{mosimage}On 2 May 2005, over 12,000 members and supporters of the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) left the city of Goiânia, in the state of Goiás, and embarked upon a two week, 230 km, 'National March for Agrarian Reform' to the federal capital, Brasilia.

The sea of marchers waving their red MST flags and banners did not only call for agrarian reform, they demanded radical changes in the Lula government's neoliberal economic policies.

"A reforma agraria se faz no campo, mas se ganha na cidade" - MST slogan
(You make agrarian reform in the countryside, but you win it in the cities)

"Marches always represent the disposition to struggle, of moving forward. They demonstrate the extreme degree of sacrifice by men, women and children, who challenge themselves to walk hundreds of kilometers for an ideal: to see land shared." - MST

In its 21 year history, marches have been an important ingredient in the MST's growth from a small regional movement in southern Brazil into the largest, most organized and dynamic social movement in Brazilian history.

The objective of most of these marches was to take the demands of the landless to and win the support of the population in local towns, provincial capitals and the national capital.

The building of links with urban sectors of society has allowed the MST to overcome the 'isolation' of rural struggles and win popular support for agrarian reform. This strategy is crucial in a country that is 80% urbanized.

The MST draws inspiration from many historic marches ranging from Gandhi's salt march, Martin Luther King's civil rights march on Washington DC, and the Prestes Column's 25,000 km march across Brazil against elite domination of the rural and urban poor.

Of the many marches that the MST has undertaken, three stand out. Most of these marches were shaped by the particular conjunctures of their time.

In October 1985, the newly born MST carried out its largest land occupation as 2,500 families took over the 9,500 hectare Fazenda Anoni estate.

However, two years later the tent camp of 7,000 people had still not been settled on land. The MST was at a crossroads: patiently wait for the government to fulfill its promises or march on the provincial capital, Porto Alegre and pressure the government to settle the families?

The MST decided on the latter. After marching 450 km over 27 days, the marchers were welcomed by 10,000 Porto Alegrenses and given the keys to the city by the mayor. The march was instrumental in placing land reform on the national agenda, in the settlement of the Fazenda Anonni families, and served as the launching pad for the growth of the MST into a national movement.

The second major march took place in another difficult conjuncture. During the mid-1990s, the neoliberal Cardoso administration - after failing in its efforts to co-opt the MST - utilized the full arsenal of the state machinery (the judiciary, intelligence agency, the police and the media) to vilify, criminalize and repress the MST and its strategy of occupying unproductive farms. Scores of MST members were arrested on trumped up charges of murder.

In 1996, 19 MST members were killed and a further 69 wounded (many shot in the back) by the military police while on a peaceful march on the highway at Eldorado dos Carajás protesting unfulfilled government promises.

The MST went on the offensive and in February 1997 organized a two month national march for 'Land Reform, Employment and Justice,' to the center of political power in Brasília.

One thousand three hundred MST members left from three corners of Brazil and covered 1500 km to arrive in the nation's capital on 17 April 1997, the first anniversary of the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre.

The March highlighted that a year later none of the military police officers implicated in the massacre had been arrested. The reference to unemployment was a clear allusion to President Cardoso's trade liberalization policies that forced thousands of family farmers off the land, to the job losses associated with privatization of state enterprises, and to the high interest rate policy which was bankrupting factories and leading to rising unemployment.

The MST thus demonstrated how local struggles for agrarian reform are connected to the broader struggle against neoliberal policies.

Enroute to Brasília, the marchers were warmly received by residents of small towns who wanted to know more about the lives of the Sem Terra (the Landless) as MST members are popularly referred to.

The Sem Terra were invited to address schools and churches to explain the purpose of the march, to talk about life in their plastic tent camps, and of their struggle for a better life.

As the marchers converged onto Brasília they were welcomed by over 100,000 people. The march, which was widely covered by the print and electronic media, sparked the popular imagination and generated admiration and pride at the determination of a group of people who were willing to fight for their ideals.

