Land Occupations, Violence, and the Politics of Agrarian Reform in ...

Land Occupations, Violence, and the Politics of Agrarian Reform in Brazil by John L. Hammond

Landless farmworkers in Brazil typically occupy land that is legally eligible for expropriation, but the state normally does not expropriate until a land occupation forces the hand of authorities. Landowners and local authorities in the Brazilian countryside frequently respond to occupations with violent repression. Their action reflects the hybrid character of the Brazilian state, modern and rational in cities and at the federal level but, in many rural areas, still clientelistic and marked by nonlegitimate violence. Land occupiers, landowners, and authorities jointly enact a repertoire of collective action that corresponds to the backward character of the state in those areas. The action of the land occupiers, however, is legitimated by the claim of civil disobedience while the efforts to repress them cannot lay claim to legitimacy on that basis. Keywords: Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), Violence, Brazil, Agrarian reform, Contentious repertoires

In Brazil political science finds a limit in the bullet of the henchman. —Machado de Assis

Landless farmworkers waging the battle for agrarian reform in Brazil have been the object of repeated violent attacks by illegal armed vigilantes in the pay of landowners and by official security forces. The landless challenge landowners and authorities by occupying idle farmland, though they rarely inflict violence on people. The violence they face is reactive, responding to those occupations. The occupation process and the violent response to it constitute a repertoire of collective action that follows a premodern pattern corresponding to the lack of a modern, rational state structure in rural Brazil. Violence has been an integral part of rural class relations and a main means by which landowners ensure the submission of the labor force in all of Latin America since the European conquest. Because they act most violently when their dominance is challenged, violence accompanied the major Latin

John L. Hammond teaches sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is a participating editor of Latin American Perspectives. He is the author of Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador (1998) and Building Popular Power: Workers’ and Neighborhood Movements in the Portuguese Revolution (1988). This is a revised version of a paper presented at the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, DC, September 2001. This research has been supported in part by the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation. The author appreciates the helpful comments of Desmond Arias, Gabriel Ondetti, Wayne teBrake, Cliff Welch, and Wendy Wolford. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 167, Vol. 36 No. 4, July 2009 156-177 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X09338589 © 2009 Latin American Perspectives

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American land reform programs in the last half of the twentieth century (Kay, 2001; Leite, 2006: 28). Violence—interpersonal, paramilitary, criminal, and official—is, moreover, pervasive throughout Brazilian society. Indeed, violence—as the nineteenthcentury novelist Machado de Assis suggests in the epigraph to this article—is (still today) part of the normal system of governing. Attacks on the rural poor, indigent children, prisoners and detainees, and alleged criminal suspects1 have been denounced repeatedly by national and international human rights organizations. The line between violence inflicted by security forces and that inflicted by extraofficial bodies is often hard to discern (Chevigny, 1995: 145–180; Human Rights Watch, 1997; Macaulay, 2000; Pinheiro, 2000: 125). Even if violence is a seeming universal of Brazilian culture, however, specific patterns call for further explanation. Violence is a political phenomenon, and its location and frequency shift with changes in the political process. Violence against the rural poor rises and falls and the targets change in response to the political salience of specific agrarian issues. The Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra—CPT), an agency of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, has kept (approximately) complete records of rural conflicts since the return of democracy in 1985. These records show that violent repression of land occupations was rare during the first decade. It increased substantially after 1995 as the land occupations themselves, mostly led by the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra—MST) became more frequent. The frequency of violence in rural areas and other settings alike can be explained by the peculiar hybrid character of the Brazilian state. The use of violence and its variation across geographic areas and in the class position of its targets reflect the state’s juxtaposition of modernity and backwardness. At the top, and to outward appearances, the state is liberal, universalistic, rational-legal, and modern. At the base, however, and especially in rural areas, it is backward—patrimonial, clientelistic, and locally controlled.2 Rural Brazil, where the demand for agrarian reform is felt, is backward in several respects: clientelism, particularistic justice, the lack of clear property demarcation, and the lack of state monopoly of the use of violence. Landowners control local political machines and dispense patronage to maintain that control. The administration of justice exhibits the same hybrid character that marks the state as a whole: an only apparently universalistic and authoritative judicial system is superimposed on local clientelistic control.3 Neither the boundaries of rural properties nor titles to their ownership are clearly established in much of Brazil’s vast territory. The state does not exercise a legitimate monopoly over the use of force: not only do rural landowners routinely sponsor extraofficial violence to protect their property but the police themselves regularly exceed their legal mandate, acting more as free agents than as officially empowered authorities. All three agents—hired guns, the property owners who hire them, and the police—enjoy virtual impunity (Leonídio, 2006; Oliveira, 2001). I take the term “backward” from the work of the Brazilian rural sociologist José de Souza Martins, author of O Poder do Atraso (The Power of Backwardness). Though he does not define “backwardness” precisely, he identifies it with the relation between rural landowners and peasants, manifested in the same phenomena I discuss: clientelism; the ambiguous definition of rural property

