The legacy of social conflicts over property rights in rural Brazil and Mexico: Current land struggles in historical perspective

Abstract

This article proposes an approach to the agrarian question that focuses on the establishment of absolute private property rights over land in Brazil and Mexico. The author argues that current land struggles are conditioned by the property regimes inherited from past struggles. The author examines the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century and argues that the balance of class forces led to the slow establishment of absolute private property in Brazil, while in Mexico they triggered the Revolution of 1910–1917, which limited agrarian capitalism. The author then turns to the consequences of these different property regimes in the twentieth century and argues that capitalist social relations have been more dominant in the Brazilian than in the Mexican countryside. The conservative modernization of the 1960s and 1970s is identified as a turning point in the fully capitalist development of agriculture in Brazil. The shift toward food imports, the elimination of subsidies, and the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution signal the re-establishment of the conditions for capitalist development of agriculture in Mexico. The article ends with an assessment of the MST and EZLN's strategies to protect peasants’ access to land and to influence the institutional setting determining access to land.

Keywords:

• land
• property rights
• capitalism
• commodification
• market imperative of competition
• class struggle
• so-called primitive accumulation
• neoliberal globalization
• MST
• EZLN

Notes

¹This said, throughout Brazil regardless of the adverse situation, smallholders still grow a significant proportion of the food production: 30% of the rice, 67.2% of the black beans, 48.6% of the maize, 83.9% of the manioc, 72.4% of the onions, 58.5% of the pigs, 52.1% of the milk, and 39.9% of the poultry (Ferreira et al.2001, 494–95).

²For a good and brief explanation of Brenner's contribution to the debate on the agrarian question that goes beyond our focus on distinctive property rights, see Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2010a., 196–98).

³These companies were also created in Brazil around the same time and also played an important role in the process of land grabbing and concentration in the South and the interior of São Paulo.

⁴Jan de Vos estimate is lower arguing that 43 million hectares where privatized between 1821 and 1910 (1995, 244).

⁵The ejido refers to a peasant community that has been awarded by the state a title of collective use right over a given territory. However, even if the ejidatario has exclusive rights over his plots of land, before 1992, he could not sell his plot or use it as collateral for loans, which limited the commodification of land.

⁶Considering that many forms of illegal land grabbing were and are still in use throughout Brazil, particularly in the Amazon, it cannot be said that politically constituted property disappeared as a form of control of land and surplus labour. However, there is a clear movement toward ‘absolute private property’.

⁷The program was a failure, as many peasant families bought land of poor quality and did not receive adequate support to produce enough to pay back their loans (see Borras 2003, 377–81). However, it was continued this time with a lower profile in parallel to the state-led agrarian reform by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

⁸According to official sources from 1995 to 2010 (Arruda 2011), the Brazilian state would have distributed 69.4 million hectares of land (21.1 million under Cardoso and 48.3 million under Lula) to one million 155 thousand families (541,000 under Cardoso and 614,000 under Lula). However, scholars of the agrarian reform have traditionally contested these numbers because governments have tended to inflate statistics by counting legalizations of formal possession as distributions through expropriation. Bernardo Mançano Fernandes argues that from 1985 to 2006 47.8 million hectares would have been distributed to 766,639 families (Fernandes 2008, 79).

⁹There are also other credits to which settler families can apply in group to acquire larger machinery or start-up a small agroindustry.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leandro Vergara-Camus

The author would like to thank Paula Hevia-Pacheco, Judith Hellman, Cristobal Kay, Geoff Kennedy, Samuel Knafo and Thierry Lapointe for commenting on earlier versions of this article, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their detailed criticism and numerous suggestions, which significantly improved the initial paper.