A "Great Leap Forward" for South America?
Posted on 09/13/2003 2:35:31 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Private property rights are under siege in Brazil. Since leftist President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva took office in January, farmland has been invaded by radical Marxist movements almost every 24 hours.
Lula has turned a blind eye to farm invasions, Robert Mugabe style. Mugabe, a notorious African strongman who encouraged land invasions in Zimbabwe while declaring the “economy is the land” made good on his promise to redistribute his country’s farms. As a result, Zimbabwe’s economy, once among Africa’s strongest, is in freefall. Could this really happen in a democracy like Brazil?
Occupations have spread to Brazil’s cities. On July 18 some 4,000 people organized by the Marxist Movement of Workers Without a Roof, known as the “MTST” occupied land in São Paulo owned by Volkswagen. When squatters demanded title to the land to build new homes, one of Lula’s top judiciary appointees, Claudio Fonteneles, justified their acts by declaring that all private property must have a “social function” in order to be recognized by the government.
Members of the radical Landless Rural Workers Movement, known as the “MST”, have invaded and occupied three farms belonging to the US-based multinational Monsanto so far this year. The MST said that the actions were taken in protest at what it sees as the illegal growing of genetically modified crops.
The MST is a traditional ally of the ruling Worker's Party (PT) in Brazil, a country with a territory larger than the continental US that is the world’s 5th largest democracy and 10th largest economy.
The MST has intensified the struggle for land in Brazil, as signs of growing self-confidence and increasing expectations among the rural poor have continued to multiply. Occupations of farms, cattle ranches and sugar mills as well as widespread looting, highway robberies and protests by peasants in the countryside have prompted a warning by one state governor that the situation in the northeast of the country has become a “powder keg.” The protesters have also set up encampments along highways to publicize their demands.
During last year’s election campaign the MST kept a low profile, so as not to endanger Lula’s chances. If Lula thought his victory would mollify the MST, he was wrong. The movement has turned up the heat of late demanding audiences at the Palacio do Planalto (Presidential Palace) where Lula made promises of support and donned the MST’s trademark red baseball cap whose logo depicts a peasant menacingly brandishing a sword.
Government sanctioned farm invasions
Lula came to power in January promising his left-wing government would carry out a major reallocation of unused farmland in a country where half the arable land is held by just three percent of landowners. So far, his government has delivered a fraction of the land promised, as the agrarian reform budget has been hit by spending cutbacks in an economy sliding toward recession.
The MST, swelled by Brazil's army of jobless urban and rural poor, has turned to land invasions to force Lula to honor his word. They have staged 117 land grabs in the first half of 2003 compared to 103 in all of 2002, according to the government. MST tactics of invading farmland and torching ranch houses, have left Lula open to widespread criticism in the media and from opposition parties that he has lost control of his allies and failed to create jobs to help them.
Founded in 1984, the MST mixes Marxism with Catholic liberation theology -- a blend of religious teachings and calls for social justice -- and promises its 1.5 million members a chance to own land if they work for it and join the movement.
The MST now has 150,000 families living in squatter camps that it runs while waiting for the government to expropriate and redistribute unused land. Lula promised to settle 60,000 families in 2003. During the first seven months of the year he has settled only 2,534, according to the government. That compares to 43,000 families settled in 2002 during the last year of the previous centrist government of President Cardoso.
With Lula failing to deliver on his promises he is not in a strong position to condemn the landless' fight and he now faces loud demands for a tougher stance. Despite Lula's election vows to bring robust economic growth and provide jobs, jobless numbers are growing since he took office in January prompting Lula to replace economic deliverables with land invasions.
The MST leadership has increased its activity with repeated public calls for a Cuban and Soviet inspired revolution. Meanwhile, Brazil’s Agrarian Reform Minister Miguel Rosetto, a self-defined Trotskyite, has aggressively defended the MST’s behavior from growing criticism from middle class and business leaders.
Brazilian ranchers form militias to protect their land
The MST’s national leader, João Pedro Stedile, was recently recorded by a journalist describing the landless movement’s activists as “our army” and calling for it to “finish with” the 27,000 ranchers and landowners facing the 23-million people involved in the “fight in the countryside” (“luta camponesa”). “That is the dispute. We won’t sleep until we do away with them.” In response, ranchers in fertile southern regions such as Sao Paulo state’s Pontal do Paranapanema are forming militias to protect their property from invasion by landless farm workers, and police fear the tension could explode into armed conflict. Landowners are stepping up pressure on the Lula government to move against the protests to little avail.
“We have a president who swore to respect and uphold the constitution but is not doing so,” fumed rancher Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, president of the Democratic Rural Union, a conservative farmers rights group known as the “UDR”. “When land invasions take place” says Garcia, “the police stand by with arms crossed, because this government has no will to enforce the law.” The farmers' UDR association says the MST recruits in Brazil's city slums, leading to what it calls the "slumification" of the countryside and contends only people who know how to farm should be eligible for land. "The people who are coming to make up these mega-camps are unemployed people from urban areas who have come to get land in the country. As they have no knowledge of the land it will be hard for them to produce anything," said Mayor Jose Roberto Pinheiro Nunes of the Pontal region. "So you think that after all that struggle we are going to hand the land over to a populist criminal faction which does not respect the law? That's inconceivable," said Luiz Antonio Nabhan Garcia.