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titles, permitting fraudulent land claims; the deployment of violence by private paramilitary forces, belying the claim of the state to monopolize violence; and the bias of the local judiciary in rural areas in favor of landowners (Martins, 1999: 35–38, 82–92). Many scholars have noted the backward character of Brazil’s clientelistic pattern of representation. Maria do Carmo Campello de Souza calls the pattern “invertebrate centralism” (1989: 355), suggesting that the state is formally centralized but not governed by a central nervous system. Most parties are loose alliances of regional elites. A national government can govern only by making nonprogrammatic alliances with them and rewarding them with jobs, projects, and funds to dispense (Ames, 2001). What these scholars do not recognize so clearly is the state’s dualism. The backward and the modern state form a single system. Brazil is now over 80 percent urban, and the electoral democracy organized into political parties that prevails in major cities and at the federal level leaves vast geographic areas still subject to the clientelistic control of the legendary “colonels,” who run local political machines and deploy goon squads to protect their interests as landowners and to intimidate those who might challenge them. Disproportionate representation of small states in the national Congress magnifies their influence at the federal level despite the declining relative size of the rural population. As Martins (1999: 13) says, “backwardness is an instrument of power.” One can find what Guillermo O’Donnell (2004: 41–42) calls “brown areas” in many nations of Latin America (and the post-Soviet world). They present a world of extreme violence, as abundant data from both rural and urban regions show. These “brown areas” are subnational systems of power that have a territorial basis and an informal but quite effective legal system, yet they coexist with a regime that, at least at the national political center, is democratic. . . . Local politicians use the votes they command and the institutional positions they attain at the center in order to reproduce the systems of privatized power they represent. Not incidentally, in Argentina and Brazil, legislators from these “brown” areas have shown a keen interest (with frequent success) in dominating the legislative committees that appoint federal judges in those same regions.

Under such domination, autonomous popular organizing, especially around class interests, is extremely difficult (Gay, 1990: 452–454; Hagopian, 1996; Mainwaring, 1991: 39–40). Not only are the mechanisms for representation of those interests weak but the local elites do not hesitate to inflict violence on those who try to use them. In the face of such a system, challenging groups and the poor in general can have little confidence that formal political institutions will respond to their claims. To achieve their goals, they resort to direct action. “Backward” is obviously a pejorative term, closely associated with modernization theory and tracing back to Edward Banfield’s (1958) study of southern Italy; in the lexicon of modernization theorists, it frequently connoted an evolutionary process through which the backward sector must sooner or later become modern. The term is widely used by scholars, however, not all of whom share the assumptions of modernization theory (e.g., Roxborough, 1992; Whitehead, 1994). I use the term with a specific meaning,


to refer to the combination of clientelism, uncertain property demarcation, fraudulent titles, judicial partiality, and resort to extraofficial violence on the part of the local dominants. Nor do I suggest any process of evolution. On the contrary, the point is that the two apparently contradictory systems interact with each other to produce specific patterns of political behavior by advocates and opponents of agrarian reform. In this paper I emphasize the backward sector because that is where the violence occurs, but the two sectors comprise a larger whole. We can examine the forms of collective action through which social movements promoting and opposing agrarian reform press their demands in the light of this dualism. Charles Tilly introduced the concept of a “repertoire of contention,” a fixed set of routines adopted by a collectivity in staking political claims (1978: 143–159). As Tilly first used the concept, a repertoire encompassed the forms of collective action of a single collectivity. He later modified it to take into account the involvement of government agents—as interlocutors, regulators, or agents provocateurs. Collective action within a repertoire, Tilly said, is a play of strategic interaction: “Each routine within an established repertoire actually consists of an interaction among two or more parties. Repertoires belong to sets of contending actors, not to single actors” (1995: 29–30). I add that a repertoire can also consist of three-way interactions, between two sets of contenders, opposed to each other, and between them and authorities. To say that collective action is derived from a repertoire implies that protesters do not spontaneously create new forms of action for each incident of protest; instead they follow familiar forms. But repertoires are not permanent and unchanging. In Europe, as Sidney Tarrow (1994: 35) has pointed out, the characteristic repertoire of collective action changed around the mid-nineteenth century. Before that, Tarrow argues, it consisted of action that was direct, specific, and local. Collective action challenged an antagonist directly. Its forms depended directly on the nature of the grievance, and therefore any one form was specific to one kind of grievance. A typical form was the bread riot, in which people invaded a bakery or storehouse to protest a price hike or the withholding of bread and appropriated it. The bread riot had a conventional form that was widely repeated. Its claim was based on a community’s shared notions of a just price (Thompson, 1971; Tilly, 1975). Importantly, moreover, it secured the objective: people got the bread they needed. Since then the repertoire of collective action has become “general rather than specific; indirect rather than direct; flexible rather than rigid” (Tarrow, 1994: 40). Typical forms of the contemporary repertoire include the mass march, the demonstration, and the public meeting. This repertoire is modular: “it [can] be adapted to a number of different settings and its elements combined in major campaigns of collective action.” Its forms are interchangeable: interchangeable among themselves (any of the forms can serve a given purpose) and interchangeable among movements (each of the forms can be adopted to serve various goals). The modular repertoire arises in tandem with the national social movement and reflects the growth of mass communication and the national representative state. It does not win objectives directly but is intended to pressure authorities into responding (cf. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001: 48–50, 144–147). For convenience I will refer to the two repertoires


