to the political

102 Chapter Three and ideological vacuum created by the defeat of the authoritarian state (Castañeda 1993; Sorj 1998). In the years since the mst began, its initially localized struggle for land and community has been scaled up into a luta de todos—the struggle by and for everything and everybody.≤≠ In the mst’s utopian vision for the future, the movement successfully resignifies the struggle for land as a struggle for a new society. Through the mistica, land comes to symbolically occupy multiple scales simultaneously: the new man and woman, the household, the community, the environment, the nation, and the world. The mst’s goals of land distribution, small-scale family farming, and agroecological sustainability, are shared by farmers’ movements across Latin America and the global South (see Shiva 2003; also see Deene and Royce 2009; Gupta 1998; Kitching 1992; O’Connor n.d.; Thurow and Kilman 2003). The mst is highly respected among Latin American social movements, and new movements in urban areas and in other countries have sought out mst leaders for tactical advice.≤∞ mst activists regularly go on solidarity tours in Mexico, Cuba, the United States, Europe, the Philippines, India, and South Africa (among other countries).≤≤ mst leaders also helped to found and participate actively in the international farmers’ movement, Via Campesina (created in 1992), and movement representatives joined the Inter-Continental Caravan that traveled across western Europe in 1999 (Featherstone 2003). Alongside these and other agrarian movements, the mst is an important actor in the worldwide counterglobalization movement: the mst has played a significant role in organizing and maintaining the People’s Global Action network and the World Social Forum. These transnational connections have provided financial, cultural, and moral resources to the mst that have helped the movement establish itself as an important political actor in Brazil. Outside social movements and ngos such as Christian Aid and Global Exchange have donated considerable funds to the mst: charitable donations constitute the largest (and overwhelming) part of the movement’s budget. International letterwriting campaigns organized by the mst have played a key role in pushing for the relocation of human rights trials to the national level, rather than keeping them at the local level, where elite interests tend to exert a more conservative influence. Awards such as the Right Livelihood Award (also called the ‘‘alternative Nobel Prize’’) and the King Baudouin International Development Prize, as well as recognition from unicef for an innovative

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 103 educational campaign, provide financial resources as well as external legitimacy for an organization the Brazilian government and media have tried consistently to delegitimate and criminalize. Cultural icons such as Chico Buarque (a Brazilian singer and writer) and Sebastião Salgado (a Brazilian photographer) have also contributed to the movement’s fame and familiarity, by appearing at social events honoring the movement and contributing to artistic endeavors in the movement’s name. All of these public displays of solidarity are extremely important in maintaining the movement’s popularity.≤≥ At the end of the movement’s National March in 1997, more than 100,000 people greeted movement members as they marched into Brasília, the capital city of Brazil. These supporters carried the signs of their own struggles (unemployed teachers’ unions, student groups, Catholic groups, etc.), but they marched alongside the mst in part because the movement has become symbolic of poverty in Brazil. On some level, to be subaltern, marginalized, or exploited in Brazil is to be landless and displaced, and vice versa—nos somos todos sem terra, we are all without a place of our own. As Regina Novaes said, ‘‘agrarian reform is now part of [Brazilian] national political culture’’ (1998: 174). The mst has become the dominant representative of landlessness in Brazil. Movement leaders are regularly asked to define the ‘‘agrarian problem’’ in Brazil. They are quoted in newspaper articles and books on the subject as representing the organized landless poor, even though there are dozens of movements throughout the country—as well as a long history of militant trade unionism. Politicians—from President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva at the national level to the local mayors—meet with mst representatives in order to reassure the voters that an agrarian reform agenda exists. Furthermore, agrarian reform officials are always ‘‘one step behind the social movements’’: they follow the mst’s lead in examining which properties are eligible for expropriation by the state.

The Pitfalls of Scaling Up: Misreading Community In southern Brazil, the mst’s populist discourse is most clearly expressed in the production collectives. But it is here that the dangers of scaling up are evident. mst leaders hoped to expand and deepen the struggle for

104 Chapter Three

8. mst National March outside Brasília, April 1997. Photo by author.

land by scaling up agricultural production: collectives would be a metaphor for—and analogous to—the development of a collective consciousness. But in both the theory and the practice, this scaling up has been complicated by the difficulty of articulating a general theory of cooperation with diverse conditions on the ground. When mst leaders implemented the collective project on Vento, they were optimistic about the potential for creating an economic and social alternative to conventional agriculture. But the collective failed twice: the original cooperative organized in 1989 lasted only one harvest, after which thirty-seven families broke off and created Copagro (the Cooperativa de Produção Agropecuária). The leaders suggested that the settlers’ inability to engage in collective production was an essential problem of peasant consciousness: the peasant was too individualistic and could not adequately replace the ‘‘I’’ of conventional capitalist society with the ‘‘we’’ of the mst alternative community. But in fact, as the experience of Vento shows, the settlers initially embraced the idea of collective production: working in a group fit in well with their experiences on the land and made sense to them as a way to move forward. Their ‘‘peasant consciousness’’ made them initially quite receptive to the idea of cooperative production. They were hoping that the cooperative would succeed because the form of production appealed to

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 105 their traditional sense of egalitarian community. These small farmers had always worked alone on their own land, far from their neighbors and far from anything one could call a ‘‘boss.’’ And yet, they had a history of calling on their neighbors in times of hard work or trouble. They remembered sharing workdays in their communities during the harvest when everyone’s corn and beans needed to be brought in as quickly as possible. They wanted the collective to succeed because the moral economy of smallholder production suggested that this was a productive way of organizing the relationship between land and labor. When they ultimately left the collective, it was not because they didn’t understand how to cooperate; it was because the collective was implemented according to a generic plan, one that had been devised in mst and incra (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária) offices according to universal criteria of efficiency and rational organization (efficiency both in terms of economic profit and in terms of ideological development). The way in which the collective was ultimately implemented clashed with the settlers’ particular organization of work, family, and community. Only five of the Copagro members who were there in 1998 had been with the collective when it was founded in 1990 after the dissolution of the initial cooperative project. The other thirty-two members had all left for a variety of reasons. When I arrived on the settlement in 1998, there were seventeen families in the cooperative, and nine of those seventeen were getting ready to leave. The remaining houses stood empty, although there were plans to recruit new members. Two of the seventeen families had, in fact, recently been recruited from mst occupation sites. One was dedicated to the cooperative and excited to have the opportunity to take part. The other was silent in his disapproval and had elected to join the eight other households in leaving the collective. The eight other families who were leaving the collective were all members of the same family, sons and daughters of Velinha (little old one), as everyone called her. Although Velinha was one of the original members of the mst cooperative on the settlement (Copagro) and continued to be a strong believer in the ideals of collective work, her children had become frustrated with the collective’s administration. Two of Velinha’s daughters were married to men who had previously been part of the administration (one had been the president for several years, the other had been the treasurer). The two men were accused (by the present administration) of having manipulated the cooperative’s accounts and stealing a considerable

106 Chapter Three sum of money. Other accusations, bitter insults and, most important, hurt feelings, were flying around the cooperative as the nine families made ready to leave the group. They were all going to take their share of the collective patrimony and set up individual farms in another area of the settlement. On Vento, Copagro’s complicated history initially appears to vindicate the belief that cooperative production did not resonate with the small farming mode of production. The fact that the ninety-seven settlers had managed to form a cooperative at all could have been explained by ‘‘conjunctural’’ factors, such as bonding during the occupation period, state incentives, or aggressive mst encouragement. After interviewing settlers who were involved with the project in the beginning and asking what their reactions were to the formation of the cooperative, I was surprised to realize that while conjunctural factors certainly played a role, the idea of group work resonated with elements of the settlers’ traditional political economy. On the one hand, the ninety-six families who were originally settled on Vento were encouraged to form a giant collective because the government agrarian reform agency, incra, felt the land was inappropriate for individual farming. Both incra and the mst promoted the idea of a collective as a model for future settlements and promised to oversee the provision of substantial loans and technical-organizational assistance. Many of the settlers mentioned this as a reason for getting involved in the cooperative in the first place: ‘‘incra showed us how it would work and encouraged everyone to join, saying that we would get funds more easily and that they would be well applied.’’ The same settler argued that he and his family thought cooperation sounded good in part because ‘‘at that time, no one was well educated and no one understood what it meant to work in a group.’’ On the other hand, the settlers in the Northeast have been offered the same incentives and encouragement to form cooperatives and they have not participated to nearly the same extent. When discussing the original project established on the settlement in 1989, a majority of the families remembered having originally approved of the idea of collective work. They were disappointed when the cooperative did not last in its original form. Despite the troubles they experienced, settlers who remembered being ‘‘pushed’’ into the cooperative still insisted that it would be better for them all to be working in a group: ‘‘It is good to work in a group and easier than working alone, but the important

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 107 thing is to have good leadership.’’ Another settler, a young man with three children, complained that the troubles he experienced in the cooperative kept the family from participating when they would have liked to: ‘‘We are people who suffer, and I would even like to work in a group.’’ The settlers’ reactions to the collective suggested that the ideals of group production did fit in with their traditional practices of family production, work sharing, and strong, relatively egalitarian communities. The formation of strong families in southern Brazil facilitated involvement in the cooperative. Larger families headed by both a man and a woman were able to participate in the cooperative because with more hands available, the household could liberate certain members for participation in activities that often took place far from home or for long periods of time. This was important, as active participation in an mst cooperative requires attendance at an almost constant round of meetings and mobilizations. Families would send one or more members to participate, which allowed the others to stay at home tending to the household. The sons were often the most committed to the mst as many of the young boys on Vento had spent their most formative years within the movement’s educational and motivation system. The gender division of labor within the family was also an important factor in shaping household participation. The whole family participates in farm production, and the few tasks that are more strictly ‘‘male,’’ such as operating heavy machinery or marketing production, do not usually take place on a regular basis and a farm can maintain itself for an extended period of time without their completion. Because families worked together in the fields, they could liberate the male or female heads of the household for meetings, congresses, or mobilizations knowing that the cows would still be milked and the garden weeded. The settlers were also receptive to the idea of collective production because the majority had spent their entire lives working in the fields, and they understood that their small-scale farming methods were not always the most efficient. The settlers seemed eager to reap the rewards that incra promised them—not just for personal enrichment, but because they imagined they could run their farm as the sort of efficient, giant business that they had always envied: ‘‘The collective has certain advantages— it is a group, not just one person alone who is making all the investments. You have more incentive to work, it’s easier to get things accomplished. Like buying a machine, for example—we can buy one! For those who work

108 Chapter Three alone, they will never get one. If it is everyone for themselves, we will never get anything done.’’ Of the ninety-six families who were settled on Vento in 1989, seventeen originally worked on the expropriated farm as cattle hands and overseers for the landlord, Chico Morães. All seventeen families left Vento within the first year of being settled because they did not want to be part of the cooperative. Having worked all their lives as someone else’s labor, they did not want to involve themselves in a cooperative that they understood to be more of the same. But almost ten years later one of the settlers explained why he regretted having left Vento: ‘‘A collective is not what [the other families] told me it was. They told me that being in a collective meant being a day laborer.’’ The settlers were able to interpret the ideal of collective production through their historical experience with relatively egalitarian communities. Most of the settlers were accustomed to participating in mutirões (collective work teams) during the harvest, when several families would work together to bring in each others’ ripened corn or beans. Mutirões were also formed when families needed assistance with big projects, such as building a house or redoing a barn. Work parties were also commonly organized through the church or the school to help with occasional tasks in the community center. A German settler from Rio Grande do Sul argued that it was not difficult to learn how to work in a collective because they had been working in a group since they were little, ‘‘and everyone [on the settlement] got along.’’ The tradition of community assistance began before mst was even started. When the first occupation in Santa Catarina took place, in 1980, the landless peasants were not yet part of mst. Even so, they sent a portion of their first harvest down to landless squatters in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Sul.≤∂ Participation in the collective built on the settlers’ historical experience with egalitarian communities. Families consider themselves to be among equals on the settlements, and elaborate social processes discourage individuals from either exceeding or falling behind the welfare norm. Families that have achieved an ‘‘unusual’’ degree of financial comfort are gossiped about nastily and haunted by constant suggestions that they have stolen money from the group’s coffers. Suspicion of any increase in wealth was automatic on the settlements studied. At the same time, an ‘‘unusual’’ amount of poverty was also looked down upon as indicative of laziness or incompetence.

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 109 Commitment to join the collective was often a reflection of the settlers’ desire to maintain that traditional equality among themselves: ‘‘Where we were [in western Santa Catarina], there was already a collective group. Given that we only had a little bit of land for joining the cooperative, we decided that if there were a similar thing where we went, we would develop better because this way we were all equal.’’ The settlers were initially responsive to the idea of cooperative production because they understood and appreciated the idea that everyone would be equal. Another settler argued that she had chosen to work in the collective because: ‘‘We just go with whatever form of work works the best—it just depends on how everyone can work together and equally.’’ The desire for equality and cooperation was further strengthened by the presence of several large, extended families on the settlement. The settlers seemed predisposed to trust an association that included many of their own kin. Given the many ways that cooperative production appealed to the settlers initially, it seems that it was not the idea of collective production that accounted for Copagro’s problems, it was the practical application of the idea. The collective ran into problems because it betrayed many of the small farm ideals it was based on. Ironically, the collective failed to reward family production, overturned the settler’s traditional safety net, and actually increased inequality among the settlers. The settlers complained that the formation of the collective undermined family labor arrangements. The ability of the cooperatives to compete on the market depended partly on the group’s ability to access family labor. Labor was ‘‘paid’’ only a small wage per day, and children were not paid anything at all, even though they often helped their parents in the field. A single mother argued that working in the cooperative was good, but when the opportunity to leave arose, she took it: ‘‘In the cooperative, the kids didn’t work. Here [on our own land] they do. The cooperative didn’t accept kids’ work. In the garden, their work helps. Here they plant a bit of everything.’’ The capacity to self-exploit the greatest number of workers possible was one of the collective’s most important competitive advantages. Ironically, the form that this self-exploitation took directly contributed to the downfall of the collective. Families were often willing to exploit their labor if they were assured a stake in the group’s patrimony, but the model of cooperative production Copagro followed did not provide similar remuneration for children who worked with the group. Many families who had older children interested in building their own households

110 Chapter Three voiced their resistance to the cooperative model by exiting, although their objection was accommodated in some cases. Copagro was also difficult to maintain because the organization transformed the settlers’ access to their traditional safety net: subsistence production. The rules of the collective required every member to purchase basic supplies such as milk, flour, corn, and beans from the group ‘‘store,’’ goods that they had produced. The idea of paying for their subsistence was vocally resisted by many who were still in the collective, as well as those who had left entirely. One settler argued that when he was in the collective he was unable to pay for supplies and had to rely on family members who did not live on the settlement as his safety net: ‘‘We [were lucky] because we had food that our family produced, and everything that we needed to eat we got from there.’’ The most common complaint against the cooperative was that it created inequality through the designation of ‘‘leaders.’’ Leaders were selected through the unfamiliar process of community elections and mst membership, rather than through the more familiar processes of patriarchy and primogeniture. The leaders—often mst activists —were seen as putting themselves ‘‘above’’ the settlers because they did not have to ‘‘work.’’ Manual labor—working in the fields—was the only work that the settlers understood as real. Office work was associated with petty bureaucrats and bank officials who ‘‘never did anything.’’ A settler who left the collective in 1991 argued that everyone wanted to join the megaproject but that ‘‘from the beginning it was complicated because of the leaders of the collective. The mst leaders just wanted to be leaders and be organizing ‘in the front of the masses’—they didn’t want to help with the planting, and so people complained.’’ According to the settlers, the leaders of the cooperative sat around in the office avoiding ‘‘work.’’ Another settler argued that when the settlers arrived in the area, many of them had already decided they wanted to work in a collective. The settlers agreed with the movement’s original proposals but disagreed with the way that the movement executed the project: ‘‘You had to agree with what they said [the people from the state leadership], and they discriminated against people from different areas.’’ The impression of inequality in the collective was further heightened by the spatial and social division of labor. The work design that was initially implemented forced every settler to specialize in one task, such as milking or tending the tomatoes—a specialization at odds with the traditional diversification of tasks. Specialization and spatial separation created an

Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 111 environment where the tasks carried out by each person differed on a regular basis, and, therefore, the effort put into the task was assumed to be unequal. One settler argued: ‘‘We worked in the collective for two years, but it didn’t go well. Some people worked, but there were others who didn’t.’’ Another settler argued that he was leaving the collective because ‘‘you just can’t have people abusing other people’s work.’’ There was no way of proving for sure whether people were slacking off or working hard, and this uncertainty turned into distrust when the cooperative project began to run into trouble. Specialization also created problems because the settlers quickly became bored with their assigned task, and it was easy to assume that someone else’s task was easier, or better. These sorts of complaints increased as production faltered due to a couple of weak harvests between 1996 and 1997. In conclusion, it is evident that the peasant culture that shaped the early formation of the mst has resonated with farming protests and politics around the world. The mst’s rise in the 1980s has to be read through national and local conditions but also as a specific materialization of the global political and economic conjuncture. In an effort to both generate and capture the energy at the transnational scale, the mst broadened its message of access to land into one that included the struggle for human rights, indigenous identity, alternative food systems, and so on. Scaling up has provided the mst with considerable political resources—and the movement’s analysis of the need for worldwide organizing is undoubtedly prescient. At the same time, there are dangers to scaling up that are evident in the movement’s drive toward production collectives. The mst’s roots in southern Brazil generated discourses around land and community that resonated worldwide, but ironically these were the very same customs and norms that were violated by the move toward large-scale collective production. The settlers in Santa Catarina may have originally embraced the idea of working collectively, but it soon became clear that the ‘‘factory in the fields’’ contradicted their own ideas about production, social reproduction, and community. This has been a discussion of scaling up through intensification—intensifying the struggle in southern Brazil by applying more fundamental theories of collective production. In the next two chapters, I discuss the difficulties of scaling up ‘‘extensively’’ by spreading from the South into the Northeast.

4 The Making of a Movement in Northeastern Brazil After organizing in the South during the mid- and late 1980s, the mst began to work its way up into the Northeast of the country. Movement leaders had recognized at the very first official meeting that they would be much more effective politically as a national rather than local or regional movement. It was in 1989 that the movement attempted to mobilize rural sugarcane workers in the zona da mata (forested zone) of Pernambuco, a region that had been dominated by large-scale sugarcane production since the first mills were set up in the 1530s. The region has a long history of deep poverty—it is one of the poorest regions in all of Latin America—but it also has a long history of resistance, and so mst activists considered the region to be both materially and symbolically important for mobilization. It took several years for the movement to develop its membership in the region, however, because land-labor relationships on the plantations were very different than those on the small farms of southern Brazil. These relationships are the subject of this chapter.

Sugarcane in Northeastern Brazil The physical characteristics of coastal Pernambuco that constitute the zona da mata and that foster sugarcane production are a consequence of the Boborema Plateau, which runs northeast-southwest along the coast at an elevation of several hundred feet. The plateau falls away eastward, changing gradually into tableland and lowlands about a hundred miles before it reaches sea level. The sugarcane region in Pernambuco, which runs along the length of this coastal region, is traditionally divided into three ‘‘zones.’’ The northern region, above the urban centers of Recife and Cabo, is relatively dry and hilly and is called the mata seca (dry forest) in order to distinguish it from the humid, tropical southern zone. The northern sugar region occupies a narrow strip of land with deciduous forest cover, and is

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 113 generally considered less appropriate for sugarcane. Since the beginning of the colonial period, sugarcane production has been much more predominant in the southern region than it has been along the north coast. The metropolitan zone—the cities of Recife and Cabo—separates the northern and southern coastal zones, both politically and geographically. The southern coastal zone is where the municipality of Água Preta is located. It is wetter and more humid there (in terms of both rainfall and groundwater) than in the north; the vegetative cover is evergreen, although the forest has been decimated for sugarcane production. The sugarcane economy in the southern region has been dominated by large plantations—as opposed to the north, where small-scale subsistence farms were much more common, even among sugarcane planters (Andrade 1980: 45, 76). The soil in the sugarcane region as a whole is very fertile, and is considered ‘‘ideal’’ for the crop, although it supports many different species of flora. The best soil is known as massapê, a dark red soil (technically a yellow lattosoil) ‘‘famed for fertility, easy to cultivate, and good water retention’’ (Eisenberg 1974: 36) and concentrated in the varzeas (river floodplains) (Freyre 1989: 42–44; Schwartz 1985: 107). In spite of this fertility—in spite of the ‘‘fat land and well-oiled air’’ (Freyre 1989: 41)—the sugarcane region as a whole has historically been characterized by extreme hunger and poverty.∞ This has everything to do with the relationship between land and labor on the plantations, a relationship that has survived remarkably intact in the five hundred years since sugar was first introduced. When the Portuguese first colonized Brazil and the territory was divided into captaincies, only two—Pernambuco (in the northeast) and São Vicente (to the south of the current-day city of São Paulo)—succeeded economically over the following hundred years. Sugar played a key role in both captaincies, and the rise of large-scale, monocrop production in these captaincies has given Brazil its ‘‘plantationist’’ reputation (Linhares 1983: 748, cited in Barickman 1998).≤ Duarte de Coelho, the captain of Pernambuco, is recognized as having successfully adapted sugarcane to Brazilian soil, organizing an internal labor force made up mostly of slaves, and establishing trading routes by which raw sucrose could be shipped to Europe in exchange for consumer goods.≥ From the early 1500s until the 1800s, sugarcane production was a highly labor-intensive process. Sugarcane stalks were planted in the spring (July through August in the hills, and September through November in the

114 Chapter Four

9. Sugarcane planted on the hills outside Água Preta, Pernambuco, October 1999. Photo by author.

lowlands; Eisenberg 1974: 34–35) and harvested roughly eighteen months later (between October and March). The cane stubble—ratoons or soca, resoca (Schwartz 1985: 109)—was often left in the fields to grow, thus generating second and third harvests, although the quality of the cane diminished with each successive harvest. The cut cane was milled using a horizontal mill and two presses, until a much more efficient vertical threeroller press was devised (Galloway 1989: 73; Schwartz 2004: 163). After rolling the cane and extracting the juice, the sugar liquid was boiled in a series of kettles: the liquid was poured into one kettle, and then strained through linen cloth into another to successively remove the impurities. Wood ashes were added to the boiling kettles in order to remove impurities from the sugar, and the scum that rose to the surface during the boiling process was wiped off regularly (these skimmings were used to make rum or fertilizer). As soon as the liquid had become syrupy, it was poured into pots for cooling, and the crystals that rose to the top were wiped off. The syrup was squeezed (or spun in a centrifuge after the mid- to late 1800s) to get rid of excess water, and then placed in molds to dry. This produced the brownish sugar called mascavado (Eisenberg 1974: 37–41). Between 1500 and 1800, few changes were made in the production process: the same variety of cane, called Creole, was planted throughout

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 115 this period (Eisenberg 1974: 32–33).∂ No fertilizer was used, the dried stalks (known as bagaço) were thrown away and not used as fuel, and the energy used to power the mills came primarily from animals. Planters sold some raw sugar (known as ‘‘clayed sugar’’ because of its brown color and heavy, wet consistency) on the Brazilian market, but the majority was shipped to Britain to be distilled. The fact that the commodity was industrially processed in Europe meant that few upstream benefits—such as alcohol production and distillation technology—were captured locally. Furthermore, the people who controlled the sugar trade in Brazil were those who also controlled the local economy and politics. The most pressing problem for the captaincy of Pernambuco was providing labor for this production process: considerable numbers of workers were needed, and the work—cutting the cane, weeding, transporting loads of freshly cut stalks, operating the mills, supervising the distillation process—was unpleasant, relentless, and physically demanding. Because the indigenous peoples were limited in number and were considered poor workers, by the 1580s the mill owners had turned to imported slaves to carry out the unskilled tasks (Pereira 1997: 21; Galloway 1989: 73; see Schwartz 1985: 65–72 for a discussion of the transition from indigenous to African slaves).∑ Fausto (1999) suggests that inexperience with iron tools made it difficult for the indigenous peoples to work in the sugar mills, and the white colonists in Brazil would not have made good workers on the plantations because, as one colonist in 1690 remarked, ‘‘it is not the style for the white people of these parts, or of any other of our colonies, to do more than command their slaves to work and tell them what to do.’’∏ Between 1500 and 1850, Euro-Brazilian colonists imported millions of slaves from the African continent. By the time the slave trade was finally abolished in 1888, over 3.65 million slaves had been shipped to Brazil, more than to any other region in the Americas (Skidmore 1999: 17).π The captaincy of Pernambuco, and particularly the southern sugarcane region, had the highest ratio of slaves to wage laborers in the country (Andrade 1980). Despite the attempt to paint a picture of Brazil as a ‘‘racial democracy’’ founded in the gentle relationship between slave and master (Freyre 1967), the institution was cruel enough that many braved considerable danger to try to escape their captors. As one contemporary observer wrote: ‘‘A sugar mill is hell and all the masters of them are damned.’’∫ The importation of slave labor comprised one leg of a trading triangle: ships left Europe with manufactured goods and advanced weaponry, trav-

116 Chapter Four eled to Africa in search of slaves, headed to Brazil to exchange the people for raw materials—sugar, gold, and silver—and then returned to their home ports. In the late 1500s and early 1600s, sugar was still a delicacy for European consumers, and the high price allowed for the extensive and wasteful use of both labor and land. Basic food supplies, however, were difficult to find during the early colonial period in Brazil. Most foodstuffs were imported from Lisbon and Argentina, in large part because plantation owners were reluctant to grow food crops on their land.Ω From 1635 to 1654, when the Dutch ruled the region of Pernambuco, Count Maurits of Nassau—who was sent by the Dutch West India Company with powers as governor general (see Nastari 1983: 55–61)—was forced to order all planters to plant manioc on their land, because basic subsistence was becoming a problem (Andrade 1980: 56; Oliveira Lima 1997 [1895]: 108– 110). Even then, food production depended on localized relationships between particular plantation owners and their slaves.∞≠ In the late 1800s, an internal market began to develop for the production and consumption of agricultural products, but manioc production never competed with sugarcane, instead serving as the pioneer crop opening up new, uncleared land for sugarcane (Andrade 1980: 72; also see Schwartz 1997: 69–100). Until railroads were built in Brazil (in 1855, the imperial and provincial governments gave a ninety-year monopoly to an English company, the Recife and San Francisco Company, to build a railroad going southwest from Recife), food supplies such as corn and beans continued to be imported from southern Bahia, Portugal, and Italy, and meat was imported from Argentina (Andrade 1980; Barickman 1998: 75, 221 n. 16). It was not until the nineteenth century that this system of large-scale, monocrop exploitation and social stratification began to undergo significant transformations.

Sugarcane: A History of Crisis and Recovery Throughout its long history, sugarcane production went through prolonged periods of boom and bust, intermittent cycles that followed changes in international supply and demand and reverberated throughout the region. During periods of low prices, government officials regularly investigated the possibility of ‘‘restructuring’’ the industry, and addressing widespread hunger and poverty in the region by implementing agrar-

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 117 ian reforms that would carve up the plantations into small-scale plots of land. Relationships between planters and their workers were more relaxed during these down times, and the workers were often given space for planting subsistence crops on plantation land (Barickman 1994; Andrade 1980: 96–97; Eisenberg 1974: introduction). But when the market revived, labor relationships became more impersonal, and the search for higher profits squeezed the laborers and reduced their access to land. Throughout the history of sugarcane production, local governments have attempted to restructure the industry in order to increase competitiveness and improve conditions for the working poor. Reforms were implemented to revitalize sugarcane production by expropriating lessefficient plantations and providing the workers with access to land and between-harvest means of subsistence. These reforms have not dramatically altered the underlying structures of land use or access, because sugarcane planters in the region have been singularly focused on the production of sugarcane within their own plantations, and have resisted attempts at expropriation. The changes of the late 1800s were partly a result of economic crisis. The Pernambuco plantation economy was hurt by Dutch producers in Cuba, whose modern processing techniques and favorable access to the North American market hurt Brazil’s export opportunities. Brazilian sugar exports dropped from 238,074 tons per year during the period 1881–1885 to 147,274 tons per year between 1886 and 1890; by 1906– 1910, the annual average of exports had dropped to 51,338 tons (figures cited in Andrade 1988: 640). The economic crisis prompted government intervention to ‘‘rationalize’’ the sugarcane industry in order to increase efficiency. The initial plan in the late 1800s was to create centralized sugar mills. The theory behind centralized mills was one of specialization: the separation of the agricultural from the industrial components of the sugar production process (Eisenberg 1974: 88–90). Whereas the nature of sugarcane production and of northeastern Brazilian society had given rise to a form of production that integrated agriculture and industry, the idea behind central mills was to create a new division of labor in which central mills processed the planters’ cane. After their introduction in the early 1880s, however, central mills performed disappointingly because of a lack of workable machinery, difficulty sustaining sufficient and regular cane production in the natural environment, planters’ wariness in delivering

118 Chapter Four their sugarcane, lack of credit, and difficulty forming stable business relationships (Eisenberg 1974; Galloway 1989). Although the central mills failed, they did pave the way for the development of sugarcane factories, or usinas. The usinas were modern mills that bought up enough land for planting that they were able to meet the capacity of the new refining machinery. They solved the distribution problem of the central mills, which essentially resulted from the attempt to separate the two functions of sugarcane production (planting and processing). The smaller mills resisted the concentrating tendency of these factories, but by the mid-1950s, smaller mills were almost nonexistent (or were affiliated with a factory). With the creation of central mills, the search for a consistent labor supply became more important. In 1871, when the Law of the Free Womb emancipated all future children born to slaves, the provincial president of Pernambuco created the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Immigração e Colonização para a Provincia de Pernambuco. The society raised money to subsidize immigration, and the first contract was signed in 1875. One hundred sixteen immigrants came to Pernambuco, but they soon left after complaining of poor working conditions, lack of food, and dislike of agricultural work (Eisenberg 1974: 200–201). Despite fears that emancipation would be ruinous, however, it was relatively painless for the planters because they were able to turn to a ready source of cheap labor: the smallholders, sharecroppers, and free peasants living on the peripheries of the plantation (Eisenberg 1974; Galloway 1968). Because they were technically living on the plantation’s land, subsistence farmers living on the edges of plantations—referred to as moradores (residents)—were already tied into the ‘‘big house’’ through a series of nonmarket obligations and rights, which the owners manipulated in order to engage the moradores directly in sugarcane production (Eisenberg 1974; Lima and Silva 1995; Reis 1990; Sigaud 1979; Wanderley 1978). Ex-slaves also remained in the sugarcane region—indeed, this region had the highest proportion of slaves to free workers at the time of emancipation, although free workers did outnumber slaves everywhere in the zona da mata (see Andrade 1980). From the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, the moradores were incorporated into the plantation economy, where their relationship with the patrão (boss) was mediated by an informal system of rights and obligations. Sugarcane production remained at relatively low levels during this period,

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 119

10. A plantation community in Água Preta, Pernambuco, August 1999. Photo by author.

encouraging peasants with small and medium plots of land to plant subsistence crops whenever possible. Mill owners leased land to the peasantry, particularly in the municipalities of Bonito, Vitoria de Santo Antão, and Amaraji in Pernambuco (these would become the areas of the first Peasant Leagues in the 1950s). The moradores would be housed on the plantation—generally in row houses, which were laid out in a linear fashion and shared their walls with the neighboring houses—in exchange for working regularly in the cane fields. The wage conditions offered to the workers differed from plantation to plantation, although they generally centered on an established measure of production. Until the mid-1950s, the plantation owners were relatively generous in providing their workers with access to land around their living areas. Privileged workers were given sitios (small farms) away from the rest of the plantation community.∞∞ Production techniques that relied on unskilled manual labor and teams of oxen were able to survive well into the 1900s, as the sugar industry’s reliance on state protection diverted capital into paternalistic, resourceseeking activities, rather than forcing planters to improve production techniques (Lima and Silva 1995: 188). In the 1930s, the government created an ambitious program to promote the sugar industry as a whole,

120 Chapter Four

11. Row houses for sugarcane workers on the plantation, October 1999. Photo by author.

with a particular emphasis on protecting the northeastern producers from the increasingly competitive southern states. The Institute for Alcohol and Sugar (Instituto do Álcool e Açúcar, or iaa), created in 1933, maintained high production levels in the Northeast through a complicated set of production quotas and differential prices (Lima and Silva 1995: 183). In spite of the priority given to producers in the Northeast, the state of São Paulo was producing ten times more sugar per hectare than the state of Pernambuco by the 1950s (Maybury-Lewis 1994: 65). The iaa centralized inefficient plantations, putting many of them under the control of industrial distilleries (the usinas) that processed the cane on-site, and introduced a higher level of technology into the production process. The Bezerra de Melo group became the largest sugar producer in the Northeast: they organized technicians to run the distilleries, such as Rio Una in Barreiros, Santo André, Central Barreiros, and others. The industry as a whole experienced a concerted increase in production: between 1960 and 1980, the amount of land in Brazil planted in sugarcane doubled, rising from 1.3 million to 2.6 million hectares. In the state of Pernambuco, the heart of the Northeast sugarcane region, the amount of land planted in sugarcane increased from 214,000 hectares in 1960 to

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 121 345,000 hectares in 1980. Plantation owners who had left their land idle during the industry-wide slump prior to the 1950s returned, and planted sugarcane where small-scale farmers had taken up residence (Martins 1981: 77–79). At the same time, new production techniques were adopted that decreased the planters’ reliance on manual labor; this gave rise to a rapid ‘‘purification’’ of what had been relatively ‘‘disguised wage relations’’ (Goodman, Sorj, et al. 1984: 204; see also Martins 1981). Between 1950 and 1960, the mill owners cut their permanent labor force in half and centralized production (Maybury-Lewis 1994: 65). Moradores were encouraged—more or less directly, depending on the circumstances—to leave the plantation for a rua (the town). Planters relied heavily on workforce segmentation to convince moradores to leave the plantation: for example, moradores who were accustomed to doing one job were often ordered to do another with which they were unfamiliar, and when faced by the prospect of doing a new job poorly, the moradores often found it in their best interest to leave the plantation (Sigaud 1979). As one former cane worker in Água Preta said during an interview: ‘‘I stayed there for four years without leaving. I worked with the tractor there. And . . . something happened—the tractor broke down—and the man said ‘If you want, you can go cut cane,’ and so I said, ‘If it’s to cut cane, I will do it somewhere else, but not here in your mill.’’ Each person’s capacity to resist or challenge the pressure to leave depended on his or her outside family connections and opportunities for work in the towns; many moradores were unable to stay on the land, and the level of urbanization increased steadily between 1950 and 1980 (see table 9).∞≤ However, many moradores resisted these changing labor arrangements. In 1955, workers of the Galileia Distillery founded an association called Sociedade Agrícola e Pecuaria dos Plantadores de Pernambuco (the Agricultural and Livestock Society of Planters in Pernambuco), which soon came to be known as the Ligas Camponesas (Peasant Leagues). The Galileia workers—led by Francisco Julião, a plantation-born lawyer—formed their society as a means of organizing resistance to their employer’s decision to break with the tradition of providing coffins for workers’ burials (Pereira 1997). The peasant leagues grew rapidly, with a membership base made up primarily of small-scale farmers who had been forced out of the mills by returning plantation owners in the 1950s.

122 Chapter Four Table 9. Urban Population as a Percentage of Total Population, Pernambuco, 1950–1980 Region

1950

1960

1970

1980

Sugarcane Region, Pernambuco Água Preta*

24.70 12.57

32.70 17.51

42.13 28.09

52.63 35.20

* Field research site Source: Figures cited in Andrade 1988: 593.

