The Promised Land Journey into the Struggle of the Sem Terra
A brief passage of the story for the readers
“I do not photograph miserable wretches. I photograph people who have fewer resources, fewer material goods. For me a wretch is someone who is no longer part of a community, someone who is isolated and alone and has lost hope. I have met a lot of hungry people. But they weren’t wretches because they belonged to a community and believed in something. The only way for people to survive is … to believe in the community. “
Sebastião Salgado
( on the photographic exhibition dedicated to the Sem Terra)
It is the early hours of a very hot August afternoon in the assentamento Vila Esperança; outside his hut Antonio is bent over a map; he tells us the stories of the struggles of the encampment where he and his family have been living for years. He describes the places, explains property lines mentioning dates and names unknown to us, and yet the stories he tells seem a kind of déjà vu, pointing back to something familiar even if undefined. Very slowly it dawns on me what Antonio is talking about: beyond the specific details of the assentamento battles, his words speak of the ancient battle of the two souls of man, the battle for existence – which is a contradiction because it has no arguments except existence itself and it is against nature because it carries within it the seeds of destruction.
If I were to give one image of the MST movement it is this moment that I would freeze in a picture, perhaps because of the accumulation of everything seen to that point. It is as if the words of Antonio had triggered an excavating mechanism and an unearthing of scenes and sensations now brought to the surface from who knows what niche of the consciousness, and from which the Movement emerges as a universal symbol of Struggle out of time and out of place which at regular intervals is clad in new “familiar” clothing: the rich against the poor, the powerful against the oppressed, black against white, the settler against the nomad…
More specifically, this struggle finds its antagonist in the figure of Chico Gomes – the “infamous” as they call him here in the camp – a rich and powerful faziendiero, a candidate in the imminent administrative elections who has managed to retain ownership of a piece of land within the 12,000 hectares allocated to the MST thanks to their battle for expropriation.
The assentamento Vila Esperança is to be found right next to this piece of land.
But let’s start at the beginning…
Il Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) is the largest popular movement in South America, arising out of the urgent need to heal the enormous social injustices that still rend Brazil, and which seeks to obtain a fairer redistribution of wealth through a process of land restitution – in fact taking the place of the Agrarian Reform so urgently needed by the country and which has never been carried out despite the many promises and some attempts to do so.
The centuries-old history of European colonization and oppression of the Brazilian people did not end with the declaration of independence from the Portuguese crown (1822) or with the abolition of slavery (1888), and not even with the end of the 20-year period of military dictatorship (1984). The most recent enslavement of capital to the new logic of market neo-liberalism, helped by policies tending to give priority to the country’s position on the international scene rather than to the subsistence and domestic growth of a people which has still in large part to free itself from hunger and illiteracy, have in fact fuelled a process of uneven growth, widening the gape between rich and poor which is so evident in the new opulent cities with their burden of unemployment, widespread petty crime and desperate humanity crowded into the favelas.
Even the Lula government, which had given such hope to the enormous mass of ex-peasants and the unemployed, has not been able to fully keep its campaign promises to heal the gaps, burdened as it is with the heavy international debt of former governments (above all the preceding Cardoso government).
Founded officially in January 1984, the MST is now present in all the States of Brazil. Thanks to its work of land re-appropriation, today almost two million Brazilians have once more found the means to support their families in a dignified way, creating fair forms of production and trade, and thus demonstrating that a healthier and more balanced economy is in effect possible.
In this process, the camp is the first form of public claim. The initial occupation is generally carried out at night in order to limit the possibility of being removed by the police or being raided by bands of pistoleiros in the pay of the fazendeiros, and it is preceded by a great deal of preparatory work to bring together the many participating families.
In addition to the practical preparation, the ultimate goal of the MST is the formation of a critical conscience and the idea of the masses as a political entity, and the legitimatization of the struggle which has also found expression in the bosom of the Catholic Church in Brazil which, thanks to the CPT (Pastoral Land Commission) has been able to add a new progressive element to the traditional more abstract and transcendental vision: there can be no Christian salvation without economic, social and ideological liberation, and the help of God cannot come about without Man’s commitment to bring down every form of social injustice and abuse. Within this context, land becomes the visible tool for the achievement of human dignity. This is the Theology of Liberation of the writer and Dominican friar Frei Betto.