as the targeted and the modular repertoire (or the older and newer repertoire) respectively. The most important determinant of the change in the repertoire of collective action is the changing character of the state; the modern repertoire emerges with the consolidation of the national state and its role as the arbiter of conflict. In Brazil, however (as I will argue), the repertoire is necessarily dual just as the state is. Collective action in the countryside for and against agrarian reform takes the form of the premodern, targeted repertoire, while the same contenders use the modular repertoire in their interaction with the federal state. THE LAND OCCUPATION MOVEMENT Within this dualistic system, land occupations are a means to promote agrarian reform. The strategy of rural movements is dictated by the backward character of the political system in rural areas. To confront that system effectively, they opt for direct action. They organize unemployed and landless farmworkers to invade and occupy idle farmland. They do so to create pressure to get the occupied properties expropriated under the country’s agrarian reform law and, in the longer term, to maintain steady pressure for a more general agrarian reform. Many organizations have carried out land occupations. The largest and most important is the MST; land occupations have also been organized by competing land reform movements and by rural trade unions affiliated with the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (Confederação Nacional de Trabalhadores Agrícolas—CONTAG). The MST grew out of a series of land occupations beginning in 1978 and was formally constituted in 1984. It grew in strength and activism through the 1990s to become the liveliest and most influential political movement on the Brazilian scene (Brumer, 1990: 25; Fernandes, 2000; Hammond, 1999a; Ondetti, 2008; Wright and Wolford, 2003). The following account is based on interviews with MST land occupiers and leaders in several regions of Brazil. The process of land occupation is similar for all organizations, but only the MST prominently adopts the modular repertoire to press for reform at the national level. The demand for land reform is determined by the rural property structure in Brazil, the country with the second-most-extreme concentration of land ownership in the world. In contrast to several Latin American countries, Brazil has never had a significant land reform. All efforts, with the possible exception of that of 1962–1964, have been at best symbolic and at worst frauds; in the one exceptional case, land struggles were a major cause of the 1964 coup that ushered in 21 years of military rule. Land concentration is an essential part of the model of conservative modernization of agriculture that was adopted by that regime and is still in force (Gerner, 1994; Pereira, 1997; Thiesenhusen and Melmed-Sanjack, 1990). According to Sérgio Leite (2006: 19), that model has had “perverse effects”: it has made land ownership more concentrated, increased income disparities and the exploitation of the agricultural labor force, and damaged the rural environment. It might be expected that the modernization of some sectors of


agriculture would cause the political interests of landowners practicing modern and traditional agriculture to diverge, weakening each group politically. They have not diverged, as Leite points out; instead, modern and traditional landowners have formed a “coalition of rent-seeking interests” (22) that has increased the political power of both. The landless occupy land to force the government to expropriate it. The 1985 agrarian reform law provides that farmland that is not being farmed productively can be declared “of social interest” and expropriated. Provisions of this law were incorporated into the 1988 constitution (though they were watered down in the Constituent Assembly in response to pressure from opponents of agrarian reform). Other laws permit takeover of properties for which no one has a proper title, and sometimes the landless occupy publicly owned (state or federal) potential farmland from which they calculate that they are unlikely to be evicted. The law of expropriation is not usually enforced, however, unless direct action forces the hand of authorities. The agrarian reform movements identify properties that they believe are eligible for expropriation, and they recruit a corps of occupiers from among the rural (and sometimes the urban) poor. Several hundred families together enter the targeted property and set up makeshift housing. They then seek legal title under the cover of the various federal and state laws. An occupation sets in motion a process of conflict among several parties: the occupiers, the landowner (and possibly allies on both sides), and various governmental authorities, including the police forces, the courts, and the federal agrarian reform bureaucracy. Expropriation usually requires a long legal process. The landowner (or claimant) typically responds to an occupation by petitioning a local court for an order of restoration of possession (reintegração de posse). The local courts in which the petition is heard in the first instance are part of the local governing structure, notoriously favorable to landowners. They usually respond by ordering the occupiers evicted (Fernandes, 1997: 36). The eviction may be carried out with greater or lesser force depending on negotiations between the occupiers and the police. Evictions can become major political events in which not only the courts and police but landowners’ organizations and politicians supporting each side become involved. This is the point at which landowners or their agents are most likely to retaliate violently against occupiers. Because landowners typically rely on the support of the local authorities, occupiers could (until the last years of the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso [see below]) sometimes find support from the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária—INCRA), the federal agency responsible for land redistribution.4 INCRA would investigate an occupied property to determine whether it was expropriable. If so, compensation for the owner was set. An owner could go to court to challenge the expropriation or, more commonly, the value of the compensation. Some owners were happy to be expropriated; they might be able to negotiate a payment greater than the market value of the land (Petry, 1997: 35; SEJUP News from Brazil 293, November 20, 1997). Expropriated properties are turned over to applicants who meet an income test and other criteria. Normally the occupiers meet the criteria; until recently


