Dispatches

The Activists Pack Up Their Hoes and Stage an Occupation

The Brazilian government can expropriate unutilized private land and redistribute it to poor farmers; in the state of Mato Grosso, it has been three years since the program has moved residents of an MST encampment, like this one, to a permanent settlement

Given its dependence on natural light, the encampment generally wakes with the sunrise. But on the morning of Oct. 1, coffee was brewing on wood-fueled stovetops at 3:30 a.m. The night before, organizers had readied families for a predawn occupation. The target was a state legislator’s plantation a few miles up the highway. As always, participation was mandatory. Families collected their farming tools and sacks of beans and rice, marched to the site, cut through the wire fence, and by 5:30 a.m. several hundred landless activists were hard at work chopping down the politician’s eucalyptus trees.

The action was symbolic. The fazendeiro was one of the largest landowners in the area, and the eucalyptus he had planted were cultivated for export. Within minutes of the invasion, the plantation manager appeared and pleaded with the intruders to stop destroying the crop. When were they going to leave? They would leave once they had harvested their beans and rice, replied Edilson Silva, the group’s coordinator, who then returned to hoeing a furrow in the earth.

When a couple of dozen police officers arrived at the scene, everyone stopped their work and, hoes and machetes in hand, they formed a human blockade along the length of the broken fence. The standard negotiation was about to begin. “Let us in, or we’ll cut your throat,” the officer in charge said.

Edilson Silva (with his son Kaio) is the camp’s chief strategist and ideological sparkplug

Edilson had little reason to back down. Murder at the hands of the police wasn’t probable, at least in this part of the state. And allowing them through the barricade would more likely lead to roundups than productive talks. A roundup would be disastrous. Chances were they’d be trucked to their home cities, as many as a couple of hundred miles away, rather than back to the encampment. A dispersal like that could destroy the movement.

Other than numbers, the activists on the barricade had the advantage of time. Previous confrontations and the ensuing legal battles that followed had convinced the local police force to grudgingly respect the 48-hour waiting period occupiers were guaranteed before a forced removal. Sure enough, the lead officer softened his threatening tone after radioing his commander. The invaders marched home later that day.

Most of the movement’s occupations around Sinop have been just as brief, and the results have been just as intangible. Hundreds of MST activists blockaded the highway once, halting all timber traffic from the Amazon. That lasted for an afternoon. Another time, police officers broke up an occupation at Sinop’s city hall with tear gas after a few days, long before any meaningful concessions could be negotiated. In one notable setback, a fazendeiro lured eight MST members away from the movement during a short occupation of his plantation. He hired them on to his private security force.

In May, at an encampment about 60 miles east of Sinop, men allegedly hired by local landowners abducted seven landless activists, an eighth was severely beaten, and a ninth stabbed. It’s a miracle no one’s been killed yet. When the movement arrived in this part of Mato Grosso two years ago, there were rumors of a $900-per-head bounty for killing activists. As it is, murder in Brazil doesn’t require much provocation. When people from the MST start waving their machetes—more an expression of peasant power than practical weaponry—fazendeiros reply with gun-toting goon squads. “The people are the weapon,” says Edilson, but it’s still a lopsided contest. Landowners aren’t getting killed, activists are. Massacres are relatively common, including the killing of 19 at an encampment in the eastern Amazon in 1996, perhaps the movement’s defining moment. Countless MST settlements and temporary shantytowns end up named for people martyred during the struggle. In 2005, a camp about 50 miles north was named in honor of Dorothy Stang, a 73-year-old missionary from Dayton, Ohio. Stang, who belonged to a landless organization frequently allied with the MST, had complained about loggers illegally raiding the area of the eastern Amazon where she was helping form an environmentally sustainable settlement. Last February, one of those loggers had her gunned down.

Edilson lives in a two-room shack at the edge of the encampment with his wife, his sister, and his infant son. When we spoke, he spread his personal library on the table of his open-air kitchen. The works were what you might expect: Lenin, Mao, and, naturally, Che, the MST’s patron saint. Edilson raged that it seemed someone always had to die before progress could be made, before headlines pressured a judge to rule on a case or for the government to finally purchase land for settlement. And then, with a gesture to his books, he grew more philosophical about the sacrifice. “In all the great conquests, people are killed.”

Dirceu Flores splits his time between the MST encampment and a fishing shack on the Teles-Pides River; toxins from soy cultivation have diminished the daily catch

The shantytown doesn’t have a true leader. Officially, it’s run by a governing council of elected representatives. Edilson is the chief strategist and ideological spark plug, and on Sundays he is the star striker on the MST soccer team as it takes on squads from the sawmills on the small pitch by the highway. As a teenager, he worked as the houseboy and bagman for a wealthy landowner and drug trafficker, before his stepfather yanked him back home. He joined the movement at 19, when his mother got her own plot of land in an MST-organized settlement downstate. He passed through a phase of evangelical fanaticism before abandoning the church and entering the movement’s training program for militants. Israel, a slightly older stepbrother, chose a different path. He was a gunman in a landowner’s security force. His job was to “clean the land”—that is, steal it from small farmers. Israel died at 17, shot dead by 14 bullets.

Most of the encampment’s residents crave rest after lifetimes of desperate migration around Brazil. Edilson, though, acknowledges other aims. “I have a task in the movement, and this is bigger than my dream of having a piece of land. Some people want to die on their own land. But I’m the opposite. I want to die fighting.” His wife isn’t too happy about that.