The choice of land to be occupied must take into account its unproductive nature, so as to demonstrate that it can be expropriated on the basis of its “lack of social function” as established in Art. 184 of the Federal Constitution of Brazil.
Once recognition is acquired – often after many years – the camp begins to transform itself into an assentamento, thus losing its character of illegality and now able to count on a new stability over time.
The Movement thus becomes the owner of the land; families are entrusted with its cultivation and use. But no piece of land is given in ownership to the families, in order to avoid infiltrations and attacks from the outside which would be dangerous for the integrity of the Movement itself.
The families also acquire the right to state subsidies (including the Bolsa Familia, a programme of assistance for education and health costs, created by the Lula government).
Theoretically, all rights relating to utilities and infrastructure necessary to daily life and the regular organization of the community are also now recognized. In actual fact, this often involves having to undertake a new struggle, which at times proves extenuating.
Irma Dorothy is the name of the first MST settlement we visited in the North-eastern state of Maranhão. It is a camp next to the town of Presidente Vargas, south of São Luís.
It has been standing for the past two years and like all the encampments consists of temporary huts made of cane, straw and clay, but conditions are on average superior to what is found in most camps.
Its organization in terms of logistics features the peculiar character common to MST settlements.
School plays an extremely important role and it is one of the first structures to be built; here it consists of a partly open structure in stone, with a straw roof, and furnished with chairs and desks. It is also used as a venue for periodical meetings and assemblies.
What the people tell us spontaneously during these assemblies or in conversations within the family circle are the expression of an acquired capacity to analyze society and recognize one’s place within it, free of any game of submission: those who teach are not the bearers of any superior knowledge, but participate in an equal exchange with those who learn, achieving the reciprocity of roles theorized in Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Education beyond the basic level occurs outside the circle of the camp, in the nearby districts, and the MST organizes many courses in numerous Brazilian universities. Located near Coelho Neto, bordering Piauì State, the Maria Aragones settlement presents a completely different situation.
Cleared initially by the Police, the occupying families chose to move to an area near a highway, right under the cables of an electrical plant to avoid being sent away again. In fact the electrical plant places the land under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, while the families can be sent away only by the State Government.
Conditions in this encampment are much harder: the location right next to road, the distance from the small rio, the lack of electricity and the scarcity of food, along with the precarious hygienic conditions, harden the faces of the adults without however affecting their openness and hospitality.
As is the case everywhere, swarms of children fill the air with their gay voices and curious and laughing eyes, playing games that require little.
Life here seems rather nomadic, the women seem to play a dominant role in the work, the management of the family and in contact with the outside world; there is an impression almost of a matriarchal type of organization, but this is an isolated case regarding this encampment only. In order to fight against the remains of the machismo typical of Latin American societies and the tendency to relegate women to the sole task of caring for the family (which is always very large), there are rules and defined percentages in the Movement’s organization to ensure that the role of women is guaranteed beyond the natural propensity in the society.
Maria Aragones lives on the means of subsistence derived from the animals raised within the camp (chickens, pigs), occasional food aid from the State and the processing of seeds of a particular type of coconut, whose pungent odour pervades the entire camp. Later, the oil obtained from it will be sold to buy rice, beans and bananas. The children, who have just come away from a sort of open black well, literally eat even the banana peels.
The Vila di Fatima assentamento , near Vargem Grande, is unanimously considered an ideal situation in terms of achievement of stability and efficiency. The atmosphere here is one of great serenity, of strong commitment but also of a great deal of amusement with much time being devoted to social and family life, music and dance.
The family whose guests we are is a large and extended one. The relationships among the family members are based particularly on joy and sharing, and have the common features of great care and attention for us as guests. The assentamentos of Balajaga and Santo Domingo, also in the south of Maranhão, also present a rather positive situation in terms of facilities and services, with a small health unit for vaccinations, a large furnished brick school, a church, a factory for the manual processing of manioca, bee-keeping and fish-breeding, running water or any rate water that is easily available.
We then reach Vila Esperança, an assentamento in name but in fact still only an encampment, at the centre of that absurd and unequal battle to obtain recognized services, water, a road, electricity, the right to go to school for the older children. Vila Esperança has also had its tragic moments, culminating in 2004 with the death of the young Evaldo in an ambush by a commando which included ex-members of the camp as well, in the pay of the fazendeiro. Luìs, a man of an undefined age who was the true target of the ambush, still bears its scars on his body and in his mind, and his story rises up out of a silence charged with emotion.