According to their leader, Francisco Julião, the Peasant Leagues were a response to the changing nature of production in the sugarcane industry. To Julião, the decline of agrarian society in the Northeast could be attributed to the introduction of the modern factories (usinas) and their industrial equipment: as planters became suppliers, sugarcane was planted everywhere, and the natural environment was progressively destroyed. The Atlantic forest, for which the region was famous, was cut down, leading to soil erosion and falling groundwater levels. It was this transition to sugarcane factories, Julião argued, that made staying on the land more difficult for peasant workers: the desire for land forced desperate plantation owners to eject their former tenants and forsake traditional agreements. Although the decision to call the workers’ associations ‘‘Peasant Leagues’’ did not come from Julião, he argued that ‘‘each of us has a peasant within us’’ (1972: 49). Julião maintained that the peasant was a product of the physical geography of the Northeast: ‘‘The peasant is shaped by his environment, by his backwardness, by the kind of work he must do, by his contact generation after generation with the earth and by the traditions of life’’ (1972: 53). Because Julião believed that peasants were generally afraid to contravene the law, he situated the struggle for land within the legal system of rights, and argued that it was the plantation owners who were acting illegally, not the workers (Forman 1970: 186). He argued that peasant consciousness could be easily understood: peasants were individualistic, isolated, insecure, and impulsive—while all they wanted was land and liberty, they would not act on these desires because of the influence of the church, rum, and capangas (hired thugs) (Julião 1972: 53). Julião worked with the Peasant Leagues and emphasized two modest demands—rent increases, and the end of cambão (corvee labor, or free workdays on the owner’s plantation land)—because he felt the workers ‘‘had to walk before they ran.’’

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 123 Rural organization among plantation workers violated regional norms that had maintained an inequitable system of rights for more than four hundred years, and the pervasive presence of the Communist Party contributed to the impression that revolution was imminent.∞≥ Recife, Pernambuco, was led by a socialist mayor, Miguel Arrães, who came to be known as a friend of the rural poor because of his support for rural workers’ rights. In 1963, Arrães oversaw the implementation of the Rural Worker Statute (the Estatuto de Trabalhador Rural) (etr), which extended the same rights to rural workers as had been won by urban workers in the 1930s. Under the 1963 labor statute, rural workers were entitled to receive holiday pay, bonuses, medical care, sick leave, and the right to organize (Maybury-Lewis 1994; Pereira 1997; Taylor 1978). Despite these improvements, social unrest continued to grow. A brief outline of the government’s attempts to carry out modest land reforms in response to the unrest sheds light on the contemporary moment in which the mst is organizing settlements. In 1962, President Goulart had created a Superintendency of Agrarian Reform (Superintendência de Reforma Agrária) (Supra) and a Superintendency of Development for the Northeast (Superintendência de Desenvolvimento do Nordeste) (Sudene) to deal specifically with unrest in the Northeast (Andrade 1980: 87–88). The first president of Sudene was Celso Furtado, a well-known economist from the northeastern state of Paraiba (Taylor 1978: 9). Before the new agencies could implement significant changes, however, escalating rural unrest provoked international concerns that a revolution was under way. Funding for regional development to the Northeast from the U.S. Agency for International Development increased from 250,000 U.S. dollars per year before 1960, to 65 million dollars per year after 1962, largely because of widespread fears of communism (Taylor 1978: 137). As the Brazilian geographer Josue de Castro put it, ‘‘The international community discovered the Northeast of Brazil twice: once in 1500 and again in the 1960s’’ (de Castro 1966: 19). President Kennedy emphasized the U.S. focus on the region when he said that ‘‘no area is in greater or more urgent need of attention than Brazil’s vast Northeast’’ (quoted in Pereira 1999: 8). This unrest in the countryside—both imagined and real—was partly responsible for the decision of the Brazilian military to take control of the federal government on April 1, 1964. After the coup, some areas in the northeastern sugarcane region were expropriated through Sudene. In order to increase regional well-being, the

124 Chapter Four agency was to promote migration out of the Northeast, to restructure agroindustry in order to increase productivity, and to grant lands to small farmers, who could then produce food. Furtado elaborated a technically proficient plan that would have implemented new irrigation systems on planters’ land in exchange for a portion of their property (equivalent in value to the irrigation equipment). This land would then be redistributed to small farmers, who would receive technical assistance for planting. The landowners had until 1973 to deliver the estimates of what land could be expropriated for the project; of 130,000 hectares available for expropriation, the landlords actually turned over 77,000. Plantation owners were resistant to this plan because they were not interested in vertical integration, and they did not want to see regional development create competition for wage labor (Andrade 1980). In Pernambuco, the military years allowed workers to focus on workers’ rights (direitos) won under the new legislation of 1963, including union organization, certification of labor, holiday pay, yearly bonuses, and clear wage-production relationships. Rural unions were fairly cohesive, in part because there was no need to fight for territory: under the principle of unicidade, only one union per category of rural worker was allowed to form in any given territory. Rural unions from Pernambuco (affiliated under the Federação de Trabalhadores de Agricultura de Pernambuco, Fetape, the Federation of Agricultural Workers in Pernambuco) were known for their dynastic strength in the national agricultural confederation, Confederação de Trabalhadores de Agricultura, or Contag: José Francisco da Silva, from the Pernambuco sugarcane region, was the president of Contag from 1968 to 1989, and directly coordinated a series of major rural worker strikes in 1979–1980. In 1966—as social unrest continued—the Special Group for the Rationalization of the Sugarcane Agroindustry in the Northeast (Grupo Especial para Racionalização da Agroindústria Canavieira da Nordeste, or geran) was created (Decree 59.033-A), with the intent of rationalizing sugarcane production and freeing up land for small farmers. Its executive council included representatives from the Institute for Alcohol and Sugar (the iaa), the Brazilian Institute for Agrarian Reform (Instituto Brasileiro de Reforma Agrária, or ibra), the National Institute for the Development of Agriculture (Instituto Nacional de Desenvolvimento Agrário, or inda), and the Bank of Brazil. geran had three objectives: the first was to modernize and diversify agricultural activities in the sug-

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 125 arcane region; the second was to modernize and diversify the industrial activities that depended on sugarcane production (in order to relieve bottlenecks); and the third was to restructure the use of labor and terras liberadas (liberated lands) through a ‘‘process of rationalization.’’∞∂ The project was funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (usaid); however, it was terminated in 1972 without any land having been acquired. As the military resettled poor farmers in colonization programs, the large-scale sugarcane producers in the Northeast received increased government assistance under the military’s agricultural modernization program. In 1974, a significant drop in sugarcane prices—coinciding with high oil prices—prompted a search for alternative markets for raw cane. In 1975, the government created the National Fuel Alcohol Program (Programa Nacional de Álcool, or Proalcool) to provide incentives and resources for processing sugarcane into ethanol. The ethanol was intended primarily to be used as automotive fuel, as a means of reducing the country’s reliance on oil imports. Between 1975 and 1989, the Brazilian government invested approximately 11 to 12 billion U.S. dollars in Proalcool (Walter, Dolzan, and Piacente 2006: 4), and ethanol production soared (see table 10). The subsidy was crucial in enabling the relatively inefficient producers of the Northeast to remain in business (Maybury-Lewis 1994: 35).∞∑ The increase in—and technological modernization of—sugarcane production led to an increasing concentration of land ownership throughout the sugarcane region of Pernambuco between 1964 and 1980. Labor conditions also worsened: even as legalization of rural unions allowed organizing for rights to continue among certified workers, tighter labor regulations encouraged many plantations to begin using clandestinos, workers who possessed no legal working papers and were clandestinely contracted by the season to work on the plantations.

The Crisis of the 1980s In the late 1980s, the sugarcane industry of the Northeast was again hit by economic crisis. The agroindustry emerged from the modernization boom of the 1960s and 1970s heavily indebted and facing a rapidly shrinking market for both sugarcane and ethanol—due, in part, to the

126 Chapter Four Table 10. Fuel Alcohol Production in Brazil, 1975–1982 Year

Production in 1000 Liters

1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982

580,130 642,155 1,387,855 2,359,075 n.a. 3,676,134 4,109,398 5,621,147

Source: Figures cited in Andrade 1988: 671.

increasing role that developed countries played in the global sugar market. Between 1975 and 1985, the developed countries increased their sugar exports from 20 to 43 percent of the world’s total (De Souza, d’Irmão, and Araujo 1997: 2). At the same time, the production of popular artificial sweeteners weakened demand for refined sugar. The crisis was further exacerbated by the loss of the industry’s main source of support: government funds. In the 1990s, the new civilian government deregulated the military’s sugarcane support program, and revised regional legislation that had previously protected the northeastern producers (Buarque 1997: 3). By 1995, 44 percent of the sugarcane refining distilleries in Pernambuco were classified as ‘‘paralyzed or functioning with difficulty’’ (Lins et al. 1996: 2). In response to the crisis, the state government of Pernambuco again pointed to agrarian reform as one of the region’s most viable alternatives. As a 1998 government report pointed out, ‘‘The crisis of the sugarcane industry in the northeastern tropical forest region is a crisis of the [productive] model. The crisis provides a unique opportunity to carry out sweeping structural changes that will eliminate the concentration of landholdings and mono-cultural production, in order to benefit the economic development of the region with equality and social justice’’ (Ministerio Extraordinário da Política Fundiária 1998: 1). The crisis of sugarcane prices coincided with the growing strength of the mst, and with a general, nationwide determination to carry out agrarian reform. More land was distributed between 1995 and 2001 than had been distributed in all previous administrations combined—in the Northeast as well as in the rest of the country. Although grassroots social

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 127 movements are typically responsible for bringing unproductive plantations to the government’s attention (primarily through unsolicited land occupations), the state prioritizes the rights of the workers already residing on the plantation.∞∏ Once the government has evaluated the plantation and deemed it suitable for expropriation, everyone associated with the plantation who wants land receives approximately ten hectares. Although the population associated with the plantation includes a wide range of social classes (e.g., the bosses, administrative heads, team leaders, and workers), most of the people accept the land, because few economic alternatives exist in the region. Once the government has accommodated the existing residents, it distributes land to as many members of the occupying social movement as the area will hold. All settlers are provided with credit and technical assistance, according to agreements established at the federal level. Although the credit generally arrives after the appropriate planting season is over (which was the cause of the march in Água Preta described in chapter 1), and the technical advisors can rarely assist all the settlers in their area, the majority of settlers manage to successfully produce basic good on their land (Moreira, Moreira, and Menezes 2003).∞π The settlements have not sated the demand for land, however. In 2003, throughout the state of Pernambuco, there were over 18,884 families living in 143 temporary encampments.∞∫

New Leaders, New Ideas: The Spectacular Rise of Jaime Amorim The real history of mst organization in Pernambuco begins in 1989 when a group of activists went to the state from Paraiba, Bahia, and Espírito Santo. The mst was interested in working in Pernambuco because the state had a long history of rural resistance. The activists were all people who are now ‘‘famous’’ within the movement—including Jaime Amorim, an activist from Guara-Mirim, Santa Catarina. An activist who still works for the movement described how Jaime went from door to door in the early days of the movement: ‘‘He talked about how we could free ourselves a little from the situation we were living in . . . and how it was that we could change. He said that the only way of changing things was to occupy land. He convinced me and four hundred other families from all around the town and the neighboring towns and we went to find land.’’

128 Chapter Four In the 1990s, Jaime’s presence in Pernambuco grew to the point where he was the most visible and powerful mst leader in the state. The son of small farmers from a town he called ‘‘Guamiri,’’ on the northern coast of Santa Catarina, Jaime had worked in agriculture all his life. At a young age, he got involved in politics. He joined the Catholic Youth Pastoral (Pastoral da Juventude) in 1978 and soon afterwards he began participating in the local ecclesiastical base community. This was at a time when the Catholic Church was the main site of opposition to the military dictatorship. Jaime was also interested in the opposition unions that were beginning to form in his region, and in 1981 he joined the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or pt). In 1983 and 1984, Jaime coordinated the Youth Action Group in his municipality, and from 1985 to 1987 he worked in the Pastoral da Terra (Land Pastoral) in the diocese of Joinville, Santa Catarina. From there, Jaime attended the mst’s first national congress in Curitiba, as a representative of the Land Pastoral. When he returned to Guamiri, the small farmers and political activists were already discussing the movement’s ideas. In 1986, the mst invited Jaime to help begin building the movement in the Northeast. He agreed, and after finishing out the harvest season in May of 1987 he left for Bahia. On September 7, 1987, he led the first occupation in the Northeast, and he traveled that same year to several other states, including Bahia, Maranhão, Piauí, Sergipe, Alagoas, Paraiba, and Rio Grande do Norte. Pernambuco was the second-to-last northeastern state in which the movement started organizing, and according to Jaime it was the most difficult state for the movement to organize in: ‘‘In the Northeast in general, the organizations that worked with the people— the unions and the political parties—were all killed [farcelada] by the military government, and especially here in Pernambuco. The Peasant Leagues were totally destroyed, eliminated; nothing lasted, politically and organically—nothing but the fear of the people. But the union itself survived because the federal government imposed this structure as a way to oppose the Peasant Leagues, and so the trade unions survived the military years.’’ Jaime saw the presence of the unions as both a good thing— because they represented potential opposition to the government—and as an obstacle to movement organizing: ‘‘Here in Pernambuco, these organizations like Fetape have always been very strong, and managed to carry out strong battles, like the cane workers’ strikes of ’78 and ’79. These were very important, and also the Pastoral Land Commission was strong here

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 129 as it was in Petrolina. So there were strong forces active here, and they worked to impede the organization of the movement.’’ When Jaime arrived in Pernambuco, Miguel Arrães was in office, and the mst thought that this left-wing leader from the premilitary days would be sympathetic to the goals of the movement: ‘‘We evaluated the political environment in the state, and we thought that Miguel Arrães, who was governor from 1985 to ’90, would support us if we occupied land. Even if his support wasn’t public, we thought that he would at least recognize that it was important for the struggle to go forward. A number of mst activists came to Pernambuco from other northeastern states, including Paraíba, Sergipe, Alagoas, Bahia, and Espírito Santo. We held the first occupation right here in 1989, in the sugarcane region, in the municipality of Cabo. The occupation was on public lands, a former industrial park called suape that covered approximately 20,000 hectares.’’ But the mst must have misinterpreted Arrães’s political orientation, because he reacted decisively against the squatters: ‘‘We were expelled with more force than has ever been used in this state—cavalry, helicopters, dogs— everything you can imagine.’’ The mst squatters went to the square in front of the governor’s mansion, and Arrães gave them until midnight to leave or be forcibly evicted. Jaime said that Arrães’s reaction taught the movement that it had to do more grassroots work before it could begin organizing large-scale occupations in Pernambuco. ‘‘We had been trying to talk to the government, but they had just told us that there was already an organization that worked with rural workers, and that was the rural union Fetape. Any other force that was here would be divisive, and Arrães was against division. He thought that Fetape was strong. So he was against the mst —and he was also against agrarian reform. Arrães had a vision of agrarian reform that would provide land for the workers in the interharvest period.’’ In fact, the interharvest vision of agrarian reform was a well-accepted one in the sugarcane region: the rural unions had fought for the legalization and then implementation of the Lei do Sitio (Small Farm Law 1965), which was intended to provide all registered plantation workers with two hectares of land on which to plant subsistence crops. The law was never effectively enforced, and the plantation owners distributed land as they saw fit; however, many rural union leaders believed that this was the ideal way to implement agrarian reform while maintaining the workers’ productivity as sugarcane harvesters. During an interview conducted with the

130 Chapter Four author in Berkeley, California, on February 25, 2000, Raul Jungmann—the minister of agrarian reform, and a former member of one of Brazil’s two main communist parties (the pcdob)—also suggested that Arrães did not support mst’s actions because he was committed to this alternative strategy: ‘‘Arrães and the communists had a vision that you should promote wage labor, because . . . capitalism had already entered the countryside, so what was needed was to take those social rights that had already been won in the city to the countryside. . . . For this reason, Arrães was very much against [agrarian reform]: he thought it was going backward.’’ When the mst squatters were expelled from their occupation site in 1989, they did not know where to turn. They had little support other than the state’s offer of assistance through a social program called Chapéu de Palha (Straw Hat), which would have provided them with food baskets and some money. However, the squatters refused the state’s charity, and continued to pressure incra to find land (Fernandes 1999: 110). As Jaime said: ‘‘Only in July did we receive an offer from incra to settle the people camped out by the side of the road in the arid backlands—on land in the municipality of Cabrobó, land that was embroiled in the Manioc Scandal [1984], where large farmers had received money to plant manioc and didn’t. So, we went there, without really knowing where we were going. One hundred twenty families went from the sugarcane region; the other families left after living on the side of the street for three months.’’ The government transported all the families to the interior of Pernambuco. ‘‘It was a totally different thing in the sertão [arid backlands] versus the sugarcane region. The government left us some sixty kilometers inside the brush forest [caatinga], without streets or water—just one well, and the mafia was using it to plant marijuana. Many families left. And it became a political issue for us to go back to the sugarcane region, because we always felt that agrarian reform was the only way out for the sugarcane region.’’ In 1991, two years after the suape incident, the movement held its next occupation. It was no more successful than the first, as Jaime reports: ‘‘We were kicked out two hours after.’’ But then on March 19, 1992, the movement had its first big victory in the Northeast. ‘‘This was when I came here definitively. After this, we started to consolidate our forces here in the sugarcane region. The year 1992–1993 was very important for us. This is also when we began to diversify the struggle here in the state and expand to other areas.’’ In 2003, Jaime was living in the semi-arid region (the agreste) of Per-

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 131 nambuco, but he oversaw the movement’s activities in all three regions (the sugarcane region, the agreste, and the arid zone or sertão). Working across these regions was a challenge. Jaime argued that the agreste and the sertão were somewhat alike, but that in the sugarcane region there was ‘‘a very strong cultural, economic, social degradation—and also physical. Imagine the slaves who came here from Africa. They were a strong people—they say that the average height was very tall—and now 60 percent of the people here are unnaturally short. All the values of the people have been destroyed. And so this has consequences when you struggle for land, because we try and deal with these other questions. We try to reintegrate people not just economically but also with dignity, and citizenship.’’ The concerns about sugarcane production persisted, but Jaime emphasized the movement’s success in organizing occupations and winning land for its members. The movement’s success created an exponential increase in land occupations: in 1993 Fetape created a secretariat for agrarian reform, and soon began conducting their own occupations (or lending their support to people who had occupied or claimed unproductive plantations). The unions, according to Jaime, had understood agrarian reform in the same way as Miguel Arrães: ‘‘Why were they against agrarian reform? They thought that the rural workers would not want land, but they would only want jobs. So Fetape would carry out strikes and struggle for wages, and who ended up getting the money? The distillery owners who won subsidies from the government to create jobs. And, in reality, they never created the jobs; [it] just kept getting worse and worse. The situation is totally bankrupt.’’ The mst’s vision of agrarian reform—in contrast to that of the rural unions—was based on the weakening of the sugarcane economy: ‘‘We first had to convince incra that we could expropriate land here. We had to convince them in practice that rural workers in this region could produce something other than sugarcane. The minister of agrarian reform brought us this idea of agrarian reform as a way of creating small-scale suppliers of sugarcane, and we didn’t accept this idea. We are going to show them that the rural workers—slowly, with organization and technical assistance— will overcome this [history]. And because of the diverse topography here you really have to do a number of activities—cattle, fish, fruit, coffee. And so we have this idea of implementing diverse experiences.’’ In this work, Jaime was confronting a hegemonic narrative that sugarcane was the crop best suited to the particular climate, topography, and

132 Chapter Four soil conditions of the region. Although this narrative was not entirely accurate—the soils in the region are some of the richest in the world and the humid tropical climate favors a wide variety of fruits and vegetables (see Andrade and Andrade 2001: 48–54; and Moreira, Moreira, and Menezes 2003)—extreme social inequality worked to naturalize sugarcane’s dominance in the region. Plantation elites have consistently worked to discourage the production of alternate crops, and attempts to create or sustain an independent peasantry have foundered. In 1973, Manuel Correia de Andrade argued that although there was sufficient physical space for small farmers, there was very little political space because plantation elites were afraid of the possibility that ‘‘a small middle class of farmers whose standard of living would soon contrast with the rural wage earners, demonstrating to them the need to fight for better living and working conditions’’ (Andrade 1980: 194). This narrative was never a coherent one nor was it uncontested: rural workers have planted food crops on the plantation openly and in secret. It wasn’t easy to convince the settlers to leave the plantations and join the movement. As Jaime said, ‘‘The plantation structure has maintained itself, and this means that the people here still think like this—this is a rich region, one of the richest in the country, but unfortunately, the tradition is just to plant sugarcane. But today we are beginning to overcome some of the difficulties.’’ Jaime argued that rural sugarcane workers were very resistant to the movement’s ideas, and that they required more education (conscientização) than the settlers in southern Brazil, or even in other regions of Pernambuco: ‘‘There is initially more cooperation in the interior of Pernambuco than in the sugarcane region. Almost all of the settlements in the interior are working—at least in part—collectively. Maybe they have one or two hectares individually, but the majority of the land is worked collectively. Most of the families in the São Francisco River valley region work in a production collective, or a regional cooperative, more because of necessity than political awareness. In the sugarcane region, there is also a need for cooperation, but not a visible one—we see it, the people who come here to study the issue, they see it, but the rural worker does not. The rural worker in the sugarcane region still thinks that by himself he can plant some manioc or beans, and he thinks he can get by selling it at the weekly market. He will only begin to realize the problem when he returns from the market without selling anything.’’ Jaime attributed this unwillingness to cooperate to the local culture:

The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 133 ‘‘It’s the culture of the region. The people are individualistic, they don’t trust other people, so there’s a strong resistance to working collectively. Here, there is no regional attachment. The people don’t think about themselves as belonging to a settlement, let alone a region. There is no unity within the settlement.’’ The local culture, in turn, Jaime situated within the family, or what he called ‘‘the principal cell of society.’’ Norms of family membership were more powerful, he argued, than class or labor relationships forged on the plantation. Family ties were, for Jaime, one of the key differences between the North and the South, and movement leaders were expected to talk about ‘‘family’’ in their meetings with the settlers so that the northeastern workers could learn from mst families in the South. ‘‘The family doesn’t exist there, we have to reconstruct it. There are very few families there. Most of the kids marry when they’re thirteen, fourteen years old. There are girls who are seventeen years old who already have five or six kids, and are tying their tubes so they won’t have any more. We have activists here who are eighteen years old, who have already been through three or four experiences of marriage. And so this is a region that was completely degraded—it’s a big challenge. The plantation owners, besides having their wives, they’re also having sex with the young girls. And this isn’t from the past century, it’s happening now. It’s a situation of domination that we have to deal with. In the South, there is a family tradition, families get together for Christmas, Easter, etc. But it’s not that way in the sugarcane region. . . . And this has direct repercussion in the settlement. Because a woman on the settlement will be living with the next-door neighbor, and the husband who feels betrayed sits around drinking rum—or becomes a Protestant, and the action of the evangelical church is very strong and makes people accept their fate. Whenever we put up an agrovila, we have a party because this is already a big step forward. You would think that people would want to live together because they were already used to it on the mill, but the tendency is to isolate because of the anger they have. You can see it, they are so angry at the plantation owner and they just want to be isolated, as far away as possible.’’ Jaime used this experience of anger—and the hierarchical nature of sugarcane plantation society—to explain the different style of political leadership in the sugarcane region vis-à-vis the South of Brazil: ‘‘You will see that every president of a settlement association or union leader acts just like the owner of the plantation or the former renter. We call it presidencialismo. The president of the association starts to mandar

134 Chapter Four [order others around]. And the people have this sort of president as their reference, and not a director of the association.’’ Despite these regional differences, Jaime argued that the movement was able to establish a membership in Pernambuco because movement leaders based the struggle around a universal good: land. Jaime believed that working on the land would transform the rural workers: ‘‘It is production that will unite the family [in the Northeast]. Because the woman will have different roles in a small farming family, and so agrarian reform has the possibility of recovering this idea of the family. We are also almost unified on this question of education—there is only one form.’’ The ‘‘recuperation’’ of the family was to be central to the development of cooperation and production collectives: ‘‘I believe that they will also perceive the value of cooperation. We have realized that through cooperation we could develop the various regions. The form of cooperation could be a bit different, but we came together around the idea of some kind of cooperation —associations, collectives, regional cooperatives. For the first time, the rural workers are using the word safra [harvest] and finding out what custeio [investment] means.’’ In Jaime’s analysis, one can hear the tensions between the political culture developed within the mst and the localized norms of the sugarcane region. On the one hand, successfully organizing rural workers in the region helped to establish the mst as a national movement; the articulation of demands from small farmers in the South to rural workers in the Northeast demonstrated the importance of the struggle for land and generated political possibilities for expropriation and distribution. On the other hand, the mst came in to the sugarcane region with a political culture developed among the small farmers in southern Brazil—what I have called an agrarian populism—and the movement’s analysis of family and ‘‘plantation culture’’ in the Northeast all turn on a negative comparison with the South. This was evident in Jaime’s closing suggestion that regional differences could be overturned by mobilizing the ‘‘universal desire’’ for production and the land.

5 Moral Economies of Sugarcane and Social Mobilization The settlements in the sugarcane region of the Northeast have grown out of a very different history from those in Santa Catarina. My work has focused on one of these settlements, that of Flora, in the state of Pernambuco. Of the forty-seven settlers living on the Flora settlement, only thirteen had participated in an mst occupation. Fernando, a settler in Flora, was living in Água Preta when the mst activists began to organize for the occupation of a large mill in 1993. He heard about the mst from a militant who was ‘‘knocking on doors’’ in town. Along with 1,250 other families, Fernando decided to occupy the mill, building a temporary encampment inside the plantation.∞ Another mst member said that so many people went, that ‘‘it was women and children everywhere, it made you happy just to see them [fazia gosto].’’ After three days in the encampment, the police showed up (people remembered it as a thousand police), and the atmosphere grew very tense. As the squatters and the police were facing off, a car arrived and Jaime Amorim got out. Jaime was greatly admired by the families there, even the ones who didn’t know him personally. Jaime managed to convince the families to be calm. The settlers who were there remembered walking slowly out of the plantation instead of resisting, undermining the police’s expectations of violence. At that point, some of the families gave up, and went back to their homes or their families. The rest bided their time at Flor Nascente (Blossoming Flower), a nearby mill that had been turned into a settlement by state law several years earlier. After several months, the families left again for a mill named Flora, whose land bordered the edge of Água Preta’s town center. As was the case with many mills in Pernambuco, Flora was owned by a distillery, but had been rented out for at least twenty years to different planters. The planter at the time, Ivanir, rented approximately 450 hectares of land in Flora and planted sugarcane. He employed twelve permanent workers on the plantation, most of whom lived on the plantation in

136 Chapter Five small mud houses. The higher-skilled workers were allowed to live in plaster houses that sat side by side, on a tiny dirt path running alongside the casa grande (big house), where Ivanir lived. When necessary, Ivanir brought in temporary labor from the neighboring town. Although Ivanir was not planting on the land when the mst occupied the plantation, he strongly resisted their efforts to see the area expropriated. Five days after the mst families occupied Flora—putting up temporary tents in a wooded area inside the plantation—Ivanir arrived with the police, and the families were forced off the land. They moved to the side of the street that ran parallel to both the center of town and the plantation. Then, twenty-four hours later, they occupied the plantation again and set up their tents. Ivanir again threatened to kick the families out, so a committee of squatters and the mst leaders went to the main incra office in Recife. incra officials agreed to visit the mill and conduct an evaluation of the land. The agency determined that the land belonged to a distillery that was heavily in debt. Plantation residents also argued that Ivanir himself had stopped planting cane and paying wages earlier that year. incra delivered an eviction notice to Ivanir, but the occupying families were kicked out again and only allowed back on the land when negotiations with Ivanir and the remaining plantation residents had been completed. In all, most of the families camped out for more than four years. They managed to feed themselves with potatoes and corn that they planted near their temporary tents. They also received one delivery of food from the government that lasted them roughly two months. The people who were living in the mill when the mst members arrived told very different stories about the occupation and expropriation. According to the residents, incra officials had come by the mill in 1973 during the earlier state-led attempt at agrarian reform. At that time, incra was considering expropriating the mill because of the distillery owner’s debts. Nothing ever came of the incra inquiries, however, and when the mst squatters arrived, the residents were skeptical that this time would be any different. The residents had little idea of what the mst was, or that the squatters camped out on the plantation were even part of the movement. Indeed, there was general disagreement about whether the mst was even responsible for forcing the expropriation of the mill, though most residents argued that the movement’s occupation had at least served to expedite the process. After the land was expropriated, anyone who was associated with the

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 137

12. A small farm (sitio) in the sugarcane plantation, October 1999. Photo by author.

plantation at the time of the expropriation was eligible for land. Only people who owned or rented property elsewhere were excluded. This regulation created a somewhat unusual situation on the settlement: former bosses, team leaders, and common workers all accepted land and lived on the plantation as land reform settlers. In Flora, only one resident worker on the plantation did not accept the offer of land. And the plantation boss, Ivanir, was not offered land because he was renting land on other mills in the region, but his wife and son each received nine hectares. Ivanir’s family also won the right to stay in the casa grande that looked down onto the main residential area of the settlement.≤ The land in Flora is good, rich land—although an official assessment has never been conducted, and the settlers argue over who has the better land. Twenty percent of the total settlement property was reserved for reforestation, and the settlers were told to protect their reserve against the townspeople, who would enter at night to find wood. The process of dividing the land into individual plots was very slow, as it often is. One of the settlers eventually took over the process, insisting that the incra agents were not familiar enough with the land. Although the plots differ considerably, most of the settlers have some combination of steep slope, valley, and elevated flat land. During the dry season, the valleys are the

138 Chapter Five

13. mst settler in front of his house in Água Preta, Pernambuco, July 1999. Photo by author.

only areas suitable for planting. The moist soil in the valleys is better able to support crops than the hillsides or raised plateaus. In 1999, the majority of the settlers planted manioc, corn, beans, and bananas. Some continued to plant sugarcane on their land, although the mst tried to discourage settlers from planting the crop; the price for raw cane was extremely unreliable, and the mst hoped to break the settlers’ ties to an exploitative past.≥ Bananas were planted on most plots, because the government targeted its production loans toward both banana and coconut production.∂ The layout of Flora is similar in some ways to that of Vento in Campos Novos. At the entrance of the settlement is a small concentration of houses (the agrovila), just off of the main road across from the center of Água Preta. The agrovila sits on five hectares of land, adjacent to forty-one hectares of communal space where some of the settlers hoped to begin a collective garden or fish pond. Many of the families decided to build their new houses in the central agrovila, because they were unaccustomed to living alone or far from their neighbors. The agrovila also provided amenities such as access to basic infrastructure and proximity to the town center. Many of the houses still lacked water and electricity in 1999, however, and some of the families continued to wash their clothes in the

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 139 small pool of water at the settlement’s entrance. The families that chose to build on their land lived along two main roads that ran through the interior of the plantation. The two roads were relatively reliable in the summer, but in the wet winter they were impassable. Many of the settlers rode horses or bicycles to school and to the market.

The Articulation of Family, Work, and Community: Água Preta There are two groups of families on Flora. One group consists of those families who won land as a result of participating in an mst occupation. The other consists of those families who received land as a result of having worked on the plantation and having been unemployed but living in the area at the time of the expropriation. Following the occupation of Flora, the latter group of settlers slowly learned more about the mst. Six years later, the majority of those families had joined the movement. In this chapter, I elaborate on the reasons why people in the region joined the movement (see table 11). In brief, the first group of families was pushed into the mst because they had tried everything else and had no other option. They were closely tied to the sugarcane industry, and were the most severely affected by the latest economic crisis. They had limited family or community networks on which they could rely—mostly as a result of their unstable and tenuous position within the plantation hierarchy. The second group, on the other hand, was pulled into the mst by the movement’s promise of access to resources, and by their desire for a political voice. In relation to the mst it could be argued that rural workers in the Northeast joined the movement in protest (conscious and not) against changing social relations on the plantation—primarily due to the deepening crisis of the regional sugarcane economy. Organizing rural workers in this region was difficult because joining the mst is not something the workers necessarily want to do. The culture of work in the sugarcane region is characterized by a dependence on money, and people tend to prioritize paid employment over access to land. The settlers rely on their regular income to purchase their groceries at the weekly market (ScheperHughes 1992: 9, 148–152). They are nervous about how they will continue to pay their bills and feed themselves without a steady wage. As one

140 Chapter Five Table 11. Settlers’ Initial Contacts with the mst on Flora, Água Preta, Pernambuco Discovery of the mst

10% through neighbors 61% through the occupation of the plantation 28% through activists

Reason for Joining the mst

31% because mst took over the settlement 23% because mst won them land 31% land of one’s own 10% no other alternative 5% have not joined

Source: Fieldwork, 1998–1999.

mst leader said, ‘‘When you go to them with an idea about going after land . . . they measure the time [that they would spend in an occupation] against the time that they would spend employed. If they started a job today, in five days they would already have money in their pocket. And so if you go to them and ask if they want land or a job, they are going to say ‘a job.’ ’’ Many of the townspeople, as well as the workers residing on the plantation, actually blamed the mst for the decline of the sugarcane industry— even though the original movement members were among those most severely impacted. This perception was due to the rapidity with which the industry declined. The mst entered aggressively soon thereafter, and took credit for all expropriations that were conducted under the government’s regional rehabilitation program. The mst’s visibility and success created a backlash, because of the general preference for wage labor rather than small farming. As one townsperson in Água Preta said: ‘‘Things are only going to get more difficult because of these Sem Terra. The government takes the land to give to the people, gives them more money, and they are only going to eat with it, and plant—the few of them who [do] plant! . . . How many mills around here weren’t taken to give [land] to these people? Wherever I used to go, the land was covered in sugarcane. When the distillery began to process the cane, it was all of that hubbub, everything was sugarcane, it was well organized, and everyone was working. . . . Think about how many people used to work here—650 people! And today no one is working. The land is all full of trees now, they gave it all to those settlers and today no one is planting.’’

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 141 Sigaud (1983) argues that the massive expulsions of workers from the plantations in the 1950s and 1960s created a hierarchical distinction among the labor force, separating those who had access to land in the plantation from those who did not. Plantation owners provided land to workers at their discretion, and access to land was usually an indication of preference. According to Sigaud, the visible distinction between ‘‘landed’’ and ‘‘landless’’ created a belief that access to land provided a certain stability. Those who had land felt that their jobs were more secure: ‘‘If you have a piece of land, the boss has to come knock on your door to call you to work, but if you don’t have land, you’re the one who has to get up and go after the boss to ask him for work’’ (worker, quoted in Sigaud 1983: 89). This reliance on land is not necessarily indicative of a preference for land per se; rather, it is indicative of a desire for job stability. Those workers who live within the plantation still express a reluctance to accept land over their salaried positions. According to an mst leader who had been working in Água Preta since the mid-1990s, ‘‘You see a rural worker on a plantation, who only gets land for the time that he is working there. . . . But if the land is expropriated and . . . you say to him, ‘Do you want to stay here?’ [that rural worker] would prefer to leave, to abandon the land and continue the life that he had before.’’ As Jaime Amorim argued, the rural sugarcane workers of the Northeast have significantly different notions of family and community than their counterparts do in the South. In the Northeast, there is no strong tradition of investment in either land or jobs for the future generations. The monopolistic production of sugarcane has created a tradition of mobility that has nothing to do with the search for land, and has actually weakened family ties across generations. Boys often began work with their fathers at the age of eight or nine. A few years later, they leave in search of their own fortune: ‘‘When we were grown up and came into our own and were going to bring up our own families, we left to go out into the world, and my father stayed there with his family.’’ Family labor on the plantations is segregated by gender: men often worked in the fields by themselves while the women took care of the home. Because of this segregation, mobility in search of work often meant that women and children would stay on one plantation, or in town, while the men found work elsewhere. And because plantation owners accepted laborers as they chose, larger extended families rarely moved around together. As a result, families on the settlements tended to be small, and there were very few extended families.

