Rural unions and the struggle for land in Brazil

Abstract

Studies of Brazil's agricultural labor movement have generally neglected its relationship to the struggle for land, but this is neither fair nor accurate. Analyzing the rural labor movement's historical contributions to the land struggle in Brazil, this contribution has been organized into three main periods, emphasizing social relations, institutional activism and policy changes. It argues that despite the peculiarities of different historical contexts, rural labor consistently provoked protest against policies that privileged large landholders, whose concentration of power over land and labor resources continually worsened Brazil's ranking as one of the most unequal of nations. For more than half a century, the most constant opponent of this situation among the peasantry has been the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture (CONTAG), a corporatist organization of rural labor unions founded in 1963.

Keywords:

• rural labor organizations
• peasants
• agrarian reform
• land struggle
• family farmers
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

The authors thank issue organizers Rebecca Tarlau and Anthony Pahnke, as well as Editor Jun Borras for soliciting this contribution and having enough patience to let us ‘finish' it. We are also grateful to Rebecca for translating several parts of the manuscript. Two anonymous reviewers offered many helpful comments and questions to improve the piece. We are also grateful for diverse grants from Brazilian funding agencies such as Brazil's National Science and Technology Research Council (CNPq) and CAPES, that have been important sources for the scholarship, research materials, travel financing and time needed to complete the paper.

Notes

¹Founded in 1922, the PCB was called the Communist Party of Brazil until a breakaway organization chose the same name for itself in 1962. To retain its acronym, the PCB changed its name to the Brazilian Communist Party and the new party adopted the acronym PCdoB. During the dictatorship, both gave attention to peasant mobilization, with the PCB emphasizing unionization and the PCdoB stressing armed struggle until 1974, when nearly all guerrilla groups had been repressed.

²Established as Public Law 4,214 in March 1963, it was built on existing rights to create a specific law aimed at rural labor, establishing a corporatist system of syndical organization that was similar to those already used by some urban workers since the 1940s. It was amended and substituted by law 5,889 in 1973.

³Established by decree law 4,504 in November 1964, it had been debated for many years, but the project finally approved had been produced by a conservative think tank allied with coup conspirators. It suffered various revisions before being approved by the regime leader, Marshal Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco (Bruno 1995).

⁴In 1970, these two institutes were merged to form the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA, in its Brazilian acronym), which still functions today.

⁵Ricci (1999) argues that the rural union movement lost its way in the 1970s, when it privileged land reform despite the fast growth of farm labor membership more interested in wages and conditions. Ricci claims this failure to represent the rural labor voice made CONTAG ill-prepared to head off the formation of rural social movements in the 1980s.

⁶Founded in 1967, ABRA gradually took the form of a ‘think tank’ dedicated to agrarian reform advocacy, and was led by José Gomes da Silva, who carefully constructed an alliance with the rural labor movement, including CONTAG officers, CPT figures like Poletto and other rural leaders.

⁷According to Poletto (1990, 19), the final document of the 1986 general assembly overemphasized the CPT's support to the organization's ‘conditioning the “value” of the struggle for land to the discovery of the political importance of the unions’ and party's organizations’.

⁸A ‘fiscal module’ (modulo fiscal) is a Brazilian legal term defined in the 1964 land statute as an area of land sufficient to support a family. The calculation of its size varies from municipality to municipality, depending on agricultural conditions.

⁹Two internal disputes continued to influence the peasant labor movement. These were the 1989 founding of the Federation of Rural Employee Unions (FERAESP, in its Brazilian acronym) in the state of São Paulo, and that of the Federation of Family Farm Workers (FETRAF, in its Brazilian acronym), both affiliated to CUT. FERAESP militated mostly among seasonal cane cutters and fruit pickers, increasingly supporting them in direct-action land struggle. Founded in 2001, FETRAF-Sul remained a regional organization in the southern state of Santa Catarina until 2005, when it expanded activities into other states, stimulating its transformation into a national organization.

¹⁰For some authors, the family farmer idea came to be seen as an important means for defusing a growing international anti-globalization peasant resistance movement, especially the growing alliance of rural social movements in the Via Campesina (Fernandes 2002; Borras, Edelman, and Kay 2008).

¹¹The manifesto of 1995 Grito was signed by several agrarian, indigenous and fishing movements and organizations, including CUT and MST, and stressed the need for the government to design a ‘Differentiated Agricultural Policy for Family Farming’ (Grito 1995, 4).

¹²Executive Order 1.577/1997, reissued under the number 2.027-38 on 4 May 2000, and definitively replaced by Executive Order 2.183-56 on 24 August 2001, prohibited ‘rural property to be the object of judicial dispossession if subjected to invasion motivated by agrarian conflict or collective land conflict’ for two years or more following the end of the dispute (Brazil 2001, Article 4, Section 6).

¹³According to the 2001 congress document, ‘the democratization of the use and possession of land is an essential means for altering the set of social, economic, environmental, and political conditions necessary to the process of development in the country' (CONTAG 2001, 30).

¹⁴Public law 11,326 was approved on 24 July 2006, to establish the concept and directives for the development of national policy for family farmers and their businesses (Brazil 2006).

¹⁵By the end of 2012, President Dilma had created one of the lowest numbers of settlements and settled one of the lowest numbers of families per year of any other president since 1988. As her reelection campaign started to gear up toward the end of 2013, she suddenly approved 100 agrarian reform land expropriations, still a very low number.

¹⁶To explain the contradiction between support and negotiation at this point in history, it is essential to clarify that CONTAG member federations and local unions are affiliated with at least four major labor movement confederations. Each has a distinct relationship with important political parties. While the CUT predominates as an ally of the PT that seeks to provide unconditional support for Dilma, the General Confederation of Workers is aligned with the Brazilian Socialist Party, a friendly rival to the PT, as is the Male and Female Workers Central of Brazil, which follows the line of the PCdoB, which is also a tendentious player in the PT governing coalition. As a PSDB ally, the Força Sindical affiliated members are the most critical of Dilma and supporting the PSDB's candidate for presidency in 2014.

¹⁷The formal name of this event was the United Meeting of Male and Female Rural Workers and Peoples of the Countryside, Waters and Forests. Organizers reflected on its similarities with the First Peasant Congress organized by the Communist Party in 1961 (see above), but the gathering rejected being called a “congress” as participants did not aspire to deliberate over specific political decisions.

Additional information

Clifford Andrew Welch is professor of contemporary Brazilian history at São Paulo Federal University (UNIFESP). He also teaches in the postgraduate program on Latin American and Caribbean Territorial Development at São Paulo State University (UNESP), where he is a researcher in the Center for Agrarian Reform Research, Study and Projects (NERA). In 2014, he completed a senior leave postdoctorate as Humanities Research Associate in History at the University of California – Santa Cruz, made possible by a grant from Brazil's Coordinator for Improvement Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).

Sérgio Sauer is a professor of agrarian themes at the University of Brasília (Planaltina Campus of the UnB) and in the Post-Graduate Program on Environment and Rural Development, Mader. He is a visiting professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague and his postdoctoral research is on land grabbing, with a grant from CAPES. Email: [email protected]