A poll taken during the march showed that over 80% of Brazilians supported agrarian reform and that the Cardoso government had not done enough to promote agrarian reform and combat rural violence. Popular support for land reform and the Sem Terra forced President Cardoso to back down from his efforts to criminalize and repress the MST.

The MST national march to Brasília during May 2005, unlike the 1997 march, did not take place in a context of repression, but one of cooptation and unfulfilled promises from a government that declared land reform a priority.

The 2005 march was offensive rather than defensive and had as its objective changes in the Lula government's neoliberal macro-economic policy, which undermined the land reform program. To understand the significance of the 2005 March, it is necessary to briefly situate it in its political context.

The Context to the 2005 March: The Workers Party (PT) and Lula in Power

In October 2002, over 52 million Brazilians voted Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former metal worker, as their President. Lula came into office on a strong platform of change to undo a decade of neoliberal rule.

He had broad popular support from the working class, the middle class and sections of the national bourgeoisie, all of whom had to a lesser or greater extent been squeezed by neoliberal policies.

Despite his left rhetoric, Lula not only gave continuity to, but actually deepened the neoliberal agenda of the previous administration. The Lula government voluntarily increased the primary budget surplus target of 3.75% of GDP (initially agreed to with the IMF) to 4.25% to gain the confidence of the markets.

The IMF imposed primary budget surpluses are generated to service interest payments on Brazil's debt. To meet the self-imposed target of 4.25%, the Finance Ministry drastically curbed public spending.

In 2003, rigid monetary and fiscal measures resulted in the economy contracting by 0.2%, resulting in rising unemployment, declines in worker income, and reductions in family consumption.

During 2003-2004 the Lula government spent 273 billion reais (roughly US$ 110 billion) just servicing interest payments on debt. Instead of tackling Brazil's social debt, Lula religiously prioritized debt payments.

Lula and many of the NGO and social movement activists who entered government called on popular movements to be patient, arguing that the Brazilian state could not be transformed overnight and that the conservative turn in economic policy was transitional.

Instead of promoting and reinforcing popular mobilizations in support of a progressive agenda, the moderate tendency in the PT and the Lula government through a discourse of patience demobilized popular forces while at the same time reinforcing the "liberal ideology of private property and the business class as the principal protagonists of society."

While most movements were caught in a state of paralysis and confusion, the MST - despite its close ties to the PT - was among the first popular movements to assert its autonomy and challenge the Lula administration's conservative turn.

In late 2003, the MST and other rural movements marched on Brasília to demand the launch of the government's National Plan for Agrarian Reform (PNRA).

The drafters of the PNRA stated that there was sufficient unproductive land (liable for expropriation under the Brazilian constitution) to settle one million families over four years.

In addition, the drafters proposed a set of agricultural credit and infrastructural policies to ensure the success and sustainability of the PNRA. The government, however, scaled back the original PNRA by only agreeing to settle 430,000 families by the end of 2006.

In 2003, the government declared that it had settled 36,000 families of the PNRA target of 60,000 and in 2004 settled 81,000 families of the planned 115,000. All rural movements contested these figures, arguing that many of the families included in these statistics were already on the land and merely had their tenure status legalized and thus should not be included as being settled. The MST asserts that less than 60,000 families were settled during 2003-2004.

The May 2005 'National March for Land Reform' thus took place in another challenging conjuncture for the MST. The Lula government's embrace of fiscal discipline undermined PNRA targets.

To ensure that the primary surplus target of 4.25% to service debt was achieved, the Finance Ministry announced 15 billion reais (approximately US$ 6 billion) worth of spending cuts in the 2005 budget.

The agrarian reform budget allocation of 3.7 billion reais was cut by 2 billion reais (US$ 800 million). In 2004, when the agrarian reform budget had suffered a similar fate, the MST embarked upon a massive month-long national campaign of popular actions (land occupations, marches, occupation of government buildings and road blocks), which the corporate media dubbed "Red April" in a naked attempt to conjure images of disorder and transgressions of the rule of law that needed to be severely repressed.

The MST appropriated and incorporated "Red April" into its own struggle lexicon and went on to occupy 127 unproductive farms throughout Brazil, the highest number ever for a single month.

