Brazil's landless not backing down

www.upi.com By Carmen Gentile UPI Latin America Correspondent From the International Desk Published 3/7/2003 5:05 PM

SAO PAULO, Brazil, March 7 (UPI) -- Brazil's landless workers movement -- coming off a week of land seizures throughout the country -- said Friday that it would not back down in its fight for agrarian reform even though it considers the nation's president its ally.

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, known locally as the MST, said it would continue to hold its current seizures and intensify its efforts next month, according to the movement's leadership.

Movement officials said they would increase its efforts until April 17, the seventh anniversary of the 1996 killing of 19 MST members during protests in the northern state of Para.

The MST appeared to catch Brazilian officials off guard when it broke its informal truce with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and invaded several private owned farms during the Carnaval celebration, which ended earlier this week.

"The government of the PT (Lula's Workers' Party) was our dream, but government is government and the movement is the movement," said Jaime Amorim, an MST coordinator.

Founded in the early 1980s, the MST uses large-scale seizures to bring attention to inequitable land distribution in a nation where most of the nation's farmable land is held by a small fraction of the population.

The movement says it has ended its truce with Brazil's leading leftist Workers' Party though still considers Lula an ally to its cause.

Lula, a formal labor activist, won over the MST when he campaigned on a platform that included promises of more aggressive land reform tactics and accelerated distribution efforts.

The reform group however, appears to have grown weary of waiting for change despite the president's relatively brief tenure in office. Since assuming the presidency on Jan. 1, Lula has focused much of his attention on other reform issues, mostly political and economic, and his nationwide hunger eradication program.

Still, PT officials maintain that agrarian reform is in the works, and criticized the MST for its recent invasion of the headquarters of Brazil's National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform in the central states of Mato Grosso and Goias.

"President Lula has only been in office for two months and wants to better the MST's situation," said PT President Jose Genoino in an interview with Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper. "Agrarian reform will be made, but its must be done peacefully, without compromising agriculture productivity."

"The MST cannot treat the PT as its enemy," he said.

Genoino's pleas reflect the PT's decidedly different stance regarding the MST and agrarian reform from its predecessor, the moderate Social Democratic Party led by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

The Cardoso administration showed less tolerance for land seizures and regularly arrested activists, though said it had it has allocated some 50 million acres to landless workers during his eight-year tenure, a claim the MST widely refutes.