Like millions of poorly educated, impoverished Brazilians, dos Santos has always dreamed of a better life, a dream that invariably centers on owning a house and land.
Now he's closer to his dream than ever before.
An organizer for a Brazilian group called MST, the Portuguese acronym for "Landless Workers Movement," dos Santos joined about 300 other families last year in occupying a vacant, dusty tract about 20 miles north of Sao Paulo, Brazil's teeming industrial hub.
They are part of a growing wave of confrontational, sometimes violent land invasions by the poor across Brazil, a movement that has created a growing crisis for the new government of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva -- himself a laborer who rose from poverty.
With his roots in the labor movement, da Silva raised great hopes among the landless, who gave him their solid support and ended their invasions for several months after his January inauguration in the belief he would quickly answer their demands.
But da Silva has moved cautiously on the landless issue, prompting a new round of land invasions that have sometimes turned bloody.
Outraged landowners have banded together and hired armed guards to protect their property, while dozens of landless protesters have been killed in clashes with police and guards.
With each side dug in, the crisis seems on the verge of exploding.
"The law allows us to defend our land," said Marcos Menezes Prochet, head of a landowners group called the Union of Democratic Ruralists in the southern state of Parana. "We are the ones being attacked, not the opposite. What creates violence is not our armed guards, but the invasion of our lands."
Prochet's farm was invaded six years ago by peasants armed with guns, knives and agricultural tools, he said. The men held him hostage for several hours, then occupied his ranch for several months before he could win a court order to have them removed.
"This movement, MST, is not a social movement," he said. "They are a political, ideological movement and their goal is socialism, the expropriation of land with no payments to the owners, just like in Communist Russia." ***
MARIA ISOLIETT IGLESIAS EL UNIVERSAL - [full text] The Altamira Plaza activist who was illegally arrested on Friday October 31 octubre, was found as if by magic by CICPC agents, Thursday 11:00 pm in Valencia.
According to the police report by Silvio Daniel Mérida Ortiz, he was taken by his captors to a hut near Valencia, where he was forced to sit at gunpoint until the arrival of the CICPC Immediate Rescue Unit who rescued him but did not make any arrests.
Between torture and hoods
Silvio Daniel Mérida Ortiz was captured, illegally, on Friday October 31 by civilians who arrived at Block 7 in the El Silencio [district] executing a police raid. Since that day, until Thursday November 6, he was held somewhere [outside Caracas].
During this week he was victim of constant torture. He was hung for 12 continuous hours by his wrists, they put a cigarette out on his skin, they whipped his back, applied electric shock to his feet, and shoved his head into a toilet, in order to make him reveal, according to his attorneys Guillermo Heredia and Rigoberto Quintero, if he had any knowledge of ties between the Altamira military dissidents and bombs detonated at diplomatic facilities, and possible insurrection by the opposition.
Place and date
The reason for the liberation of Mérida Ortiz is questionable and still has no coherent answer.
The actions by police following the rescue have arroused questions. They interrogated him two hours after finding him, without his lawyers present, he slept cuffed to the legs of his cell bunk, and the forensic report made [in Valencia] made no mention of physical damage, but according to his mother... where, at the hearing to present charges, they could not even put the handcuffs on him "because his wrists were lacerated". [end]