As it became apparent that the moderate tendency in the PT and Lula had fully converted to a neoliberal agenda that prioritized debt payments over meeting PNRA targets, the MST prepared for its biggest march onto Brasília.

The 2005 'National March for Agrarian Reform' and a Popular Project for Brazil

Like the 1997 march, the 2005 'National March for Agrarian Reform' goes beyond narrow corporatist demands for land reform to posit national popular demands. It called for an economic policy that addressed the problems of the Brazilian people.

To this end, the MST mobilized a broad rural-urban coalition that included affiliates of the Via Campesina-Brasil (e.g. the Small Farmers Movement, the Movement of People Affected by Dams and the Movement of Peasant Women), indigenous movements, the church (Pastoral Land Commission and Rural Pastoral Youth), and urban movements (e.g. the National Union of Students, Movement of Occupied Factories, the Homeless Workers Movement, the Unemployed Workers Movement, Grito dos Excluídos, the Coordination of Social Movements, the Marcha Mundial dos Mulheres, and cultural organizations), and quilombola communities.

Quilombolas are descendants of runaway slave communities who are fighting for legal recognition to land they are living on or claiming lands from which they were dispossessed.

The extensive list of demands contained in the national march document - "Proposals of the MST, the Via Campesina, and the Social Movements to the Lula Government" - ranged from meeting the PNRA target of settling 430,000 families by the end of 2006, the installation of agro-industries on land reform settlements and the provision of a special new credit for agrarian reform.

For the MST, the transfer of land needs to be backed up by inputs, credit, infrastructure, technical assistance and access to markets to ensure the feasibility of the agrarian reform program.

The proposals also strongly critiqued the government's economic policy and demanded that the primary surpluses be invested in public education, healthcare, housing and sanitation needs of the country rather than paying bankers.

One of the objectives of the march according to Fátima Ribeiro, a MST leader, is to make clear to the Lula government that "We will not accept that the 2 billion reais (US$ 800 million) for land reform be destined to pay interest on debt."

With the almost religious preoccupation of repaying debt, Lula's administration encouraged the expansion of agro-exports to generate foreign exchange. Lula took to heart former president Cardoso's advice that Brazil had to "export or die" and, in so doing, gave continuity to an exclusionary agro-export model: the colonial sugar and coffee plantations with their oppressive social relations gave way to vast 'modern' soy farms.

The states of Mato Grosso and Pará experienced the most rapid growth of soy production. However, instead of 'modernizing' social relations in the countryside, agribusiness simply reproduced the oppressive and exploitative practices of the past: these states have among the highest indices of land grabbing, land conflicts, slave labor and assassinations of rural workers.

During the week in which Brazil celebrated 117 years of the abolition of slavery, a representative of the 'modern' agribusiness in Pará, Lima Araújo Agropecuária Ltda, was fined 3 million reais (US$ 1.2 million) for maintaining 180 workers under slave conditions. According to the ILO and the Pastoral Land Commission, Brazil has about 25,000 people working under conditions of slavery.

The sheer scale of land grabbing and soy expansion has also had devastating environmental consequences. A recent study by the National Institute of Spatial Research (INPE), released in mid-May 2005, reported that 26.130 square km (almost the size of Haiti) of the Amazon was deforested during 2003-2004.

INPE satellite images showed that deforestation was highest where agribusiness, especially soy plantations, was expanding most rapidly. Mato Grosso, governed by the world's largest individual soy producer, Blairo Maggi, was responsible for more than 50% of deforestation.

In its drive for profit, agribusiness expansion onto indigenous reserves led to violent conflicts over land which undermines indigenous ways of life.

For example, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul indigenous reserves constitute little islands in a sea of soy plantations. The Guarani Cauiá people had always lived in a dispersed manner on vast tracts of land, but with the advance of agribusiness they were forced onto smaller areas.

The concentration of large numbers of Guarani Cauiá on small plots led to extreme levels of destitution and was the principal reason for increased levels of chronic malnutrition and infant mortalities.

During the first three months of 2005 - and in the midst of the extreme wealth of the agro-export elite - thirty indigenous children died of malnutrition related illnesses.