142 Chapter Five Community ties were also extremely tenuous, as the workers tended to move regularly from one plantation to another in search of the best wages or working conditions. Mobility was the most effective means of expressing discontent with a plantation. Work contracts were usually informal and open to interpretation, so exit was often the only effective resistance to working conditions that were perceived as ‘‘unfair.’’ The option to move formed part of the workers’ sense of autonomy, of freedom. I was told: ‘‘At that time, there wasn’t anything holding you in one place. . . . I would spend two or three years in one place, and when that started to get bad, I was already leaving for somewhere else.’’ At the same time, expulsion was a strategy used by the mill owners to maintain labor flexibility: ‘‘Sometimes I liked [my bosses], and I would spend two years [or] three with them, living in the mill. Sometimes we would disagree and they would order me to leave, and what were we going to do? We didn’t have land, we didn’t have anywhere to live, the house there wasn’t ours, so we would head our lives off in another direction. That is how it was in the mills.’’ The communities that did develop within the plantations were relatively hierarchical; social networks reflected the labor process. The way that sugarcane was produced on the plantation required a few skilled ‘‘employees’’ (empregados) and many unskilled ‘‘workers’’ (trabalhadores). The employees managed the estate and oversaw the work crews, while the workers cut the cane, weeded the fields, and loaded the trucks. Labor segmentation was enforced formally, by creating distinct occupations, and informally, through traditional norms attached to rights and privileges. Rights and privileges were constantly renegotiated, as the informal nature of labor contracts left the distinction between occupations open to constant reinterpretation. For example, one indication of status was the size and type of residence a worker had on the plantation: most of the common trabalhadores lived on the plantation in small, one-room houses connected by side walls, while the more important workers lived either in larger houses in the mill’s center or further out on sitios (small farms) allotted to them by the plantation owner.∑ Community ties were largely built around social and geographical proximity. Workers who were contracted seasonally—or without their working papers—occupied the most insecure, unstable positions on the plantation. In spite of the many factors discouraging rural workers from joining the mst, those who had been most severely affected by the sugarcane crisis considered the movement to be their only viable alternative. In the ten

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 143 years after the first settler in Pernambuco joined the mst, conditions in the region got harder, not easier, because of the sugarcane crisis described earlier: ‘‘Today, no matter how much you work, you have just enough [to survive]. There are people who work sixteen hours a day and don’t have enough to eat. Most of them go to sell their labor without having eaten; in the afternoon, they go to the little plantation shop and get some packages of cornmeal, flour, and fish to have something to eat that night. The next day, they are going back to work without anything to eat again.’’ The settlers who joined the mst did so because they had no alternative: ‘‘Today, sugarcane is finished . . . and so, the way we were living, if it hadn’t been for agrarian reform, we could say that we would have been dead. There were no jobs, there was no work—how were we going to live?’’ In general, the people most affected by the crisis were those who had been expelled from the interior of the plantations and were living in the cities. After being kicked off of the plantations, many of these workers were employed as clandestinos. According to Pernambuco state law, the mill owners are expected to sign working papers for every person employed on the plantation. The papers are intended to ensure that the workers receive their rights, that they are eligible for union membership, and that they have their years of service counted toward their benefits. Uncertified workers, on the other hand, do not receive any of the public or private benefits of being registered as a legal worker. They are contracted seasonally to work in the mills and usually live in the towns. Being forced to live in the town makes their position that much more unstable, and they often have to do the most menial tasks of the harvest for a fraction of the pay they were promised. They have little recourse to complain, however, if they wish to be contracted again the following year.∏ Occupational stratification also made it difficult for the workers to complain against the mill owners. ‘‘It’s rare that you see the boss, because he just lives traveling all over the place. You see the administrator, the chief who steals for the boss. You manage to cut 1,000 kilos of cane and he goes and measures it and says you cut 800 kilos, and he steals 200 kilos for the boss. If he doesn’t do this, the boss throws him out.’’ These temporary and illegal workers had little allegiance to any particular plantation or plantation boss. Even though joining the mst clashed with regional notions of work and access to land, people who joined the movement felt that it was better than the instability of seasonal plantation work.π One settler in Flora

144 Chapter Five described her husband’s discovery of the mst and the reasons why they decided to join the movement: ‘‘A man came and asked my husband if he wanted a piece of land, you know? And my husband said that he did, because he lived working for others and paying rent in the city. One day we were here, the next day there, living in the stables because we didn’t have a house to live in. It was too much suffering.’’ José had a similar story. When he turned eight years old, he began working alongside his mother and younger brother in the sugarcane fields. The three of them cut fourteen loads of cane per day, and the family never had access to land for planting subsistence crops: ‘‘Even the trees that the workers planted, they would knock them all down.’’ José found out about the movement one day, when he was filling a truck with sugarcane stalks. An activist came by and held a meeting by the truck: ‘‘He talked to us to find out if we were wanting to involve ourselves with the movement—if we wanted to get a plot [of land], and if we wanted to be part of the movement. I said to him: ‘Buddy, I am for whatever works and for what comes my way.’ At that time I was unemployed—not just me, a lot of people.’’ Traditional community institutions shaped the ways that people thought about their options in general, and about the mst in particular. The people most likely to join the mst were those who had the weakest ties to those around them—which generally meant the lower levels of the plantation community (the trabalhadores), who tended to move regularly from one plantation to another in search of the best wages or working conditions. None of the people on the settlement in Água Preta had joined an occupation with members of the same original community. Even when two people from the same community joined the mst, they made their decisions independently and did not seem to purposefully maintain social ties after receiving land. The people most likely to join the mst were also those who did not have the option of attaching themselves to communities already established in the city or another rural area.

The Moradores: Joining the Movement for Political Voice The settlers who had been living and working on the plantation at the time of the occupation were drawn into the movement for different reasons—some of them against their will. They received land because they

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 145 had worked on the plantation at some point (on the condition that this working relationship was able to be verified, either by working papers or by personal testimonies of other workers), and because they had been there to claim their land when incra carried out the expropriation.∫ At the time of expropriation, these moradores were often doing a little bit better than the uncertified workers or the mst members, but not well enough to leave the plantation. They joined the mst because the movement came to their new settlement and began to organize aggressively. The movement’s organizing efforts—together with the promise of money and the desire for a political voice—provided powerful incentives for joining. When mst members settle on a plantation alongside people who originally resided in the area, there are often conflicts between the two groups: ‘‘In the beginning [the residents] don’t support the movement, because they think that we messed up their lives, because when they worked for the boss, they had work, every week they had a little income, and after we get there, they don’t have this any more.’’ But the residents are drawn into the mst, because the movement becomes the most logical vehicle for organizing the settlement. Each settlement is required to form an association, to which all the members belong. The association is in charge of collecting official documents from the settlers, disseminating information, regulating conflict, and so on. Wherever the mst has a significant presence, the movement virtually controls the association, and some settlers join because they feel they have little other option. This is demonstrated by an interview with a settler who had been an administrator on the settlement before the expropriation (see Wolford 2004): Caio (assistant field researcher, or R): And now are you part of the movement? Settler (S): I am now part of the movement because truly I live on the settlement, and in any case I have to be part of the movement whether I want to or not . . . because we arrange things within the movement. R: And do you pay the movement something? S: They [the people from the movement] charge a fee, and so I paid some fees and now we are waiting for other charges for us to continue paying again. R: How was it decided that you would pay? S: The president of the association decided. He got together with the agricultural extension agents [who were all mst militants] . . . to make some charges that would be put into practice . . . with the settlers. R: Have you ever spoken with the militants, the leaders of the mst?

146 Chapter Five S: Until now I have never been close to the leaders of the mst because I truly don’t know them well, no. I only speak with the agronomists who have to talk with them. But I am not very close to these leaders of the mst, no. I hardly know them. R: Do you support the mst? S: I support the mst. R: Have you participated in some mobilization, a march, or something like that? S: Until now not that I know of. R: Does the movement help you today? S: No, up to this point, the movement hasn’t helped me with anything.

Of all of the factors that have pulled this second group of settlers into the movement, the promise of access to resources such as credit was the most significant: ‘‘I think that the movement helps us, I think that they give us a lot of strength. They confront incra. They put pressure on the government to make the projects happen for us, it’s always the strength of the movement.’’ In organizing the settlement, the mst’s biggest task was to pressure the government to disburse its promised credit, on time and in full. In Água Preta, 85 percent of the settlers said that the mst helped them because the movement brought them government credit. The movement was considered responsible for forcing the government to disburse money for houses as well as credit for planting: ‘‘I think that the movement helps. They say that these projects are with their help, because . . . if it weren’t for them, I think that we would wait longer [for our projects], in this way they help.’’ Joining the movement is also an opportunity to have a political voice. Because of the elitist character of politics in the Northeast, a political voice is often synonymous with an economic voice. For a community as marginalized as the plantation workers, the opportunity for political entrée is extremely significant. As one local mst leader said: ‘‘We work with the people who are marginalized by the bourgeoisie, they are the . . . thieves, the layabouts, the idiots, and so the movement takes those people and turns them into citizens. . . . When the movement goes back to his original community with him in two years, the people in the city who used to not care about him at all, they begin to see him as an authority, but before he lived without a voice in society.’’ The legacy of political paternalism has been a key element of the plantation ‘‘moral economy’’ that the mst has had to address in mobilizing in

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 147 the Northeast. Within the sugarcane community, the ‘‘Big House’’ has been an integral part of local politics. The plantation boss ran his own closed society, and meted out punishments and rewards. The boss ‘‘took care of’’ his workers—although the relationship was constantly being contested and renegotiated. The boss style of politics continues to prevail in much of the Northeast today, particularly in the sugarcane region. In Água Preta, the mayor’s office was the primary source of employment, food, and housing. Because of the ongoing sugarcane crisis, the most important economic actor in town was actually the mayor’s office, which employed 1,184 people. Employment, food, and housing were ostensibly disbursed according to need, but a complicated system of social networks actually dictated who got what when. In Água Preta, the mst had a ‘‘special relationship’’ with the town’s mayor. The close relationship between the mayor and one of the mst’s agricultural extension agents meant that concerns voiced as ‘‘settlement concerns’’—or as ‘‘mst concerns’’—earned special consideration. For example, on August 18, 1999, a late-night meeting was held at the mayor’s beautiful old farmhouse, six miles outside of the town center. The meeting brought together an important regional mst leader, the local agricultural extension agent (who was also a well-regarded leader in the region), the leader of an encampment built on the edge of town, as well as Caio (my research assistant) and myself. The mayor met us on his expansive front porch, looking out over his cattle stables and four hundred hectares of farmland. The meeting opened up with declarations by both the mayor and the mst leaders, as to the strengths and accomplishments of their respective groups. After two hours of discussion, the mayor agreed to send 100 reais (approximately U.S. $70 at the time) in food coupons per week to a nearby mst encampment. He also promised to hire a doctor to visit the settlements for two hours per week, to repair a truck the movement owned, and to fix the schoolhouse roof in a nearby settlement. All of these public goods were exchanged for the movement’s political support. This legacy of paternalism is also evident in the way that mst members in Pernambuco looked at their own leaders—as voices and advocates for them rather than as equal members of the same movement. For example, the settlers felt that Jaime Amorim was a man who was influential in Recife, the state’s capital—and so, by virtue of belonging to the mst, they felt that they had an influence: as one said, ‘‘You will have already thought that Jaime Amorim is a man who embraces millions to his heart; his desire

148 Chapter Five is that all should be well off, everyone should earn something good.’’ Another settler who took part in the occupation of the state incra offices in 1996 argued that the occupation was successful not because of the forty Sem Terra who were present, or because of the fourteen people who went on a hunger strike for several days, but because ‘‘Jaime came down on everyone there in order to get what we needed.’’

Three Testimonies of Movement and Membership The dynamics of movement membership and representation in Água Preta were complicated and diverse. In order to help illustrate the subjective nature of the moral economy that I have been describing—and its relationship to mobilization—I present the stories of three different mst settlers. All three people were on a settlement considered to be ‘‘mst settlements’’ by the local government, the townspeople, the settlers, and the movement itself. And, although none of these people were ‘‘leaders’’ or the sort of people normally featured in a social movement analysis, they represent the spectrum of mst ‘‘members’’ on the plantations in the Northeast.

Settler 1: Rosa I interviewed Rosa at her home in September 1999. She lived in a settlement adjacent to Flora in the municipality of Água Preta. Rosa joined the mst through an occupation and won access to land while living under the iconic black plastic tents. Rosa had three children, all of whom lived at home with her and her husband. She was born in Água Preta, and described her parents as ‘‘peasants’’ who had lived their whole lives in a neighboring mill called Camurim: ‘‘Since my father was a boy he dedicated himself to work in the field.’’ Her mother and father were elderly (by local standards), fifty-five and sixty, respectively, but both still worked. They had separated when Rosa was very young: ‘‘When I was eight he left my mother, and she brought me up by herself.’’ From the beginning, Rosa worked in the sugarcane fields: ‘‘I went to work when I was nine, and I didn’t want that. I would have rather studied, but my mother couldn’t afford it. She had eight children, so she had to put us to work. We left at

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 149 four in the morning and returned at two in the afternoon. Now I have three children and I want them to work, but first I want them to study.’’ Rosa lived with her mother in the sugarcane mill until she was fifteen and left to work as a domestic maid in town. When she got pregnant with her first child, she married and moved in with her husband. She remembered her life as ‘‘horrible’’: ‘‘because you work in the morning to eat at night. It is sad. The salary was small, and for eight children it wasn’t enough. Sometimes I think and say: ‘My life has improved a lot, when I was a child I starved, I worked with a hoe.’ Now I work, but it is different— I work for myself.’’ The expression ‘‘worked with a hoe’’ (na enxada) was a common way of expressing the difficulty of working in agriculture: working with a hoe was an indication of work that was unrewarding and physically demanding. It meant a life of toil at the mercy of the fields. Rosa’s life was dominated by physical labor and ‘‘working for someone else.’’ As she said, ‘‘If we work for other people we don’t have future.’’ She did not like her bosses because she didn’t trust them: ‘‘They were horrible. I only got more freedom when I left home. . . . I never thought of [any of my bosses] as good people.’’ Rosa said she and her family did not have ‘‘the right to plant’’ for themselves in the mill where they lived because they were not legally employed. But her grandfather, ‘‘who lived in another mill, he had the right to plant, and we always planted there.’’ Initially it was Rosa’s husband and mother who decided to occupy land with the mst when they saw other people in the region doing it: ‘‘It was the example of an occupation at a neighboring mill. We had never thought about invading. Then people came to us with the idea of, ‘Let’s make a camp . . . but we have to live in shacks just like the people of [the other mill] did.’ . . .’’ When Rosa heard of the idea, she was scared: ‘‘I remember that I cried a lot when my mother went away to the camp. I saw on TV that people were beat up and I cried a lot so my mother wouldn’t go. I thought it didn’t have a future. Then I talked to the activists and I got used to it and I saw that it was a good idea. I cried at first because we were taking a chance, but it was a great idea. . . .’’ Rosa’s mother had been employed as a clandestine worker on Camurim, working without proper papers, and so she didn’t receive any of her rightful payments when she left. Rosa said, ‘‘My mother worked for eight years and what she got from the distillery wasn’t even valid payment for two months. If that was well investigated, she wouldn’t need to think about

150 Chapter Five working.’’ Rosa recounted the experience living in the mst encampments with a certain dispatch. She hadn’t actually lived there herself because she ‘‘had to take care of the children,’’ but she experienced the process through her husband and mother, and her own identity as a settler was very much based on having been through the struggle to get land. ‘‘I myself didn’t stay in the camp, but my mother and the others, they all suffered very much. Have you thought about what it would be like to live in a shack [barraco] for four years? It is horrible! It took us four years to have something here; we were evicted twice from here. . . . Today we have a house; we have the land to plant and our own work. We suffered a lot to acquire this portion of land. When [my husband and mother] were in a very tranquil place [minding their own business], planting some crops, the police arrived and kicked them out. And so it went on.’’ Living on the settlement, Rosa was pleased with her new position as a land reform settler and small farmer: ‘‘Now everything has changed a lot, everybody has their own garden, everybody plants, and after a while our own children can have a future. It is very good. We not only sell crops but we give to those who don’t have any, and it is something I couldn’t do in the past. I like this life of agriculture.’’ Rosa attributed the success of the encampment—and the movement— to its most visible leader, Jaime Amorim. ‘‘I think the one who suffers the most with this development of the land struggle is Jaime. He is the one who is responsible for the settlements. He and the other movement leaders suffer a lot. Just like one time, or many times, he was arrested—and we felt like giving up. The police beat them all up—they don’t spare the children or anyone. Whenever we hear that he has been arrested, some people cry because he was very good to us.’’ Rosa believed that the mst was successful because Jaime was powerful and he could speak for the poor: ‘‘Only he protects the mst, and if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be anyone, because it wouldn’t work if we speak. We, the poor, have worked a lot, they should give us a chance; but for us to have anything we suffer a lot.’’ Rosa remained committed to the movement and said, ‘‘When they have a meeting, we are willing to go to help the ones who don’t have land and help ourselves who still need a lot of help.’’ Both Rosa and her husband went to the meetings, but her husband ‘‘understands things better.’’ They paid two reais every month to the settlement association, and Rosa said she paid the movement ‘‘a little bit more’’: ‘‘But it is what gives all the support to us. When we received the money to build our house we gave

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 151 them fifty reais. We agreed to pay something because we only get a project or receive land through them.’’ She believed that the movement still helped them: ‘‘It is the movement that goes to the bank to request loans for us. They fight a lot to do something for us, that’s why I think they are a very good tool for us.’’ Rosa thought that her life had improved because she had land and a house, which she had never had: ‘‘Look, I have my plot and I am always planting something around the house, I have pumpkin, manioc, and potato.’’ She had also planted beans, corn, fruit trees, and banana. ‘‘I am a woman and I think more about planting vegetables and fruit. We want to have a coconut garden, but it takes too long to grow coconut.’’ She thought that the family could live off of the land, although it would be better if the family had jobs: ‘‘If we had the chance to have work, it would be better. The government promises jobs, but no one see them. It has been almost two years since the president came to power and we haven’t seen anything. When we go to Brasília to talk to him, he shuts the door, like he did several times in our faces. Now if we don’t stay there, he doesn’t negotiate.’’ Although the settlers received support from the town mayor and local organizations, the assistance was most often in the form of ‘‘donations’’ or favors, while the support to which they had a right—such as running water and paved streets—did not seem to be forthcoming. This was the nature of plantation politics in the region, wherein favors could be had for the asking but ‘‘rights’’ were heavily contested. As Rosa said, ‘‘Most of the people here want to build a fish pond, and it is very good. In addition to that, this month we are receiving fish, they all donate [things to us]— Imater [the Institute for Agricultural Research], and city hall, and the church. . . . [But] we are without resources here. This settlement was supposed to have an asphalt road, just like the mayor promised, ‘Look, I promise, if you grant me this piece of land to put Água Preta’s garbage . . . [I will pave the road],’ and they granted it to him. Nowadays he promises so many lies and can’t carry them out.’’ Rosa liked the idea of working in a collective. The movement had proposed the idea, but it hadn’t yet gotten off the ground in any of the local settlements. ‘‘[The plan for a collective] is great; the collective improves people’s lives. Here twenty people accepted it, and we think that the ones who didn’t accept it are going to regret it later. What really matters is our fellowship. When you have a collective you don’t need to work in another place. Even with the land people sometimes leave here to cut cane outside,

152 Chapter Five and by having the cooperative they will not need to leave.’’ With the collective an uncertain project, Rosa concentrated on a future on her land, ‘‘For my future I only think about my children. In relation to my life, I think about improving, having my land full of crops, so my children can study and sleep without thinking about whether they will be able to eat or buy their books. To have that little bit of money to buy things and study, that’s what I think about.’’ As is evident from this interview, Rosa is a Sem Terra: in many ways she embodies the ideals of the settlers in southern Brazil. She was born into a life of sugarcane wage-labor but she followed her mother and husband into the mst and became convinced that the movement was the best way forward. She worked hard to ‘‘fill up her land’’ and remained committed to the movement long after becoming a settler. But her understanding of the movement was very much shaped by her encounters with plantation bosses and paternalistic political authorities: she believed that the movement was strong because Jaime Amorim was. And she saw herself as represented by the mst rather than as constituting the mst herself.

Settler 2: Paulo I interviewed Paulo in July 1999 on his front porch in the house he built on Flora. It was a busy place to talk—seven other people were living at home with him. Paulo was born in Catende, a well-known mill not very far from the settlement where he now lived. His parents lived in the plantation, although they never had access to land. Because he had been born there, Paulo called himself a ‘‘natural son’’ of Catende. Back when he lived with his parents, he never dreamed that one day he would have land: ‘‘No, because at that time when I left the house, I was very young, and we didn’t have this movement business yet, although agrarian reform has always existed. But it was more complicated, slower—now when this movement appeared, that’s when things really began to get going.’’ Paulo kept jumping forward during our interview, he was happy to talk about his former life working in the sugarcane, but he regularly returned to marvel at the way his life had changed once he had access to land: ‘‘In ’96, to this day— that was when incra expropriated everything. We took over, and now we are the responsibility of the federal government [ficamos por conta do governo federal]!’’ Life, in general was more ‘‘complicated’’ when Paulo was young. He left

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 153 home early, somewhere between twelve and fourteen years old: ‘‘And so I brought myself up, I understood people because I was always living outside of my home.’’ Paulo was not bitter or upset at having to leave home so early; rather, he saw it as part of the natural evolution of family: ‘‘It wasn’t bad or because of my dad—I left home when I was very young, and my parents stayed there. And they live there to this day, and I live here.’’ After leaving home, Paulo worked in sugarcane. Like his parents, he never had land on the settlement. He worked for the mills in Água Preta: he cut cane, brought in the harvest, transported cane from the field to the road, and filled the truck. He did all of these jobs but considered his ‘‘real’’ job to be transporting cane from the field to the road: ‘‘bundling [the cane] on top of the donkeys and taking it to the side of the road to where the trucks would come and get it to take it to the distillery. And in the interharvest period, which was the winter, my job was the same, but I transported seed cane for planting and wood as well, because the plantation owner from here had a sawmill . . . and so my job every day was always to transport things.’’ Paulo worked without his legal papers but said he always liked his bosses. His description of his relationship with his bosses was contradictory in ways that made perfect sense in the sugarcane region. He evaluated his own bosses in relative terms (i.e., compared to other bosses, or compared to what a boss could potentially be like, an image crafted from real stories and regional legend). But this personal and relative evaluation differed from his more general evaluation of what it meant to work for another person, something that he condemned very broadly. No matter how good your own boss was, he argued that wage work was in general exploitative and created conditions of uncertainty and fear for the average worker: ‘‘Yes, they were excellent bosses, although they pushed us really hard because bosses always want to push the worker a lot. But in comparison, the boss from here was an excellent boss—he was a real servant in the dance [muito servidor na danca]. When you needed him, he would not say no. At any time of the day or night, he was available—you just had to leave here and go to town because he lived there in town. Any time you arrived at his door, he would take care of you—medicine, transportation, hospital, for these things he never said no. He just had one fault because he was very cheap [barateiro]. Now to make up for it, we are better off today because we are living in what is ours. No matter how good the boss is, every day we are waiting to be kicked out, for any reason, even for really

154 Chapter Five minor problems. At any time he [the boss] could say, ‘Get out of the house, I don’t want to see you any more in my mill,’ and a person at a time like this wouldn’t have anywhere else to go. They would just be wandering around the world. And now, it’s different, thank God, because whether I live well or badly, we live in what is ours.’’ Even with this uncertainty and potential for ‘‘wandering around the world,’’ working in the mills was the only life Paulo had known before the agrarian reform, and he admitted that he never thought it was strange— instead, it was agrarian reform that seemed strange: ‘‘At that time, we never dreamt that we would fall inside this landless movement and one day be a part of agrarian reform. And so we even got used to our life. Ever since we were young, our thing was always to work for the boss. We never thought this was odd, no. And so, afterward, three years ago, this was when we started to find things strange because we had never seen this [agrarian reform], but little by little we are getting used to it.’’ Paulo found out about the expropriation because he was living on the mill when the mst came to build their encampment: ‘‘There were always rumors that this was a mill that had been [chosen for agrarian reform] twenty years ago. We already thought that it was registered with incra to be expropriated, to be divided for the workers. But time passed and we forgot about this. But then one day, the Sem Terra came to the edge of the road and talked with the owner of the mill. [The boss] let them stay and they stayed there, some days went by, and they came in here. And in the meantime, the boss was negotiating there with incra without us knowing anything, us workers were totally innocent, and there he was documenting everything in incra, negotiating to sell to incra. And so when the boys [from the movement] came here, they put up some plastic tents in there, where there is a house, and [the boss] said to us: ‘You stay out of there, don’t invade here because that land there is going to be yours [the workers’] and don’t get all hot-headed. When it is time, you can go in.’ And so afterward the boys said to us that this place was going to expropriated. The owner was going to be without this here. We thought about this . . . but we kept on [with our business] [tocamo’ pro frente], always working. But we worked without any spirit, with the boss always promising—in the winter, in the interharvest period—to stop everything, to not give one hour more of work to anyone. Then, when it was November 17, 1996, we were cutting sugarcane over there below . . . and even though we weren’t expecting an official from incra, he came, all set up in a car, with a driver.

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 155 He arrived here on top of the hill—we were down below and from up there he yelled for us, signaled us with his hand, calling us. And so we stopped our scythes and we went up to where he was. When we got there, the incra official said, ‘Did you know that this is now yours? The owner does not have any rights here to take out even one stick of garlic if he wants. All of this is now going to become yours. It is part of agrarian reform and whatever is inside the mill the owner will not take, it all belongs to incra, we already paid him for it.’ And so he told us to sign [the papers]. . . . He [the owner] was pretty mad at us. But it was always like this anyway. Also from then until now, he has never come again to the mill—he has stayed there in town until today.’’ Paulo seemed pleased that the land had been expropriated from its owner, but he was at a loss for how to think about his new position as smallholder. I asked him what he thought of the idea, when he found out that the mill would be expropriated, and he said: ‘‘My thinking was the same as everyone else’s. Because we were used to the boss—every week we worked, and we would get money to do our little market shopping in town.’’ Besides losing their wages, the workers had to learn to calculate their earnings as deferred income. They had to get used to planting in one season and not reaping their rewards until the next. This was difficult for people who had always earned their salary on a regular basis and depended on it for subsistence: ‘‘And after agrarian reform, we didn’t have the right to this, and so we had to plant, and to work, whether our stomachs were full or empty. We had to work, because if we didn’t, it would be worse. We work now so that later, in the future, we will have something and we won’t be hungry any more. And so we thought that all of this was very strange. That was the reason why we thought this change from the former owner to incra was difficult.’’ As he ‘‘got used’’ to the idea of working on his land, Paulo participated in mst activities although he never thought of himself as a Sem Terra. He participated in the movement but still equated the Sem Terra with miserable people who lived in black plastic tents while they waited for land. When I asked Paulo if he was part of the mst he said, ‘‘No, I am just a small farmer.’’ But, he said, ‘‘If they have any problems, we have to get together [and help]. Because the movement is an organization that battles a lot for us, it confronts many difficulties. If it weren’t for the movement, we would still be here without receiving even one bit [um tostao], nothing. Because the movement works a lot, it pushes itself a lot, it sacrifices a lot.’’

156 Chapter Five Paulo paid his regular ‘‘fees’’ to the movement: ‘‘So when we get some money we collaborate with the movement so that it can continue its work—because it deserves to continue.’’ Paulo did not remember when the settlers had agreed to pay the mst its membership ‘‘fees,’’ and he didn’t think he had ever spoken to an activist (this last was untrue as he knew very well the settlement president, who was also one of the most active mst leaders in the region). But this leader did not match Paulo’s image of a Sem Terra, and so he never realized that he in fact regularly spoke with an mst leader. In spite of his confusion about the movement, Paulo said that he supported its activities. He had even participated in a march. He thought the movement still helped them on the settlement, and he believed in ‘‘the movement—just after God’’: ‘‘Because if it weren’t for the movement, I don’t know. We are already receiving two projects and we are going to receive another, all of it because of the strength of the movement. Because if it were up to incra, it wouldn’t have all come out so early, not the first one. It wouldn’t come out if it weren’t for the movement, which gives the small farmer a lot of strength.’’ Like Rosa, Paulo attributed the movement’s strength to its state leader, Jaime Amorim (although Paulo referred to him as Jarbas Amorim, perhaps confusing him with the state governor, Jarbas Vasconcelas): ‘‘Jarbas Amorim is a leader, I forget what position he occupies, but he is a leader who battles a lot for the landless, battles a lot really. He gives his life for agrarian reform.’’ Paulo’s uncertainty about the movement stemmed from his uncertainty about living on the land. When I asked him if he thought his life was better now, he said: ‘‘On the one hand, it is better because now we are known as small business owners—we have our land, our little piece of land. And so we are, thank God, better off than we were with the boss. On the other hand, it was good with the boss. But on the other, we lived, like I said, just waiting for the time when he would put us out [of the plantation] for any reason, any little thing, and we would fall out.’’ The year I met him, Paulo had planted a little garden with corn, banana, gerimum, potato, beans, and pasture. It was difficult going, though, because he had to use his own resources in planting and some days there was ‘‘not even coffee to start the day. And so we can’t push too hard because we don’t have the money and because our bodies resist us.’’ He and other settlers worked outside their little plots of land, often as daily or seasonal

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 157 laborers for the first generation of agrarian reform owners who had been given larger plots of land in the 1970s. These mid-sized landowners (with approximately twenty-seven to thirty-five hectares of land) were already planting full fields of sugarcane: ‘‘And so we spend the summer working for others, and when it’s winter, we always plant a little bit [besteirinha] so that when it is winter we will have a little macaxeirinha to sell at the market, so that we have a little garden to make some flour. And so we go traveling along.’’ As is evident from this interview, Paulo was not exactly an mst member, although he was claimed as a member by the movement and he participated in movement activities. He himself said he wasn’t part of the movement—he was a ‘‘small farmer.’’ And even as Paulo recognized the power of the movement in pushing agrarian reform forward, he was uncertain whether he liked working on his land. He could not make himself think like a small farmer, which to him meant deferring income until market sales were complete. So, instead, he spent more time working for other people than he did on his own nine hectares.

Settler 3: Senhor Antônio Not everyone who decided to join the mst was pleased about the circumstances that had led up to their membership in the movement. Senhor Antônio, for example, was not someone whom outsiders would think of as a ‘‘Sem Terra.’’ He had always worked on sugarcane plantations, but for more than twenty-five years, he worked as an ‘‘empregado,’’ an upper-level employee, who oversaw as many as six hundred people. Now he was the treasurer on Flora. He lived with his wife and three daughters in a fourroom house up the hill from the main entrance. I interviewed Senhor Antônio after I had been in Água Preta for over two months (in July 1999) and had several opportunities to talk with him informally or observe him in meetings. His house sat directly above (and within shouting distance of) the house where the mst leader (also called Antônio) lived. The two Antônios were involved in a regular set of exchanges. The former team leader built a fence for the mst leader, painted it, weeded the front lawn, sprayed insecticide on the back lawn, watched over the house whenever the mst leader left for the night, and regularly brought vegetables and tubers by from his garden. In return, the mst leader and his wife

158 Chapter Five ‘‘helped out’’ the other Antônio with money, medicine (from the settlement pharmacy—all of which was provided by the mayor’s office) and food baskets that also came from the mayor’s office. Senhor Antônio was born in a medium-sized city out in the Pernambucano agreste, called Belo Jardim. The agreste constitutes the climatological and spatial border zone between the humid tropical coast of the Northeast and the dry interior; most of the subsistence agriculture in the state is undertaken here, although the region has also been home to intensive cotton production. His grandfather had a small plot of land in Belo Jardim, and the family worked for a rancher, tending to his cattle and planting garden crops on their own land. When the family began to grow, however, there were too many children and not enough ‘‘land for everyone’’: ‘‘And so the oldest kids were given some in the beginning and the rest of us were left without anything.’’ Senhor Antônio and his mother had to make do for themselves. When he was eleven years old, the two left Belo Jardim and traveled one hundred kilometers east to the municipality of Catende in the coastal region. As Senhor Antônio said, ‘‘Things got bad and I was getting smarter, and so I decided to leave and so my mother came with me also.’’ Catende was a company town; it was owned and organized by the Catende family. The distillery owned or rented approximately forty-three mills at the height of its operations in the 1960s and 1970s. The distillery hired Senhor Antônio, then eleven years old, to work in a mill called Piranjí. At that time, there were roughly 180 people working legally in the mill, most of whom lived on the property. Senhor Antônio had to call the cattle into the pen at night, and spread insecticide on the sugarcane: ‘‘These were the jobs that the younger people did, and so we earned just half a day’s salary.’’ Senhor Antônio would work there for twenty-one years, until he was thirty-two years old. The owner of the mill did not give him land to plant, but his memories of the mill were good: ‘‘Everything was well organized. There, there was enough work for the whole world, we all had papers, and we had our proper rights. We worked the whole year through, there was no lack of work.’’ Soon after he turned sixteen, Senhor Antônio was promoted to the status of empregado (‘‘employee,’’ as distinct from a trabalhador, a worker). He organized a group of sixty to seventy cane workers, measured cut cane, and took care of work schedules (mandar naquilo tudinho). Eventually Senhor Antônio left: ‘‘When a person is in the administration, it isn’t like being a worker who cuts cane, it’s different. Some new chief arrived who

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 159 didn’t get along well with me, and they threw me out.’’ Senhor Antônio did not attend school until 1970, when he went to get his professional identification card in the nearby town of Palmares. He wanted proper identification so that he could be legalized as a sugarcane worker. When he arrived at the union office, a woman asked him why he wasn’t studying. Senhor Antônio told her that he didn’t have the means to buy books or notebooks, and so the union helped him attend school. He only studied for two years before he got married and had to leave school, but in that time he learned to write and do basic numbers. Although the union helped Senhor Antônio study, and he appropriated the language of rights that came from the union-led struggles over working conditions in the 1970s and 1980s, he said the union in Água Preta was weak: ‘‘At times we needed the union, but when we got there, we weren’t attended to very well. There were even other empregados who got there and they said, ‘If you’re not listed here, we can’t go after your rights.’ ’’ For Senhor Antônio, it was the mayor’s office rather than the union that provided him with basic services such as assistance at the hospital. Senhor Antônio’s life improved after he received his working papers. The working papers allowed him access to the rights won by rural workers in the 1950s and 1960s. These rights were consecrated in the 1963 Rural Workers’ Statute, which extended urban workers’ rights into the countryside. Senhor Antônio worked in Catende until he was thirty-two, and then left for Flora. There he was also employed as a head person, overseeing the cane cutters, living on the mill, and doing his shopping in the small town market held every Saturday morning. Life was good in the beginning, even though Senhor Antônio had better memories of working for the old distillery than for a renter: ‘‘It’s very different. In the distillery we have our full rights. There is a food-basket, and at the end of the year we receive our rights. If we ask for our certification, we get it. We receive our bonus and it’s on the correct date. Now the distilleries are having some difficulties and they don’t pay, but before they paid everything. But even now they still pay, they don’t pay all at once, but then they keep paying. And with the renter, no—with the renter, we don’t have market baskets, we don’t get our bonuses, which are the rights that the government gave to the worker. There isn’t even a family gift anymore, it doesn’t exist. We don’t get anything, and we never did from the renter. But you can’t go after your rights because. . . . It’s difficult.’’ Ivanir (the renter) also never gave the workers land to plant, not even when the land stood still after

