Needing to be firm and impartial
GOVT HAS TO BACKTRACK AFTER LULA APPEARS TO ENDORSE MST
The historic links between the workers' party (PT) and the landless people's movement (Movimento dos Sem-Terra, MST) have come back to haunt the leftwing party now that it is in power.
After a period of inactivity during Lula da Silva's campaign for the presidency last year, the MST has resumed its invasions of farms in various parts of Brazil, pressing for agrarian reform in the most direct, and potentially explosive manner.
Lula's government is caught between its traditional sympathy for the MST's cause and its need to placate the farmers, some of whom have seats in the cabinet (including agriculture minister Roberto Rodrigues).
Lula's photo gaffe. Despite his 23 years in politics, Lula still has something to learn about the art of photo opportunities, if the evidence of his meeting with the MST leaders on July 2 is anything to go by.
It was bad enough, from the point of view of some, that he met the MST leaders at all, having fobbed off farmers' representatives since taking office at the beginning of the year by passing their requests for an audience to Rodrigues.
But on receiving from MST leader João Pedro Stédile a baseball cap with the movement's name emblazoned on it, he donned it in front of the waiting press pack. Cameras flashed, and Lula guaranteed his presence on the front pages of every major newspaper, not to mention the TV news programmes, flying the flag of a movement that is invading farms up and down the country.
CPI and shots. His opponents in congress were outraged, and tabled a motion to install a parliamentary board of inquiry (CPI) into the activities of the MST.
Most CPIs result in little more than a lot of mud being slung at the government, and a CPI on the MST certainly wouldn't resolve the conflict brewing in rural areas.
The far more serious consequence of Lula's act of camaraderie with the MST, however, is that farmers, already irritated by the invasions taking place in several areas over the last four months [see RB-03-05] will see it as justification for taking the law into their own hands. The day after the President's meeting with the sem-terra leaders, gunmen working for a local landowner fired on a group of MST members who had invaded a farm in the southern state of Paraná, injuring one of them.
Ironically, the shots came after the sem-terra had already agreed with the police to leave peacefully.
Taking a tough line. The government has clearly recognised its leader's faux pas, so that while the head of the civilian household, José Dirceu, was pooh-poohing the whole kerfuffle as an exaggeration, justice minister Márcio Thomaz Bastos insisted that 'any act that infringes the Brazilian penal code will be punished and punished severely, be it from the farmers or from members of the MST.'
And well he might. Though recent censuses have shown Brazil becoming an ever more urban society, the history of the MST over the last 15 years reveals there is a continued capacity for violent flare-ups in rural areas.
There is a very real danger that, if it does not show a firm hand, the government could lose control of an already volatile situation, with dire consequences.
Rainha softens his tone. There are, however, signs that some MST activists are pulling back from the brink.
Firebrand leader José Rainha, who has been threatening a full-on revolution in Pontal de Paranapanema (in the state of São Paulo), where he is camped out with several thousand sem-terra, has begun calling for negotiations in the last few days.