Thus, there is little that is 'progressive' or modern about agribusiness in Brazil. Many of the tools employed in the expansion of agribusiness are reminiscent of the tactics utilized during earlier periods of unbridled capitalist accumulation: domination of indigenous peoples and cultures, the use of slave labor and land grabbing, expulsions and violence.

Moreover, the 'success' of the modern agro-export sector is predicated on massive subsidies, export incentives and infrastructure support provided by successive government's.

In 2003, the agribusiness elite received 39 billion reais (US$ 15.6 billion) in subsidies, while the family agriculture sector which comprises millions of families and produces over 60% of Brazil's food crops only received 7 billion reais (US$ 2.8 billion) in support.

In addition, while agribusiness was the recipient of state largesse under Lula, state institutions working with indigenous communities had their budgets cut.

The MST march proposals calls for the protection of indigenous peoples and cultures and the demarcation of their lands; the protection of the Amazon and its biodiversity; and, the passage of a law allowing for the expropriation and redistribution of all farms that utilize slave labor.

For the MST, the struggle is against an agribusiness dominated agricultural model that is bent on restructuring and transforming family agriculture into an appendage of the agro-export sector.

The march thus forms part of the MST's strategy of accumulating forces in society to challenge an agribusiness model which prioritizes exports over meeting domestic food needs.

While Brazil has 'grown' into one of the world's largest exporters of soy, sugar, coffee and oranges, it is importing staple foods (e.g. beans and rice) in which it was self sufficient.

The MST through the global peasant movement, Via Campesina, opposes WTO attempts to liberalize agriculture in the interests of agribusiness, arguing that food is a basic human right that can only be attained in a system where food sovereignty is guaranteed.

Food sovereignty according to the Via Campesina is "the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its own basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity. We have the right to produce our own food in our own territory. Food sovereignty is a precondition to genuine food security."

The MST not only marched against the monoculture of agribusiness which undermines the food sovereignty of the Brazilian people, but also against the Lula government's neoliberal policies which promotes and 'cultivates' the agribusiness model of agriculture.

The march proposal also called for an audit of the external debt - as determined by the Brazilian Constitution - so that the people know how much they have paid thus far, renegotiate its value since the debt has been paid many times over and direct these resources to education and others areas.

The document called for a doubling of the minimum wage to redistribute income and stimulate the domestic economy; reduce Brazil's exorbitant interest rates (among the highest in the world), which favors the speculative financial sector over the productive sectors of the economy; and demanded that the government not sign the Free Trade Area of the America's (FTAA).

The fight against the FTAA is crucial since it is "through the FTAA that we will arrive at the complete denationalization of agriculture, and the impracticality of a national development project, a necessary condition for the viability of land reform."

The popular movements involved in the march decided to take their demands to the people and to dispute the rightward shift of the Lula government. Or as João Pedro Stédile, a MST leader, put it a year earlier:

"The most important issue is to alter the correlation of forces in the government and in society so that the government is convinced to change its economic policy and utilize agrarian reform and changes in the agricultural model as an instrument for the implementation of a new economic policy that has as its core solutions to the social problems of our people."

The initial 10,000 members of the MST swelled to 12,000 with the entry of sympathizers and members of other movements when the march left Goiânia.

Simone Domingo, who left her three children at home to participate in the march, said "I think the march is good to improve things, so that we can have land to work and live with our children."

Felipe da Silva, a student who is camped with his family in Goiás says "I am going to ask Lula to fix the roads and schools." As is the characteristic practice of the MST, the march also had the pedagogic role of raising and deepening political consciousness through study, debate and reflection.

Marching, Studying, and Debating the future of Brazil

Over the two week period, the march started at 6 am to avoid the blazing afternoon sun of the planalto region, stopped to have lunch, rest and recharge the batteries for the afternoon study and debate sessions.

Each participant received a set of booklets that covered a diverse set of topics related to the national and international political economy: e.g. the capitalist project for the restructuring of agriculture via agribusiness, TNC control over seeds via GMOs and its implications for family agriculture, the FTAA, the environment, the privatization of water, the national political conjuncture under the Lula government, and the MST's vision of a popular project for Brazil.