160 Chapter Five 1993: ‘‘He didn’t want anyone to plant, even a little garden.’’ The former owner had given the workers land, but only one hundred braços deep inside the plantation, and Senhor Antônio hadn’t even bothered to try and plant there. Despite this mistreatment, Senhor Antônio had difficulty talking badly about his former boss and he maintained that Ivanir wasn’t all that bad: ‘‘[He] helped us in the way that he could. . . . The boss wasn’t bad, I can’t say that he was a bad boss, because even though he didn’t pay properly, no one does, isn’t that so? But they always paid us what was possible and that was enough to get on with life.’’ But things became more difficult in the late 1980s. This was a time when the sugarcane industry along the coast of the Northeast sank into a deep economic crisis: ‘‘Afterward the difficulty came, and that summer of 1989, ’90—until ’93—all the cane was finished up. Ivanir used to plant all this cane. We managed to process 18,000 tons of it here in this mill. After the difficulty of summer came, the summers of ’89 until ’93, they were very heavy summers and weak winters, and so it finished the cane and we were without the means to go on. And so that was when the news came out in the newspaper that the mill was going to be expropriated.’’ Senhor Antônio first came upon the mst squatters by accident. The families were camped out deep inside the mill by a little stream: ‘‘I went in there after some mules that had gotten loose and . . . [when] we arrived there, we saw this huge group of people. I was even afraid! I thought they were gypsies because, in the old days, it was the gypsies who went around like this.’’ Senhor Antônio did not go up to the squatters to find out why they were there. Like most of the residents, he found out the details of the occupation by going into town and reading the local newspapers. Senhor Antônio’s barber pointed out the newspaper article out to him. Senhor Antônio went back to the plantation and asked Ivanir if he knew that the plantation was to be divided up: ‘‘[Ivanir] knew, but he wanted to hide it from us. After a few days, though, he got better and came to talk to us and invited us to do a partnership with him.’’ The plantation boss had no intention of passing over the land without a fight, and he proposed a plan: the resident workers would all push incra for land, and if they were united, they could convince the government that there was no room for the mst squatters. If the mst squatters still wouldn’t leave: ‘‘It would be like [the massacre that] happened up in Parà, you know? Everyone would get a rifle or whatever they use, and we

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 161 would set those people [who were camped out] running. And meanwhile, we would divide the land for us, and he would still be the owner, you know? He would still be in charge and we would take land only to say that the land was ours. This was the agreement.’’ The residents did not agree with Ivanir’s plan: ‘‘But we didn’t accept it. We weren’t going to fight with anyone, or kill anyone, or shoot at the encampment that already had people who were living worse than we were—people living beneath that black plastic. We weren’t going to do this because they have rights too, don’t they? So we didn’t accept [his plan] and there was a lot of fighting, a lot of commotion. He threatened me with a fight right there in his doorway. He called me a thief and got mad at me.’’ At that time, Senhor Antônio and his family didn’t know very much about the mst. His wife said, ‘‘I thought that the Sem Terra were only about ransacking cars, coming here like this and invading, fighting with the master, killing people. Now we’re already understanding things better.’’ Senhor Antônio said he came to understand the movement better after the nightly soap opera called The Cattle King aired in 1997. He said, ‘‘This explained everything. . . . When this business showed up here, that soap opera showed up too and we began to understand.’’ But there was still a divide between the people who were involved in the movement and the people who were not. Senhor Antônio’s wife explained: ‘‘At the time there was a sort of separation between the people who worked in the mill and had their legal papers and the people who invaded the land. . . . The people who invaded the land said that the others supported the old boss, and so the people weren’t united.’’ For the people living in the mill, it was the government officials with incra as well as mst leaders who explained the movement’s role: ‘‘[They] advised us about the movement, told us who the Sem Terra were, and they said that we should unite with them to make a bigger force.’’ And both Senhor Antônio and his wife thought that the two groups were becoming closer: ‘‘And so the two sides are uniting, and today we are a family. There are some still that live in the boss’s house, even today, but it’s only a few people. . . . It was that the people from here thought that they would be kicked off the land because they were on the side of the boss, but that wasn’t how it was. We lived off of this work, we were afraid of losing our jobs. But after we were able to understand how things were, everyone became united. The ones from there come to meetings here and we go to meetings there.’’ Senhor Antônio didn’t join the movement at that time,

162 Chapter Five but he worked closely with movement leaders and believed that the settlement’s future depended on all of the settlers working together, with the mst: ‘‘When the people from the movement come here, we all resolve our problems together, everyone’s together. There is no separation.’’ Senhor Antônio took pride in the outcomes: ‘‘Now everyone has their own business. The old renter stays there and we are here. He is the one who lost out because he used to be the owner of everything and today he is equal to us. He’s the owner of a plot of land, just like us.’’ Senhor Antônio still didn’t get along with the renter, and when the latter came to offer gifts, he refused: ‘‘Now, he sent for me to go to his house and offered me a container to put wood into. Now he wants to get closer to me, I don’t know how, but he wants to. But he already did what he did to me. It doesn’t hurt him to do it again in the future, so I’ll leave him alone.’’ When everyone found out that the land was going to be expropriated, there was a rush to claim land on the plantation. Senhor Antônio chose a spot that he knew to be a fertile one: ‘‘I planted right away some four hundred braços of garden. I cleaned up some banana trees that were below, and I opened up some stream beds. And so when incra came to survey everyone, the doctor said I had a right to stay where I was. . . . And thanks to God, I managed to stay.’’ After the land was expropriated, the settlers were required to form a settlement association that would have official, elected positions and meet monthly to discuss group business. Settlement associations are required of any group winning land through the process of agrarian reform. Although there is no mechanism in place to ensure that people actually meet, nothing official happens without a procedure that involves the elected settlement officials and acts signed by a majority of the settlers. When the settlers on Flora formed their association, they chose the former renter’s son to be their president. This was eerily reminiscent of the first Peasant Leagues of the 1950s, when the plantation owner was made honorary president of a league he later set out to destroy. When a government worker from incra came out to the settlement soon after the expropriation, she asked Senhor Antônio, ‘‘How is it that you guys took the owner and put him in the presidency of the association? You are going to lose.’’ Senhor Antônio described the son’s rise to leadership as a result of the allegiance between the former mill workers and their boss: ‘‘The people from the mill, the group that is together with him, you know, there are still people here who are together with him, who only live there, so he

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 163 got to those people, got into their heads, told them a pretty story, and they nominated him and put him in the presidency.’’ Having the renter’s son in the presidency was a problem, and Senhor Antônio came to see it as a clever ploy to retain control over both the land and its laborers. ‘‘There was a lot of fighting, and the renter’s son was president of the association—the group put him there—he wanted all of this land here—all of this in front of us. He’s smart, isn’t he? The land was expropriated and he’s going to get all of the best land? But I already knew that he was going to have to leave. But there was a resident—who is even a good person—who said to me, ‘If you have abused the plan, I am going there to that place you picked out, I am going to plant and I want to see if you come down on me.’ I said, ‘No, I am not going come down on you, no, boy. Now, if I have the right, you are going to lose even what you planted, and the person who is going to have the say is the doctor of incra. I am not going to fight with you because you aren’t going to plant. Plant what you want, because I am within my rights; if the doctor says that it is for me to stay, then I am staying.’ We saw that it wasn’t going to go well because if we asked for these little things in incra, in these houses here—in this row of houses, there are seven of them. Well, then, he was the president of the association. He went right to incra to ask them to get us to leave without anyone having anywhere to go. He and his wife went to incra to ask them to kick us out, and so the doctor came here in our house, a dark little one, Dr. Arlete. She came in, sat on our old sofa, and she said: ‘Do you have anywhere to live? Do you have somewhere to go?’ ‘No, no,’ we said, ‘we don’t have anywhere, no. . . .’ And so afterward they saw the consequences. We ran quickly into the encampment and got the people from there. We talked to that group, got the people together for a meeting, and we took him out of the presidency. And so an Official Act was registered, the association’s official book was created. And so we had a better deal and the hope of fighting against this again. But we would have lost. And those who didn’t have a place to go would have ended up below the black plastic as well, or under the bridge.’’ Senhor Antônio’s newfound independence both scared and pleased him. Without the security of formal employment, he was always worried about earning enough to live on from one season to the next; he had never had quite the same concerns when he was employed. This uncertainty made him regret the government’s decision to expropriate the land—even though he had been unemployed from 1993 to 1997, when he began to

164 Chapter Five work on his own land. ‘‘I never thought it was a good idea, you see? I was used to a job where you worked, and every week I received money to do my shopping. I never had financial difficulty because a person who is working has a specific salary and knows that he has a fixed job, doesn’t he? The rich person, no. His financial situation is such that if one thing falls down, he thinks it’s terrible, but not me. If I have a good job that is enough for me to maintain my family, then this is a very good situation, and so I think it’s very difficult [to have land here], I haven’t gotten used to it. Until now, I still haven’t gotten used to it. . . . I am still not used to it, I can’t lie. For me it is a very big, bad difficulty. There are days that I think a lot about how it is that I am going to survive from now on, because the resources that come from incra or from the government are not very much and they take a long time to get here and we are in a situation that is difficult to survive, and so for this I say that I am not yet used to it. I am going to get used to it, I know that I am, because there is no other way. I have to get used to this itself.’’ Senhor Antônio’s wife suggested that even though Senhor Antônio knew how to do most of the tasks associated with garden work, he would prefer to have people working for him that he could supervise: ‘‘Because, if a person had a lot, land, and enough resources to put at least two people working on it together with him, and if that money came that was enough for you to plant and there was one person who worked permanently with that person, well, then, everything would be easier.’’ When I left Senhor Antônio and his wife in 1999, they were trying their best to plant food crops, not sugarcane, on their land. They had coconut trees, bananas, manioc, and corn in short neat rows. He had had little experience with bananas, but was being shown how to care for them by the settlement agricultural extension agent. He was having some trouble because the only thing he really thought he knew how to plant was sugarcane. ‘‘In this region, my life has been planting cane. I came here young, and with the twenty years that I have worked, I have only planted cane. Now, planting cane I know, any type, any quality, I know it.’’ But Senhor Antônio was not planning on planting sugarcane on his land anymore because the price was so low: ‘‘You have to stop, really stop, planting sugarcane.’’ As is evident from this interview, Senhor Antônio was a member of the mst, but he did not really consider himself a Sem Terra. He had worked his whole life in sugarcane, but he had achieved a position of some responsibility and importance on the plantation. He was given access to land

Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 165 when the movement occupied the plantation and pressured incra to expropriate the property. He was a reluctant small farmer—he knew how to plant garden crops, but he preferred to be employed as a worker with a steady salary. He was also a reluctant mst member, although he was very visible in settlement politics and someone that other movement leaders relied on fairly heavily to organize the other settlers. Senhor Antônio was ‘‘getting closer’’ to the mst and never disagreed when movement leaders represented Flora as an mst settlement or Senhor Antônio as a movement member. At the same time, he thought longingly of the days on the plantation. He had no moral analysis of whether holding large plots of land was right or wrong—he was simply given access to land and tried to make the best of it.

6 Going Bananas Producing for Market, State, and Movement In this chapter, I investigate working relations on the former sugarcane plantations in an attempt to understand why the rural workers in Água Preta left the movement after having been members for only five years. Little academic work has been done on the mst’s trajectory in the region, but the movement’s difficulties could be seen simply as the all-toocommon failure of political mobilization. The ‘‘classical’’ social movement theories (as outlined by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001) might offer the following explanations: 1. Political process theory: The movement rose to political power in the sugarcane region at precisely the same time that the Brazilian president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, improved the political conditions for the reproduction of land reform throughout the country (Pereira 2003). Two brutal massacres, well documented and covered by the international media, created international scandals and forced the president to deepen his public commitment to land distribution (Deere and Medeiros 2005: 14; Ondetti 2002, 2008). By 2000, however, the national political context had changed. Memory of the massacres had faded, and President Cardoso established plans for a New Rural World (Novo Mundo Rural), emphasizing the privatization and decentralization of land reform to the municipal and market level (see Deere and Medeiros 2005; Pereira 2003: 48–61). Integral to this project was a marginalization of social movement actors, particularly the mst. A federal decree in 1998 made it illegal to expropriate properties that had been occupied in the past two years, effectively invalidating the mst’s most powerful strategy of resistance, the land occupation, and creating a hostile political context for the movement throughout the country. In its focus on the political context, this sort of argument falls under political opportunity theory, which emphasizes the importance of institutional politics in enabling or disabling social movement activity (see Tarrow 1998; in regards to Latin America, see O’Donnell 1994; Ondetti 2008; Oxhorn 1991, 1994).

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 167 2. Resource mobilization theory: At the same time, resources provided for agrarian reform were cut drastically after 2000. Credit promised for investment and production projects was consistently delayed, often well past the proper season for planting. Support programs such as the Lumiar Project for Technical Assistance in the Settlements (Projeto Lumiar de Assistência Técnica aos Assentamentos), which provided funding for agricultural extension agents on the settlements, were also cut, leaving the mst with little ‘‘legitimate’’ or formal access to the settlers. Previously, extension agents contracted through the Lumiar program could be selected by the mst and they often maintained an ideological commitment to the movement beyond the simple provision of services. This reduction of resources was particularly devastating in the sugarcane region, where the material benefits of participation were crucial for convincing former rural workers of the mst’s political power. The rural workers associated material resources—such as money or food—with political strength, and when neither was forthcoming from the mst, they turned back to the sugarcane elite and the state for assistance. The importance of resources to generate or facilitate collective organization is articulated by resource mobilization theories most often associated with the original work of James McCarthy and Mayer Zald (1973). 3. Rational choice grievance theory: After a decade of decline, the regional sugarcane economy began to revive again in 2000–2001. As the market price for sugarcane increased, settlers in Água Preta went back to planting sugarcane, a move that they themselves characterized as a rational decision to earn money and ‘‘take care of the family.’’

All of these arguments are plausible, and they provide some of the contextual elements in which the mst’s organization ‘‘crisis’’ has to be situated. These structural conditions do not tell the whole story, however. In fact, although the mst declined over this period, rural mobilization as a whole did not: organized occupations of both land and public buildings continued after 2000. Increasingly, however, these occupations were led by the rural unions (affiliated with the Federation of Agricultural Workers of Pernambuco, or Fetape, one of the strongest rural federations in the country), not the mst (see Rosa 2003). The rural unions began incorporating occupations and land reform into their agenda as early as 1993, when Fetape created a specialized secretariat for agrarian reform, but the unions did not come to dominate the political scene until after 2000. Understanding this transition from the mst to the rural unions requires

168 Chapter Six and analysis of the ways in which movement leaders and members negotiated political opportunities, resource availability and ongoing grievances. In other words, an analysis of the mst’s decline in Água Preta has to be situated in the particular history of land-labor politics in the region that gave rise to the the different meanings that people associate with land— meanings that are constituted in historically grounded social relationships between land use and labor rights. The mst had a difficult time establishing and maintaining its presence in the sugarcane region because the rural workers’ identity and political consciousness differed significantly from the peasant ideology promoted by the mst. The rural workers in Água Preta did value land, but they did not associate it with the same set of meanings for production or social reproduction as the small family farmers did in southern Brazil, a difference that led them to question many of the mst’s principles and strategies.

The Revitalization of the Sugarcane Industry in Pernambuco In the first years of agrarian reform in Água Preta, the settlers attempted to plant alternative crops on their land and to move away from sugarcane. The ostensible goal of land distribution was to promote the production of alternative crops such as bananas and coconuts for people who could no longer depend on the sugarcane industry for their sustenance. For the mst, the move away from sugarcane included an ideological element: movement leaders tried to convince people that land was (and should be) the key element for both production and social reproduction. Sugarcane was equated with the evils of colonization, with exploitation, and with poverty. Agronomists paid for by the state and affiliated with the mst encouraged the settlers to move away from sugarcane and into subsistence garden crops, high-value fruits for sale on local markets, and smallscale livestock production. The vehicle through which normative ideas about production were transmitted on the settlements was bank credit.∞ Through a program called Procera (Programa Especial de Credito para Reforma Agrária, Special Credit Program for Agrarian Reform), the federal government provides all agrarian reform settlers in the country with annual production loans (custeio) as well as a one-time loan for investment (investimento).≤ Funds for both were

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 169

14. mst meeting with demonstration in Riberão, Pernambuco, September 1999. Photo by author.

channeled through the Bank of Brazil. Although the exact funding amount varied, in 1999 settlers were entitled to an annual loan of up to 2,000 reais (approximately U.S. $1,000 in May of 1999) as well as a one-time investment loan of up to 7,500 reais. All loans were to be repaid in half, the other 50 percent being a ‘‘rebate’’ or ‘‘free.’’ The annual loans were to be paid back at the end of each year, at which time the settlers would be eligible for a new short-term loan, and the investment loan was to be paid back over seven years, with a two-year grace period and low interest rates. In accordance with government specifications, these loans for production and investment were not given directly to the settlers. ‘‘Projects’’ (as they were called) for both production and investment were drawn up in conjunction with a trifecta of experts, including state agrarian reform officials (representatives of incra, the national agrarian reform agency), lending agents with the Bank of Brazil, and mst-affiliated agricultural extension agents (who were often the local mst leaders, as in the case of Água Preta). In every region of the country, these projects focused on a few key crops that land reform settlers could produce for the market. In the sugarcane region of Pernambuco, the annual production projects were slated for

170 Chapter Six banana and coconut crops, while the investment projects were to be used for raising cattle. For the annual production loan in 1999, the settlers in Água Preta were required to plant at least two hundred banana trees using the recommended applications of fertilizer and pesticides; for the longer-term investment credit, which was expected to arrive in 2000, they were required to fence in their land, plant pasture crops, and purchase between three and six cows. Local mst leaders hoped to secure further funding through the Bank of the Northeast to establish a fruit-processing facility to make, among other things, the banana candies that are popular in the region. Representatives from the Bank of Brazil, incra, and the mst all expressed different goals in relation to the projects: for the bank, the main goal was repayment; for the state, the main goal was to ensure the settlers’ future independence from government support; for the mst, the main concern was that the settlers received (and continue to receive) sufficient credit to produce on their land. In all three cases, however, production decisions were based on rendabilidade, or ‘‘income generation,’’ that would enable the settlers to pay back their bank debts in a timely way. Rendabilidade centered on the ability of the settlers to generate income working on their land as small family farmers. For the settlers, this was a serious flaw: the projects measured income in terms of farm sales rather than in wages (as had been the workers’ custom). The settlers argued that the agronomists and government officials had calculated the costs and benefits of production in detail but without taking into account the cost of the settlers’ labor. The time the settlers would spend building fences, planting pasture, tending to the bananas and coconut trees, and so on, was not accounted for because the experts considered the settlers to (now) be family farmers —and, therefore, by definition, not earning a wage. One settlement president described the bank’s calculations and said: ‘‘Look—the bank has already [drawn up the project guidelines], but if you divide things up like this, we are going to work for free, we are going to plant the pasture for free to feed the cow—we are going to do a lot of things for free here.’’ Given the competing visions for agrarian reform and the need for resources to make any of it happen, the production projects became a key site of contestation, negotiation, and resistance—at the same time as they were the main avenue through which state agents, bank officials, and

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 171 movement leaders all came together to press for the same goals: uniformity, surveillance, and bureaucratic compliance. mst activists who envisioned a new society in the midst of the sugarcane plantations were constrained by the mechanisms of the project: they considered themselves in opposition to the state, but they still had to adhere to state production and organizational guidelines.

The Monthly Meeting as a Site of Subject Production If the production and investment projects represented a key site of struggle on the settlement, the monthly meetings were the landscape on which they played out. The federal government requires all land reform settlers to form an association, which is then expected to meet regularly (usually monthly) to discuss production issues. Because most of the settlements in the country are affiliated with a social movement such as the mst, or a trade union, or a church, association meetings are often also platforms for the dissemination of political information. The act of meeting regularly and the institutional demands of independently directing the association are supposed to strengthen the feeling of ‘‘community’’ on the settlement, but that community is not necessarily a welcoming or inclusive one. Within the association, all of the settlers have one vote. The meetings in Água Preta were usually run by mst leaders, but with the association president as a key ‘‘witness’’ to events. The association president is elected every two years, although a vote can be called when there seems to be a question concerning the president’s mandate. The president acts as a representative of the settlement, although there was little the president could do without the entire ‘‘directors’ board.’’ The president requires the presence of the treasurer, the secretary, and up to three accountants for official negotiations with the government for access to resources. Although being president or treasurer sounds like a coveted position, there were few settlers who would have chosen to be members of the directors’ board. One of the settlers who had acted as an informal leader on the settlement in the first days after incra expropriated the land was officially elected president once the association had been formed, but he refused, saying, ‘‘Even if they had given me 1,000 reais I wouldn’t have stayed on as president. The president has to run around a lot—and the

172 Chapter Six more that he does, the more he is humiliated!’’ Most of the settlers were content to monitor the president’s activities (usually critically) and were happy not to be involved in administration.≥ The tensions between income realization, bureaucratic compliance, and uniformity were evident in the movement’s politicization of the production projects. Monthly settlement meetings provided the occasion and the authority for movement leaders to develop their positions over the production projects. By coordinating the relationship between the settlers and their land, the mst leaders became intermediaries between the state and the settlement, even though the leaders generally saw and projected compliance as a tool of resistance. Meetings were also opportunities for mst leaders to demonstrate the power of the movement. Antônio, the mst leader and agronomist, stressed the importance of the mst in pressuring the government for everything from credit to medical supplies and electricity. The following description of a settlement meeting that took place on July 26, 1999, in Água Preta is illustrative of production politics in the sugarcane region. Meetings were held in an open area between two houses. The area had been filled in with concrete for flooring, but no walls had been built, and the side nearest the road was blocked in by a two-level fence; a few of the men sat on the fence and hooked their feet behind the bottom rung. Almost all of the settlers came: the monthly meetings were well attended when there was important business, particularly money, to be discussed. Antônio stood in the middle of the floor; near him but off to the side were the settlement president and treasurer. The president sat in the only chair available; everyone else found a seat on the floor or stood around the outer edge of the lot. Several young boys played on the dirt driveway next to the meeting area. Antônio opened the meeting with a discussion of the money that was due the settlers: they had received a portion of their annual production credit and were waiting for the final portion that would allow them to finish planting their bananas and coconuts. The credit was late, however, and people were beginning to think that perhaps they should no longer accept the money. If they did, they could be forced to plant the trees out of season and then find themselves unable to pay the bank back when the loan came due. Antônio argued that the settlers should take their credit and presented the situation as one of principle: the settlers had to prove to the bank and the state that they could succeed no matter what obsta-

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 173 cles were thrown in their path. The movement would not broker any discussion with the settlers about not accepting the credit, perhaps in part because the movement’s main source of funds came from the fees paid as a percentage of all government monies received by the settlers. In Água Preta, the fee was 2 percent, although the movement technically asked for 5 percent. Many of the settlers attributed their reduced fee rate to Antônio’s intervention with the movement. They paid their fees with the same resignation they would have shown toward their union dues. Standing in front of the settlers, Antônio began. ‘‘This is the opening of our meeting, and we will start with information. . . . To begin with, as I was coming to the meeting from my house, I heard some people talking about the credit for our production projects. I heard someone say, ‘If the second half of my credit is going to arrive as late as September, or in October, then I don’t want it.’ Look here people . . . we know that the money for our projects is being released from the government a little bit late—and only after much fighting—this is absolutely the truth. It is already [almost] August; and it would be ideal if the project came out in April, because then we would have the whole rainy season of April, May, June and we could plant our banana. This would be more appropriate. But given that the government often acts in bad faith, it is only now that these projects are being released. . . . We tried to talk with Dr. – – – [one of the incra agents in charge of the Água Preta settlements], and she put many obstacles in our way so that that money would not be released. But we here on Flora have a certain strength because of the movement: we pressured her and thank God this money came out.’’ Antônio paced as he spoke, and the settlers listened attentively, waiting to be able to ask questions. He focused on the Bank of Brazil’s need for a formal evaluation to be done of the settlers’ land and their production performance to date. The bank wanted proof that the settlers had already invested in their land and were capable of both investing the credit and paying the bank back. The state-supported agronomist or agricultural extension agents (until 2000 selected by the mst and paid for with funds from Lumiar, mentioned above) were required to keep records outlining initial production goals and filing regular progress reports. They took pictures, counted trees, spoke with the settlers, and coordinated their results with the bank officials in charge of distributing government credit. The technical evaluations are the bank and the government’s main way of determining viability on the settlements, and so movement leaders and

174 Chapter Six agronomists spend a great deal of time planning, discussing, and eventually preparing the evaluations. Antônio continued: ‘‘The bank wanted to release the money only after an evaluation had been done, but the bank wouldn’t set the date, or the hour, or the day, and didn’t even talk about an evaluation. During this last trip that we took to the bank (on Friday), the man from the bank said that we would still need to prepare this evaluation and that there was no certain date for this next allotment of money to come out. And so what can we do? Now, the leadership of the movement is going to try to send this evaluation this week to the bank and we are going to go to the management of the bank and try to negotiate when the rest of the money will come out. It isn’t like the bank can just say, ‘It will come out in September,’ but it will also not just be the way we want it. We are going to try and negotiate with them, to pressure [the bank], to show them: if they do not liberate this money, we are going to have much more difficulty repaying this money because September is a dry month and it’s impossible to produce banana in the height of summer. But we are not going to worry about this part anymore in this meeting; we will just say that we are sending our evaluation to the bank this week and . . . then we will negotiate with the bank. And we will bring back a date for when the money is going to be liberated, and as soon as we have this concrete information we will come back, hold a meeting and mark this date.’’ Antônio then moved on to remind the settlers that they were responsible for complying with the goals of the production project, goals that had been established in the same meetings with the bank, the mst leaders, and the government officials. If the settlers did not satisfy the terms of the project, then they would not be eligible for future credit from the government and, Antônio argued, this would jeopardize the movement’s standing in the region: ‘‘Continuing on this topic, the agricultural extension agent [to whom people often referred but who had long been absent from the settlement] and I are responsible for this investment project. It will be impossible for the bank to liberate the money for these projects if we send in an evaluation to the bank with incorrect information, saying that the banana was already planted. This is illegal, if some professional acts like this, he is irresponsible and incompetent and would be putting in danger our whole struggle to have land.’’ Here Antônio invoked the classic representation of mst members as having won land through occupations although he himself had never been

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 175 in an occupation: ‘‘We spent more than four years living in occupation camps under the black plastic: so, now, when we manage to get our first investment project, we will act in front of the bank in an appropriate way. The responsibility for this is mine as well. . . . More now than ever, we need to do our things correctly. We have an extension agent, we have an agronomist, we have assistance, and so we need to make sure that from now on things happen naturally, but also with competence. We have to produce this banana so that in the year 2000 we can pay the bank back without having to sell our land. . . . I am going to begin to go to your land now, people, [to conduct evaluations].’’ Even as he took responsibility for the settlers’ production, Antônio called on prominent people within the settlement to bear witness to his actions and to legitimate his position: ‘‘At the last meeting I said—and [the treasurer] and [the president] are my witness—it is the bank itself that is pressuring for everyone to plant banana. This puts us in a delicate situation: whoever doesn’t plant bananas is not going to get the second half of the investment credit.’’ Antônio argued that the movement was on the settlers’ side but could only help them if they helped themselves: ‘‘I went to [the town nearby] and tried to negotiate. I met with the agricultural extension agent and with the regional mst leader on Friday, and what I have told you is the same proposal the movement has. Because the movement doesn’t want to help people who won’t help themselves. The movement is giving us some coverage, but if we don’t hold up our end, they are going to let us go.’’ The movement, Antônio argued, would not allow him, or the settlers, to deviate from the technically agreed-upon conditions of the official projects. ‘‘And so it is the position of the movement that given that we are currently presented with so many favorable conditions—it’s raining well, and this first piece of credit was liberated—that the bank, as well as the leadership of the movement, and I as an extension agent, we will not have any way to send an evaluation to the bank for a settler who is still not planting banana. We already have some information from the settlement, because I walked through some of the plots and in general I found many people planting. But I found others who weren’t even at home. I think that whoever is willing to work should already be producing their banana—and then there will not be any difficulty for us to send an evaluation. Now, for those people who are still not planting, we are going to have difficulty sending the bank an evaluation.’’ Then Antônio opened the meeting up for questions: ‘‘If you want to ask a question in relation to the production

176 Chapter Six credit, we are here at your service.’’ The first question asked went to the heart of the official production projects: did the settlers have any choice in what they planted on their land, or did they have to satisfy the government’s (and the bank’s and the movement’s) demands? Question: ‘‘This money that came out—if a guy wants to plant banana, he can plant it and if he doesn’t want to, he can plant something else right, as long as the money is there to pay the bank, right?’’ Antônio answered impatiently: ‘‘We all know that this project is to plant bananas, I already said this in the last meeting, but you weren’t there, so I am going to repeat it. We are not crazy enough to give 100 percent priority to planting banana, so what I said is that we are going to try to comply with the rules of the project! We are going to plant at least 200 banana seedlings.’’ Question: ‘‘And if we don’t produce enough to pay the bank, what will happen?’’ Antônio used the question to emphasize the importance of fulfilling the requirements of the production projects as laid out in the original plans. Exceptions would be made for circumstances outside their control (God’s fury, weather-related problems, and government corruption), but otherwise people would be expected to comply with the regulations that circumscribed their new position as small farmers and land reform settlers. ‘‘I think, and I am certain, that if we produce banana . . . we will pay back the loans. The project is here, and if someone wants to see it I have it on a computer diskette. The project is for us to apply fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, everything. Let’s say that we don’t fulfill 100 percent of this project, but we are working and the banana is there on our land. If God Almighty gives a drought sometime between now and further on and there isn’t sufficient rain for this banana to grow, those of us who do technical assistance from the movement, well we are responsible for renegotiating this money with the bank. Because we know that it wasn’t your incompetence or ours. But if there is good rain and you don’t produce? Well, then we will send in an evaluation saying that your banana didn’t produce. As an extension agent I can do this. Then the bank will send a person to evaluate and when they get to your land, they won’t see even one seedling of banana. [So, if you don’t plant,] you will be messing me up professionally, you will be messing up the forty-seven settlers.’’ Antônio moved on to discuss the larger investment projects, the 7,500 reais that land reform settlers throughout the country were guaranteed (at

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 177 that time) for large-scale investment projects on their land. This money was distributed under the government-funded credit program, Procera (the Program for Special Credit for Agrarian Reform), which was perennially underfunded. Settlements engaged in constant negotiation with local and federal government officials in order to receive their money. The key component of this negotiation was the completion of a presentable production project: the variables for production, harvesting, and sale had to be carefully determined before money would be released. The settlements that were well organized through an oragnization like the mst would be preferentially placed to receive their credit. Antônio went over the details of the projects and emphasized the mst’s role in securing the settlers’ credit for the future. ‘‘In relation to the investment money—to our 7,500 reais that is still to come out—we know that of 128 settlements that are currently supervised by incra, only 12 settlements in the state of Pernambuco are going to receive their money. The movement’s governing committee has met with incra for four weeks in a row now, and today it is going into the fifth meeting. We are certain—we have concrete news from within incra and from the movement itself—that our investment money is set up to be released later this year. . . . Only twelve settlements are going to receive investment credit, and Flora is a privileged settlement because it is among the twelve. . . . We are beginning to work starting tonight. At 8:00 [this evening] I will be meeting with the extension agents from the mst’s central coordinating committee to work on the question of investment, because there are going to be some changes in the project. We need to reelaborate this project so that we can register it with the Bank of Brazil in August. For us this is very good, many people can be content: it is not because Flora has a big name, no, and it’s also not because there are two settlements joined together here, no. [We got the investment credit] because Flora is a settlement in Pernambuco today that demands attention because things are going right. When we—people from the settlement— arrive all together at the offices of ProRural [the Support Program for Small Rural Producers, O Programa de Apoio ao Pequeno Produtor Rural], at incra, at the Bank of Brazil, we arrive to negotiate, to talk about serious things. We do not go there trying to create problems, or to fight, to measure forces, and not even to tell lies or fool around. What we have today is an organized association. Out of all the settlements in the state, we are among the ten most organized associations in the state; we have our documents in order . . . and this gives us strength.’’

178 Chapter Six Antônio argued that Flora’s level of organization would enable it to access more resources from the government. If they had all their documents in order and were willing to work collectively, then they would receive funding from the government to generate what the settlers wanted most: money. ‘‘We are privileged, and whatever good things are going to be distributed among the settlements, we can be sure that Flora is going to be favored. So much so that ProRural is coming here; they told us to set up a meeting for the eighth [of the month]. They are going to do the fish project—this is the beginning of collective work—and we know through technical and guaranteed information that profits around the level of 8,000 or 10,000 reais are going to come into Flora every month with this fish project. This is also not just a foolish fight, we are proving that we want something, so much so that even on a Monday, forty-four of us are meeting here.’’ This creativity and hard work would be rewarded, Antônio argued, even though the federal government was doing its best to defeat agrarian reform and underfund the settlements. The strength of the movement and the involvement of all the settlers would force the government to continue providing the settlers with resources: ‘‘We know that today in every municipality of Pernambuco, the Cardoso administration together with [the governor of the state] Jarba, the two of them together, are trying to undermine our settlements. They do not have proposals for our plots of land, they don’t have any ideas, they don’t have anything. But our movement is strong, and it has proposals for the government and it also has proposals for us. We have already managed to negotiate our tractor project together with the leadership of ProRural. . . . To put forward a project like this with ProRural you need to have the mayor’s office, you need to go through the local council, and it’s a real run-around. But the movement went there—Jaime, Edilson, and Brasileiro—and negotiated personally with the general supervisor of the bank, and we managed to register this project for the tractor. The mst managed to get today twenty-five projects out of ProRural, and included in that is our tractor.’’ After talking about relations with the mayor, Antônio began to talk about the local union. The unions had lost much of their power when the agricultural crisis hit the region: they were traditionally important representatives for the sugarcane workers, but they had more trouble negotiating the politics and dynamics of agrarian reform. As Jaime Amorim had

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 179 argued, their vision for reform was embedded in the struggle for better working conditions, and therefore was embedded in the historical context of the sugarcane industry. They were intent on raising living conditions within the plantation, but agrarian reform without sugarcane plantations was outside of their experience and, until the late 1990s, outside of their official agenda. They had supervised expropriations in the state, including the most successful expropriation of Catende, once the largest sugarcane production and processing facility in Latin America, but the expropriated area was primarily reestablished as a factory, with the former workers now small-scale owners. The unions’ vision for agrarian reform required a healthy sugarcane industry, while the mst’s vision for agrarian reform, it turned out, was predicated on a failing sugarcane industry. As the movement began to mobilize more effectively in Pernambuco, it battled with the unions for legitimacy and authority. Antônio argued that the settlers should join the union, but he stressed that the only benefits would be eligibility for the basic services that the unions had worked to provide over the past thirty years: ‘‘The issue with the union is legalization. I am going to cite an example. [The treasurer] has a child now who had a son, and because he was always registered with the union, his kids are eligible for sus [social security] from the federal government that will help pay for the maternity ward at the hospital. This means that his child can receive a minimum salary for either three or four months. This is a good thing. For all of these reasons, it’s good to have a union to give us assistance.’’ At the same time, Antônio deprecated the unions’ work with agrarian reform in the region: ‘‘We know that [four settlements] are Fetape [the agricultural federation] settlements today, but they were only created through the mst’s struggle. . . . We know also that Fetape has not given any assistance to the settlements and today there is a fight for control between different groups. It’s a huge fight. And meanwhile, the settlers there are in a miserable situation: the production credit hasn’t come out; the investment credit hasn’t come out; the coffee project done together with ProRural hasn’t come out and the people there are in a difficult situation. We already have information that [two settlements] already want us to put the mst’s flag up in their settlements. We know that the mst really is committed to bettering the quality of life for the settlements [organized by] the movement.’’