He manages to talk to us about those tragic moments and shows us the photographs of Evaldo’s body as it was found three days after the ambush when finally the police intervened.
He also tells us that the ambush does not end with the event itself, but that it represents in some way a watershed in the life of the community and serves as a kind of litmus test to measure the different levels of interpretation and involvement in the same struggle, showing once again how the community cannot escape from the individuals that make it up.
The same feeling emerges during the evening mistica, a kind of theatrical representation – strongly symbolic – in which the death of Evaldo is evoked, a death which has remained virtually unpunished.
At the end, people get up spontaneously from their chairs to say something; a woman speaks with a firm voice of the importance of struggle and unity, and denounces the lingering connivance of those within the camp who do not strongly condemn this death (“Eu tenho vergonha da impunidade” is one of the slogans recalling the many unpunished massacres of the Sem Terras), and she wonders how one can still believe in the justice of men. Luìs himself at that point steps in, starting with a statement that sounds like an acknowledgement of the strong worth of the female members : “Perhaps there cannot be great faith in the justice of men, but it seems there can be in the justice of women…”.
These are the most striking aspects that emerge in sharing even for a short time the path travelled by the Sem Terra: the social sense of the community, the taste of politics carried out individually each with his/her personal contribution connected to the normal activities of daily life but always with a sense of belonging to a greater whole and a greater cause.
The sensation that comes out of this is that perhaps there is a hope, and that it comes out of this reality. Even the organization at the top in the MST movement is of the collegial and transversal type at the various levels, and the Movement is a true model of organization of the masses.
And it is these masses which are the critical subject (in the definition of Frei Betto) which seems to be able to offer the necessary support to those who are politically active in the high places of power, sending clear messages and demanding the recognition of basic rights and self-determination, free of the idea of ‘might is right’. At a time when the struggle for land becomes part of a larger battle for the conservation and natural distribution of common resources worldwide, it is precisely this injection of a critical sense and awareness that can bring new lifeblood to the capacity to conceive of a different social organization and to fairer forms of production and marketing, so that new words and concepts like Food Sovereignty, Biodiversity and protection of Mother Earth do not remain dead words but a serious stimulus to the process of renewal and healing which now more than ever is among the first priorities of the planet.
Palma Navarrino
Sebastião Salgado
( on the photographic exhibition dedicated to the Sem Terra)
It is the early hours of a very hot August afternoon in the assentamento Vila Esperança; outside his hut Antonio is bent over a map; he tells us the stories of the struggles of the encampment where he and his family have been living for years. He describes the places, explains property lines mentioning dates and names unknown to us, and yet the stories he tells seem a kind of déjà vu, pointing back to something familiar even if undefined. Very slowly it dawns on me what Antonio is talking about: beyond the specific details of the assentamento battles, his words speak of the ancient battle of the two souls of man, the battle for existence – which is a contradiction because it has no arguments except existence itself and it is against nature because it carries within it the seeds of destruction.
If I were to give one image of the MST movement it is this moment that I would freeze in a picture, perhaps because of the accumulation of everything seen to that point. It is as if the words of Antonio had triggered an excavating mechanism and an unearthing of scenes and sensations now brought to the surface from who knows what niche of the consciousness, and from which the Movement emerges as a universal symbol of Struggle out of time and out of place which at regular intervals is clad in new “familiar” clothing: the rich against the poor, the powerful against the oppressed, black against white, the settler against the nomad…
More specifically, this struggle finds its antagonist in the figure of Chico Gomes – the “infamous” as they call him here in the camp – a rich and powerful faziendiero, a candidate in the imminent administrative elections who has managed to retain ownership of a piece of land within the 12,000 hectares allocated to the MST thanks to their battle for expropriation.
The assentamento Vila Esperança is to be found right next to this piece of land.
But let’s start at the beginning…
Il Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) is the largest popular movement in South America, arising out of the urgent need to heal the enormous social injustices that still rend Brazil, and which seeks to obtain a fairer redistribution of wealth through a process of land restitution – in fact taking the place of the Agrarian Reform so urgently needed by the country and which has never been carried out despite the many promises and some attempts to do so.