A number of public intellectuals and left politicians were invited to address the 12,000 marchers via the 10,000 radios that were loaned to the MST by the World Social Forum organizing committee.

An itinerant radio station, Brasil em Movimento FM 88.5, was especially created for the march by the Brazilian Association of Community Radios. The 20 km radius of the frequency allowed for broadcasts to be transmitted to local communities along the path of the march.

Adelar Pizetta, the MST's national coordinator for political education, speaking on the importance of radios in facilitating political education during the march, noted that:

"If it was not for the radio, we would not have been able to realize political activities for such a large contingent of people. It was a learning process for all of us to perceive that the radio could play such an important role in political education."

One of the MST marchers from the northeastern state of Paraíba, Maria de Nazaré Nascimento, who has been camped for two years waiting to be settled states that "I am very happy to have participated in this work of the March. I am learning a lot during the periods of political education."

To ensure that those MST members who can't read are not left out of the study and debate sessions, the 600 group leaders facilitated the reading and explanation of the key points of the booklets.

The MST's popular method of learning and solidarity gives practical content to a powerful phrase by one of Africa's forgotten revolutionaries, Amilcar Cabral:

"Let those who know a little more teach those who know a little less. We must learn from life, learn among our own people, learn from books and the experiences of others, but always learn."

The stress that the MST places on political education and on developing its own 'organic intellectuals' has been fundamental to the growth and consistent capacity for mobilization of the MST over its 21 year history.

Many of the local, regional and national leadership have planned and led land occupations and have emerged from within the ranks of the MST's acampamentos (camps) and assentamentos (land reform settlements).

Besides political education, Radio Brasil em Movimento, was also fundamental in facilitating the logistics of the march, allowing for communication and organization in real time.

The march simply reaffirmed the role and potential of free community radio stations as a fundamental tool in the democratization of corporate controlled media.

After giving a presentation via radio, a left PT senator, Eduardo Suplicy, said: "It is as if agrarian reform on land was being realized in air."

Democratizing Cinema and Theatre

The MST also inaugurated a pilot project for bringing cinema and theatre to the countryside, 'Cinema on the Land,' during the march. During the evenings documentaries on MST history and the struggle for land were projected onto massive screens.

One of the documentaries, Raiz Forte (Strong Root), describes how MST militants recruited landless and agricultural workers to go on land occupations in the states of Pernambuco, Bahia, Pará and Paraná. The Motorcycle Diaries and two documentaries on Lula, Entreatos and Peoes, among others were also shown.

Entreatos covers Lula on the campaign trail during the 2002 presidential elections making a series of promises to the Brazilian people. In the discussions after the screening many of the Sem Terra were scathing in their comments.

Deivid Moura, who hails from Mato Grosso and had never seen a movie or documentary before criticized Lula's campaign promises: "Lula from the movie is one, while Lula as president is another."

Joanilson Santos, a member of a MST land reform settlement in the northeastern province of Sergipe was even more critical, saying "Lula told all those lies to deceive the Brazilian people."

Joao dos Santos Souza, also from Mato Grosso, describes the practical effects of Lula's unfulfilled promises: "For the last 6 years I am living in a plastic shack and have still not been considered for the land reform program. I passed a big part of my life listening to Lula say that land reform was the salvation for all of Brazil's problems. From what I'm seeing, the president changed his opinion."

This level of critical consciousness is not very common in rural Brazil where clientelist and patronage politics are still the order of the day. The MST's political education programs on Brazilian social reality in the acampamentos and assentamentos and the personal experiences and insights of MST members have led to the emergence of a critical political consciousness that challenges the notion that 'there is no alternative' to market rule.

The land occupations that knock down the fences of large unproductive farms (and hence of capital) is testament to the alternatives that the Sem Terra are creating.

Throughout the two week march, the MST's national theatre brigade, Patativa do Assaré, held a series of plays that spoke to the nation's social problems.

