Brazil: MST blocks highway, holds official

www.upi.com By Carmen Gentile UPI Latin America Correspondent From the International Desk Published 2/4/2003 5:28 PM

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Brazil's Landless Workers Movement, armed with scythes and sticks, blocked a major highway Tuesday in the country's northeast and is holding a state secretary of agriculture hostage.

Known locally as the MST, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, an estimated 500 protesters calling for widespread agrarian reform in the state of Alagoas, have been refusing to let traffic pass since Monday.

Specifically, officials in the MST -- the world's largest land reform group -- are calling on representatives of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or INCRA, to make available land for distribution among its ranks and are asking for guarantees regarding access to water and electricity.

The economic divide between the South American nation's wealthy and poor is one of the greatest in the world, particularly in the impoverished northeast, where a great portion of private lands are held by a relative few.

The MST often organizes and carries out seizures of private land to draw attention to their cause and have asked the Brazilian government to introduce wide-scale agrarian reform.

"We want a solution for this calamitous state," said local MST leader Jose Marcone Alves, adding that the protest was an effort to bring national attention to the slow pace of negotiations with INCRA.

The movement calls for a restructuring of Brazilian land ownership in a country where the MST claims 60 percent of Brazil's farmland remains unused, while 25 million peasants toil as landless laborers.

The previous Brazilian government claimed that during its eight-year tenure -- the time of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's administration -- it had allocated some 20 million hectares to landless workers.

The MST widely disputes that figure.

Meanwhile, State Secretary of Agriculture Reinaldo Falcao -- along with five other state officials -- are being held by the MST blocking the Alagoas highway, although they are reportedly in no danger and are working toward ending the siege.

"We came to intervene in negotiations between the MST and INCRA, but we are impeded from leaving," Falcao said Tuesday in a phone interview with Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.

The highway siege is the first large-scale action by the MST since the Jan. 1 inauguration of Brazil's new, leftist leader, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The MST had stated publicly up until Monday that they would maintain an informal truce with the Brazil government in an effort to allow Lula an opportunity to show that he is committed to agrarian reform.

The former union leader and labor-rights activist campaigned on a platform to work toward allocating under-utilized land to those Brazilians seeking to establish their own farms.

During his visits to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Lula took the opportunity to stress the need for agrarian reform in Brazil.

"We now have an administration with the political will to resolve social problems," national MST leader Joao Stedile said last month in Porto Alegre, expressing optimism about the prospects for reform during Lula's tenure in office.

He maintained, however, that the MST would continue to pressure the Brazilian government to resolve the agrarian issue and "organize the workers, the poor, and the people to fight for their rights."