The centuries-old history of European colonization and oppression of the Brazilian people did not end with the declaration of independence from the Portuguese crown (1822) or with the abolition of slavery (1888), and not even with the end of the 20-year period of military dictatorship (1984). The most recent enslavement of capital to the new logic of market neo-liberalism, helped by policies tending to give priority to the country’s position on the international scene rather than to the subsistence and domestic growth of a people which has still in large part to free itself from hunger and illiteracy, have in fact fuelled a process of uneven growth, widening the gape between rich and poor which is so evident in the new opulent cities with their burden of unemployment, widespread petty crime and desperate humanity crowded into the favelas.
Even the Lula government, which had given such hope to the enormous mass of ex-peasants and the unemployed, has not been able to fully keep its campaign promises to heal the gaps, burdened as it is with the heavy international debt of former governments (above all the preceding Cardoso government).
Founded officially in January 1984, the MST is now present in all the States of Brazil. Thanks to its work of land re-appropriation, today almost two million Brazilians have once more found the means to support their families in a dignified way, creating fair forms of production and trade, and thus demonstrating that a healthier and more balanced economy is in effect possible.
In this process, the camp is the first form of public claim. The initial occupation is generally carried out at night in order to limit the possibility of being removed by the police or being raided by bands of pistoleiros in the pay of the fazendeiros, and it is preceded by a great deal of preparatory work to bring together the many participating families.
In addition to the practical preparation, the ultimate goal of the MST is the formation of a critical conscience and the idea of the masses as a political entity, and the legitimatization of the struggle which has also found expression in the bosom of the Catholic Church in Brazil which, thanks to the CPT (Pastoral Land Commission) has been able to add a new progressive element to the traditional more abstract and transcendental vision: there can be no Christian salvation without economic, social and ideological liberation, and the help of God cannot come about without Man’s commitment to bring down every form of social injustice and abuse. Within this context, land becomes the visible tool for the achievement of human dignity. This is the Theology of Liberation of the writer and Dominican friar Frei Betto.
The choice of land to be occupied must take into account its unproductive nature, so as to demonstrate that it can be expropriated on the basis of its “lack of social function” as established in Art. 184 of the Federal Constitution of Brazil.
Once recognition is acquired – often after many years – the camp begins to transform itself into an assentamento, thus losing its character of illegality and now able to count on a new stability over time.
The Movement thus becomes the owner of the land; families are entrusted with its cultivation and use. But no piece of land is given in ownership to the families, in order to avoid infiltrations and attacks from the outside which would be dangerous for the integrity of the Movement itself.
The families also acquire the right to state subsidies (including the Bolsa Familia, a programme of assistance for education and health costs, created by the Lula government).
Theoretically, all rights relating to utilities and infrastructure necessary to daily life and the regular organization of the community are also now recognized. In actual fact, this often involves having to undertake a new struggle, which at times proves extenuating.
Irma Dorothy is the name of the first MST settlement we visited in the North-eastern state of Maranhão. It is a camp next to the town of Presidente Vargas, south of São Luís.
It has been standing for the past two years and like all the encampments consists of temporary huts made of cane, straw and clay, but conditions are on average superior to what is found in most camps.
Its organization in terms of logistics features the peculiar character common to MST settlements.
School plays an extremely important role and it is one of the first structures to be built; here it consists of a partly open structure in stone, with a straw roof, and furnished with chairs and desks. It is also used as a venue for periodical meetings and assemblies.
What the people tell us spontaneously during these assemblies or in conversations within the family circle are the expression of an acquired capacity to analyze society and recognize one’s place within it, free of any game of submission: those who teach are not the bearers of any superior knowledge, but participate in an equal exchange with those who learn, achieving the reciprocity of roles theorized in Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Education beyond the basic level occurs outside the circle of the camp, in the nearby districts, and the MST organizes many courses in numerous Brazilian universities. Located near Coelho Neto, bordering Piauì State, the Maria Aragones settlement presents a completely different situation.
Cleared initially by the Police, the occupying families chose to move to an area near a highway, right under the cables of an electrical plant to avoid being sent away again. In fact the electrical plant places the land under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, while the families can be sent away only by the State Government.
Conditions in this encampment are much harder: the location right next to road, the distance from the small rio, the lack of electricity and the scarcity of food, along with the precarious hygienic conditions, harden the faces of the adults without however affecting their openness and hospitality.