they could expect that the land would be awarded to them, but only after a delay of months or years following the initial occupation. In the interim, evicted occupiers may be resettled on land other than that which they originally occupied, either state-owned or already expropriated for agrarian reform. More often they erect an encampment of improvised houses or tents somewhere in the vicinity, generally in the right-of-way of a public road, and wait for expropriation; on public property, they are likely to be safe from another eviction (D’Incao, 1991: 91; Paiero and Damatto, 1996: 41, 119). Joining a land occupation entails a high commitment, as occupiers leave their entire life behind and wait to find out whether their gamble will pay off. If they win title to the land, the payoff is high: they become property owners, create a settlement (assentamento), and farm the land. Because agricultural and marketing conditions vary widely across Brazil, some settlements offer conditions highly favorable to production and profitability, but others have poor soil, insufficient rainfall, and no access to markets (Sarima Neto, 1997). Settlers, though living close to the poverty line, on the average fare moderately well by the standards of rural Brazil, in part thanks to government subsidies for food and housing construction. A 2002 national study found that the average monthly family income was R$232 in settlements created between 1985 and 1994 and R$198 in settlements created between 1995 and 2001 (with significant regional variations). These figures included off-farm income and government benefits, but most of the income came from work on the settlement. According to the study, these income levels were comparable to those of salaried workers and higher than those of day laborers in the same locality (Sparovek, 2003: 136–137). A study in 2001, confined to the Northeast (where, according to the national study just cited, settlers’ income was the lowest in the country), showed that their average income was R$188, 72 percent higher than before living on the settlement, while the value of their property (apart from the land itself) was 138 percent higher and their housing conditions had improved significantly (Buainain, 2003).5 Land occupations fall within the older, targeted collective-action repertoire. But land reform advocates also use the pressure tactics of the modern repertoire. The MST, far more actively than the other organizations promoting land occupations, pressures the federal government to carry out a national agrarian reform program. It stages demonstrations and marches in the cities, especially the state capitals. Members frequently go on hunger strikes or camp out in public places and occupy government agencies especially the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agraria—INCRA). The MST seeks out favorable media coverage, with mixed success (Hammond, 2004). It has also protested government policies beyond agriculture and assumed leadership of a broader left movement in Brazil. Most often, however, these multiple tactics are applied in the service of the central objectives of defending particular occupations and promoting land reform. As I have noted, the MST is the most active leftist movement in Brazil today. This prominence of a rural movement is surprising in highly urbanized Brazil, especially when other popular movements appear becalmed. Several years before he was elected president in 2002, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recognized the MST as the most important political actor in Brazil (Mesquita Neto, 1997: 17).


RURAL VIOLENCE IN THE BACKWARD STATE It is the backwardness of the state in the Brazilian countryside that accounts for the persistence of rural violence. Anthony Pereira’s (1997: 103–118) study of farmworkers’ unions in the sugar zone of Pernambuco shows that landowner violence against unions is related to the modernization of agriculture: in southeastern Brazil, where sugar cultivation is capital-intensive and not dependent on cheap, unskilled labor, such violence is rare. In the Northeast, in contrast, where technology is less advanced, it is still necessary to keep labor costs as low as possible, and the traditional clientelistic politics still rule. There, landowners intervene directly to repress the unions. Violence against land occupations, though also due to backwardness, is greatest on the agricultural frontier. In newly settled regions, backwardness is reflected less in agricultural technology or labor relations than in the lack of rationalization of the property system. Property ownership is often poorly defined in much of Brazil’s vast continental expanse, especially (though by no means only) in the areas of recent settlement. This lack of definition is most noted in the Amazon region, but it can also be found in the hinterland areas of some coastal states. São Paulo, for example, is Brazil’s industrial heartland, but the Pontal do Paranapanema, in the far west of the state, was settled for farming only in the mid-twentieth century and retains many of the backward conditions of landholding and politics that prevail in the Amazon. The history of the extension of settlement has been a history of competition between poor farmers squatting on virgin land (posseiros) and land grabbers determined to occupy large expanses for ranching or speculative ownership. As settlement extends to new areas, it is relatively easy for the wealthy and well-connected to obtain titles to open land. Between 1964 and 1985 the military government granted huge concessions of frontier land for logging and ranching. Many get titles through irregular means. Title forgers are known as grileiros because they rub counterfeit deeds with crickets (grilos) to make them look old. New roads and the conversion of huge virgin territories to cultivation or pasture in the last half century have produced innumerable opportunities for title fraud (cf. Bunker, 1984: 1043–1044; Hall, 1990; Maybury-Lewis, 1994: 99–124). Claimants, legitimate or not, often dispossess squatters from land after the squatters have opened up a territory and cleared small patches, easing the way for extensive farming. Irregular land tenure creates two kinds of situations that often lead to violence: the dispossession of squatters by grileiros (or by those to whom the government grants titles) and land occupations where occupiers believe that the claimant either is not farming the land productively or does not have a legitimate title. Both reflect the incomplete penetration of the state in areas of recent settlement (as do land grabs and title disputes) and expose the state’s lack of monopoly of the use of force. It is on today’s frontier—mainly in the Amazon region but also in the relatively open western parts of some coastal states—that violence against land occupiers has been greatest. Land occupations, rare during the military regime, returned with the restoration of democracy in 1985. Landowners, strengthened by the military