180 Chapter Six

Planting the Projects: From Banana to Sugarcane Despite the political and logistical work done to prepare the settlers for planting bananas and raising cattle, the new production and investment projects were problematic from the start. The settlers themselves were not consulted about the formulation of the production projects. Logistical and cultural difficulties encouraged a centralized decision-making process. It was difficult to physically reach all of the settlers and even harder to envision them agreeing on particular crops (other than sugarcane), and, at the same time, it was widely believed that plantation workers lacked the experience to establish their own production agendas on the model of the small family farm. As Candida, the president of an mst settlement fifteen kilometers away from Flora said when I asked her in February 2003 if the settlers had been consulted about the investment project, ‘‘No, the boys [from the movement] said: ‘We’re going to do a project.’ [And we said] ‘OK.’ [And they said] ‘We are going to do a project to plant coconut trees and we are going to do a project with cows.’ And so other people said, ‘I don’t want cows, I want sheep.’ Every person wanted a different [thing], and afterward they said to us that it was going to be coconuts and cows, and that was it [pronto].’’ In fact, the production projects were predicated on removing the settlers from the one area in which they could reasonably claim agricultural expertise—sugarcane. Movement leaders insisted that the settlers not plant sugarcane on their land; bananas were to be planted in the riverbottom land that had been the privileged space of sugarcane. The crop was associated with a historical legacy of inequality, labor exploitation, and environmental damage, and mst leaders argued that if the rural workers were to become small family farmers and mst members, they would have to leave sugarcane behind. Movement leaders incorporated lessons into settlement meetings describing the long, dark history of sugarcane. Cultural performance, or the mística, was used to explain the value of planting alternative crops. Movement activists argued that the sugarcane already on the settlers’ land, left over from the days of the former plantation, ought to be pulled up to make room for the new crops. Having sugarcane on your land was seen as both an act of defiance and a lack of political consciousness. As one rural leader, Dona Nica, said, ‘‘We debated this quite a lot, and it is our settlements that are rebellious, who do not

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 181 obey, who do not follow our instructions, they are the ones that plant sugarcane. Because they have sugarcane in their heads, [they think] that sugarcane is the future, that sugarcane makes money, although in reality we know that sugarcane is a monoculture, and in reality sugarcane doesn’t have a future, it’s just a waste, just work, and there are other crops around here that we could plant.’’ In this way, production decisions became a political battlefield. mst leaders argued that planting bananas and subsistence crops signified a higher political consciousness, and the settlers came to equate planting sugarcane with going against the movement’s wishes. The settlement president quoted earlier said, ‘‘We used to plant sugarcane here [because that’s what did well]. But since the movement doesn’t want [us to plant it], it is a huge fight. I have sugarcane here in the front [of my house], but it’s a huge fight whenever [people from the movement] come. But I spent two years just losing [money], I lost [it all]—and then I said, I’m done. . . . — and so we planted sugarcane, but there has already been half a world of fighting over this cane here.’’ In arguing against sugarcane production, the mst leaders were echoing the advice of government officials. The government officials, most often incra employees, were not against sugarcane per se; they were primarily concerned that the settlers meet the parameters of the production projects once they were established. As Candida said, ‘‘One day recently the people from incra came, with people from the bank too. They came to do the survey to see if the cows would really be delivered. And so the guy asked: ‘And this sugarcane here [outside the house], what is it for?’ And I said: ‘I planted this cane because I lost the manioc I planted, so I put down some cane, before the cattle arrive.’ And so he said: ‘You know, you’re going to have cattle, and so you can’t have sugarcane.’ They are afraid because they know that cane pays the bank and garden crops don’t pay. So for this, they liberate money and put it in the hands of the farmer and tell him to plant garden crops because garden crops will never pay the bank. . . . They always want the farmer to be in debt to the bank.’’ The mst had a different reason for wanting the settlers to stop planting sugarcane but most of the settlers were unconvinced. ‘‘The people from the movement want us to plant garden crops, and so they don’t want us to plant cane. . . . I think that all of this means that when I leave [the settlement presidency] and someone else takes over, I think that the settlement will leave the movement.’’

182 Chapter Six By 2001, the economic crisis that began in the sugarcane region in the late 1980s had come to a (perhaps temporary) end. Three years after industry prices hit bottom, falling to six cents a pound (world market price) in 1999, they began to revive again.∂ After falling for six straight years, international prices increased sharply because of lowered production in India and Cuba. Continued deregulation of the industry allowed a greater percentage of production to be exported, and a drought in the productive fields of southern Brazil during the 2001 planting season increased the demand for production from the Northeast. There was also excited discussion of the possibility that the new president of Brazil, elected on October 17, 2002, would reinvigorate Proalcool, the fuel alcohol production incentive program that heavily subsidized sugarcane producers around the country from 1975 to 1989.∑ With the rise of sugarcane prices, and the tantalizing promise (and then realization) of renewed government support, the mills and sugar factories in the region began planting and processing sugarcane again.∏ The sugarcane factories in and around the town of Água Preta made it easy for the settlers to begin planting sugarcane.π Factory representatives visited the settlements, riding deep into the former plantations on fast little motorcycles and signing up prospective cane sellers even before they began planting. There were no producers too small. As one settler said, ‘‘[Before the crisis] it was more difficult to have an account with the factory because you had to have a certain amount of cane, you had to be a large-scale supplier. But today you can take one little truckload and go there [to the factory] and whether they have your information or not, you get there and take care of business.’’ The representatives filled out a card with the settlers’ information and set up an account for them. When it came time to harvest and process the cane, the factories sent trucks to the settlements and discounted the cost of transportation from the price paid for the sugar. By 2003, most of the settlers in Água Preta had covered some portion of their land with sugarcane. Sugarcane overtook many of the alternative crops that people had planted earlier: the banana plants and coconut trees were either gone or disappearing, and plans to build cattle fences and fish ponds were proceeding very slowly. Settlers who had sworn never to plant sugarcane again were working in the neighboring mills cutting sugarcane, as well as planting cane on their own land. As one settler said, during the final weeks of the harvest season, ‘‘At this moment, almost everyone is

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 183 working in one of the mills over there, in [a nearby mill called] Barra d’Ouro. They’re cutting cane, filling bags, doing everything. And then when it’s evening, they work on their own land.’’ By working with the land reform settlers, distillery owners and managers were cleverly (even if unintentionally) renegotiating land-labor relationships in the region to ensure what was seen as a regular supply of raw materials but was, in fact, a regular supply of cheap labor. Distillery owners did not have to pay these new workers (the settlers) any of the rights that had been won in previous decades, including regular weekly or biweekly salaries, vacation pay, yearly bonuses, and legal certification for membership in the rural trade union. Technically, the rural workers’ rights included the right to a small plot of land (approximately two hectares) if they resided on the plantation (as required under the Lei do Sitio [the Small Farm Law]), but the law was never actually implemented. In annual negotiations, the rural unions fought for the right to land for subsistence production, but this was very different from the struggle for agrarian reform (see chapter 4). And the distilleries had little to fear from labor unrest: the land reform settlers were ill placed to utilize the most important political tool of the 1980s, the annual strike.∫ Perhaps even more important, this new working force was spatially removed from the distilleries, which worked to distance labor from management even more efficiently than the hierarchical spatialization of occupational position on the former plantation. Distillery owners no longer had to provide the goods that convention had previously demanded of them, including housing, land, electricity, and clean water for their workers. These goods, seen alternately as ‘‘gifts’’ or ‘‘rights,’’ had been progressively dismantled since the 1950s but still existed in some form on many distillery and plantation properties (Sigaud 1979). Now, with the rural workers on land reform settlements, the state was responsible for the social reproduction of the workforce. The local (municipal), state, and national governments were all engaged in providing the settlers with access to land, electricity, passable roads, agricultural extension assistance, and even emergency food donations to help them weather lean periods. These state services, combined with the settlers’ tradition of work on the plantations, created nearly perfect workers: the settlers were skilled, having cut sugarcane for most of their working lives, and they were embedded in cultural systems that valued planting sugarcane over and above alternative crops. When the settlers worried about providing for them-

184 Chapter Six selves and their families, they turned to sugarcane, not trusting other crops to put sufficient food on their table. As settlement president Candida said, ‘‘There are so many [settlers], my God, who have land and—I don’t know why—they have land and they’re dying of hunger.’’ When asked why those settlers hadn’t planted anything on their land, she answered, ‘‘They’re tired, they have to leave the house early to cut cane so they have something to eat.’’ And it was clear from government documents that although agrarian reform was envisioned at the federal level as a means of producing small family farmers, at the state level agrarian reform was envisioned primarily (as it had been in the past) as a means of ‘‘rationalizing’’ or modernizing the sugarcane industry and only secondarily as promoting small family farming. In discussing the ‘‘Integrated Reform Program’’ for the northeastern sugarcane region, the strategic goals for combating the sugarcane crisis were outlined as including restructuring the organization of production in the region; supporting family agriculture; diversifying production ‘‘without undermining the supply of sugarcane’’; and strengthening the sugar-ethanol industrial park (Ministério Extraordinário da Política Fundiária 1998: 8–9). Family agriculture was to be supported so that it could serve ‘‘above all for the subsistence of the family in the interharvest period’’ (Buarque 1997: 9).Ω While the pledge to restructure production may be sincere, it is difficult for local state governments to implement significant change because unequal wealth distribution has created a conservative business class accustomed to market protection, government subsidies, and debt pardons. The entire economic and social structure of the plantation region has been built around these expectations (Lima and Silva 1995: 188). Even amid generalized crisis, few people suggest that sugarcane production be entirely abandoned. Instead, plans for diversification include agrarian reform as a means to occupy land that is inappropriate for sugar production; employ excess labor on a seasonable basis; and, at the same time, foster smallholder suppliers of cane for the large distilleries (Ministério Extraordinário da Política Fundiária 1998: 2). The government has also pledged to encourage the industry’s modernization through targeted programs that will ‘‘free’’ more labor for small-scale cane production and supply the large-scale distilleries. With the revival of sugarcane production in Água Preta, the mst was scarcely visible on the local settlements. The movement’s symbolic red

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 185 flag no longer hung at the entrance of Flora, and none of the settlers interviewed in 2003 still considered themselves part of the movement. According to the regional mst leader, movement membership in the sugarcane region of southern Pernambuco had entered into a ‘‘crisis,’’ dropping to one-third the level it had been in the late 1990s.∞≠ Many of the most active leaders had left the region as well, some returning to their families, others working in new areas for the mst, and still others waiting for the movement to begin functioning again in the sugarcane region. In what follows, I explain how the rural workers’ perceptions of land, which they held to be common sense, shaped their relationship with the movement. The most important aspects of this relationship can be understood through an analysis of the settlers’ attitudes toward production. As is clear from the above discussion, the movement had a difficult time convincing the settlers that they should not plant sugarcane. The hegemony of the sugarcane discourse was such that even as rural workers planted fruits and vegetables, they still maintained that sugarcane was the only truly viable crop. One worker described with delight all of the fruits and vegetables he was planting, proudly demonstrating each flowering tree, bush, and plant as we sat on the porch of his small house: ‘‘I planted all of this and it’s already ready for harvest. I have already made caju juice and there are even apples . . . although the tree doesn’t produce all that many apples, I have [tropical fruits], graviola, carambola, caju, and mango. The mangoes aren’t ready for harvest yet, but the caju is just about ready. I have oranges too—they’re not ready yet but they’re already looking good. Later on I am going to plant more. God willing, I will plant string beans over there below the stream.’’ After describing his fruits and vegetables, however, this same settler explained that he could not depend on these products for his subsistence or his livelihood: ‘‘The land here in this place only supports sugarcane. Sometimes you need to use fertilizer, but it is also good for sugarcane without fertilizer if you take care of it constantly. But for us to live off of garden crops here is to die of hunger [é pra morrer de fome].’’ The settlers throughout Água Preta argued that sugarcane was the only crop really suited to the region: only sugarcane had long enough roots to grow on the steep hillsides that characterized the topography in the southern region, and they spoke admiringly of sugarcane as a ‘‘good crop. . . . one that is exported all over the world, as sugar.’’ The particular nature of this

186 Chapter Six hegemonic narrative worked to justify its own contradictions: the simultaneous presence of lush sugarcane fields and immense poverty makes (common) sense in the region. The settlers’ resistance to the idea that they move from sugarcane to bananas went beyond a simple dependence on sugarcane, however; their responses were also situated within the particular natural and social construction of bananas themselves. Even though bananas are everywhere in the sugarcane region, growing wild on the side of roads and along waterways, many settlers did not have land that was appropriate for banana production. Banana plants are considered easy to grow, but they require careful attention when grown for regular fruit production. They do well in soil that is easily watered but loosely packed to allow drainage, and they need frequent applications of fertilizer, fungicide, and pesticide. The region’s topography, characterized by low, rolling hills, meant that much of the land in the settlements was on a slope or a hilltop, and only people who had access to good-quality land near streams could plant bananas. Without irrigation, settlers who could not easily access groundwater would lose their plants during the long dry season. When the settlement closest to the town of Água Preta—Flora—was created, all of the settlers were supposed to receive equivalent nine-hectare plots of land. But the mapping process was chaotic, and not all of the soon-to-be settlers were equally well placed to negotiate with government officials for their plot of land. Those rural workers who approached the incra officials in charge of the expropriation were told that any settler who had cleared and planted land before the settlement map was drawn up would be able to remain in that area. Those settlers who already had sitios or who possessed the time, extra family labor, skills, and capital to begin clearing land did so quickly. Thus, occupational and spatial hierarchies from the plantation period were retained: the former sitio owner had a plot of land near stream beds already planted with fruit trees; the former plantation renter (rendeiro) maintained his right to the ‘‘big house’’ because his wife and son received plots of land; and former plantation administrators were able to begin planting immediately. The resulting unequal distribution of land and water on Flora meant that only a few settlers had sufficient goodquality land to plant the number of banana trees required by the bank to fulfill the terms of the investment project. Many of the settlers accepted money for production even though they recognized that they would probably not be able to grow bananas: ‘‘Look,

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 187 the situation with the bananas is this. I wasted a lot of money with that banana [project]. Now, I planted it just to make the boys from the movement happy. I said, I am going to plant [this], but I am going to lose the money. This year, I harvested 170 tons of sugarcane. . . . If the distillery owners pay the proper price, God willing, I will keep planting cane and taking care of my little garden plants [lavourazinhas].’’ When the settlers accepted the government loan to plant bananas, they received money that was heavily subsidized, but they also tied themselves to a crop with which they had little experience. As plantation workers, they were rarely allowed to plant bananas. Even when the plantation owner allowed them a small plot for subsistence crops, they were only allowed to plant annual crops like manioc and corn because plantation owners were afraid that planting perennial crops with raizes (roots) could be used to prove a worker’s squatter rights to that land. The constitutional definition of direito de posse, or right of possession, allowed a person who was producing on land the possibility of a legal claim to the land, or revindicação de posse.∞∞ As one rural worker said of his former plantation boss, ‘‘This mill where we were working never gave anyone land to plant, no, never. Even the trees that the workers planted, the mill owner would knock them all down. They planted cane and threw the workers out. The mill didn’t want to give anything to the worker because they thought that the worker would take over the land.’’ On the plantations in Água Preta, workers were sometimes allowed to plant food crops, but bananas were rarely allowed, even when the land was not being used for sugarcane. One settler said, when asked if he had planted food crops while working for the former mill owner, ‘‘We were free to plant, he just didn’t want us to plant bananas. If a person planted bananas, the administrator would pull them up, so we had to plant them in secret.’’ Another settler summed up his experience in this way: ‘‘Not every mill would give the worker land to plant, on some you had to hide what you planted. And when they did give you land, they told you not to plant bananas. [They said,] ‘Plant a garden or staple crops that don’t last seven months—three months and that’s all.’ ’’ Because the settlers did not have experience with bananas and because the government did not follow through on its promise of sending extension agents to all of the settlement areas, the settlers planted the banana trees too close together, in tight-fitting rows without room for the roots to spread, and they lit fires to clear weeds from the ground cover. One

188 Chapter Six settler said, when asked whether any extension agents had been out to help instruct the settlers in growing crops, ‘‘To show me how to plant? No, not yet. They tell us to plant bananas and not to plant sugarcane, but [they haven’t come] to explain to us how to work on the land, not yet.’’ As a result of the difficulties the settlers experienced in carrying out the production plans outlined for them, they resorted to sugarcane when prices were high enough to offer the promise of an immediate cash return. They pulled up banana trees to plant sugarcane, made contracts with the local mills for delivery, and found work on neighboring plantations for seven reais a day.∞≤ Because sugarcane had been presented and come to be seen as antithetical to mst politics, when the settlers began planting sugarcane again, they left the movement—not because they necessarily wanted to, but because they believed that by planting cane they were de facto exiting from the movement.

Every Monkey Has Its Own Head: Scaling Up and Implementing Collectives Given the land and labor relationships of the sugarcane region, one might expect that production collectives would be more popular in Pernambuco than in southern Brazil. In Água Preta, the settlers had previously been part of a highly socialized form of production—plantation work. The settlers were accustomed to carrying out single, specialized tasks and working side by side with other laborers. The idea of collective production and ownership, however, has provoked extreme objections. Settlers have voiced their resistance directly through vehement protestations, and indirectly by pretending ignorance or confusion. Objections have been so extreme in the sugarcane region that the idea of forming a full-scale collective is now rarely discussed. mst leaders argue that the rural workers-turned-settlers in the Northeast lack ‘‘politicization,’’ but reasons for the low levels of participation can be found in the segmented gender division of labor, traditional dependence on wages for survival, and the historical hierarchy and individuality that characterized their plantation experience. The settlers in the Northeast have little basis for evaluating collective organization as a positive thing. They associate collective work groups with working alongside

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 189 their companions and following preestablished orders in the sugarcane fields. Participation in collectives in the Northeast was shaped by the distribution of tasks within the household. The division of labor was highly gendered and tasks were not usually interchangeable: the men were usually in charge of tending to the land while women took care of the house. The segmentation of family labor made it much more difficult for people in the Northeast to participate in mst activities than people in the South. If one person left the settlement for an out-of-town meeting or mobilization, their work did not necessarily get done. And if the man left his own land to work on the cooperative, there would be no one to work his land and ensure that his family got the food they needed to survive. As one male settler said: ‘‘I would like to [go to meetings away from the settlement], but I have never participated because my family is big and I have to work six days out of the week to take care of eight children.’’ With some exceptions, it would have been extremely difficult for a woman to travel very far from home in order to attend an mst mobilization or meeting. There are children (boys) who sometimes participate in movement activities, but families on the settlements in the Northeast tend to be smaller than in the South because children leave their parents earlier in the search for their own livelihood. Many who do stay at home are urged by their parents to get a good education so they can leave the countryside. Often it was the men who participated in the occupation of land, and the women had little understanding of, or allegiance to, the mst. Women were often reluctant to consider themselves as ‘‘landed.’’ Many women in Água Preta said they preferred to live in the town rather than in the countryside (something you rarely heard in Campos Novos), and there were even women settled on Flora who had not yet visited their family’s plot of land because it was so ‘‘odd’’ (esquisito) and ‘‘in the middle of nowhere’’ (no meio do mundo). In direct contrast to the southern settlers, many of the settlers in the Northeast did not consider land essential for social reproduction, or the maintenance of the family. Households had a ‘‘working’’ relationship with the land, rather than a ‘‘family’’ relationship. Parents argued that their children should not have to suffer as they did, ‘‘living by the hoe’’ (na enxada). When asked, older settlers on Flora said they did not know who would stay on the land after they died and dismissed the idea that children

190 Chapter Six should maintain their parent’s legacy on the land. One woman on the settlement, when asked whether her sons would stay on the land that she had won, answered: ‘‘I don’t think so. They might even, but I think that they won’t. They are studying. Filipo is studying computers. I don’t know if he is going to stay here, I think they’re too weak for this kind of work, you know.’’ Many settlers suggested that they were working hard in order to give their children the opportunity to find work in the town and not suffer as their parents had. For many settlers, it was not the idea of working with others that they disliked. It was the idea of working without receiving immediate compensation that was difficult to accept. As plantation workers, they had received wages every two weeks and this was the money they took to the weekend market to buy groceries, clothing, and other necessities. The settlers are not accustomed to relying on the land for subsistence, and the market continues to be an important part of their lives. On market day, when the vendors set up their colorful booths, children, men, and women meet to do their shopping and gossip about the past week—and the whole town lights up. In this context, collectives are hard to sell because they do not provide access to money. The settlers may have left the plantation behind, but they have not lost their desire for a weekly wage and a turn at the market. As an mst leader in the region said: ‘‘This is a region where the people are very used to working in production, with a salary and with certain tasks. And so today whoever works with the question of cooperatives here has to do this as well.’’ A settler on a nearby settlement described how plans had been put together to build a large fish pond that would be cared for by the whole settlement. The settlement had received funds from the government for the project, and construction had already begun on the land set aside for the ponds. The only problem was that no one had agreed to work with the fish. The settler suggested that no one would, unless offered money to do so. Another settler claimed that the fish pond would work if some people ran it and everyone else worked for them. The idea of dividing long-term returns between a group of people has little place in the settlers’ traditional understandings of community and compensation: ‘‘Right now, they are cutting down the forest, clearing the forest, and when they want everyone to go, everyone goes. . . . But when it is time to part with money, no one is going to want to.’’ In fact the settlers said that they would be happy to join the cooperative

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 191 if they were paid to do so. One settler believed that the collective would only work if the government gave them enough money to do their weekly shopping: ‘‘Because a person who works in the collective group is going to go . . . back to his own house and he won’t have anything to eat there? No. He has to go back knowing that he has something to eat and that when Saturday comes, he will have some change to do his shopping.’’ Another settler said that she would join the cooperative if it would save her money: ‘‘I don’t know what I think about the cooperative. . . . I am not against it—I think it’s good, because it isn’t always that we are with money and can pay someone to work, right?’’ The collective ideology was also prejudiced by the settlers’ experience with work as a very individual process. On the plantations, the workers planted sugarcane in work teams, side by side with their fellow workers. But the tasks they were assigned were not collective. Unlike a factory where workers are responsible for pieces of a larger project, such as putting together a car or packaging chicken, the plantation workers were assigned individual tasks that they were responsible for completing before they could go home. A local mst leader argued that a cooperative would have to mimic this sort of ‘‘piecework’’ formation, as well as providing a steady flow of money to the settlers, because the rituals surrounding work have to do with personal responsibility and group deviance. ‘‘In the cooperative, if you were to leave the people on their own, . . . say you have thirty men, for example, when they go to work, they arrive all full of the will to work, but after [they start to work], the conversations start, and the storytelling. There are people who begin to nap. They fall down right on top of their hoes. It’s absurd.’’ The method of plantation work rewarded individuality and made it difficult to interpret the mst’s idea of cooperative production in a positive way. As one settler said, ‘‘Every monkey should stick to his own cage,’’ or, in the words of another settler, ‘‘Every head is a world.’’ The persistence of extreme inequality on the settlements made the settlers wary of reproducing such relations within a collective setting— especially when they finally had the chance to be their own bosses. Plantation hierarchies remain firmly entrenched and do not lend themselves easily to creation of a broader community. Although the common workers lived in close proximity on the former plantation, mutual support was rarely mentioned as crucial for the reproduction of the family or the land. Becoming settlers has not changed this for most people. The sense of

192 Chapter Six community on the settlements is further weakened by the self-selection of mst members who had the weakest ties to their original communities and the strongest links to the sugarcane industry

Property and Politics Any discussion of the struggle for land has to be situated within a discussion of property. The two are not equivalent, of course, although they are often treated as such, and it is assumed that the struggle for agrarian reform can be located precisely along either a bourgeois path to capitalist development (through the creation of small private property owners) or a communitarian path to socialist development (through the rejection of property and embrace of collective resource use). Both the rejection and the acceptance of ‘‘property’’ in these discussions are problematic. They assume that the function of property follows its form, or, in other words, that the way in which property is held determines the broader social relations of production. They also assume that ideas about property change with the political institutions that govern property; so that people wear the concept of property like a coat, a coat that can be easily taken on and off for political purposes. In truth, of course, there is no such ‘‘thing’’ as property (Sayer 2004); the tendency to think of it as such is a predominantly Western habit and a reification of social relations (Verdeny 2003: 15). Property is better thought of as a norm, or a set of social relationships: one person’s property, however rights or claims are distributed and protected, is made possible by the others either agreeing (consenting) or being coerced into accepting. In different times and places, the concept of property has been applied to things (such as land), bodies, relations, space, and ideas. If we think about property as a thing to which one has ‘‘rights,’’ then property regimes range from open access to common to private. But if we think about property as a norm that enables the social construction of property rights, then property itself becomes an ‘‘ethnographic object’’ of inquiry (Verdery and Humphrey 2004: 2), one that is influenced by the rules of the game (the political-institutional structure), by culture, by custom, and by contingency. Deconstructing the concept of property as applied to land in Brazil is necessary for a better understanding of the personal and collective politics underlying the struggle for (and against) agrarian re-

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 193 form. In this context, property is best analyzed as a ‘‘bundle of norms’’: legal norms, judicial norms (which, in Brazil, are not easily read off of the legal norms), the mst’s norms as iterated in its political discourse, and normative understandings of property held by the different groups of Brazilians involved in agrarian reform. In his work on colonization of the Amazon, José de Souza Martins (1984) made a well-known distinction between terra de trabalho (land of work) and terra de negocio (land of business) that roughly parallels Marx’s concepts of use value and exchange value respectively. Martins argues that ‘‘it is terra de trabalho against terra de negocio. What unifies the aspirations and struggle of a southern colonist (colonó gaúcho), a squatter from Maranhão, and a Tapirapé Indian, is this obstinate resistance to the expansion of capitalism’s appropriation of land, even if each one, each social category, constructs their own conception of property, and his own regime of anti-capitalist property: peasant property, communitarian property and the squatter’s property.’’ Martins argued that class distinctions on the Amazonian frontier materialized in these dualistic metanotions of property: the small landless farmers who traveled to the region to make a living (whether from Rio Grande do Sul, Maranhão, or Pará) saw the land as a site of work and livelihood, while the wealthy landowners (often not farmers themselves) saw the ‘‘empty’’ frontier as a landscape that could be bounded and defined as private simply or primarily for the purposes of exchange. The notion of ‘‘terra de trabalho’’ is imbued with populist notions of equality (because physical inequalities that manifest themselves in differential products of labor are far smaller than inequalities in ‘‘purchasing power’’ in any market economy), sustainability (the land as alive, a geophysical extension of the laborer), and democracy. Terra de trabalho is the land of family and sustenance. The notion of ‘‘terra de negocio,’’ on the other hand, suggests that what matters in this conception is not the land at all, but money: land is an input, a factor of production. Terra de negocio belongs to the modern, rationalistic, world of finance-industrial capitalism, and to individuals rather than families. This dichotomous division of property, however appealing for its neat alliance with cold war ideological struggles (the liberal-bourgeois versus the socialist-communitarian), is insufficient for understanding the complexity of the struggle for land in Brazil today. In southern Brazil, both movement activists and large-scale commodity farmers articulate a theory of property rights that turns on trabalho—labor. They justify opposing

194 Chapter Six claims to land—often the same piece of land, in the case of occupations— through personal histories of working on ‘‘the Land’’: ‘‘Land’’ in this sense is an abstract way of life rather than a physical space. The farmers and mst settlers all moved frequently from place to place, often migrating in search of new land, so property and land were not synonymous. People justified property rights through normative visions of proper land use and distribution. The key difference between the two groups in southern Brazil was their construction of the self through property claims: the large farmers use notions of work to defend the institution of private property with rights guaranteed for individuals throughout the marketplace, while the mst settlers called on notions of work to defend subsistence rights throughout the community. Even as what could be called a ‘‘labor theory of property’’ in the tradition of John Locke (2002 [1698], see Wolford 2005) was dominant among people interviewed in the South, on the sugarcane plantations of northeastern Brazil, property norms have been shaped by a history of access to land as power. Land ‘‘ownership’’ in the sugarcane region was the means to wielding political, economic, and social power, to excluding others, and to creating the law. For the rural workers, their own labor had been considered someone else’s property even though they were active participants in the contract, with recourse (at least in theory) to the political system and to their own mobility if property norms regarding their labor were transgressed. As settlers and farmers of their ‘‘own land,’’ the rural workers demanded the same respect they had been forced to give its former owners. There are many different norms surrounding property, and they are all influenced by both labor and exchange, as well as class, identity, the law, and power relations. (E)valuating land claims/property rights is not as simple as the mst (as repository and constructor of alternative property rights) versus the large landholders (as oriented predominantly toward exchange rights). Property norms among settlers and mst leaders in the Northeast differ, and these variations have led inevitably to tension between the two groups. We can see how this plays out in one situation, when the mst tried to claim land on one of the most visible settlements situated alongside the road leading into the town of Água Preta. This struggle over land on the settlement would usher in a new relationship between the rural workers and the movement.

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 195 Struggles over Access to Land: The Settlers and the MST on Flora Movement leaders hoped to establish their regional headquarters in Flora’s old plantation stables, which stood at the entrance to the settlement’s main agrovila. This area of the settlement was the settlement ‘‘collective area,’’ which meant that it belonged to the group as a whole. Families that wanted to build their house in the area were allowed to, and relatives of the settlers were also allowed to approach the group and ask for living space. The community was expected to make decisions as a group about the division and use of the common space. In 1999, there were twenty-six families living in the agrovila. Some of them had decided to use their housing funds from the government to renovate old buildings in the area, and others had built new houses. Still others were living in the agrovila even though they had used the government funds to build new houses on their plot of land. The agrovila was situated within easy walking distance to the center of town and most of the area was within easy reach of electricity: the settlers could splice into the main lines running through the agrovila to the casa grande. The mst’s decision to turn the settlement stables into the movement’s regional headquarters proved to be a turning point in the movement’s relationship with the settlers. Before the mst leaders decided to take over the stables, the building was run-down and dark. The only animals housed there were two (sometimes more) old horses, and every evening the steps of the building filled with young boys who would wrestle noisily and call out to people passing by on the street. When the regional mst leaders decided in a meeting to use the building for its headquarters, they called the settlers together and asked them to sign an official ato (legal document) attesting to their willingness to have the movement build on the settlement grounds. The settlers signed, and the movement leaders brought in outside workers to work on the building. When the renovations were finished, all of the settlers agreed that the new building was very attractive and a considerable improvement over the stables. But as movement leaders prepared to move in, rumors began to spread about the implications of having the mst on land that both was theirs and was not theirs. The rumors fed on cultural assumptions about property and on an increasing sense of distrust between the settlers and the movement. So the settlers got together to demand the mst’s removal from the

196 Chapter Six stables. They sent a small group of settlers to the state incra offices in Recife, protesting that the movement had tricked them. They insisted that the movement should remain in the small house it used in the nearby town rather than occupying their land. At the bottom of the dispute were two elements of the settlers’ normative understanding of property: the belief that access to their own land was crucial to maintaining their independence and control; and the feeling that neither they nor the mst were the ones who could dictate how the land was used—ultimately, this was in the government’s hands. Even as the settlers in Água Preta argued with mst leaders over the place of sugarcane on their land, they jealously guarded their new identity as settlers because access to land signified a ‘‘place in the world.’’ Although plantation workers did not have the same sense of attachment to land that small farmers from Santa Catarina did, they possessed a social memory of the value of land, and most expressed gratitude for the opportunity to own their own. They were happy to be rid of the plantation boss, who had increasingly violated his obligations to the workers. Even as the rural workers’ celebrated their new independence, however, they followed traditional plantation norms in demanding control over the use of their land. For the settlers, the right to own land was embedded in the political and social relations of the former plantation: land was not just a means of production, it was a means of improving one’s personal political (and therefore economic) position. As landowners they had more status in the community and more stability in their own lives. Freed from the cativeiro (captivity) of the plantation, they were senhores (masters) of their own land, and on those nine hectares they did as they pleased (Sigaud 2008: 89). As one settler who had been born on a former plantation in Água Preta said, ‘‘In my opinion, things are better [now] because here [on the settlement] there isn’t anyone who orders you around. We do what we want and whatever you have on your land is yours. Now we plant what we want and no one sticks their nose in.’’ Access to land brought with it some certainty about the future, a certainty that had been denied to plantation workers whose most effective form of resistance was exit (or migration from mill to mill). As one worker said when I asked him whether planting cane on his own land was any different than working for the distillery: ‘‘Planting cane here is better because I am going to work for myself, to take care of myself [pra me manter]. I won’t be working for others, because the guy who works for

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 197 others is going to get yelled at, and he runs the risk of having his days of service cut short, or he’ll get beat up. The guy who works for others is called a slave. But the person working for himself doesn’t have anyone who bosses him around. He is the owner. . . . There is no slavery, and no one to be complaining about him.’’ The conceptualization of private property as a means of securing privacy eventually came into conflict with the movement’s conceptualization of property as a social good. For the mst, private property was intended to be the material basis for producing new social and economic relationships. In other words, property was not just the means of promoting the social good, it was itself a social good. This is why the movement calls all of its members Sem Terra (Landless) even when those who are already land reform settlers are, technically, com terra (literally, with land). The settlers began to worry that if the movement was able to claim such an attractive and highly visible space on the settlement, they would also have a claim over the settlers themselves. They worried that if the movement occupied such a nice house, in effect claiming land on the settlement, they would be able to act like plantation bosses: ‘‘Whenever they come, they will want to order us around.’’ They worried that having the movement activists on the settlement would mean other government officials would be around more often and this de facto surveillance would be an invasion of their privacy and, ultimately, their independence. As one settler said, ‘‘If they build this office, and we leave a wheelbarrow outside, or this or that [lying around], . . . then the guy from incra, or from the government, from the state, will be around and we won’t be able to leave things around outside.’’ Another settler, who was the treasurer at the time, said, ‘‘[The regional mst leader] used to come by the settlement a lot because the movement was building the office for their headquarters. They did this by force—they brought along someone carrying a gun and put him outside the building.’’ When I asked him if that could really be true, that the mst would bring in an armed guard to oversee the construction, he replied, ‘‘Yes. They tried to build it over there. It is dangerous to talk about something like this.’’ What most offended the settler was not that the mst would be able to use land on the settlement; it was common land and everyone recognized that the office building would be an improvement over the stables. The problem was that the settlers feared that the mst leaders would be able to encroach on their personal and private space if they occupied settlement

198 Chapter Six space. They associated control over space with control over the persons on or around the space, as has been the practice on the plantations. As the settler said: ‘‘It is unfair; they build their offices, and after that they would bring one hundred people, add another two hundred people, and they would all keep stealing things from us. The people from the movement, the outsiders [estrangeiros, also translated as foreigners, strangers] who wander all around the world—that’s what they do, they don’t do good things. There was a party here, and they spent eight days celebrating.’’ I asked him, ‘‘You mean the movement had a party?’’ The settler replied, ‘‘Yes. So they mess with things that belong to other people—get something from one person or the other—they don’t ask for anything. The guy came here in my house and said—I didn’t even know him—he knocked on my door, entered here and said: ‘I want your stereo to take to the party.’ This is not manners to ask people something. Who does he thinks he is? With authority as if he gave orders in my house, to enter my house and put things in my fridge—he went there and did this. I asked him: ‘Do you know me?’ ‘No.’ ‘Aren’t you too assured of yourself?’ [I said] Then he got angry at me. The party lasted eight days. I didn’t even go there.’’ I asked, ‘‘But who was he? Was it an activist who came here?’’ The settler replied, ‘‘Yes, it was. He wanted to give orders here in my house.’’ In addition to these concerns, the settlers were reluctant to allow the mst to build their headquarters on the settlement because they thought perhaps this violated the ‘‘rules of use’’ that governed their property. They deferred to the agency officials from incra, saying that the government now had final say over who could build on settlement property. This deferral was partly disingenuous: the settlers were able to make numerous decisions about their land without consulting with the government. But it was also a sign of their discomfort with the notion of ‘‘use rights,’’ and their belief that the government had ‘‘given’’ them the gift of land use, much as ‘‘good’’ plantation owners had done in the past. The rural workers did not want to violate the social contract established between the group and the doctors from incra. A settler who had supported the movement strongly in 1999 explained why he objected to the mst’s project: ‘‘The deal with the headquarters that the mst was building was the following. . . . They did that con-

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 199 struction work there but it was pretty much by force.’’ When I questioned him, what did he mean ‘‘by force,’’ he said, ‘‘Yes, it was by force, and I say that because we can’t do this sort of thing—go behind incra’s back [to build the stables]. incra is the federal government, can you do a thing like this?’’ I said, ‘‘I don’t know, I don’t understand the whole thing very well.’’ He responded: ‘‘But I do . . . we were put here by the [mst], but I can’t agree with having those headquarters here because we still don’t have title to the land here, we just have a contract of occupation. . . . They stopped the construction because we have to have a formal decision [about it], because we can only put a person there if incra says we can. Here I have my land and I can’t put any outsider to work on it, and we can’t just take a piece of land to build an office on it . . . , and so the settlement [association] and incra put a stop to it. For me, it was a bad business because we can only give what is ours to give, that settlement land there is community land. . . . And people from outside [the settlement] can’t just build there, can they? A guy from the movement came here and held a meeting—I was there at that time, but—we had to go to incra and negotiate to see if it was possible to do this. We have to get incra’s approval, you can’t just do things foolishly [à toa] without getting incra’s approval.’’ The fear that incra would find something wrong in the way the settlers were using the land was partly a product of the way that the government officials had established their own authority during the expropriation process. Government officials distrusted the rural workers, believing that their commitment to remaining on the land was weak. They strictly outlined the proper relationship between the settlers and their land. The settler just quoted explained how they knew this: ‘‘When the doctor from incra came here to deliver the title of possession to us, he said: ‘Look, for the next ten years, don’t sell [your land], don’t exchange it, don’t rent it out, don’t even put anyone to work on it, and if you spend ninety days off the land, someone else can already take over it.’ ’’ The settlement treasurer who had objected to the movement militant asking to borrow his stereo also justified his reluctance to see the mst occupy the stables by arguing that the settlers did not ‘‘own’’ the land, and so they could not determine how the collective property ought to be used. His suggestion that incra needed to be consulted was tied to his distrust of the mst: the government was given ultimate control over the property because incra officials made better patrons than the mst militants did.