After the marchers converged onto the Finance Ministry buildings in Brasilia there was a mistica performance showing the Ministry as the representative of bankers and agribusiness.

Later, Patativa do Assaré enacted the objectives of the march: one actor portrayed the Minister of Finance, Antonio Palocci. The other artists represented popular movements who demanded an economic policy that would meet the needs of the Brazilian people.

The corporate media was scornful of the march. Rubens Ricupero, former secretary-general of Unctad, writing about Gandhi's salt march in India commented that "The MST's national march takes place under the most implacable malice of almost the entire media."

This was not surprising since the media, as the representative of capital, bristles at the MST's slightest challenge to the sacrosanct institution of private property. For the MST land is a common good which should be at the service of society.

The political education sessions were reported as indoctrination while the MST's defense of family agriculture was described as archaic.

What the media found most surprising was that the march had theatre presentations, music, poetry, and cinema as if this was abnormal. Gilmar Mauro, a MST national coordinator, describes this deep seated elitist prejudice:

"It seems that in Brazil the poor cannot like cinema, like theatre, discuss the economy. It is as if these subjects and fields are the 'exclusive property' of those who have money, those who study.

"For us, however, communication and culture are extremely important tools of education for the people, of opening up a dialogue with society, and it is for that reason that we invest in these areas.

"On the other hand, we have huge concerns over the future of our country, and it is this that the march tries to bring to the public."

The other favorite question of the media was: how did the MST fund the march? Again, the media found it incredulous that most of the food to feed the 12,000 marchers came from MST land reform settlements; that MST members, despite having little, donated cows, goats, sacks of maize or rice, which were sold to support the march and pay for the hiring of buses that took many of the Sem Terra on the two to three day journey to Goiânia.

The march was also made possible through the solidarity of the church, national and international movements. According to the MST, it would not exist without solidarity and that it depends on the "Solidarity of the Brazilian people to sustain its struggles, its dreams."

There was also the internal organizational structure that made the March work: a food team of 450 volunteers that cooked the meals, a health team, the accommodation team that set up and dismantled the tents every day, and the education team that taught at the itinerant school.

"Nothing begins, nor ends: it continues"

The two week march was a massive school of learning, of sharing experiences, of debate and study, of building and deepening national and international solidarity, and a valorization of Brazils' rich and diverse cultures.

The march was a demonstration of the organizational capacity of the MST. And, in taking their demands and proposals for change into the citadels of power, the 12 thousand women and men from all corners of rural Brazil demonstrated that they are not passive victims, but active shapers of their own history. They are making history in a world where some had already declared the end of history.

One of the great qualities of the MST lies in its sharp understanding of counter-hegemonic politics. The MST embarked upon the march by giving practical content to one of its slogans - "You make agrarian reform in the countryside, but you win it in the cities" - through building a strong rural-urban coalition.

Moreover, in calling for the doubling of the minimum wage to redistribute income and the reduction of interest rates to stimulate job creation, the March proposals took up national popular demands of the working class and the national bourgeoisie.

The MST's consistent emphasis on "accumulating forces" and on taking its demands to the masses is part of its vision of a popular project for Brazil. The national march was thus a key moment in demystifying the glorified agro-export agricultural model.

The Sem Terra march posed key questions to the Brazilian people: Why should government support an agricultural model that uses slave labor and violence and expels tens of thousands of families who will end up swelling already overcrowded urban slums? Why despite the massive increase in agro-exports are children still dying of malnutrition?

Should Brazilians follow a neoliberal economic model that generates surpluses of billions of dollars just to service debt while there is a shortage of housing and underinvestment in public education and healthcare?

These are some of the burning questions that MST militants will raise when they engage in the consulta popular (popular consultations) with the Brazilian people.

As an author writing on the MST once remarked, "Nothing begins nor ends: it continues."

The National March for Agrarian Reform was not the beginning of the struggle for agrarian reform and against neoliberalism, nor will it be the end.

Rather, the 2005 March constitutes the continuation of the struggle for agrarian reform and a popular project for Brazil.

Abdurazack Karriem has a Ph.D. from the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University.

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