regime’s promotion of the capitalist modernization of agriculture, organized under the restored democracy to exercise political pressure through legitimate channels and through extraofficial violence. Attacks on squatters were especially common in the first years after the end of the military government (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, 1986; Goodman, 1989: 84–86; Maybury-Lewis, 1994: 99–124). Land occupations grew more frequent in the 1990s. Occupiers demand that land held for speculation, unfarmed, or under suspect titles be expropriated under the agrarian reform laws and redistributed. Like advocates, opponents of agrarian reform use both direct action— violent, in their case—and the elements of the modular repertoire. With the end of the military dictatorship, landowners organized in opposition to the ambitious agrarian reform bill presented by President José Sarney in 1985. They lobbied and got the bill watered down; they founded an organization, the Ruralist Democratic Union (União Democrática Ruralista—UDR), which organized small farmers to oppose the bill openly and paramilitary squads to intimidate farmworkers and peasants covertly. The UDR successfully fought the adoption of proposed provisions in the constitution of 1988 that would have made possible serious agrarian reform; the constitution as adopted provided for expropriation only of land that was “not fulfilling its social function,” that is, that was not being farmed productively. After the Constituent Assembly, the UDR launched an independent presidential candidate in 1989. The campaign was a failure, and the organization formally disbanded in 1994, but the ruralist caucus (bancada ruralista) has been among the most cohesive groups in the Congress. It elected more than 150 members in both 1994 and 1998, transcending party lines from the far right to the center-left. Cardoso depended on the caucus’s support to pass his legislative program (Estado de São Paulo, October 13, 1998; Folha de São Paulo via Brazil on Line [www.bol.com.br], May 19, 1996; Gros, 1992: 60–63; Grzybowski, 1987: 15; Hall, 1990: 218–222; Tavares, 1995: 23–26). As the struggle for land reform heated up in the mid-1990s, landowners organized again at the local level. They regularly targeted occupations for violence, contracting paramilitary groups or individual hired guns (jagunços and pistoleiros) directly or enlisting the official forces of order. They took few pains to disguise their intentions. A new organization claiming the UDR’s name was formed in the Pontal do Paranapanema region of western São Paulo state in 1996 and announced in August 1997 that it was creating an armed militia to fight occupations. It regularly condemned the MST and denounced the government for failing to respond to occupations with sufficient force. Several groups of landowners sprang up in the states of Baía, Espírito Santo, Mato Grosso do Sul, and Minas Gerais in 1997 and 1998 and threatened to use violence against land occupiers; a national group called the National Association of Rural Producers (Associação Nacional de Produtores Rurais— ANPRU) claimed to be creating a security system through which landowners could call out militias to defend their property (Associated Press via LexisNexis, October 18, 1997; Folha de São Paulo via BOL, February 9, March 30, April 1, April 13, 1998; SEJUP News from Brazil 283, August 14, 1997). The annual reports of the church-based CPT show that 1,443 people (rural workers, priests, lawyers, and trade unionists) were killed in rural violence between 1985 and 2006. The killings were at their peak in the late 1980s, when

Hammond / AGRARIAN REFORM IN BRAZIL 165 TABLE 1

Land Occupations and Retaliatory Violence, Brazil, 1994–2006 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Occupations (CPT)

Occupations (MST)

119 52 146 93 398 167 463 173 599 132 593 160 393 194 184 391 496 437 384

Rural Conflicts

Land Conflicts

Killings

485 554 750 736 1,100 983 660 880 925 1,690 1,801 1,881 1,657

379 440 653 658 751 870 564 625 743 1,335 1,398 1,304 1,212

47 41 54 30 47 27 21 29 43 71 37 38 35

Sources: MST occupations, 1997–98: Fernandes (2000: 261); 1999: MST (n.d.); other variables: Comissão Pastoral da Terra (2008).