As is the case everywhere, swarms of children fill the air with their gay voices and curious and laughing eyes, playing games that require little.
Life here seems rather nomadic, the women seem to play a dominant role in the work, the management of the family and in contact with the outside world; there is an impression almost of a matriarchal type of organization, but this is an isolated case regarding this encampment only. In order to fight against the remains of the machismo typical of Latin American societies and the tendency to relegate women to the sole task of caring for the family (which is always very large), there are rules and defined percentages in the Movement’s organization to ensure that the role of women is guaranteed beyond the natural propensity in the society.
Maria Aragones lives on the means of subsistence derived from the animals raised within the camp (chickens, pigs), occasional food aid from the State and the processing of seeds of a particular type of coconut, whose pungent odour pervades the entire camp. Later, the oil obtained from it will be sold to buy rice, beans and bananas. The children, who have just come away from a sort of open black well, literally eat even the banana peels.
The Vila di Fatima assentamento , near Vargem Grande, is unanimously considered an ideal situation in terms of achievement of stability and efficiency. The atmosphere here is one of great serenity, of strong commitment but also of a great deal of amusement with much time being devoted to social and family life, music and dance.
The family whose guests we are is a large and extended one. The relationships among the family members are based particularly on joy and sharing, and have the common features of great care and attention for us as guests. The assentamentos of Balajaga and Santo Domingo, also in the south of Maranhão, also present a rather positive situation in terms of facilities and services, with a small health unit for vaccinations, a large furnished brick school, a church, a factory for the manual processing of manioca, bee-keeping and fish-breeding, running water or any rate water that is easily available.
We then reach Vila Esperança, an assentamento in name but in fact still only an encampment, at the centre of that absurd and unequal battle to obtain recognized services, water, a road, electricity, the right to go to school for the older children. Vila Esperança has also had its tragic moments, culminating in 2004 with the death of the young Evaldo in an ambush by a commando which included ex-members of the camp as well, in the pay of the fazendeiro. Luìs, a man of an undefined age who was the true target of the ambush, still bears its scars on his body and in his mind, and his story rises up out of a silence charged with emotion.
He manages to talk to us about those tragic moments and shows us the photographs of Evaldo’s body as it was found three days after the ambush when finally the police intervened.
He also tells us that the ambush does not end with the event itself, but that it represents in some way a watershed in the life of the community and serves as a kind of litmus test to measure the different levels of interpretation and involvement in the same struggle, showing once again how the community cannot escape from the individuals that make it up.
The same feeling emerges during the evening mistica, a kind of theatrical representation – strongly symbolic – in which the death of Evaldo is evoked, a death which has remained virtually unpunished.
At the end, people get up spontaneously from their chairs to say something; a woman speaks with a firm voice of the importance of struggle and unity, and denounces the lingering connivance of those within the camp who do not strongly condemn this death (“Eu tenho vergonha da impunidade” is one of the slogans recalling the many unpunished massacres of the Sem Terras), and she wonders how one can still believe in the justice of men. Luìs himself at that point steps in, starting with a statement that sounds like an acknowledgement of the strong worth of the female members : “Perhaps there cannot be great faith in the justice of men, but it seems there can be in the justice of women…”.
These are the most striking aspects that emerge in sharing even for a short time the path travelled by the Sem Terra: the social sense of the community, the taste of politics carried out individually each with his/her personal contribution connected to the normal activities of daily life but always with a sense of belonging to a greater whole and a greater cause.
The sensation that comes out of this is that perhaps there is a hope, and that it comes out of this reality. Even the organization at the top in the MST movement is of the collegial and transversal type at the various levels, and the Movement is a true model of organization of the masses.
And it is these masses which are the critical subject (in the definition of Frei Betto) which seems to be able to offer the necessary support to those who are politically active in the high places of power, sending clear messages and demanding the recognition of basic rights and self-determination, free of the idea of ‘might is right’. At a time when the struggle for land becomes part of a larger battle for the conservation and natural distribution of common resources worldwide, it is precisely this injection of a critical sense and awareness that can bring new lifeblood to the capacity to conceive of a different social organization and to fairer forms of production and marketing, so that new words and concepts like Food Sovereignty, Biodiversity and protection of Mother Earth do not remain dead words but a serious stimulus to the process of renewal and healing which now more than ever is among the first priorities of the planet.
Palma Navarrino