The farmers assert that they have every right to defend their properties from landless groups. “Landowners can’t take it any more,” Garcia said, “and they are taking advantage of their right under law to arm themselves, their relatives, and their employees to protect their property.” Tensions are high. In fact, senior Brazilian Military officials have made off the record warnings in the media about the danger of the MST becoming a FARC-like terrorist organization based in the jungles and have pointed out the danger of Che Guevara inspired guerilla activity. According to a recent report in the Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper, factions of the MST are adopting the doctrine of the Peru’s Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path terrorist group), have set up clandestine bases and are planning kidnappings and bank robberies.
Dr. Zhivago comes to Brazil
The MST has taken advantage of the just cause of land reform to pit rural workers against landowners. These worrisome developments evoke Russian Nobel Prize-winning author Boris Pasternak’s classic novel, Dr. Zhivago. This anti-communist epic, which later became an acclaimed film starring Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness, depicted the betrayal of large segments of Russian society who were initially sympathetic towards Bolshevism as a response to Russia’s feudal agricultural system.
As a country of significant social inequalities, Marxism in Brazil has always been a force, but it has never been as close to realizing true power in this country as it is now. By abandoning the traditional Marxist strategy of launching an armed insurgency and revolution, Brazil’s Workers’ Party, known as the “PT”, has been able to effectively elaborate a “Gramscian” [Inspired by renown Italian Marxist Theorist Antonio Gramsci, widely read in PT circles] strategy of penetrating the key institutions of civil society and democracy first, and then using the legitimate authority conferred by elections to abridge constitutional restraints to establish a Marxist state.
So far, this strategy has worked, because the financial markets have been soothed by IMF debt servicing even while Lula is implementing creeping authoritarianism by transferring budgetary authority away from Brazil’s constituent states and the Federal Chamber of Deputies. Anyone who has read the history of the NEP in Soviet Russia would recognize these gradualist tactics for what they may soon become – a preemptive “New Economic Policy,” as described by the great Russian historian and former Reagan advisor, Richard Pipes, who described the “NEP” aptly in his history of “Russia under the Bolshevik Regime:”
“When, in March 1921, confronting economic collapse and massive rebellions, Lenin felt compelled to make a radical turnabout in economic policy resulting in significant concessions to private enterprise, a course that came to be known as the NEP, It was widely believed in the country and abroad that the Russian Revolution, too, had run its course and entered a thermidorian phase.”“The revolutionary “thermidor” was a development they were determined at all costs to prevent and the historical analogy turned out to be inapplicable. The most conspicuous difference between 1794 and 1921 lay in the fact that whereas in France the Jacobins had been overthrown and their leaders executed, in Russia, it was the Soviet equivalent of the Jacobins who initiated and carried out a new, moderate course.”
“The NEP had two tracks: Foreign (commerce & loans and subversion); and domestic (commerce and repression). They understood that they were making a temporary shift, like the Brest Treaty, and it was unaccompanied by a political relaxation. Liberalization was limited to economics and there was an intensification of the political struggle in order to prevent a restoration. It was in 1921-23 that Moscow crushed what remained of rival socialist parties, imposed systematic censorship, extended activities by the secret police, waged a vicious campaign against the church, and tightened controls over foreign and domestic communists.”
Nikolai Bukharin, the Russian Bolshevik Party’s most prominent thinker and intellectual father of the NEP said it even more directly when he wrote:
“Economic concessions were made to avoid political concessions. This was the source of the NEP.”
By anticipating this scenario and soothing international financial markets by meeting IMF interest payments, temporarily avoiding radical economic measures, and toning down radical economic rhetoric, Lula has distracted investors from his long-term agenda of re-nationalization of privatized assets and constitutional abridgements, just as Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela.
In fact, several members of Brazil’s intelligentsia such as filmmaker and commentator Arnaldo Jabor, are already comparing the MST crisis to Brazil’s experience in 1964 when the populist, pro-Castro government of President Goulart was overthrown by a military coup supported by the middle class in response to the chaos provoked by government sanctioned invasions of private property.
As an avowed admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, Lula da Silva’s actions lend themselves to an interpretation that does not entitle him to the benefit of the doubt. This is exactly what many Brazilian journalists have been saying in the press. Brazilian columnist Olavo de Carvalho has even poignantly asked: “Is it really impossible for American conservatives to take into account what is happening here?”
``The incendiary rhetoric of the president has awakened a lot of hate within the country's impoverished classes,'' said Jose Ruiz, head of the ranchers association of Portuguesa state where a farmer was recently murdered by alleged land invaders.
``They call us land invaders, but we are not, we are the natives here,'' said Leon, standing outside his shack beside a red flag of Chavez wearing his trademark paratrooper's beret. ''The invaders were the ones who expanded the national park so we had no-where left to live.'' ***
Venezuelans Protest Kidnappings (Chavez suspends gun licenses--threats to jail militiamen)***Carmen Tamayo, an office worker. ``Something must be done because nobody should have to live like this.''
Forty-one people were reported kidnapped in Venezuela during the first six months of this year, compared to 39 kidnappings reported in all of 2000.
Seventeen Venezuelan kidnap victims are currently being held for ransom.
``The number of kidnappings is undoubtedly on the rise. That's why we are here demanding that the government take immediate action,'' said Jose Luis Betancourt, president of the National Ranchers' Federation.
Ranchers living along the country's remote 1,400-mile border with Colombia face the constant threat of kidnapping and extortion by Colombia's leftist guerrillas who can cross the border. Common criminals and gangs often cooperate with rebels.
Earlier this year cattlemen proposed forming private militias to fend off local criminals and rebels from neighboring Colombia. The idea was abandoned as President Hugo Chavez suspended the issuance of new gun licenses and threatened to jail would-be militiamen.
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