200 Chapter Six When I said that it was a shame that the mst was not going to occupy the stables, he replied: ‘‘I don’t think it is fair to put an organization in here that is not helping us with anything. The mst is not benefiting us in anything. We are not going to give the movement a plot of land with appreciation and good will—since we don’t have anything here to give, because this still belongs to incra, this still belongs to the federal government.’’ Movement leaders were confused by the settlers’ decision to turn to the government behind their backs. They insisted that the settlers ‘‘did not want to improve their position in life,’’ but the decision to force the movement off the settlement made sense in the context of the settlers’ belief that private property should protect their privacy rather than be the stepping stone to a ‘‘new society.’’ For the settlers, access to land improved the social good but was not itself a social good. They had worked and lived for years on sugarcane plantations where their personal space was circumscribed by the plantation owner’s demands. Now, as settlers, they drew the line between public and private at the edge of their property.

Struggles over Politics: Plantation Legacies and Leadership on Flora Access to land in the sugarcane region, as we see, is embedded in a historically understood set of political relationships and rights. Before becoming settlers, land ownership was not an isolated good, or a right in and of itself; rather, access to land on the plantations was embedded in a broader set of workers’ direitos (rights). Rural workers earned legal protection for their rights only in 1963 when labor legislation was extended into the countryside. After 1963, the relationship between plantation owner and worker became more formal, although both were still bound by notions of honor, or the social obligation to be a ‘‘good worker’’ and a ‘‘good boss.’’ This was, in James Scott’s (1985) words, a ‘‘reciprocal manipulation of the symbols of euphemization’’ (309), or, more concretely, ‘‘to be generous was a value, and the patrons’ prestige was measured by outward signs of his magnanimity’’ (Sigaud 2004: 135).∞≥ Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the rural unions came to play an increasingly visible role as both the legal protectors of the rural workers and as the moral or social providers of the assistance that plantation owners had formerly provided, including transportation to the weekly

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 201 markets if the mill was far from town, transportation for emergency reasons, access to medical care, and occasional monetary or subsistence support (Pereira 1997).∞∂ But in the late 1980s, with the crisis of the sugarcane industry, the rural unions began to lose membership (and spirit). As plantation owners went into debt, the basis of the moralized working economy shifted and the expectations of plantation owners were significantly lowered. Increasingly, rural workers had to fight simply to be paid on time and in full. As plantations were turned into settlements, it was the mst that stepped into the rural unions’ shoes (Rosa 2003). When the plantation workers in Água Preta became land reform settlers in the late 1990s, many of them joined the mst because the movement had become an important political intermediary between the settlers, the local mayor, and state agrarian reform officials. One of the local mst leaders from 1997 to 2001 was the agronomist I have quoted before, named Antônio. Antônio had grown up in Água Preta, but was working in Minas Gerais when he was tapped for his job by the mayor. He returned to the sugarcane region and began to work as an extension agent for the state and as an mst activist for the movement. He was very skillful politically and was able to use his friendship with the mayor to secure resources for the settlers. Under his guidance, membership in the mst provided many of the same benefits as the rural unions or plantation owner used to: medicines, an occasional cesta basica (food basket), money for transportation, and access to the mayor’s ear. In return, settlers brought the mst leaders gifts such as bottles of rum or a handful of fresh manioc. One longtime movement activist in the region remembered the alliance with the mayor fondly: ‘‘[At that time,] we never needed to go to Recife for a mobilization, for transportation, or even for food. [The mayor] always went to meetings, to give speeches, he participated in everything. . . . Whenever settlers affiliated with mst needed the mayor’s office, the doors were open.’’ But in 2001, Antônio began spending more time away from the settlements. He worked hard on the mayor’s reelection campaign, visiting all of the local settlements and advocating for the mayor under the banner of the mst. When the mayor easily won reelection in 2001, he left the movement to begin working as the mayor’s right-hand man. At the same time as this leader left the movement, there was a more general shift in leadership. A new regional leader, Eduardo, was brought in and a new

202 Chapter Six local-level leader, Dona Nica, was appointed to head the ‘‘microregion,’’ which included the municipalities of Água Preta, Palmares, and Joaquim Nabuco. The two leaders represented contradictory traditions in their leadership style, and neither was able to effectively mobilize the settlers. Eduardo, the new regional leader, was a young man, enthusiastic and idealistic. He was committed to the movement and looked to the national leaders of the mst to provide guidelines for his actions in the sugarcane region. Eduardo took what he called a ‘‘liberalist’’ perspective, arguing that mst activists ought to move around regularly because if they didn’t they would ‘‘lose capacity,’’ becoming too familiar with local norms and customs to be able to objectively understand the organization’s problems or failures. Eduardo tried to teach the rural workers a new ‘‘way of doing politics.’’ He wanted the settlers to leave behind the paternalistic ‘‘relational politics’’ of the plantation and subscribe to what he presented as the universal rights of every Brazilian citizen: the right to free political expression and a safe, sustainable livelihood. He argued that past leaders of the region had become mired in plantation politics and that people had begun to confuse movement leaders with patrons.∞∑ The old leaders were criticized for ‘‘always dominating [the discussion] and acting like one of the old plantation bosses [ porque o camarada é paizão].’’ But the settlers’ understanding of their rights was embedded in the assistance orientation of the plantation rather than in universalistic notions of ‘‘citizenship’’ or human rights. And so, unlike the agronomist who had been perceived as a powerful leader, Eduardo was seen as politically incompetent. People argued that he was inconsiderate because he did not provide the same sort of resources the settlers had come to expect from the movement. The new leader was of course in a difficult position because the federal government was withdrawing funds for agrarian reform and there was considerably less money available. But at the same time, Eduardo violated local political norms by supporting an mst candidate for state deputy in the local 2002 elections rather than the mayor’s son, who was also running. Although Eduardo and other mst leaders argued that the settlers had the right—and even the obligation—to vote their conscience, the decision not to support the mayor’s son was criticized because, as one settler said, ‘‘After this last election, [our support] has diminished.’’ The settlers’ relationship with the mayor became problematic because they challenged his right to establish the political agenda.

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 203 At the other end of the leadership spectrum, the new ‘‘micro’’ leader (as she was called), Dona Nica, conducted herself very much like an old-style plantation boss. She came from a relatively wealthy family in Água Preta and had a nice house in town. She was trained as a nurse and first became acquainted with the movement through her medical position. When the mst’s state leadership asked Dona Nica to take over control of the micro, she accepted, saying that her true solidarity was with the Sem Terra and she would ‘‘help the miserable to rise up.’’ She attempted to lead the settlers in the tradition of the plantation boss: she was inclined to ‘‘mandar’’ (order people around) and hated to attend meetings. But she led the settlers without having proven that she was an ‘‘honorable’’ leader and without providing the resources that had been an integral part of the plantation moral economy. Without the means to back up her claim to authority on the settlement, Dona Nica was widely distrusted by the settlers. As one rural worker said, explaining to me how the mst had let its constituency down by bringing in these two new leaders who were not able to provide the necessary strategic leadership: ‘‘With [the former mst leader in the sugarcane region], everything worked differently. At times we needed some medicine and we always went to look for it in other settlements. We always had medicine, we always had a car, everything happened in a different way. Now with [this new leader], there’s just his car and [the other leader’s] motorcycle.’’ When I asked if Dona Nica came there to help, he replied, ‘‘No, she just comes to talk. She’s the mst coordinator here. There are some people who need things, they need a food basket, a bit of medicine, and so, whether you think it’s good or bad, you have to go and ask the mayor. Because the mst won’t take care of these things now! [Dona Nica] has never done anything. By the end of the winter there were three people in the settlement going through a terrible crisis. . . . They didn’t have the means to survive, and so they came looking for me, and I went into the mayor’s office and I talked to [a young woman there] and I got together three food baskets. But the movement . . . well, I talked to [the two mst leaders] and I told them how it was with these people (who were going through a crisis) but they didn’t do anything for them. And that’s why we want to organize ourselves, call a meeting and get out of the movement.’’ I expressed my surprise and said, ‘‘When I was here before the movement was so strong.’’

204 Chapter Six ‘‘Yes,’’ said the settler, ‘‘it was, when you were here before, no one needed food. There was one time when we had more than two hundred food baskets!∞∏ And so if anyone needed anything, we would take out some food and give it to them. [The leader at that time] said: ‘If you need anything, you just have to ask. . . .’ In those days there was more incentive [to be part of the movement]. Now there is no incentive.’’ I interviewed Dona Nica on February 14, 2003. She had joined the movement’s regional leadership only a few months before. Four years earlier, when I had first visited Água Preta, Dona Nica had been working in public health, employed by the town. It was somewhat of a shock to see her now as an mst leader. In our interview, she employed the paternalistic imagery of the plantation elite to describe and analyze the settlers. She argued that the settlers were abused, they were victims, they didn’t understand the subjective condition of their own exploitation. Dona Nica had worked as a nurse’s aide, dedicating ‘‘all [her] life to public health.’’ She visited an mst encampment ‘‘out of curiosity,’’ and it was there that she saw, ‘‘the routine of living precariously. Those miserable people were just waiting, with all their anguish, for someone to help, for someone to stop by, for someone to teach them or instruct them. There was such a concentration of misery, hunger and violence.’’ It was this visit to the encampment that inspired Dona Nica to become a leader: ‘‘I realized that those people needed someone. They needed volunteers, they needed someone who would stop by often, someone who would be with them, someone who would give them some practical life instructions. They needed someone who could give them the ability to be more discerning; someone who could tell them that they were there living something wrong. They thought it was only for the land that they were there, that their world was reduced to that. Their world included violence, hunger, misery—they were always fighting in the camps. All of that bothered me. There was a high level of disease too and so I, as a nurse’s aide working in public health, I began to visit more often. I started to frequent the camps and to visit them voluntarily.’’ Visiting the encampments, Dona Nica came to feel as if they were all part of the same family. Other people didn’t visit the encampments because they held themselves aloof from the people in the camps: ‘‘They are prejudiced. We—today I refer to ‘we,’ I don’t refer to ‘they,’ I refer to ‘we’ because I am part of them. I am their family. I feel comfortable among them. I started to notice that the group I used to hang out with, they were

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 205 the elite group, they were doctors, directors, famous people . . . and the medical courses I took were all at the finest hotels. I had a very good salary. But then I began to perceive the world differently. Geez! We should be equal. Brazil needs more equality. If I have a salary and I have good earnings, how can these poor people live? They starve and all of that. I got attached to them and when I left work at the end of the day, I started going straight to the encampment. I spent the afternoon explaining things to them, having meetings, [telling them how they should handle] their leftovers because when they finished eating they threw [the food] away anywhere. Then the rats would come, cockroaches, and rodents too. Everything was contaminated. They finished eating whatever meal they could get, took the plates, and those pans—the little they had—they threw them all into their shacks. Then a hen, or a dog would go there, and insects too. So, I was trying to change their habits with explanation, trying to correct them a little, [change] the kind of life they had. I succeeded in part and it made me feel very close to them.’’ So, when the encampment grew, the leadership collective nominated Dona Nica as the coordinator of the health department in the camp. As she worked in this position, she said she had more contact with the movement and began to become even more ‘‘attached.’’ ‘‘I stayed in the coordination of the encampment, but I started to visit more often. I got curious and I started visiting other encampments. I used to leave here to go to Tamandaré, and over there I visited the camps I saw as I traveled around. If there was a camp on the side of the road, I stopped, I identified myself, and I went to talk to them. And the leaders of the movement noticed that. I acquired my knowledge by attending courses of the movement. I went to the courses in Normandia [the movement’s headquarters building in the interior city of Caruaru, Pernambuco]. I attended a public health course in [the city of Moreno, near Recife], in the Serraria settlement. By then I mingled with the people of the movement, acquiring more knowledge, and I started to leave the world I belonged to and started entering completely into their world. I fell in love, and today I can say I have a great passion in my life and it is the mst. After that I couldn’t work my shifts, I had no time left to do that! So I quit a job and kept two jobs. Time passed by, and I was offered the position of working in the health program of the whole micro. . . . Ten months later, they said: you are not going to coordinate health in the micro any more, you are going to [move up] and be part of the health program for the regional area.’’

206 Chapter Six When she began this work, Dona Nica’s family had trouble with all the changes that were being made in her life: ‘‘They agreed with the decisions I make, because I am on my own. I always say, ‘I am of age, I know what I want.’ It is hard because they couldn’t understand. They understood a different world from mine. We argued a lot about that. They claimed it wasn’t a way of life, that I was leaving my life. They said that I was leaving everything behind to follow the mst, that I would have no future with no financial profits because the movement doesn’t support you, there are no monthly payments, it is a voluntary work, done out of love, . . . There were always quarrels, there still are.’’ But Dona Nica continued working with the mst. ‘‘And then [the other leader in the area] left the micro and there was a need for someone who could take care of Água Preta. So the leaders decided that it should be. . . . . It wasn’t my area of expertise, and I resisted—I said, ‘No, I am not going because it is not my area, I am from public health. No!’ But a person who belongs to the movement must have discipline and [be prepared] for everything. Today you could be working in health, and tomorrow you are working in the sugar mills. A person who works with the mst has to be as political as possible, that’s what we are doing. The movement covers everything. So, I stepped down from where I was, I left the regional health program and I came to the micro. This is . . . where I am until now. . . . Where the movement is, I am the movement. It doesn’t matter if I am in Pernambuco even—we are the movement. This was my history in the movement: I entered it for love of the cause, and I am in it for love of the cause. I really like the movement. We have our problems, but we also are successful. What doesn’t have its ups and downs? . . . I left my jobs, and today I don’t have work. I am the movement, I am landless and I am proud to say that. Landlessness is life, so to be alive I live as a landless person. ‘‘I like working with people. There is a significant difference in working with the rich and in working with a person who needs things, with the masses, with the needy. You feel comfortable—they are honest, they respect you more. I always say that the elite classes are somewhat fake: they smile at you and it is a fake smile. Our masses, our bases, they are honest. When they feel something they look at you, [and you can see they are saying] ‘I am feeling it—it is true.’ When they smile at you it is a sincere smile, it is a fond smile, it is a smile of necessity. They need support, and they make you feel welcome. So I feel very well among them. If I leave here today I am not out of work. I can go to Tamandaré where I have a very

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 207 good circle of friends with other micros. I go to other settlements, I have dialogue with the people—I know almost everything. . . . So there is a circle. At the meetings, we get together with everybody. There is affection. When we get there we see those children suffering—those women, you can see their poverty in their faces. That needy look is stamped on their faces. They are impoverished people. Hunger and suffering are imprinted in their faces. I hope we change this country, even though we can’t do it in our time, but to have a better country, a fairest Brazil with more equality to our children, to our grandchildren, because today is very difficult. Inequality is large; individualism is also large; each of us only thinks about ourselves; they don’t think about the families that are suffering, the families that are landless.’’ Dona Nica said she used to be prejudiced and could not see the movement for what it was: ‘‘I used to see the movement as people excluded from society—and in fact they are, but they are people. I thought the people who lived in the encampments were people just like those who were living in the favelas. I thought they were there because they didn’t have a place to live, because they didn’t have support. They were people who wanted something—they lived there and isolated themselves from life. It was the image I had of the landless. So I started to spend time with them, going there to fetch roots, seeing their necessities, and the reality became clear to me. The landless are people. They are human beings. Landless people are life, they are respectable people. They need love, affection, dignity, like any other citizen. Today . . . I fight against the distorted image of the landless people, against people who are prejudiced, who humiliate the landless and believe that they are vandals, that they don’t want to do anything seriously, that they are lazy people who steal because they don’t have the courage to work. I want people to erase these images out of their minds. People should visit the settlements, and the encampments, in order to see what a landless person is . . . in order to feel their needs. ‘‘If there is agrarian reform, things will start to change; because people will leave the roads. They will leave the side of the roads where they are, on the asphalt. They will leave the shacks where they are in the camps. They will start to have their own lands. They will start to work and plant, harvest, have a full table. . . . The women will also work—they will have their own dignity and help their husbands. They won’t need to wake up at four o’clock in the morning, grab a scythe, and cut cane in secret when

208 Chapter Six they don’t have the right to say they are sem terra. So they will start to work on their own land, we hope. The land is the first step. It doesn’t resolve everything, but it is a great step. Then the government credit arrives, and we can have everything here. We can change this country.’’ In order to change the country, Dona Nica argued, the settlers had to learn to plant on their own land and to stop planting sugarcane. ‘‘We are trying to bring [other crops] to these rebellious settlements, to these rebellious camps, that keep planting cane . . . but bring what? I usually say that we need to bring [information], to reeducate, to talk, bring methods and new ways of doing things to the meetings. We need to explain to them that cane is not the way out. Cane is a crop for a large plantation, for the distillery owner, for the plantation owners. There are other products like manioc, like corn, cocoa, coffee, other crops that can supply them with whatever but they keep in their minds that cane is their salvation. We have better things; things that give a better profit, a better income; fish farms or poultry breeding. What do we need for that to work? We need the government to give us the credit and to send technicians who can work with these people. Because these people have it in their minds that cane is the only thing. They maintain a tradition, they lived their entire lives cutting cane, planting cane. They don’t know anything else. They don’t know that over there, they lived for cane. So today since they own a piece of land, they think they will plant cane. Many we could recover, reeducate, and show them: ‘Cane is not the way. Cane is a waste of time. You plant cane and you’re going to lose money; it is better to watch out.’ But this is only the beginning, it will demand a lot of time from us; we’re going to have to reeducate them a lot, to elaborate the cooperatives, the associations, and show the reality that monoculture is—it is not the solution. It is hard.’’ Dona Nica argued that the way to make people understand that they couldn’t work in sugarcane was through the projects. If the settlers had to produce something other than sugarcane, they would learn to appreciate other crops. She explained how this reeducation would work: ‘‘So through this, through this agreement they did with an agricultural ngo and some settlements, they brought us graphics and tried to reeducate the areas. They went to meetings, talking to the monitors, the professors, the students who attend technical schools in Bananeiras. . . . So we accomplished a lot in these meetings. We got people in [another settlement], even the

Producing for Market, State, and Movement 209 ones who had pulled out the cane because it was old and there was only the land, and his trophy was the new cane; even those people pulled out the cane to plant grass for cattle, so they would get their credit. They are going to receive their credit and with this ‘project’ they are going to breed cattle, eight cows will arrive for each settler. This means things are changing, people are becoming aware that cane isn’t everything. Before that no one mentioned the topic because everyone became nervous about it. They didn’t want the project, they didn’t think that they should leave the cane. And we have more difficulty on Flora, do you know why? Because people don’t have the stimulus or the curiosity to know how important the land is.’’ Dona Nica argued that the people who knew the value of land were the ones who had suffered for it, the ones who ‘‘come from the misery of everyday. That person knows the value of the land, he knows what he suffered to get there.’’ The others, presumably the former residents, did not value their land because they had ‘‘purchased’’ it and they still had the ‘‘plantation spirit. They think: ‘I am going to plant cane because cane is the crop that will bring money.’ So this kind of person is difficult to work with.’’ Dona Nica argued that she was just like any of the Sem Terra, and it was this empathy that would allow her to organize the settlements: ‘‘Is a leader better than anyone else? No. A director has more tasks, more responsibility, but he is as the same as that man under that humble shack. . . . At least in relation to myself, I make sure this is how it is. I have never asked them to treat me otherwise. Because I don’t show off and I will never do that. I would never want them to notice that I am better than they are, because I am not—I am just like them. So I always say in my meetings that I want you to respect me, have respect for me, the same way I have respect for you all.’’ The effect that these leadership changes had on the settlers’ experience of membership in the mst should not be understood simply as isolated cases of particular leaders. The conflictual relationship between the settlers and the mst leaders highlights the personal nature of politics and the importance (and context) of cultural politics in framing the struggle for social change. The settlers had been able to work with the mst leaders who worked in the region from 1997 to 2001 because their modes of leadership made sense to them. These leaders knew how to play the local political game even as they introduced new aspects of collective organiza-

210 Chapter Six tion, such as the demonstration they organized on that unusually warm evening in September 1999. When the leadership changed abruptly in 2001, the settlers were confronted with leaders they did not understand and did not like. Unaware that all members of the mst are theoretically equal, the settlers utilized a strategy that had been common on the plantations when a conflict with the owner occurred: they left.

 Conclusion

Over the past fifteen years, as I have been following the mst in Santa Catarina and in Pernambuco, something extraordinary has happened. After a nearly forty-year hiatus, land reform—as an economic and social policy of development—is back on the political and economic agenda around the world. These reforms are not always progressive in the traditional sense, but countries from Brazil to Hungary are reconfiguring rural land tenure structures in an attempt to address a variety of issues such as production bottlenecks, unequal land ownership, rural poverty, and more: in Latin America, the return to democracy in the 1980s led to the increased demand for social justice and access to land; in South Africa, the end of apartheid in the mid-1990s brought together calls for land rights as a key element of citizenship in the new ‘‘rainbow nation’’; in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the end of state-led socialism turned on the restitution and redistribution of property held in state farms and collectives; and finally, in Mexico, what one could call the ‘‘end of populism’’ led to a dramatic rethinking of the relationship between land titles and social distribution. At the last United Nations World Forum on Agrarian Reform, held in Valencia, Spain, in 2004, there were over sixty countries represented. In all of these countries, one has emerged as the acknowledged leader: Brazil. The struggle for land in Brazil has ignited strong passions for and against state-led distribution, but by the late 1990s there was arguably a consensus. At least in theory, a majority of people across the country supported agrarian reform (although many objected very strongly to having their own land expropriated). During interviews on the subject, large farmers, small farmers, plantation owners, sugarcane factory operators, landless people, members of the urban middle class, and politicians all supported the idea that the vast levels of inequality in Brazil might be addressed through a more equitable distribution of land (Wolford 2007; see also Ondetti 2006 and Pereira 2007).∞

212 Conclusion Table 12. Family Beneficiaries of Agrarian Reform, by Period and Region, 1964–2002 Region North Northeast Center West Southeast South Total

1964–1994 135,138 41,444 26,196 7,914 7,842 218,534

(61.8%) (19.0%) (12.0%) (3.6%) (3.6%) (100%)

1995–Sept. 2002 219,087 191,319 105,549 29,083 34,695 579,733

(37.8%) (33.0%) (18.2%) (5.0%) (6.0%) (100%)

Note: Excludes beneficiaries of the Land Bank and Land Credit and Poverty Reduction programs. Source: Deere and Medeiros 2005: 33.

And yet, for all the visibility that Brazil’s rural social movements have achieved, and the widespread agreement that reform is necessary in the face of high demand for land and the seeming availability of unproductive properties, agrarian reform has had a complicated and violent record in Brazil. Until the 1990s, most of the land distributed was in the Amazon region, where the military government established colonization projects (table 12). In the second half of the 1990s there was a considerable increase in land settlement, motivated in large part by two very visible massacres that occurred in 1995 and 1996 in the northern Amazon region (Corumbiara, Rondônia and El Dorado de Carajás, Pará; see table 12). The second of the two massacres was caught on tape and almost immediately became an international scandal. In response to significant pressure, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso appointed a longtime aide, Francisco Graziano Neto, to head incra. That same year (1996), Cardoso created a new ministry for agrarian reform but it was not until 1997 that he made significant resources available for both distribution and settlement. At this time the ministry was renamed, becoming the Ministry of Agrarian Development (Deere and Medeiros 2005). Even as he used state powers to expropriate land and settle families, Cardoso was constructing a new strategy for rural development under the characteristically ambitious title of the New Rural World (O Novo Mundo Rural). In general, the New Rural World was a move toward what Leonilde Medeiros calls a ‘‘new institutionality’’ promoting decentralization, privatization, and the market (Medeiros 2006). The first elements of the

Conclusion 213 Table 13. Annual Budgets for the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, 1997–2005

Year

Budget (billion reais)

Increase in Budget over Previous Year (%)

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

2.633 2.221 1.449 1.399 1.335 1.406 1.426 2.425 3.526

+68.78 –15.67 –34.76 –3.44 –5.10 +4.26 +1.4 +70.05 +41.0

Source: Budgets (Dotação Orçamentária) issued by the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (incra), Relatorio Financeiro/Contábil 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006.

plan were the National Program of Family Agriculture (Programa Nacional de Agricultura Familiar, Pronaf ) and the Land Bank (Fundo de Terras e da Reforma Agrária) for market-led agrarian reform. Although Cardoso said publicly that the New Rural World was intended to rationalize rural development at a general level and was not intended to conflict with the state-led process of land distribution, the program coincided with diminishing resources for incra (table 13) as well as a new decree in 1998 that effectively criminalized landless social mobilization. Decree number 1,245 made any property occupied by social movement activists ineligible for expropriation for a period of two years. When Cardoso left office in 2002, he could justifiably claim—and did claim—that agrarian reform was one of his greatest achievements (personal communication, April 2007, Chapel Hill, North Carolina). Social movement activists and political observers largely disagreed, however. The mst coordinated widespread mobilizations against Cardoso, denouncing his embrace of neoliberal economic policies and his move toward marketled agrarian reform. There was considerable anticipation that his successor, the left-wing icon Luis Inácio ‘‘Lula’’ da Silva, would improve the situation for agrarian reform. When Lula was elected into office in 2002, he walked into a difficult situation. Some people hoped that Lula would carry out a ‘‘massive’’ land distribution project with the potential to transform land tenure relations

214 Conclusion in the country, while other people feared that he would. At the same time, whatever Lula could do was circumscribed by the political system: the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, pt) only controlled one-fifth of the 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies (the Lower House), and Lula was forced to govern through a multiparty coalition (Hunter and Powers 2005: 133) that included the wealthy businessman José Alencar as his vice president. Perhaps more dauntingly, Lula inherited what he termed an ‘‘agrarian debt’’ from his predecessor. Land settlements around the country were failing due to a lack of infrastructure and credit, and the federal agency in charge of reform (incra) was ‘‘in disarray, like the Brazilian university system’’ (desmontado, assim como a universidade brasileira).≤ Given this political situation—with people arrayed for and against agrarian reform and Lula squeezed in by political alliances—Lula found it difficult to please anyone. There was a brief ‘‘honeymoon’’ (lua de mel) between Lula and the mst in the early days of 2003, but the mst leader, João Pedro Stedile, soon turned to criticizing Lula’s efforts. The language of political debate is more respectful between Lula and the mst than it was with Cardoso, but social movement leaders say they are disappointed because they had hoped Lula would enact a transformative agrarian reform and this has not happened (Stedile 2007). At the same time, Lula has been criticized by the rural wing of Congress for being too friendly with the social movements, wearing the mst’s cap, receiving movement leaders and activists in the Planalto, and calling them his friends. How then to evaluate Lula’s record?

The Importance of Context: The Changing Balance of Forces from Cardoso to Lula It is important to note that the political conjuncture of Lula’s two administrations have been considerably less favorable for agrarian reform than it was during Cardoso’s two administrations. When Cardoso was president, there was widespread international pressure for land distribution; the price of land was extremely low, with less than 5 percent annual inflation, because of the Plano Real; agribusiness was in a slump, particularly sugarcane in the Northeast and South of the country; and social movements such as the mst were extremely well organized and focused directly on the land question.

Conclusion 215 During Lula’s first administration, all of those things changed. The intense international pressure that followed the two massacres during Cardoso’s first term never regained its original momentum during this time (2002–2006). There was still international support for reform, but it was increasingly channeled through multimovement coalitions or transnational peasant networks, and these were more easily ignored than, for example, the pope (who met with Cardoso and pushed for land distribution in 1996; see Ondetti 2006: 73). In fact, Lula came under much greater pressure from the international financial and business community, which expressed its concern that Lula might prejudice international agribusiness interests by supporting the landless movements and conducting agrarian reform.≥ At the same time, the price of land rose steadily over the duration of Lula’s first administration to record high levels throughout the country (Deere and Medeiros 2005). The higher cost of land implies greater settlement costs per family and also suggests that competition over land is higher. In 1998, incra personnel in Santa Catarina told me that landowners called regularly, asking if they could sell their land to the state for the purposes of agrarian reform, but increased competition over land makes this much less likely. The price of land rose in part because agribusiness throughout the country rebounded: the sugarcane industry revived both because of increasing world market prices dating back to 2001 and by more recent efforts to promote ethanol production; and the soy/cotton complexes expanded both financially and geographically, pushing their way more aggressively into the Center West and North of the country (the cerrado and the Amazon forest). Domestic and foreign agribusiness capitals constitute a formidable interest group that does not usually advocate against land reform but for the sanctity of private property. Finally, the social movements that were so successful in pushing for land distribution during Cardoso’s administration reorganized the struggle in ways that made them somewhat less effective during the Lula administration. The mst, Brazil’s largest land reform movement, took its struggle to the international level after winning considerable attention and success domestically in the late 1990s. As I have argued in this book, mst leaders ‘‘massified’’ their struggle into the urban centers and international scene by focusing less on land per se and more on abstract concepts such as neoliberalism, food sovereignty, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, gender, human rights, and so on. This ‘‘transnationalization’’ is

216 Conclusion evident on the ground: mst leaders spend a portion of their time organizing under the banner of Via Campesina for campaigns that people living in settlements find somewhat difficult to engage in. By the end of Lula’s first administration, it is fair to say that mobilization by the mst had declined (see Ondetti 2008) and there was a growing divide between mst leaders and the grassroots base. In sum, Lula has governed the country during a conjuncture that is much less hospitable to agrarian reform than in previous years. This is important but not sufficiently recognized in most analyses of his agrarian reform policies.

A Partial Reckoning of Lula’s Record A New Model of Agrarian Development: Territorial Reform Agrarian reform has figured into each of Lula’s campaigns for presidency, with 2002 being no exception. In a 2002 document intended for distribution in the countryside, titled Vida Digna no Campo, Lula argued that an ‘‘ample’’ and ‘‘massive’’ agrarian reform would be the ‘‘linchpin’’ of a new model of rural development (Deere and Medeiros 2005: 29). From the beginning, however, the definition of an ample reform has been debated. Lula turned quickly to a term that had been used by his predecessor: an agrarian reform of quality, to argue that his administration would focus less on expropriation and more on sustainable development. He focused on developing regions rather than individual land reform settlements (settlements, in his words, were too often ‘‘atomized’’ or isolated from the market and state). Lula’s vision was expressed in the Second National Plan for Agrarian Reform, authored by Plínio de Arruda Sampaio (the president of the Brazilian Association of Agrarian Reform and a pt activist). This plan argued for an agrarian reform that was linked to stronger output markets (by tying production with consumption through federally funded programs such as school lunches) and stronger input markets. Although the pnra II was a wide-ranging and progressive document, Lula was criticized for not appointing a team to formulate the pnra II until July of his first year. Headed by Plínio Sampaio, the team conducted considerable research, but did not present the proposal to the Agricultural Workers Union until November 2003. Lula countered this criticism, argu-

Conclusion 217 ing that the Fome Zero (ZeroHunger) program was his first priority and that agrarian reform would be tied to federal efforts to combat hunger in the hopes that multiplier effects could be created throughout the ruralurban areas. It was not clear, however, that the technical coordinator of the Fome Zero program, José Graziano da Silva, believed that agrarian reform was a viable economic policy (he had referred to it on several occasions as an expensive social welfare policy). Lula earned further criticism by modifying the pnra II, reducing the number of families to be settled from one million to 400,000. This criticism is somewhat misleading, however, as Lula still promised to settle more than one million families, but he divided these into state-led settlements through expropriation (400,000 families); market-led settlements through credit (130,000 families); and households whose title on public lands would be properly registered (referred to as ‘‘regularized’’; 500,000 families). Social movement activists argued that this new number not only violated the spirit of the pnra II, it also represented an insufficient portion of the 3.8 million families estimated to be landless by the document’s authors.

Agrarian Reform of Quality In defense of his reduced numbers in the pnra II, Lula argued that he planned to correct the errors of previous administrations. He argued that agrarian reform had been propelled by the social movements and focused primarily on land acquisition, which resulted in too many settlements being abandoned—abandoned first by the state, then the market, and finally by the settlers themselves. Lula emphasized his focus on ‘‘quality,’’ substantially increasing the money available for agricultural credit, extension assistance, and infrastructure in the settlements (in addition to the increased cost of land, this attention to ‘‘quality’’ also explains the dramatic increase in average costs per settled family). He developed new programs for extension assistance that combined supervision by incra with third-party contracts. In 2003, the number of families served by extension assistance rose considerably to 169,821, almost double the year prior, but the figure dropped again in 2004 and has not recovered. This experience highlights a characteristic of the Lula record on agrarian reform: although the resources assigned to the process have increased, incra is consistently falling far below its target goals. The expectations that incra will be able to conduct an agrarian reform of quality without a

218 Conclusion massive increase in personnel may be unrealistic, as it is much more difficult to promote sustainable development than to expropriate land. While the attention to ‘‘quality,’’ or sustainable development, may not have satisfied the rural leaders, it did address some of the main concerns on the part of the settlers themselves, the people living and working in the fields. As one settler living on Flora in the northeastern state of Pernambuco said, when asked in a 2003 interview what she would like to see Lula do: If I was a person who went to Brasília and I could get near [Lula] to say something, I would wish that he would make some changes in the banks, to give credit to the farmer. Because Fernando Henrique, he never supported the farmer, before anything else he would say, ‘‘Today on the rich person’s table, there are things of the best quality, while on the farmer’s table there are beans, lettuce, manioc, yams.’’ I wish that [Lula] could give value to the farmer, that he would give us some credit, a line of credit and say, ‘‘Look, this is how you do it,’’ so that we could work and take more to the market because the farmer doesn’t have anything. . . . This is what we need.

Contrary to the hopes of this settler, an mst leader in the same region argued that Lula winning the presidency meant mainly that it was time for the movement to fight. His hopes for a Lula administration were the transformation of the sugarcane region: The first thing we have to do is have a strong, organized movement so that we can go to the fight [embate]. And the second thing is we have to do is go back to doing large-scale occupations with the idea of convincing the government that sugarcane is inappropriate for this region. It turns the residents into subhuman people, living in a situation of complete impoverishment. The region has to have deep changes so that people here—who are the richest people in the state—can be worth more, have better conditions of life. It’s a struggle, the biggest challenge [we face] is exactly this ideological dispute to convince the government that instead of throwing money in the hands of the mill owners as subsidies, so that these guys can continue to steal it and leave the people in misery, the government has to expropriate land and put the people to work in a diversified way with better conditions of survival.

While Lula focused on providing an agrarian reform of quality, he increased attention to regularization of title and land registration in the Brazilian Amazon. During his first four years in office, nearly half of all the

Conclusion 219 families settled were in the Amazon, a percentage that mirrored the years of the military dictatorship (see table 12). Although Lula’s reasons for focusing on public land in the Amazon were strong (land is cheaper, there is violent tension that may be addressed by improving land titles, etc.), this strategy did not sit well with the social movements, particularly the mst, who have long argued that agrarian reform should not be seen as a colonization strategy but should work toward creating sustainable development in all regions of the country, providing land for the landless in their regions of origin.