supporters and opponents of agrarian reform mobilized to exert pressure on the Constituent Assembly. The highest one-year toll was 161 in 1987. In the early 1990s there were approximately 50 a year, the number in 1996 (54) reaching the highest level since 1991. Perpetrators enjoyed virtual impunity: according to the CPT, the 1,190 killings by 2000 had resulted in only 85 trials and 71 convictions (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, 2000). The CPT also tracks land conflicts. These escalated dramatically after 1994 with the increase in land occupations (see Table 1). Occupations fell when the Cardoso government issued decrees penalizing them harshly during its last years but rose again in the first years of Lula’s presidency, when the government was more tolerant even though it left the Cardoso anti-agrarian-reform decrees on the books. Before 1994, violence was primarily directed not against land occupiers seeking expropriation but against squatters and rural trade-union activists; the MST leader João Pedro Stédile said in 1994 that only five members of the movement had been killed in the previous decade (Veja, 1994: 72). But the most widely publicized incidents of rural violence in 1995 and 1996— massacres at Corumbiara and Eldorado dos Carajás—were directed against land occupiers and left more than 30 dead. They also differed from earlier incidents, in which paramilitary forces played the major role; police forces were responsible for the 1995 and 1996 massacres. Violence by paramilitary groups is usually small in scale and occurs immediately after an occupation or when occupiers are being evicted, to intimidate occupiers and scare them off or forestall their return. Like the violence against other rural workers, attempts to prevent occupations or evict occupiers enjoy virtual impunity. I present several examples from the late 1990s, when occupations and land conflicts escalated. In January 1997, two occupiers were killed—in an ambush, the MST claimed—on the Pinhal Ralo fazenda6 in Rio Bonito de Iguaçu (Paraná), which was scheduled for expropriation. Two employees of the company that owned


the property were later arrested and accused of the murder (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, January 23 and March 5, 1997). Among the few incidents in which farmworkers themselves acted violently was one for which the MST disclaimed responsibility. The confrontation occurred on September 6, 1997, on the Cordilheira fazenda in Jundiai do Sol, Paraná, which had been occupied two days earlier. Two landowners and a five-man security detail entered the occupied fazenda. When a farmworker was shot in the leg, the occupiers took the seven men hostage, tied them to trees, and beat them. The Military Police (Polícia Militar) had to intervene to free them, and one of the hostages was briefly hospitalized. In a communiqué on September 10, the MST condemned the occupiers’ action but said that they had no connection to the movement (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, September 6 and September 8, 1997). On March 26, 1998, two state MST leaders were murdered in Parauepebas (Pará), close to the site of the Eldorado massacre two years before. The Goiás II fazenda had been occupied two weeks earlier by some 550 families, who agreed to leave voluntarily after negotiations. According to the state MST, the state secretary for public safety had assured the occupiers that the Military Police would not be called in for any eviction. A group of landowners, hired gunmen, and off-duty Military Policemen arrived to watch the occupiers leave the fazenda and march several kilometers to a campsite; there the retaliators intervened and shot the two men, who were survivors of the massacre of two years earlier, at point-blank range. Arrest warrants were issued for 10 landowners accused of participating in the killing, but by the end of the week all were still at large (MST, 1998; Folha de São Paulo via BOL, March 27, 28, and 29 and April 2, 1998). While most violence is organized locally and directly by landowners, the worst incidents of recent years were major massacres in 1995 and 1996 by the Military Police. When the police act, as in these cases, they frequently have armed backup from freelances. The first massacre took place on August 9, 1995, on the Santa Elina fazenda in Corumbiara, in the jungle of the far-western state of Rondônia. It had been occupied by a group of landless workers not affiliated with the MST a few weeks before. A predawn raid by Military Police and armed civilians resulted in 15 deaths (2 policemen and 13 occupiers), including 4 who were missing after the raid and whose bodies were discovered later; one occupier disappeared and was never found. Forensic evidence showed that at least 7 of the dead occupiers were executed after having turned themselves in (Amnesty International, 1998; Osava, 1995; Reuters via Lexis/Nexis, August 15, 1995). The most dramatic incident was the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajás (Pará). On April 17, 1996, 2,000 MST militants blocked a highway. A year earlier they had occupied the Macaxeira fazenda, alleging that the person who claimed to own it did not have a valid title. They were demonstrating to demand that the government expropriate it. Military police fired on them, killing 19. A camera crew from a local television station, caught in the traffic jam, filmed the massacre. The videotape showed that the police had approached the demonstration firing machine guns into the air and then fired directly on the demonstrators. Doctors who examined the dead found signs that some had been shot execution-style, and MST leaders claimed that the police had


