President Lula da Silva has turned his attention towards one important group of erstwhile allies that has been turning into a thorn in the side of his administration: the Movimento dos Sem-Terra (MST, the movement of landless peasants). Hoping to steal their thunder, last week Lula unveiled a US$1.6bn credit package aimed at 'family' farmers -as his political operators manoeuvred to sidestep the more radical elements of the MST.
To launch his 'national plan for family agriculture', aimed at 1.4m families of small farmers, Lula invited to the Planalto palace an array of peasant organisations, excluding the MST. He underlined to them that this was the first time that loans are being handed out before sowing time.
As the ceremony was unfolding, several hundreds of MST members were launching land seizures throughout the country, including the Pontal de Parapanema, the site of past bloody clashes between peasants and landowners.
Personal intervention. Lula has announced that he intends to intervene directly in negotiations with the MST, starting with a meeting in the presidential palace in July. Until now, the negotiations between the government and the MST have been handled by the minister of agricultural development, Miguel Rossetto.
The MST leadership was not receptive to the government's overtures. The MST's national coordinator, João Paulo Rodrigues, said that the pace of invasions would not slow. Rodrigues claims that no landless families had been given land since Lula took office: Rossetto immediately corrected him saying that 3,000 families had been awarded land and the government expected to resettle 7,000 this year, and expropriate 200,000 hectares of idle land.
Pressure from landowners. How much scope there will be for diplomacy is anyone's guess. The landowners are losing patience with what they see as an excessively tolerant attitude on the part of the authorities.
Last week, the president of the União Democrática Ruralista (UDR), Luiz Antônio Nabhan Garcia, called for the government to clamp down on the MST. Himself a victim of an MST squat in 1996, Nabhan Garcia -like the government- is particularly concerned about the growing MST camp at Pontal do Paranapanema, which now has 3,600 families living in it. The encampment, which is in the state of São Paulo and away from the main areas of MST activity in the northeast, was only set up on 25 May. The MST wants 5,000 families in the encampment by the end of July.
The MST claims that it simply wants to put pressure on the government to speed up agricultural reform. The UDR argues that the MST is not interested in reform, only in revolution.
The UDR is increasingly worried about the MST's move down from the poor northeast to the richer lands in the centre and south of the country in the states of Minas Gerais, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul.
It claims that the government may have missed its chance to take preventative action and that the confrontation may lead to conflict. It argues that these areas should be excluded from the government's agricultural reform policies. Instead, it suggests, the reforms should focus on Acre, Pará, and Maranhão.
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