Institutional Reform One of Lula’s priorities with regards to agrarian reform was strengthening incra. The agency had seen its best years during the colonization of the Amazon, and since then it had lost employees (from a high of 12,000 in 1990 to approximately 5,000 active employees in 2002), seen its funding come and go, and suffered successive organizational changes that made it difficult to carry out long-term settlement plans. Lula increased the agency’s annual budget from approximately 1.4 billion reais in 2002 to 3.5 billion reais in 2005; he contracted 471 employees in 2005 and approved a new call for applications for 1,300 positions; and he approved a new career plan for employees, many of whom had been waiting for such a plan to be able to retire (gdara, Decree 5,580). Lula also reorganized incra so that the agency would work more closely with its constituency, a constituency that now included new groups such as the Quilombos, extractive reserves, people affected by dams, and river people. Lula also prioritized the development of a National Land Registry that would expedite the settlement of squatters on public land, particularly in the Amazon region.

Relationship with Social Movements Lula’s relationship with the social movements has been characterized by compromise. He has tried to carry out an agrarian reform that would include the social movements without alienating landed interests such as agribusiness capitals, which are considered fundamental to political and economic stability. One example of this ‘‘compromise’’ position is the way Lula handled the Land Bank. The Land Bank was Cardoso’s program for generating a

220 Conclusion market-led agrarian reform. Initially funded by the World Bank, social movement activists argued that the program took resources away from the program of state-led agrarian reform and represented nothing more than a land transfer scheme for farmers to dump their worst land on poorly educated people who qualified for the loans but passed through little political or educational training before becoming settlers. One of Lula’s first actions was to terminate the Land Bank program, but he initiated or maintained three other government programs with the same function, most importantly a land credit program (crédito fundiário). All of these programs are housed within the Ministry of Agrarian Development but not within incra. Another example of Lula’s compromise position was his response to social movement demands that he revoke Cardoso’s 1998 provisional measure making it illegal to expropriate any property occupied by rural squatters. Social movement leaders believed that Lula would move quickly to get rid of this, as it was well within his presidential powers. Lula did not, however, and never publicly addressed the measure. Caio França, one of Lula’s advisors and chief of staff to Guilherme Cassell, the minister of the Ministry of Agrarian Development, argued that Lula did not revoke the measure, because doing so would have caused more harm than good. França argued that the mst and incra quietly ignored the 1998 Provisional Measure, and so it did not affect either land occupations or expropriations. At the same time, if Lula did try to revoke the Provisional Measure, he would face considerable resistance from legislators that defended the interests of private property. The ensuing battle would, França argued, do more to damage the prospects for agrarian reform than any other measure Lula could take. It may be true that revoking the Provisional Measure would cause difficulties, but the ambiguity of its use means that interpretation is negotiated between the lawyers working for incra, private landowners, and the mst. Where there is a favorable climate for land reform, the Provisional Measure may be regularly ignored, but where there is not a favorable climate, the measure is a very useful disciplinary tool (one recalls the traditional saying, ‘‘For my friends, anything, for my enemies, the law’’). Overall, Lula’s relationship with the social movements has become increasingly strained. After the pnra II was approved, Lula appointed new superintendants for incra state offices, many of whom had previously collaborated with the social movements or had a long record of working on

Conclusion 221 their behalf. Lula also appointed a pt member and longtime ally of the mst to head incra, Miguel Rossetto, leading the conservative sector to claim that incra was now an arm of the mst. Lula opened the channels of communication between himself and the social movements, but he—along with José Alencar—were consistent in their insistence that violence be kept to a minimum, that social movement activists and members respect the law and act ‘‘responsibly.’’ Lula and Alencar also argued repeatedly that agrarian reform was not only compatible with a large-scale agro-export model, the two were actually necessary to each other. Lula appointed an agribusiness executive and large landowner to head the Ministry of Agriculture (Roberto Rodriguez) and consistently worked to appease both agribusiness and agriculturalists. It is unclear how to assess this position in relation to agrarian reform. In many places, the macroeconomic focus on sugarcane and soy that has dominated the agricultural agenda since 2003 make diversified family farming more difficult.

The Numbers Game In conclusion, the numbers behind Lula’s record have been hotly contested. In May 2007, the Lula administration claimed to have settled nearly as many people as promised in the pnra II: 381,000 families over the years 2003 to 2006. Reporters with one of Brazil’s largest national newspapers, Folha de São Paulo, received the full listing of land recipients and suggested that Lula had ‘‘fattened’’ his numbers, and social movement leaders around the country echoed the claim. The numbers were misleading because 48 percent of the settlers (115,000) listed as having been settled between 2003 and 2005 were in projects that had been created by previous administrations, including some from the military dictatorship. Of the 127,000 families actually settled between 2003 and 2005, almost half were in projects supervised by state governments or were extractive reserves.∂

The Remains of the Movement: The Movement Remains The changing context for agrarian reform highlights the need for a dynamic study of social movements, one that focuses on mobilization that

222 Conclusion goes on inside of movements as well as by them. This means asking the questions, Why do social movements form at particular moments and in particular places? Why do people join them, and why are they successful sometimes and other times not? How do internal differences and politics shape movement politics and trajectories at the local, national, and transnational scales—and vice versa? These are crucial political questions, and in this book I have tried to answer them by showing how this important movement—the Brazilian mst —actually works in different places. The movement’s ability to negotiate with the Lula administration (and beyond) depends on its ability to represent the rural poor. Representation, in turn, depends on the way in which the movement’s general message of ‘‘land to those who work it’’ articulates with localized histories of land use. Across the globe, the mst stands out as an extraordinary grassroots movement. Four key aspects clarify its success. First, the movement’s membership is estimated at over two million people, and the movement successfully manages an intricate yet coherent web of social networks connecting members throughout Brazil and the world. Second, the movement has had significant success in reorienting government policy toward small farmers and land reform at a time when both of those were considered dead or obsolete in Latin America. Lula may not have implemented a ‘‘massive’’ agrarian reform but he has had to respond to the demand for land, a demand led by the mst. Third, the movement has made strong links between rural and urban social movements, creating a political agenda that goes well beyond access to land and includes such ambitious goals as ‘‘the right to have rights,’’ a dignified living, and substantive citizenship. Fourth, and finally, the movement has earned a surprising amount of support from the urban middle class in Brazil. This has been key to its ongoing success. In this book I show that in mobilizing throughout the Brazilian countryside, the movement ‘‘works’’ to produce a coherent movement identity —its ‘‘imagined community’’ of landless people. This community is an important part of the movement’s ability to ‘‘scale up’’ the struggle for land, turning it into a well-known transnational movement that stands for more than just access to land. Through the mst’s work, access to land now signifies the search for human rights, dignity, and citizenship. Even as the movement has expanded the struggle for land, its members —leaders and otherwise—continue to work on the ground. They plant, they fish, they negotiate, they demonstrate—they also argue, they gossip,

Conclusion 223 they doubt, and they defect. All of these things matter to movements and they matter to the mst’s ability to maneuver in new political contexts such as the one presented by Lula’s election to the presidency. In this book, I outline the practices through which small farmers from southern Brazil and rural workers from the Northeast have negotiated their new positions as land reform settlers and mst members. The settlers in the South have a somewhat privileged position—I use the term ‘‘hegemonic’’—within the movement. They were the sons and daughters of small farmers and rural organizers who first mobilized through the southern states. And their culture of small farming permeates movement leadership, cultures, and practices. At the same time, the moral economy of smallholder production was violated by the movement’s attempt to organize large farm collectives and thereby scale up the production capacity of the struggle. In the postcolonial context of inefficient but ongoing sugarcane production, the Brazilian state, the mst, and the market elite all have very different goals for the economic and political incorporation of land reform settlers. In the context of these competing visions for agrarian reform as a development tool, the settlers’ production projects, funded by the state and implemented by mst leaders, became a key site of contestation, negotiation, and resistance, in which control over the production process on the land was at stake. Ultimately, the settlers (and the state) rejected the mst’s vision for the land as a site of small farm production. When the price of sugarcane rose, the settlers returned to the crop and effectively left the movement. I argue that the mst tried to introduce new understandings of ‘‘rights’’ into the settlements, but that the settlers’ preexisting definition was embedded in the assistance orientation of the plantation rather than in universalistic notions of ‘‘citizenship’’ or human rights. And so, mst leaders who introduced new concepts of property and political leadership were seen as uncaring and incompetent because they ignored the norms of responsibility forged on the plantations. After more than ten years of political organizing, however, the mst has generated a new political language among rural workers in the sugarcane region. People who participated in the movement remembered the times that they mobilized successfully; they remembered the mst mobilization that I described in the beginning of this book, and they called upon these memories to defend new political choices. In February 2003, I talked with Senhor Antônio again. He was running for president of the settlement association, in elections that would be held

224 Conclusion on February 23. He was unhappy about the prospect of becoming president because things were very ‘‘disorganized’’ on the settlement: ‘‘People are not meeting very often. So the person in charge has to really meet things head on. It is not something good. The person doesn’t receive anything for this, only knocks heads together, gets laughed at from this person and that, but despite that you have to confront the thing.’’ According to Senhor Antônio, the reason for the disorganization was what you could call corruption—people stealing from the settlers, or from group coffers. Almost everyone involved in administrating financial help to the settlement was implicated, according to Senhor Antônio, who spoke about this with resigned bitterness. The technicians who had elaborated a project to create fish ponds for the settlers to manage collectively had stolen money: it cost the association a fair bit of money, although Senhor Antônio was not sure if it was roughly 200 or 2000 reais: ‘‘It was the money for the project, but it was gone, no one saw it anymore. . . . The technician filled out the project, charged the money, the agent paid it, and he left. He also owed some money to inss at the city hall, and the association is going to have to pay. When we account for the money, then the association will have to pay for that, too.’’ Senhor Antônio argued that the mst was not fulfilling what he considered to be the movement’s responsibilities: ‘‘We received the government money for that project and some people planted a few things. . . . But there should have been a technician from the government or the mst to teach us something, to teach us how to do it. But there is no one. Ever since the movement received the last payment [dues] from the project, there hasn’t been a technician here anymore. Each of us is surviving the way we can. . . . I don’t have faith in the movement—in the beginning I did. But now they don’t do anything for us to improve; unless President Lula does something along with the movement.’’ The only person from the movement who Senhor Antônio didn’t blame was the former mst leader (also called Antônio), who had left his position in the movement to work for the mayor: ‘‘No, he helps us here a lot. It’s something like: we need a car to go to incra, to fetch some fish; he does all that, he helps us. If there is anything to resolve, I go to him, and we solve it.’’ Even though he was disillusioned with the movement, Senhor Antônio expressed a newfound faith in the benefits of organizing. He was being asked to run for the presidency in part because he was considered capable of securing assistance for the settlers: ‘‘I go and talk to an outside techni-

Conclusion 225 cian. I ask for help from one or the other, and I manage to find it. . . . The settlers come after me [for help], so I went to the municipal secretary and talked to her and got three food baskets. But the movement—I talked to the leaders and told them about the condition of the people but they didn’t do anything. That’s why we want to organize ourselves, have a meeting and stay out of the movement too.’’ This newfound faith in the strength of organization was a product of the mst’s time in the region. As other settlers did, Senhor Antônio displayed faith in the value of collective work. He argued that the only way to get ahead was to work with others: ‘‘I believe working together is better than anything else. Because if a person thinks only about themselves, in a job, Brazil doesn’t develop. Only one person is not enough to make Brazil grow, it has to be a lot of people together in a group.’’ As is clear from Senhor Antônio’s testimony, although the rural workers have dropped out of the mst for now, this does not mean they will not rejoin. The settlements continue to change, and the rural workers in Água Preta are constantly reworking their perceptions of the mst. Even though the settlers had effectively withdrawn from the mst by 2003, their experiences of participation in movement politics have expanded their ‘‘repertoire of resistance’’ (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001; Tilly 1978). Through a historical memory of participation that is still largely invisible, the rural workers have added to their strategies for political action. They remember that organization was once effective and may again be. They see mobilization as a tool for political action that they might draw upon when necessary or advantageous. They drew on their experience with collective action to withdraw from the mst, and they will use their experiences again as they negotiate local politics with the town mayor. And even though they have rejected membership in the mst for now, it does not mean they always will. Strategies of resistance are never static and cannot be understood without attention to the ways they change over time. The settlers in Água Preta made their political decisions in circumstances that were constantly in flux, even as their own experiences dictated a new set of understandings for evaluating those circumstances. I argue that this understanding of the mst comes from three main aspects of my approach to social movements. First, I do not focus on ideal(ized) movement members; instead, I study rural workers who joined somewhat reluctantly and were never fully convinced of the merit of the

226 Conclusion mst’s ideology or tactics. I argue that, far from being the exception, these members reflect the diversity within the movement’s membership and their participation (or lack thereof) needs to be studied in order to fully appreciate the contingent nature of social mobilization. Second, I decenter the analysis by focusing on expressions of ‘‘common sense’’ among the movement’s grassroots base rather than on the well-formulated expressions of political belief articulated during organized mobilizations or public demonstrations. And, third, I reinterpret ‘‘movement failure’’ in northeastern Brazil as a sort of success—the success of an alternate political vision among the movement’s members. By decentering my analysis of the mst and focusing on competing visions for political organization within the movement, my goal is to make the study of social movements more dynamic. In any movement, membership is a relative position rather than an objective condition, and a movement is only fuzzily bounded, in both a spatial and temporal sense. Movements do not necessarily consist of members who join in and drop out with precision (such that the movements succeed and fail as members enter or exit). In the case of the mst, many people who ‘‘joined’’ did so with some skepticism, or even reluctance, ignorance, and bad faith. Many ‘‘left’’ in a similarly ambiguous way: although none of the rural workers I interviewed in 2003 said they still belonged to the mst, not all were convinced that the movement’s withdrawal from local politics had been a good thing. The thick lines between ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’ that social movements draw for strategic reasons are rarely, if ever, mirrored on the ground.

 Notes

1. Mobilization within Movements 1. The term ‘‘catachresis’’ is used in subaltern studies by both Gayatri Spivak (1990: 228) and Gyan Prakash (1992: 8; 1995: 212). Both probably adapted the word from Derrida, who in an interview in 1981 defined it in reference to his metaphysical project: ‘‘Catachresis is a violent production of meaning, an abuse which refers to no exterior or proper norm. The founding concepts of metaphysics—logos, eidos, theoria, etc.—are instances of catachresis rather than metaphors. . . . I am trying to produce new forms of catachresis, . . . a violent writing which stakes out the faults and deviations of language; so that the text produces a language of its own [which] emerges at a given moment as a monster, a monstrous mutation without tradition or normative precedent’’ (quoted in Kearney 1984: 123). 2. Account from the author’s field notes, September 1999. 3. There are several other organizations involved in organizing the struggle for agrarian reform in Pernambuco, including, most importantly, the rural unions affiliated with the Federation of Agricultural Workers of Pernambuco (Federação dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura do estado de Pernambuco) and the Catholic Church. The rural unions have a much longer history in the region (Mallon 1978), and until the 1990s they were the most visible advocate of both the rural workers and agrarian reform. By the mid-1990s, however, the mst was the strongest of the organizations, both in terms of political capacity and organizational strength. 4. Between 1986 and 1997, roughly 5,800 hectares of land were expropriated in Água Preta; in 1995–1996, according to the Censo agropecuario (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatísticas 1996a), there were 38,296 hectares of land in agricultural establishments (figures cited in Moreira, Moreira, and Menezes 2003: 211). In 2000, according to figures provided by the federal government and reported on the mst Web site, there were 223 expropriated settlements in Pernambuco, with 13,185 families living on 174,784 hectares of land (out of a total of roughly 5.6 million hectares); in the Northeast as a whole, there were 2,328 settlements with 194,830 families living on 6,030,533 hectares of land (out of a total of roughly 78.3 million hectares). (See http://www.mst.org.br/mst/pagina .php?cd=1007, accessed on July 1, 2009.)

228 Notes 5. Throughout the book, the general term ‘‘sugarcane region’’ refers to the zona da mata sul, the southern end of the humid-tropical coast of Pernambuco, where sugarcane has been produced since at least the 1530s. All interviews analyzed for this book come from the municipalities of Água Preta in Pernambuco and Campos Novos in Santa Catarina, although the author interviewed rural workers and mst leaders throughout both regions. There are considerable differences among sugarcane producing regions in Brazil, from the southern state of São Paulo to Minas Gerais to Paraiba, and although this study is relevant to the study of plantation production more generally, empirical differences among regions complicate any generalized conclusions. 6. Subaltern studies began as a belief and an argument that subalterns existed in an autonomous domain, that elites dominated them but did not exercise hegemony because they could not win the subalterns’ consent (Guha 1982). This argument paralleled work being done in agrarian studies more broadly that argued for a more nuanced understanding of peasant consciousness (Paige 1975; Scott 1976; Wolf 1969). Guyatri Spivak’s provocative article ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ (1988)—to which she answers no—questioned the premise of autonomous voices; she argued that the elite nature of the sources available to the subaltern scholars complicated the search for autonomous voices, even when we read against the grain. This methodological difficulty was analogous to a broader difficulty of separating what were, in effect, mutually constituted political subjectivities: the subaltern and the hegemonic. If subaltern identities were forged in relation to the elite, then there could be no autonomous subjects. 7. For applications of subaltern studies to Latin America, see Latin American Subaltern Studies Group 1993, Joseph 1990, Mallon 1994, Coronil 1994, Nelson 1997, Arias 2001, Rodríguez 2001, and Williams 2002; for applications to Africa, see Cooper 1994, Larson 1997, Moore 1998, and Newbury and Newbury 2000; for non-Indian South Asian examples, see Makdisi 2000 and Northrup 2001; for applications to the United States, see Cherniavsky 1996 and Ingram 1999. There is now an editorial collective dedicated to writing a social history of the peasantry in Brazil with a goal of reinscribing national history with subaltern agency. The work of the collective is inspired and funded by Via Campesina and Movimento de Agricultores Pequenos (Movement of Small Farmers) (map). 8. We see this much more easily in other social settings, such as the nationstate. See the debates over formal and substantive citizenship for different racial and ethnic groups in the United States (Rosaldo 1997). 9. Examples of scholarly works that focus on mst leaders are particularly common in the English-language literature (see Petras 1997; Robles 2001). Subjectelision is also evident in progressive manifestos that portray the mst as a political or ideological vanguard (e.g., Hardt and Negri 2004), or the collection We Are Everywhere, which includes an mst declaration among its pieces. Newspaper

Notes 229 stories regularly refer to the mst and unproblematically quote mst leaders as spokespeople. João Pedro Stedile is the most commonly cited mst leader. 10. This is a story attributed to both Clifford Geertz (1973) and Stephen Hawking (1998), though with different moral conclusions. In Clifford Geertz’s version, the story is told by colonized to colonizer: ‘‘There is an Indian story—at least I heard it was an Indian story—about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down’ ’’ (Geertz 1973: 28–29). In Stephen Hawking’s book, it is a story about a famous scientist who lectures on astronomy: ‘‘A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down’ ’’ (Hawking 1998: 1). While in Hawking’s version the implausibility of the old woman’s story indicates the equal implausibility of modern science’s ‘‘creation myth,’’ in Geertz’s version the woman’s story represents a triumph of subaltern logic over Western reason. 11. The research sites were chosen during a year of predissertation field research, 1996–1997, funded by a predissertation research grant from the Social Science Research Council. 12. Other vices generated by the capitalist system are personalism, anarchy, complacency, sectarianism or ‘‘radicalism,’’ impatience, adventurism, and selfsufficiency (Jornal Sem Terra, Jan./Feb. 1991: 3). 13. See Bernardo Mançano Fernandes 1999 and Jean-Yves Martin 2002 on the transformative aspects of the encampments. The alternative space the mst hopes to create parallels Foucault’s concept of a heterotopia. Foucault (1986) described heterotopias as those spaces in which alternative readings of the world could be made. Most people interpret heterotopias as having an emancipatory potential, but others have argued that Foucault’s underappreciation for the politics of place created an antinormative definition of heterotopia, where any space separated spatially or temporally from the dominant/dominated spaces qualified. Harvey (2000a) argues that the relativity of the concept robs it of critical, emancipatory potential—it is everywhere and nowhere. 14. Although most ‘‘new social movements’’ theorists would argue that the concepts ‘‘old’’ and ‘‘new’’ are heuristic, theoretical, ideal types (Mainwaring and

230 Notes Viola 1984), the concepts bear little relation to distinct practical categories and are often misleading. An analysis of the mst as a new social movement is particularly inappropriate given the movement’s specific materialistic goals (at least initially) and the long historical tradition of rural resistance. 15. See Ann Swidler’s 1986 article ‘‘Culture in Action,’’ in which she argues that ideology can be defined as highly articulated, self-conscious aspects of culture, tradition as articulated cultural beliefs and practices, and common sense as the set of nonself-conscious assumptions that are taken for granted or seen as natural (279). Clifford Geertz also outlines the ways in which ideology, religion, and common sense form a cultural whole. Antonio Gramsci of course suggests that common sense (as opposed to ideology, philosophy, and good sense) is the uncritical, perhaps immediate, sense that people make of events, ideas, and social relations. 16. In a well-argued paper, Charles Kurzman (2004) suggests that attempting to understand why people do things will ultimately undermine our ability to build post hoc explanations. He focuses on events characterized by what he calls ‘‘confusion’’ (as differentiated from simple uncertainty), such as the 1979 Iranian Revolution: ‘‘In this case, and by extension in other cases like it, explanation aspires to make actions expected, after the fact, that even the actors did not expect at the time’’ (332). In this chapter, instead, I argue that a close understanding of why people joined the mst in Água Preta is necessary to explaining the movement’s subsequent trajectories, both local and national. 17. This parallels a Foucauldian appreciation for contradiction and contingency in building genealogies, instead of neat, linear histories (see Gupta and Ferguson 2002 on the need to incorporate contradiction into studies of governmentality). McAdam and Diani (2003) argue that qualitative analyses can—and are needed to—explain some of the issues or problems raised by the significant quantitative (and structural) work already done over the past thirty years. 18. Intentionality transcends the oft-cited dichotomization of structure and agency in studies of social change, though it is related; to wit, James Duesenberry’s complaint that ‘‘economics is all about how people make choices and sociology is all about how they don’t have any choices to make’’ has been cited repeatedly (1960: 233, cited in Granovetter 1985: 405). 19. In other work, I have argued that social movement analyses need to focus on intentions in order to understand actions, rather than the reverse (Wolford 2006). I distinguish between intention and intentionality for the same reasons: intentions are a vehicle to understanding action, process, and identity through people’s subjective interpretations, while intentionality is the reverse, a vehicle to understanding subjectivity through actions, processes, and identities. Intending to do or be something is very different from assuming someone has done or is something intentionally. 20. Elisabeth Wood’s (2003) insightful study of insurgents in El Salvador

Notes 231 stresses the causal power of what she calls the ‘‘pleasure of agency,’’ where agency is defined as acting purposefully to change life’s circumstances. James M. Jasper (2004) argues for more attention to agency, defined as or through strategic choice making in social movement settings. 21. See Auyero 2003 for an excellent example. 22. The recognition that all social relations are inflected by and through power was what led to the mantra of second-wave feminism: ‘‘The personal is political’’ (Hanisch 1975). For more discussion of history as messy and contingent, see Foucault’s theorization of genealogies (Foucault 1972: 231–234). 23. The iicd worked with the mst to identify projects that movement leaders wanted done and that iicd leaders thought their ragtag teams of volunteers could actually accomplish. In 1993, the project was to rebuild several old buildings on a settlement called Quissamá, roughly thirty kilometers outside of the state capital of Aracajú. This experience was important for my overall understanding of the mst because of when and where it took place. Recently, I have learned of financial and political troubles allegedly related to the iicd and its parent ngo, Humana People to People. I do not know anything about these allegations. 24. See ‘‘Especial: Os sem-terra,’’ Veja, April 16, 1997, 34–48; and ‘‘Especial: Reforma Agraria,’’ Veja, April 23, 1997, 26–36. 25. I went back to both Vento and Flora to present a summarized version of the dissertation and to discuss what I had written.

2. The Movement in Southern Brazil 1. Before 1850, official measurements were done in leagues, the size of which differed depending on region and time (Varella 1997: 194). 2. The land comprised 130 leagues along the coast inward to the line laid out in 1495 by the Treaty of Tordesillas (Panini 1990: 22). 3. The Lei de Terras is also known as the Lei de Terras e Imigração (Land and Immigration Law) and the Lei de Terras Devolutas (Law of Public Land). See Varella 1997: 196. 4. The relationship between land and labor is an intricate one: twenty-one years after the Land Law was passed, the Lei Rio Branco (Rio Branco Law, better known as the Lei do Ventre Livre, or the Law of the Free Womb), which freed all those who were born to slaves, was presented by the government through the Ministry of Agriculture. 5. According to Peter Eisenberg (1974), the Land Law represented little real difference from the colonial period, but Emilia Viotti da Costa (2000) attributes more weight to the law. 6. The first planter to experiment with free labor was Nicolau Vergueiro, who re-

232 Notes cruited a group of German and Swiss small farmers to work on his São Paulo coffee plantation in the 1840s (Viotti da Costa 2000). But the unrest on his plantation in 1856–1857 caused the other planters to back away from the experiment. 7. Dean (1969) suggests that a relatively small proportion of the immigrants found their way to southern Brazil, where they were able to receive the land promised by the government. Holloway (1980), however, suggests that coffee was not profitable enough to institutionalize massive labor repression. Many colonos were able to become small farmers because they were geographically mobile, there was scarce labor and planter competition, there was a premium on valuable family cooperation, noneconomic incentives (house, etc.) offered a valuable cushion for the colonos, and there was plenty of available land. 8. According to Maria Pereira de Queiroz (1965), a rural sociologist, the common thread running through rural movements during this period was the charismatic leader who was responsible for shaping its form and rhythm by promising to lead his followers onto a better life. Queiroz argued that the desire for a better life was a product of disintegrating social networks (such as kinship) that produced a peculiar sort of ‘‘anomie.’’ Later accounts treat the Contestado less as a millenarian movement and more as a reflection of political and material struggles for access to resources (Diacon 1991). 9. The previous four Constitutions were written in 1824, 1891, 1934, and 1937. The Constitution of 1824 bore much resemblance to the French Constitution, while the 1891 version was more similar to the U.S. Constitution (Viotti da Costa 2000: 57–60). 10. However, much of this colonization was not planned. The government offered incentives for settlement in the Center West and Northwest of the country and most of the population movement in that area was spontaneous during the rule of the military (Hall 1990: 208–209, quoted in Deere and León de Leal 1999: 3). 11. In 1985, newspaper reports claimed that a faction of landowners belonging to the udr had collected arms intending to use them to expel settlers from two nearby fazendas. 12. The book, titled A Socialist and Confiscatory Agrarian Reform, features graphic comparisons between the struggle for agrarian reform and Soviet-style communism. Even in the 1980s, this association was a powerful one for the Brazilian rural elite. 13. This legislation is called the Rito Summario (the Summary Right), passed on June 27, 1998. 14. There have been allegations of collusion between mst leaders and landowners for whom the government represents the best land market. According to one incra official, the suspicion of collusion was the reason why President Cardoso made it illegal to expropriate land that was being occupied. 15. Interview with Dr. Alacir Pereira Batista, incra superintendent, Floria-

Notes 233 nópolis, Santa Catarina, March 24, 1999. Between 1993 and 1997, thirty-seven properties in the state of Santa Catarina were distributed for the purposes of agrarian reform. Of those thirty-seven, only seven were not the result of organized pressure. Figures from the Regional incra office of Santa Catarina and supported by an interview with the settlement division of the regional incra office in Santa Catarina, March 26, 1999. 16. Interview with the members of the settlement division of the regional incra office in Santa Catarina, March 26, 1999. 17. According to numbers provided by the mayor’s office. 18. The settlement covered exactly 2,118.81 hectares, or 5,233.46 acres. One hectare is equivalent to 2.47 acres. 19. Calculation of the dollar amount was made using the exchange rate printed in the July 1990 edition of the International Financial Statistics published by the International Monetary Fund. The exchange rate of 7,368 cruzeiros to one U.S. dollar was assessed at the end of November 1989. By May 1990, the exchange rate had fallen to 55,219 cruzeiros to one dollar. 20. Of those who gave up their land, five moved to other settlements, eight sold their plots, two acquired alternate employment making them ineligible for land, one was expelled from the settlement because of his inability to ‘‘adapt to technical or administrative norms,’’ and the rest all abandoned their land for unknown reasons. These figures are from the Regional Division of incra for Santa Catarina. The document, titled Relatorio contendo motivos do afastamento de assentados nos projetos de assentamento in Santa Catarina, was retrieved from incra’s computer database sipra (Information System on Agrarian Reform Projects), on March 16, 1999. 21. These stories are told from the perspective of one person, although stories from other settlers who were there are used to corroborate different pieces. The stories all have a number of holes in them because the interviews allowed the settlers to recount their experiences in a relatively unstructured manner so they could speak about what they remembered. 22. The number of families always changes in the occupation camps as some families give up and others settle where land becomes available. Many of the settlers, however, remembered the number of families they started with and argued that this remained relatively stable. 23. Many times, when families leave one occupation site, they camp out on the side of the street until they are ready to occupy a different area. Camping out on the side of the street is legal in Brazil as long as no accidents happen. In one roadside encampment, the settlers built speed bumps to ensure that they would not be forced to leave because of an unlucky car accident. 24. Some people said that the sons were abusive and taunted the squatters, although Wilson did not mention this.

234 Notes 25. Some of the settlers suggested that the proposal was accepted because it was painted in such idealistic terms that they really believed the goal of six minimum salaries per month would be achieved within two years. 26. One researcher, Hilda Baumann (1997), writes that this was a contradictory decision for the settlers to make because extensive grazing was a form of production that belonged to the exploitative large landowner of old. Cattle ranching was an appropriate activity, however, given the nature of Trinta’s land and the settlers’ training. 27. The demographic cycle is what makes peasants much more resilient than an economic analysis based on capitalist motivations would suggest. In Chayanov’s analysis, peasants were able to continue producing on the land in part because of their ability to accommodate family size by adding or subtracting land from the commons of early twentieth-century Russia, and in part because of their adherence to an alternative rationality. 28. The slogan ‘‘Land for those who work it’’ was the first to be adopted by the mst, in 1985. Since then, the mst’s slogan has been changed a number of times, reflecting the political environment in which the movement operates (see chapter 3). 29. During interviews with small farmers in the municipality of Campos Novos, it was clear that the vast majority received little or no technical assistance. The families expressed bitterness when asked about the local veterinarian or extension agent, arguing that they were charged so much for each visit that they could not afford to ask for help unless there was an emergency.

3. Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism 1. After widespread organizing among peasant actors in the 1960s—from Asia to Africa to Latin America—Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet pronounced the end of the era of state-led land distribution in Latin America in 1989. William Thiesenhusen’s 1995 overview of land reform policies in Latin America suggested that although the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s had not fulfilled their promise of improving living conditions for the rural poor, the political window for enacting further reforms had closed (Thiesenhusen 1995: 161). And yet, organizing for access to land and for improved conditions of production has only increased in recent years. 2. Text of this speech is reprinted in the Department of State bulletin, April 3, 1961, vol. 44, no. 1136, publication 7162. Accessed on the Web at http://www .archive.org/stream/departmentofstat4461unit/departmentofstat446/unit — djvu .txt/on July 4, 2009. 3. These three agribusiness corporations had combined sales of $20.2 billion

Notes 235 in Latin America in 2004, most of which was in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico (eclac 2006: 42). 4. As Florencia Mallon (1994: p. 1495) says, ‘‘Given the smaller size of the proletariat, peasants and rural communities had to take the lead in the forging of an Indian people-nation.’’ 5. Hardt and Negri (2004) have been criticized, especially by geographers, for their lack of attention to space and place (e.g., Kirsch 2003), but the authors make an important argument that ‘‘the challenge posed by the concept of the multitude is for a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different.’’ 6. A popular mst slogan reads ‘‘500 Years of Injustice.’’ 7. The mst takes some liberties with the history of social movements in Brazil. José de Souza Martins (2000) argues that, as activists, rural organizers often ‘‘fetishisize’’ historical moments, adapting them for their own purpose. There is considerable debate over the nature of the communities organized at Palmares (the most famous escaped slave community, or quilombo, in Brazilian history). While mst argues that the Quilombos and Canudos, and the Contestado war, are examples of the struggle for land and rural justice, many scholars argue that this ignores infighting among the members, inclusion of wealthy segments of society, and the religious nature of the disagreements. For a good discussion of the Contestado, see Diacon 1991. 8. The state also selects setters according to their background in agriculture. Each settler is required to sign a declaration stating that they are not the owners of any rural property, nor do they have dependents who own property, that they have no income other than which they receive from agricultural pursuits, that they are people of good behavior, who had never had their moral conduct questioned and that they have never received land from incra before. 9. The full list of vices also includes personalism (‘‘the personalist is always defending or looking after his personal interests’’); anarchy (‘‘the anarchist reacts against the organization of things or actions’’); comfortableness (‘‘the person who is always comfortable . . . always looks to accommodate himself or to get along well with everyone when conflictual situations arise’’); sectarianism or radicalism (‘‘the sectarian or radical individual . . . feels tortured by the apparent slowness with which the necessary conditions for realizing fundamental actions mature’’); liquidationism (‘‘the liquidationist . . . tries to kill any action that will hurt his self interest’’); adventurism (‘‘the adventurer . . . never consults reality in order to situate his action’’); and self-sufficiency (‘‘the person who is self-sufficient has an answer for everything, doesn’t ignore anything, never asks anything, never asks for explanation or has any doubts’’). 10. Every year, all of the settlements and encampments in the country carry out an exhaustive round of meetings intended to evaluate the previous year and

236 Notes establish goals for the future. These meetings take place first at the level of the individual settlement or encampment, then a regional meeting is held with selected members, and, finally, the state-wide meeting is conducted over a period of three days with hundreds of representatives from across the state. Organizing and overseeing the year-end meetings is a daunting task—the settlements and encampments are miles from each other over washed-out dirt roads and members need to be informed weeks in advance that their presence is requested on the day of the meeting. Even if the movement’s organizers manage to contact everyone, the meeting is still at the whim of the weather—if the day is sunny and clear, the activists may lose most of the settlers to the fields. 11. In the face of individual resistance to cooperative production, the administration of mst laid out a number of steps for the activists to follow when organizing a cooperative in a settlement (Jornal Sem Terra, April/May 1990, 93: 7). First, the activists needed to define the number of families, and involve the interests of each of them. It was to be made clear, at this point, that there were significant advantages to working in groups of greater than ten families. Second, the activists should explain that everybody’s labor would be important—including that of women and children. Third, domestic accommodations should be arranged in such a way that the families were able to live together in an agrovila in order to promote solidarity and community. Fourth, during the first year of the collective, families would be allowed to work on their individual plots. It was important, however, for activists to limit the number of days that the families were allowed to work on their individual plots and to limit the size of this plot. Fifth, the activists had to establish a firm administrative structure on the cooperatives. Time sheets, for example, needed to be collected at the beginning and the end of every day. The division of production and profit was to be proportionate to the number of days worked, although every worker had a right to a reasonable amount of money per month. At the end of the year, the net profits from the annual production would be calculated and the group would decide how much to divide among themselves and how much to reinvest in the community. In conjunction with this, a solid plan of production needed to be constructed, delineating what was to be planted, when, and how. Sixth, the activists would be responsible initially for establishing external connections (e.g., financial access, inputs). Seventh, in order to ensure the smooth operation of the cooperative once the activists had moved on to another settlement, internal laws had to be created and promulgated. The members had to be given the tools to continually create new laws in the assembly to deal with situations as they arose. Eighth, the activists had to establish a forum for conducting constant evaluations. 12. In 1999, there were twenty-eight service cooperatives in the country, the great majority of which are in Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, and São Paulo. There

Notes 237 were thirty full production collectives, twenty-two of which were concentrated in the three southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná. There were also twenty-one ‘‘production and service cooperatives,’’ which fall in between production and service cooperatives. In general, most of them began as service cooperatives whose success convinced its members to try planting a few crops or carrying out a few projects together (figures from the national office in São Paulo; unpublished mimeograph). 13. This tactic is similar to the tactic used by the rubber tappers in the Brazilian Amazon. As Chico Mendes stated: ‘‘When we organize a blockade, the main argument we use is that the law is being flaunted by the landowners and our blockade is only to make sure that the law is respected’’ (Mendes 1989: 66). 14. See chapter 4 for a longer discussion of Jaime Amorim and his personal story. I interviewed Jaime twice, once in September 1999 and once in February 2003, both in Caruaru, Pernambuco. 15. This information was taken from the Web site of the U.S.-based Friends of the mst: http://www.mstbrazil.org/summary.html, accessed on July 2, 2009. 16. Land is the unifying element in the struggle for another world as well. After a group of mst activists went to Palestine to show their support for the struggle, one commented: ‘‘In the first place, the land is the thing that ties us together. We, of the mst, fight to conquer a piece of land, to produce on and feed our people. The Palestinians are practically doing the same thing. They fight for a territory that will allow them to produce on their land. This binds us together very much.’’ 17. I use the term ‘‘progressive’’ to distinguish this form of populism from the paternalistic style of state governance often led by a charismatic leader whose claims to legitimacy come from ‘‘the people’’ (Ionescu and Gellner 1969). Agrarian populism is also referred to as ‘‘neo-populism’’ (Kitching 1982) and considered distinct from the small-scale industrialist populisms of the 1700s and 1800s. Several people who have written on agrarian populism in India (e.g., Gupta 1998, and Roy and Borowiak 2003) argue that populism ‘‘from below’’ was both productive of and reactive to state populism, particularly as espoused by Indira Gandhi. On populism more generally, see Laclau 2004. For critical assessments of contemporary agrarian populism, see Amin 2003; Brass 2003; Roseberry 1993; Roy and Borowiak 2003; and Sen n.d. In very abstract form, expressions of resource populism often include a critique of unequal production-consumption relations; a campaign to get back to the land or to nature; a desire to re-embed the economy in local (and usually traditional) communities or connections; and a move to revalorize the practice of sustainable (also conceived of as traditional) production practices. 18. In the period 1995–2003, when the well-known socialist-turned-conservative Fernando Henrique Cardoso was president, the mst’s main enemy was the

238 Notes government; when the working-class leader Luis Inãcio ‘‘Lula’’ da Silva won the presidency in 2002, the mst refocused its programmatic on the latifúndio. During a brief visit to the mst settlements in Água Preta in 2003, the coherence and completeness of this discursive shift was very much evident. 19. This section on the Jornal Sem Terra was cowritten with Brenda Baletti, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 20. Raymond Williams analyzes this ‘‘scaling up’’ of political struggles in his well-known concept of ‘‘militant particularism’’ (1989). Williams argues that ‘‘the unique character of working-class self-organization has been that it has tried to connect particular struggles to a general struggle in one quite special way. It has set out, as a movement, to make real what is at first sight the extraordinary claim that the defence and advancement of certain particular interests, properly brought together, are in fact the general interest’’ (quoted in Harvey 1996: 32). 21. The mst’s assistance in technical affairs was most visible in the urban semteto (homeless) movement in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, as well as in the Movimiento Sin Tierra of Bolivia. 22. See the Web site maintained by the nonprofit organization Friends of the mst (part of Global Exchange), at http://www.mstbrazil.org for details on mst tours and solidarity activities in the United States. 23. Almost everyone in Brazil agrees that agrarian reform is necessary, but the disagreements over ‘‘on whose land’’ and ‘‘for whom’’ are tremendous—and often violent. mst leaders argued from the beginning that they were going to need support from a broad spectrum of social groups throughout Brazil if the movement was to triumph against the rural elite. Building a popular culture around life in the settlements has therefore been an important element of appealing to urban Brazilians and building solidarity. 24. For more information on this, see the chapter on mst in Santa Catarina in Fernandes 1999.

