About 30 soldiers in dress uniform lifted their rifles as priests and parishioners carried Velasco's casket outside the cathedral, circled around a plaza and returned to bury him inside. Velasco died early Monday after a long battle with cancer. He was 74. Several hundred National Guardsmen formed a line to keep back dozens of President Hugo Chavez's supporters, who shouted "the rats bury their rat" in one corner of the plaza. ***
The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has launched a series of land invasions designed to pressure the government into speeding up agrarian reform. The group called a moratorium on such invasions during the election campaign late last year, but it abandoned the stay in March, turning up the heat by invading scores of farms, ranches, and government buildings in their most concerted series of actions in years. Some political analysts call the unrest the biggest threat to the popular president's nascent administration. "This is one of Lula's biggest problems," says David Fleischer, the editor of Brazil Focus, a political journal. "It's really stirred up a hornet's nest."***