killed them at point-blank range after taking them into custody. A witness claimed that a landowner of the region had paid the Military Police to attack the demonstrators, soliciting funds from other landowners for the purpose (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, April 18, 1996; Agence France-Presse via Lexis/ Nexis, April 20, 1996; Reuters via Lexis/Nexis, May 3, 1996). The existence of a videotape, broadcast nationwide, ensured greater public attention for this event than for most attacks on the rural poor. President Cardoso promised an accounting, and the 155 Military Police who had participated in the attack were all indicted. The mass indictment, however, appeared to be a symbolic gesture to avoid singling out any individual. The three commanding officers were eventually tried in August 1999, and all were acquitted; the trials of the remaining accused policemen were then suspended. The prosecutor sued to have the acquittals overturned, arguing that the judge had improperly instructed the jury and that one of the jurors had made prejudicial statements against the MST during the trial. That same juror was also accused of attempting to bribe another member of the jury panel. The reversal was granted by the state court of appeals in April 2000. One hundred fortynine Military Policemen were eventually tried in 2002, six years after the event. Only two commanding officers were finally convicted (Hammond, 1999b; Amnesty International, 2002). The Eldorado massacre has taken on historic significance. While some might dismiss it as an isolated incident, the fact that the attack on Brazilian rural workers with the biggest toll in lives in the twentieth century occurred in its last decade confirms my claim that the regulation of conflict in rural Brazil can be considered backward. The event has also had echoes beyond the borders of Brazil: its anniversary, April 17, is commemorated annually by Via Campesina, the worldwide alliance of peasant movements for agrarian reform, as the International Day of Agrarian Reform. Next to violence, judicial partiality is a second hallmark of the backwardness prevailing in the Brazilian countryside. The treatment of MST leaders in the Pontal do Paranapanema is a case in point. The Pontal was a main site of MST occupations in the mid-1990s. In 1995 22,000 families occupied 59 properties. It was there that the UDR was reconstituted in September, 1996 (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, September 15, 1996; Groppo, 1996; Los Angeles Times via Lexis/Nexis, December 3, 1995). In October 1995, six leaders of the MST in the Pontal were charged with “forming a criminal band.” Four were arrested, and warrants were issued for two who were in hiding, including José Rainha, a national MST leader. Among the arrested was Rainha’s 25-year-old wife, Diolinda Alves de Souza. Released after two weeks and then rearrested, she became an instant national celebrity when local authorities made clear that they were holding her and the other three detainees as hostages, offering to release them if the two fugitives turned themselves in. The incident exposed the divergent responses to land occupations by local authorities and those at higher levels. Mário Covas, governor of São Paulo, complained that the judge’s action hindered negotiations in progress with the MST to resolve the occupation crisis. The federal Superior Justice Tribunal ordered the detainees released on bail on March 12, 1996 (Inter Press Service, February 1, 1996; Latin America Weekly Report, 1996).


The story replayed itself a year later. At the end of 1996, a group of occupiers entered São Domingos fazenda in Sandovalina and planted corn; they remained camped out nearby, and on February 23, 1997, 2,500 occupiers entered the fazenda to harvest it. They were shot at from within the fazenda and eight were wounded; five men, including the landowner’s son and four hired gunmen, were arrested. A week later a judge released the five accused of the shooting on bail (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, February 26 and March 5, 1997). On February 24 the same judge had signed a warrant for the five MST leaders, including Rainha, claiming that they had led the occupiers into the fazenda. According to the bulletin of the church-related Justice and Peace Service, “Many would consider the decision of the judge as being strange. When arrest warrants were signed for this same group by another judge in the Pontal region in early 1996 and for the same motive, the warrant was canceled by the Superior Justice Tribunal” (SEJUP News from Brazil 264, February 27, 1997). In 1997 too the warrant was canceled by the superior tribunal on April 8 (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, April 13, 1997). Rainha was also accused of a crime in the state of Espírito Santo: participating in the murder of a police officer and a landowner during a land occupation in 1989. Rainha claimed that he had been in the state of Ceará, some 700 kilometers away, on the day of the killings; five witnesses supported him, including a Ceará state legislator. The case was not tried until June 1997. No one testified that he had been present when the killings occurred, and his attorneys charged that the pretrial depositions of witnesses were contradictory. Nevertheless he was convicted and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison, even though he was accused only as an accomplice. A retrial is automatic under Brazilian law for a sentence of 20 years or more. The state criminal court ordered the new trial moved to the state capital, Vitória. When it was finally held, Rainha was acquitted (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, June 11 and September 23, 1997; SEJUP News from Brazil 276, June 12, 1997; Hammond, 2000). An ongoing series of attacks by private and public forces in the state of Paraná since 1998 presents a dramatic pattern combining legal and violent repression. In 1999, according to the MST, there were in the state 35 evictions of occupiers, in which 173 occupiers were illegally arrested (and 6 of them tortured by the police). There were also two unsolved murders and two attempted murders of farmworkers; in addition, Darci Frigo, attorney for the state CPT, was arrested and beaten by police. (He received the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award in 2001.) In May 2000 police stopped 50 busloads of land occupiers heading to a demonstration in the state capital, Curitiba, removed them from the buses, and made them lie on the ground; some were beaten and one was killed. The unusually fierce and consistent attack was condemned by Dom Jayme Chemello, president of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (Arbex, 1999; SEJUP News from Brazil 357, July 2, 1999; 386, February 4, 2000; 413, August 18, 2000).7 In August 2001 a major army spy operation against the MST and other left political and church-related organizations going back at least three years was revealed (Reuters, via Yahoo! Brasil Notícias, August 7, 2001). In a critical report on the state of human rights in Brazil issued in December 1997, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights identified rural