4. The Movement in Northeastern Brazil 1. According to Josue de Castro, it is the hunger in this region that gives rise to widespread banditry. Many of Brazil’s most famous ‘‘bandits,’’ such as Lampião and Antonio Silva, were from the Northeast (de Castro 1966; Lewin 1987; Pessar 2004). 2. In the 1930s, the president of the Bank of Brazil and coordinator of sugar politics for Brazil, Leonardo Truda, remarked that sugar was ‘‘the principal thing with which Brazil ennobled itself and became rich’’ (Truda 1971 [1934]: 66). 3. Duarte de Coelho was a soldier who had carried himself well in the Eastern explorations of the time (Oliveira Lima 1997 [1895]: 7–8). His success with sugar-

Notes 239 cane was due in part to geographic and climatic factors that favored sugar production and marketing, but the success was also due to Coelho’s firm hand with the indigenous population. 4. The changes were also technical and related to the sugarcane plant itself: in the early 1800s, a new variety of cane was introduced. The Portuguese conquered French Guiana, and the king discovered a new variety of cane (Bourbon or Otaiti cane), named it Cayenne after the capital of the colony, and sent it to Brazil, where it was distributed to planters from the Botanical Gardens in Olinda. The new cane was an improvement over the Creole cane because it was drought resistant, larger, had greater branching potential, and richer sugar content (Eisenberg 1974: 33). Combined with the introduction of improved production technologies, such as the plow, the improved cane enabled the expansion of sugarcane throughout coastal Pernambuco. 5. The ‘‘tough, healthy, and innocent’’ people described by Pero Vaz de Carninha after the Europeans’ first encounter with the indigenous population were never numerous to begin with and were quickly decimated by contact with the outsiders (Hemming 1987). 6. Brazilian colonist in 1690, quoted in Skidmore 1999: 23. 7. These numbers vary depending on the historian, as it is difficult to produce reliable figures after 1830 when the slave trade (though not slavery) was abolished and Africans were smuggled into the country illegally. 8. De Gouvea 1627, cited in Schwartz 1991: 67. The escaped slaves made their way beyond the colonial frontiers and set up hidden communities that came to be called quilombos. Although it is difficult to distinguish between what actually took place in the quilombos from the legends that sprang up surrounding them, most scholars argue that the slaves who escaped their masters created a system of social property rights in their new communities (Freitas 1984: 36). Land was awarded a special distinction as the source of all else: ‘‘Production was individual, but the land belonged to the whole world’’ (Doria and Carvalho 1996: 119). 9. There may have been prohibitions against growing crops or raising livestock on the plantations under Portuguese rule (Josue de Castro 1966). 10. There is a long debate in the historiography of the colonial period as to whether plantation owners allowed their workers to plant subsistence crops in their ‘‘free’’ time. See Barickman 1994. 11. Even with access to land, M. C. Andrade argues, the rural workers in the sugarcane region were wage workers and not peasants; the peasants of Pernambuco were confined fairly rigidly to the agreste and the sertão (but there were fewer Peasant League offices in those regions than in the zona da mata). There were peasants, and these were particularly important in the 1800s but they were always particularly vulnerable to the whim of the landlord and in constant fear of eviction: they served essentially as a reserve supply of labor because the landlords

240 Notes generally preferred slaves but were able to tap into the peasantry when necessary (for either foodstuffs or for wage labor). 12. The ex-moradores found little employment in the cities, and many continued to work as day laborers for the plantations. In 1980, of the 6,875 people living in Água Preta, only 650 people were employed in industrial activities, and 360 people in commercial activities. Most of the commercial activities were smallscale: there were 249 establishments that employed the 360 people, meaning that each business employed an average of approximately 1–2 people. 13. See Forman (1975), who has an interesting discussion of the Peasant Leagues. Although Forman’s work tended to essentialize ‘‘the Brazilian Peasant,’’ he did get to meet Francisco Julião and observed the comings and goings of the Galileia League. Forman argues that there was no revolutionary organization, and that the leagues and Julião himself lacked an overall vision of change for the area. 14. See the Sudene Web site: http://www.sudene.gov.br/finor/Leis and access the document titled ‘‘Lei 5508–68’’ (accessed July 4, 2009). 15. The cost of fostering the inefficient industry is today conservatively valued at over 6.5 billion dollars (De Souza, Irmão, Araujo 1997: 3). 16. The mst is the largest land reform movement in the country as a whole, and in Pernambuco in particular. The struggle for agrarian reform in the Northeast, however, is characterized by a multiplicity of social actors, many of whom imitate mst’s method of occupation. 17. Figures from a Food and Agricultural Organization (fao) 1994 report show that the average income on the settlements was 3.7 times the national minimum wage. If this is an accurate representation of settlement income, it represents a significant accomplishment. 18. Posted on the mst’s Web site: http://www.mst.org.br/mstpe. See the link under Biblioteca (library) for Dados (figures) and click on Acampamentos 2003.

5. Sugarcane and Social Mobilization 1. The decision to occupy land in the sugarcane zone of Pernambuco was not a decision made lightly. In 1993, particularly, the area was characterized by regular violence. According to the settlers, the mayor of the town who held office from 1988 to 1996 was a ‘‘bandit.’’ In response to the generalized violence, thengoverner Miguel Arrães had designated the town an area of ‘‘social exclusion,’’ which authorized the entrance of state shock troops to physically disarm the townspeople. 2. When the settlement was first formed, several of the settlers organized a demonstration to try and expel Ivanir and his family from the casa grande. The

Notes 241 settlers wanted to use the building as a school and settlement meeting place. The mst settlers organized the demonstration, and several of the resident workers joined in. The demonstration did not succeed, however. A local judge ruled that Ivanir should be allowed to stay in his house. 3. Interview with Antônio, the settlement agricultural extension agent who was an mst activist. Interview conducted in August 1999 in Água Preta, Pernambuco. 4. The settlers were all offered 2,000 reais (in August 1999, this was worth approximately U.S. $1,200) for production investments. Of the 2,000 reais, only 1,000 would need to be repaid. In order to get the credit, however, the settlers had to plant bananas. Families who did not have sufficient water on their land accepted the credit and planted bananas trees that were doomed from the beginning to die. 5. The importance of a worker was determined both by occupation and by the favor of the plantation owner. Plantation owners often rewarded long or good service with a sitio, or offered one to a worker whom they hoped to entice to work in their plantation. 6. The uncertified workers were also kept from joining the rural unions, a traditional source of protection for the plantation workers. The unions were hurt badly by the region’s sugar crisis because when there aren’t any jobs, nobody pays the union fees. The unions were also deeply implicated in the sugar industry and highly ambivalent about supporting the mst: ‘‘In seven or eight cities around here, it’s the mill owner who controls the unions, so the president of the union does whatever the boss says.’’ 7. Another reason why the people who choose to join an occupation tend to come from the urban peripheries has to do with the mst’s method of organizing in the region. The militants rarely enter into a plantation to do their organizing work. Caio, the mst archivist, argued that if he were to try and organize inside a plantation, he might not leave the area alive. ‘‘The administrator finds out [that you’ve been there] and he puts it in the boss’s ear,’’ and then the boss calls together the workers and tells them they should not leave if they ever want to work again. 8. One settlement president described this process: ‘‘When incra came to do the registration, I could find only forty-eight settlers—actually forty-five because three of them came from [another mill] to register. So in this case, there were forty-eight, and the other [people who had worked here] were out of town, so we couldn’t do their registration. If they had done it, they would have gotten the plot of land, either here or in one of the other settlements, but at the right moment they weren’t here. There was another person who deserved land, but he was in São Paulo at the time [of the expropriation], and he couldn’t get it. He arrived here without a place to stay and empty-handed—I was the one who arranged that small house for him to live. Now he’s gone to Recife and found a job.’’

242 Notes

6. Producing for Market, State, and Movement 1. This is true of any market production system, particularly capitalism, and particularly in the countryside. 2. Procera was created in 1985 but only became effective in 1993. It was merged into the broader funding program for small family farmers in 2001, a point of contention with the mst. 3. The settlers took an intense interest in the ‘‘board’s’’ activities. This was in large part because the associations ruled that when members of the board were out of town on settlement business, one of the other settlers was supposed to take over the work on their land every day. This was not a very popular arrangement with most of the settlers. The president of Flora was not accustomed to having workers on his land who were his equals, and he did not realize that the settlers expected to be treated kindly. One settler said that he and a group of others went to work on the president’s land and the president ‘‘was very rude and said that he only wanted all of us there if we were going to work.’’ Most of the settlers preferred to pay a monthly fee of two reais to cover traveling expenses for anyone out on official settlement business. Because the settlers all contributed to the association in some way and were theoretically all equal within the group, they had a keen interest in knowing where their money went, and the president was regularly asked to account for all the money spent during the month. 4. All crises are, by definition, spatially and temporally limited: crises are only identifiable vis-à-vis that which is ordinary. The sugarcane region is particularly noteworthy, however, for the severity and frequency of its boom-and-bust shifts. 5. President Lula does not have a well-defined energy program, but the war in Iraq prompted him to push for increased ethanol production as an alternative fuel to petroleum-based products (as the 1973 oil crisis had originally prompted Proalcool). Distillery owners were offered substantial loans on generous terms to finance the year-round production of cane for ethanol. The amount of the loans was calculated on a production quantity basis, so the more sugarcane the distilleries processed, the more credit they received. 6. An engenho is an old-fashioned mill that comprises cane fields but no processing facilities. An usina is a more modern entity that combines both cane fields and processing facilities (or factories). 7. I use ‘‘factories’’ here because there was a division of labor: the factories around Água Preta used the settlers as essentially contract farmers who supplied sugarcane, while the mills hired the settlers during the harvest season to help cut, gather, and transport the sugarcane. 8. Between 1979–1980 and 1992, the rural workers’ unions in the sugarcane

Notes 243 region went on strike every year to pressure the plantation elites to sign the annual labor contract. 9. This was, in fact, a common trope in the sugarcane region: in crisis after crisis, regional elites argued against the dismantling of sugarcane because of the jobs the industry provided. The emphasis of state efforts to provide relief during crises has been placed on rationalizing production such that the efficient producers receive support and the workers are given assistance when there is no or little employment. 10. Regional mst leader, in a discussion during a regional meeting in the municipality of Belem de Maria, Pernambuco, held February 17, 2003. 11. This legal tool derived from the colonial period, when the Portuguese monarchy was attempting to encourage colonization and proper land use (Wright 2001; Andrade 1988). One well-documented effect of the law has been to push landowners to move tenants around frequently in an attempt to ensure they would not be able to claim rights to the land (Stolcke 1988). As John dos Passos notes in his travel memoir, Brazil on the Move (Sidgwick and Jackson 1963): ‘‘The landlords in the Northeast are no bargain either. Many of them would rather die than give their tenants a break. The basic trouble is that there’s not enough to go around. I was told the story of a man in Pernambuco who personally beat up one of his tenants for planting banana trees round his hut. I suppose the landlord thought that if the tenant had a few bananas to eat he wouldn’t cut cane at the going rate’’ (188). 12. Most of the settlers were working in the mill, Barra d’Ouro, which was offering seven reais for a day’s labor. This was considered very good money, compared to the going wage of five reais per day. 13. Lygia Sigaud (2004) points out that these mutual obligations, written in social conventions, were hierarchically perceived: workers and owners saw their contribution (labor) as an obligation, while both saw the contributions of the owner (a house, land, salary level) as ‘‘gifts’’ or donations rather than obligations. These were the terms on which the details of the relationships were negotiated. 14. The emphasis put on defense of workers’ rights or on provision of assistance differed depending on the particular region and ideological disposition of local union leaders; see Sigaud 1979. 15. Author’s notes from a mst regional meeting, in Belem de Maria, Pernambuco, February 17, 2003. 16. These food baskets were arranged by the former leader, Antônio.

Conclusion 1. The key mechanism through which these very different groups came to agree on agrarian reform was the focus on productivity. During the long debate over the

244 Notes new democratic constitution (1985–1988), the land eligible for distribution was progressively narrowed down to include only land that could be technically characterized as unproductive and therefore not fulfilling the social function (da Silva 1988; da Veiga 1986). 2. From Luiz Francisco, ‘‘Lula elogia ‘amigos do mst’ em area invadida na Bahia,’’ Folha de São Paulo, January 22, 2005. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fol ha/brasil/ult96u66808.shtml (accessed July 1, 2009). 3. From Matt Moffett, ‘‘In Brazil, the Poor Stake a Claim on Huge Farms,’’ Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2003. 4. From Rubens Valente, ‘‘Lula Engorda Reforma Agrária com Assentamento Estadual,’’ Folha de São Paulo, February 9, 2009. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ folha/brasil/ult96u89651.shtml (accessed July 1, 2009).

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 Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Adalberto (mst settler in Campos Novos), 57–67 agrarian populism, 20–21, 134, 237n17; definition of in the mst, 90–93; as mst identity, 77–90 agrarian reform: around the world, 43, 72–73, 211; death of, 234n1; democracy and, 47–49; hopes for in Brazil, 16, 21, 43–45, 211–21, 238n23; in the Amazon, 45–46, 212; in the northeast region, 123–27 agrarian studies, 9, 74–75, 228n6 agreste, 130–31, 158, 253 agricultural modernization: coffee and, 41–42; postwar conservative, 16, 44–45, 56, 69, 72–74, 125. See also Green Revolution agro-ecology, 65–66, 102 agrovilas: collectives and, 83, 236n11; in northeastern Brazil, 133, 138, 195; in southern Brazil, 55–6 Água Preta: agrarian reform and, 5; description of, 135–39; meanings of land in, 18–19, 21, 168, 189–90; mobilization in, 1–6; the mst in, 1– 6, 14–22, 26, 32–33, 139–48, 167– 210 passim, 223–26 Alagoas: the mst in, 128–29 Amazon: land reform in, 45–46, 212, 215, 218–19; notions of land ownership in, 193 Amorim, Jaime, 19, 30–31, 85, 127–

34, 135, 141, 147–48, 150–52, 156, 178–79. See also mst: leaders Anderson, Benedict, 34, 77, 79, 84. See also imagined community Antônio (mst leader in Água Preta), 157–58, 172–79, 215, 241n3, 243n16. See also mst: leaders Arraes, Miguel, 123, 129–31, 240n1 Article 184, 1. See also Constitution of Brazil Bahia, 116; construction of Canudos in, 78; the mst in, 127–29 bananas: agrarian reform and, 6, 32, 138, 151, 156, 162, 164, 168, 170– 76, 180–88, 241n4; sugarcane plantations and, 187 bandits, 30, 238n1, 240n1 black plastic tents, 13, 86, 148, 155, 161, 163, 175. See also occupations Bogo, Ademar, 99 bosses (patrões): Canudos and, 78; memories of by former rural workers, 149, 153–56, 160–62, 187; mst settlements and, 21, 105, 127, 191, 196– 97, 202–3, 241n6, 241n7; on sugarcane plantations, 118–19, 141–43, 145, 147, 200. See also plantations Brasília, 1, 28, 54, 61–62, 66, 103, 104, 151, 218 Brazilian Communist Party (pcb), 43– 44, 123

276 Index Campos Novos: history of, 51–52; large farmers and, 67–69; the mst in, 14, 17, 51–56 Canudos, 78–79, 235n7 capitalism: as distinct from peasant economy, 58, 72, 234n27; multiple experiences of, 23, 31, 130; resistance to, 70–76, 77, 79, 90–92, 97, 193; subjectivities of, 20, 104, 229n12; theory and, 7, 192, 242n1 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 49, 95– 100, 166, 178, 212–15, 237n18 Catende, 152, 158–59, 179 Catholic Church: agrarian reform and, 171; the mst in southern Brazil and, 16, 36, 44, 47, 50–51, 54, 56– 64, 108, 128; in northeastern Brazil, 122, 133, 151, 227n3. See also Comissão Pastoral de Terra (cpt); ecclesiastical base communities Chayanov, Alexander, 58, 234n27. See also demographic cycle China, 74; example of cooperative production in, 82; migrants from, 39 Chomsky, Noam, 100–101 citizenship, 228; land and, 64, 211; production of, through the mst, 35, 7–80 passim, 104, 131, 146, 202, 222 clandestinos: joining the mst and, 143, 149–50; production of, 125 class: the mst and, 79, 82, 98, 127, 133; peasants as, 36–47, 69, 72; social movements and, 23; subaltern studies and, 10; theory of, 22, 74, 193–94, 238n20 coconuts, 168, 172, 180 coffee crop: production of, 36, 39–42, 231n6; as production alternative on the settlements, 179, 208 collectives: historical forms (mutirões), 60; mst ideology and, 81–84, 99– 100, 236n11; in northeastern Brazil, 27, 32, 134, 151–52, 178, 188–

92, 195, 199; in southern Brazil, 55–56, 103–11 colonization: of the Amazon, 45–46, 125, 212, 219, 232n10; of Brazil, 37–38, 243n11; European, 72; sugarcane and, 113–16, 168; in southern Brazil, 17, 42, 52, 56, 58. See also agrarian reform colonos, 40–41, 58, 232n7 Comissão Pastoral de Terra (cpt), 50, 64, 128–29 common sense, 6, 10, 22–26, 185–86, 226, 230n15 communism: unrest and, 43–44, 73, 123, 232n12 Communist Party of Brazil (pcdob), 130 Community: international, 44, 94, 99, 123, 215; the mst and, 33, 236; in the northeast, 34, 105, 119, 139– 48, 171, 190–92; social movements and, 23, 235n7, 237n17, 239n8; in the south, 17, 54–69, 103–11. See also imagined community conaie, 70 Congresses: mst, 47, 107, 128; National Peasants’, 44 consciousness: peasant, 104, 122; political, 10, 18, 19, 25–26, 99–100, 228n6; rural worker, 168, 181 Conselheiro, Antônio, 78 Constitution of Brazil, Federal, 1, 38, 43, 45, 48, 232n9 Contestado, the, 42–43, 51, 77–78, 232n8, 235n7 Count Maurits of Nassau, 116 credit, agricultural: agrarian reform and, 53, 81, 127, 167–79, 209, 214, 217–18, 241n4; mobilization for, 1– 6; the mst and, 66–67, 84, 95, 146 Cuba, 73–74, 102; sugarcane and, 117, 182 culture: importance of, for theory, 7– 8, 22–26, 92–93, 209–10, 230n15;

Index 277 of the mst, 95–96, 98–101; of mst settlers in northeastern Brazil, 17– 21, 139–48, 180–88, 222–23; of mst settlers in southern Brazil, 16– 17, 57–69, 222–23; of the sugarcane region, 2, 130–34 De Castro, Josué, 123, 238n1, 239n9 demographic cycle, 58, 62, 234n27. See also Chayanov, Alexander demonstrations, public: in Água Preta, 1–6, 209–10; the mst and, 80, 93 ecclesiastical base communities, 128. See also Catholic Church education: the mst and, 16, 82, 86– 87, 102–3, 107, 134, 208 El Dorado das Carajás, massacre, 28, 160, 166, 212, 215 Estatuto da Terra, 45 Estatuto de Trabalhador Rural (etr), 123, 159 ethanol, 115, 120, 124–26, 184, 215, 242n5 ethnographic method, 22–26, 28, 30– 34, 221–26 family: collectives and, 103–11, 188– 92; in southern Brazil, 16–18, 49, 53, 56–61; in northeastern Brazil, 121, 133–34, 139, 153; populism and, 90, 102; large-scale production and, 40–41 Federação de Trabalhadores na Agricultura de Pernambuco (fetape), 124, 128–29, 131, 167–68, 178–79, 200–201, 227n3, 241n6, 242n8 feudalism: in Brazil, 73, 77; Portuguese, 37; in theory, 74–75 Fome Zero, 217 Foucault, Michel, 12, 229n13, 231n22 framing: by the mst, 30–31, 94, 97– 98, 209; in social movement theory, 23. See also representation

Fraser, Nancy, 7, 14 Free Trade Association of the Americas (ftaa), 97, 215 Freyre, Gilberto, 115 frontier: of agrarian populism, 91; in the Amazon, 193; in Pernambuco, 18, 239n8; in Santa Catarina, 17, 41, 56, 59, 62–63 Galiléia, 121, 240n13 Gomes da Silva, José, 47 Goulart, João, 44, 123 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 10, 22–24, 99, 230n15. See also common sense; hegemony Graziano da Silva, José, 217 Green Revolution, 73–74. See also agricultural modernization Grupo Especial para Racionalização da Agroindústria Canavieira da Nordeste (geran), 124–25 Guha, Ranajit, 10, 88, 228n6 Hardt, Michael, 34, 101, 228n9, 235n5 Harvey, David, 8, 74, 92, 229n13 hegemony, 7, 9, 10, 12, 19–21, 23–25, 35, 223, 228n6; sugarcane and, 131, 185–86 human rights: the mst and, 70, 90, 94, 96–97, 102, 111, 202, 215, 222, 223 imagined community, 34, 76–90, 222 immigration, 39–41, 231n6; in Campos Novos, 51–52; in southern Brazil, 58; sugarcane plantations and, 118, 123–24 individualism: collectives and, 188, 191; mst interpretations of, 19–20, 80, 104–5, 132–33; peasants and, 122 Instituto do Álcool e Açúcar (iaa), 120, 124 Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (incra): collective

278 Index incra (cont.) work and, 105–7; credit and, 169; funding for, 213, 217–19; land expropriation process and, 49; in Pernambuco, 130, 136, 152, 154–56, 160–63, 196, 198–200; in Santa Catarina, 51, 53–56 Jornal Sem Terra, 80, 83, 93–103 Julião, Francisco, 43, 121–22, 240n13 Justice: agrarian reform and, 45, 126, 211; meanings of, 7–9, 17, 59; the mst and, 35, 70, 79, 85, 90, 97, 235n7; scale and, 92–93 land reform. See agrarian reform Land Statute. See Estatuto da Terra Lei de Sesmarias, 37, 38 Lei do Sitio, 129, 183 Lei de Terras, 38–39, 231n3 Lenin, Vladimir, 23, 88, 96, 99; Leninist vanguard, 83 liberal modernity, 10, 25, 41, 88 liberalism: the mst and, 91, 202. See also neoliberalism Liberation Theology, 16, 87 Ligas Camponeses. See Peasant Leagues Lona preta. See black plastic tents Luis Inácio ‘‘Lula’’ da Silva, 103, 237n18, 242n5; agrarian reform and, 213–21 Lumiar, 167, 173 Mallon, Florencia, 10, 228n7, 235n4 manioc, 14; rural workers and, 132, 138, 151, 164, 181, 201, 208, 218; scandal, 130; sugarcane plantations and, 116, 187 Maranhão, 128, 193 marches: the mst and, 1–6, 61, 145– 46, 170; National March (of 1997), 28, 103, 104; Peasant Leagues and, 44; westward, 37

market-led land reform, 69, 75, 213, 219–20 Martins, José de Souza, 36, 193–94, 235n7 Marx, Karl, 8, 71–72, 193 ‘‘massification’’: mst tactic of, 95–98, 215 Mexico, 12, 102, 211, 234n3; social movements in, 70 military: dictatorship, 16, 44–47, 91, 123–28, 212, 219, 221, 232n10; police, 2–3, 4, 54–55, 135–36 mística, 87–88, 89, 102, 180 moradores, 118–19, 121, 240n12; joining the mst and, 144–48 moral economy: theory of, 7–8; agrarian populism and, 91; (de)mobilization and, 14–22; of large farmers, 67–69; in Pernambuco, 148–65, 203; Santa Catarina, 57–67, 105 mst: flag of, 1–2, 6, 184–85; formation of, 46–50; identity of, 76–92; Jornal Sem Terra and, 93–103; large farmers and, 67–69; leaders, 1–6, 8, 11–13, 17, 19–20, 28, 30–31, 57, 60, 64, 81, 82–83, 85, 88–89, 103– 5, 110, 127–34, 147, 171–80, 180– 81, 188–92, 195–210, 228n9, 238n23; Lula and, 213–15, 219–21, 237n18; in the northeast, 17–22, 26, 33–34, 126–210 passim, 218, 221–26; slogans, 2, 47, 181, 234n28, 235n6; in the south, 16– 17, 50–69. See also imagined community; land occupations; neoliberalism; new society; revolution; settlements neoliberalism: the mst and, 95–103, 213, 215 new social movements, 24; democracy and, 46 new society: the mst vision of a, 20, 78, 79, 81, 83, 87, 89, 91, 102, 171, 200

Index 279 occupations: as mst tactic, 1, 12, 20, 48–49, 85, 87, 90–91, 94–95, 218, 233nn22–23; in Pernambuco, 18, 128–31, 135–37, 139, 143, 149–50, 160, 174–75, 241n7; in Santa Catarina, 50–51, 53–54, 56, 59–62 ‘‘Official Genesis Story,’’ 16, 56, 69 Pará: the El Dorado das Carajás massacre and, 212; property in, 193 Paraiba: the mst in, 123, 127–28, 228n5 Parana: the mst in, 41–43, 47, 61, 236n12 Partido dos Trabalhadores (pt), 128, 214 Pastoral da Juventude, 50, 128 paternalism: political legacy of, 146– 47, 152, 202, 204; sugarcane plantations and, 119; vs. progressive populism, 257n17 Peasant Leagues, 43, 44, 77, 79, 119, 121–23, 128, 162, 239n11, 240n13 peasants, 21, 71–76; consciousness and, 104–5; debate over existence in Brazil of, 36–37; in the northeast, 122 Pernambuco, 15; demobilization of the mst in, 180–88, 194–210 passim; formation of the mst in, 1–6, 14, 18–35, 126–27, 135–65 passim, 240n1; Jaime Amorim in, 85, 127– 34, 237n14; mst collective in, 188– 92; mst meetings in, 89, 171–79; other social movements in, 227n3; Peasant Leagues and, 121–23; sugarcane in, 113–21, 125–27, 228n5, 239n4. See also Água Preta; plantations; sugarcane Piauí: the mst in, 128 Plano Real, 214 plantations: dominance of, 5; labor and, 38–42, 115–16, 118–19, 182– 84; the mst and, 14, 18–20, 21–22,

129, 131–34, 135–48, 184–85, 190–92, 198–200; reforms and, 116–18, 123–27, 170–71, 179, 184. See also bosses; sugarcane pnra, 47–48, 51 pnra ii, 216–17, 220–21 Political opportunity theory, 23, 166. See also social movements poverty: in Água Preta, 142–43, 184; in Brazil, 13–14; in Campos Novos, 52; in the northeast, 112 primitive accumulation, 71–72, 74–75 Programa Especial de Credito para Reforma Agrária (Procera), 168, 177, 242n2 Programa Nacional de Álcool (Proalcool), 125, 182, 242n15 property: expropriation of, 1, 18, 71– 73, 123–24, 211, 220; intellectual, 75; norms, 58–59, 65–66, 85, 88, 194–200, 223; private, 19, 37, 43, 71–73, 85, 215; right to, 1, 14, 39, 45; rights, 37–39, 43–44, 68, 239n8; theory of, 192–94. See also agrarian reform; incra; primitive accumulation Quilombo, municipality of, 57–62 Quilombos, 78, 219, 235n7, 239n8 representation: claim to, by the mst, 8, 10–12, 28, 31, 92–103, 148, 152, 165, 222; of the mst, 13–14, 27, 174–75; of social movements, 11, 23–24. See also framing; imagined community resource mobilization theory, 23, 167. See also social movements revolution: in Brazil, 123, 240n13; the mst’s message of, 18, 77–79, 88; peasantry as revolutionary, 70–73; subjectivity and, 9, 22 rights: conception of, 12, 16–18, 45, 58; land as a, 18–19, 21, 38–39,

280 Index rights (cont.) 196, 211; within movements, 10, 50, 66, 90, 93, 202; within plantation communities, 119, 122–25, 130, 142–43, 149, 151, 155, 158– 59, 183, 186–87, 200, 202, 223, 243n13; the ‘‘right to have rights,’’ 28, 65, 91, 95, 222. See also human rights; property rights Rio Grande do Norte: the mst in, 128 Rio Grande do Sul: the mst in, 41–42, 51, 58, 108, 193, 236n12 Rural Democratic Union. See União Democrática Rural (udr) rural trade unions, 36, 43–44, 47, 50, 61, 70, 103; in the northeast, 124– 25, 128–29, 131, 167, 178–79, 183, 200–201, 227n3, 241n6, 242n8. See also fetape Santa Catarina, 15; Contestado and, 41–43; environmental conditions in, 62–63; formation of the mst in, 14, 50–56, 9, 232n15, 233n20; mst collective in, 107–11; mst meetings in, 78, 89 São Paulo: city, 13, 27, 30, 41, 73, 76, 82, 84, 113, 241n8; state, 40, 42, 51–52, 120, 228n5, 231n6, 236n12, 238n21 scale: dangers of, 93–94, 103–11; economies of, 39; importance of, 8; jumping, 92; politics and, 92–93 Schwartz, Stuart, 14, 36 Scott, James, 72, 74, 91, 200, 228n6 Senhor Antônio (mst member in Água Preta): story of, 157–65, 223–25 Sergipe: the mst in, 27, 128, 129 sertão, 130–31, 239n11 sesmaria, 37–38 sitio (small farm on the sugarcane plantation), 119, 129, 137, 142, 183, 186, 241n5. See also bosses; Lei do Sitio; plantation; sugarcane

slavery, 239n7; sugarcane and, 115– 16; effects of, 131 small farmers: as idealized ‘‘middle peasant,’’ 20; in the south, 17, 56– 67. See also peasants social function of land: agrarian reform and, 45, 212, 243n1; colonization and, 37–38; the mst and, 1, 18, 51, 131 social movements: decentering, 10– 13; dirty laundry and, 6–7; ontological coherence and, 5, 8–9, 11; professionalization of, 8–9, 27; theory, 22–25, 166–67, 229n14 socialism: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and, 237n18; ideals of, 47, 78–84, 96; land reform as, 232n12; Miguel Arraes and, 123; as a system, 96, 99, 100, 192–93, 211 soil fertility: in the northeast, 113, 131–32, 137, 185–86; in the south, 62–63 Spivak, Gayatri, 2, 227n1, 228n6. See also subaltern studies squatting, 38, 41, 49, 56–59 Stedile, João Pedro, 16, 47, 88, 214, 228n9, 238n23 strategic essentialisms, 8; as simplification, 11–14 strikes: by the mst, 148; by rural workers in the northeast, 124, 128, 131, 183, 242n8 subaltern studies, 9–14, 22, 27, 228n6; in Latin America, 228n7; peasants and, 70–71, 74 sugarcane: crisis and, 115–18, 125–27; historical conditions and production of, 113–16; mills and, 6, 117–18; mst settlers and, 21, 33, 131–32, 180–85. See also plantations Superintendência do Nordeste (Sudene), 123, 240n14 Superintendência da Reforma Agrária (Supra), 44, 123

Index 281 terra devoluta, 38, 231n3 Thompson, E. P., 7–8, 91. See also moral economy transnational: agribusiness, 74; capitalism, 91; networks, 8, 70, 91–95, 101–2, 222; scale, 8, 35, 76, 92–93, 111; as tactic, 215 União Democrática Rural (udr), 48, 232n11 United States of America, 98, 228n8; intervention in Brazil, 44, 73; movements in, 23, 102, 238n22; subaltern studies in, 228n7 usinas, 118, 120, 122, 242n6

varzea, 113 Via Campesina, 8, 70, 97, 102, 216, 228n7 Workers’ Party, 128, 214 Zapatista uprising, 70 Zona da Mata, 112–13, 118, 228n5, 239n11

 Wendy Wolford is an associate professor of geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author with Angus Wright of To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (2003). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wolford, Wendy. This land is ours now : social mobilization and the meanings of land in Brazil / Wendy Wolford. p. cm. — Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4522-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4539-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Land reform—Brazil. 2. Social movements—Brazil. 3. Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Terra (Brazil) 4. Sugarcane industry—Brazil. I. Title. hd1333.b6w65 2010 333.3%181—dc22 2009041173