The escalation of the campaign by the MST, the movement of landless peasants (WR-03-25), moved President Lula da Silva to bring forward a meeting with the movement's leaders that had been scheduled for 7 July.
In the days immediately before they gathered at the Planalto palace last Wednesday, MST militants in the northeastern state of Pernambuco hijacked four trucks carrying food and distributed the cargo among peasants who had been awaiting government assistance. Another group of 150 families had struck closer to home, moving into the fazenda 'Chapadinha', only 40 kilometres outside Brasília.
As Lula was greeting the MST leaders, wearing an MST baseball cap for effect, gunmen armed by the fazendeiro, businessman Mario Zinato, were facing off the invading peasants, and there were fears that a violet clash might ensue at any moment. The background to the meeting was a government tally of 114 land seizures across 20 of Brazil's 27 states.
'No truce.' The MST leaders submitted to Lula a 16-point wish list, headed by two demands: that this year the government should settle 120,000 families in land of their own, and that by the end of Lula's term, in 2006, the total should have reached a million. A good gauge of the import of these demands is that over the past eight years the government managed to settle only slightly more than 100,000 under the agrarian reform legislation. Seen from another angle, the MST claims to represent 5m landless peasants.
Lula promised to speed things up as much as possible; at present, government plans envisage settling only about 60,000 families this year.
Lula also promised that the government would conduct, as swiftly as possible, detailed surveys to identify idle lands which could be expropriated and distributed under the agrarian reform provisions.
According to Aldo Rebelo, the ruling PT's leader in the lower chamber of congress, who was present at the meeting, Lula did not discuss the ending of the land seizures that the courts have declared illegal.
'There was no talk of a truce,' Rebelo said. 'The government did not ask for a truce, nor did the MST offer one. There was a reaffirmation of mutual confidence [that the agrarian reform will go ahead].'
Ministerial warning. A more specific response to the situation came the following day from justice minister Márcio Thomaz Bastos. He warned publicly that 'any act that breaches the law will be sanctioned with the utmost severity, whether the perpetrators are fazendeiros or the Movimento dos Sem Terra [MST].'
Bastos said that he was 'very worried' by the tension that had built up in land disputes, and that the federal police's intelligence service had been instructed to alert the government should it become apparent that it was necessary to use force to keep things controlled.
Something else appears to have been said at 'Chapadinha', which was vacated on 4 July by the MST 'invaders'. According to MST lawyer Elmano de Freitas, the land reform agency had promised to give them, legally, some of the land, which was owned by the government.
Unreleased tension. Still on the brink is the MST camp at the Pontal do Parapanema, in the state of São Paulo, where more than 10,000 peasants have congregated and fazendeiros have been mustering gunmen to evict them.
The mood among the landowners has become more belligerent since Lula received the MST delegation at the Planalto. Antônio de Salvo, president of the CNA, the umbrella farmers' confederation, says that this has sent the signal that the President endorses the MST. He is demanding equal treatment for the CNA, plus a public commitment that the government will act against illegal land seizures.
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