workers as one of the groups most vulnerable to human rights violations (SEJUP News from Brazil 296, December 18, 1997). STATE FORMS AND REPERTOIRES OF COLLECTIVE ACTION The land occupation and the official and extraofficial response make up a collective action repertoire in Tilly’s sense. Occupation and retaliation must be understood as a single process in which the behavior of each party depends on that of the other and the behavior of both responds to the political context. The repertoire resembles the older, targeted repertoire. Occupation and retaliation both represent local, direct action that is aimed at an immediate target and that, if successful, achieves a goal directly. Both land occupiers and those who resist them use forms of collective action that are elsewhere considered outdated because they are confronting a backward state. Both collective actors take direct action rather than confide in the rational administration of justice (though there are important differences between them to which I will return directly). A repertoire is not fixed, and the targeted repertoire can contain elements of the modular repertoire. Land occupations are addressed at least in part to the federal government, pressuring for expropriation; in that sense, they assume a central authority that will act according to the rule of law rather than responding merely to force. But they still are closer to the targeted repertoire in that the land occupation movement is a one-issue, one-tactic movement specific to rural areas and acting illegally rather than institutionally (even if in the cause of legality), pressuring through direct action. Both the promoters and the opponents of land reform also exert political pressure at the federal level. When confronting the federal state—modern, rational, and representative, at least formally—the MST adopts the modular repertoire, lobbying, demonstrating, and supporting electoral candidates, all to pressure the central government for agrarian reform. It looks (though with less than full confidence) to the agrarian reform bureaucracy and the superior courts to uphold the law. Landowners also use the modular repertoire, though from a much stronger power base. Both engage in electoral politics, the UDR in the 1989 presidential campaign and the MST in contests for local office in municipalities where its settlers are a significant portion of the population (Heredia et al., 2005). That both advocates and opponents of agrarian reform use those channels reflects the same bifurcation of the state that encourages direct action at the local level. If local authorities are often in the pockets of the landowners and collaborate with them in repressing land occupations, the attitude of the federal government is more ambivalent. It supports occupations in several ways. Most important, of course, if an occupation is recognized the government expropriates the land and conveys title to the new settlements. It provides food to encampments and offers rural credit to settlements for production and housing (though the terms were made less favorable to settlements in 1999 [Estado de São Paulo, February 13, 1999]). But the federal government vacillates with the political moment. The Cardoso administration (1995–2002) gave verbal support to agrarian reform,


but its policies were inconsistent (Ondetti, 2007). It was most favorable immediately after the 1996 Eldorado massacre, which produced a strong public reaction in favor of land occupiers, but later it did all it could to marginalize the movement. Several government-sponsored laws favorable to agrarian reform were passed in 1996: jurisdiction over some crimes committed by Military Police was transferred to civilian courts, summary proceedings (rito sumário) were adopted to speed up processes of expropriation, and the rural land tax on unproductive agricultural land was raised to 20 percent of value per year. Cardoso’s control over the votes of his conservative governing coalition, however, was particularly limited on issues involving human rights and land. Even measures favorable to land reform were qualified. While the land tax in particular did represent a defeat for the ruralist caucus, all the measures were watered down significantly from the original proposals. With the law of rito sumário, the government sent a message saying “No more land occupations!” (futilely, as it turned out) by excluding occupied land from accelerated judgments. The bill giving civilian courts jurisdiction over crimes committed by the Military Police had already been passed by the Chamber of Deputies. These offenses had been tried in military courts, and the change was a longstanding demand of the Brazilian human rights movement. The Senate was forced to vote on the bill in the wake of the massacre, but it gutted the measure with amendments. The law as finally enacted transferred only charges of intentional homicide to civilian courts and left the decision on transfer with the military courts (U.S. Department of State, 1997; Latin America Weekly Report via Lexis/Nexis, August 29, 1996). Administrative measures likewise can favor either side. In 1997, Agrarian Reform Minister Raul Jungmann decreed a series of measures to close some loopholes that allowed landowners to evade expropriation and to allow courts to act retroactively to overturn awards of excessive compensation for expropriations. Local INCRA employees who carry out the investigations to determine whether occupations will be rewarded with expropriations are often sympathetic to land reform and to the occupiers. As he announced the new measures to speed expropriations, however, Jungmann also announced that no occupied property would be inspected for expropriation as long as the occupiers remained on the property. In March 1998, in response to a wave of invasions of INCRA offices in 10 states, he stiffened the penalties for takeovers of offices (which have been a routine occurrence [Folha de São Paulo via BOL, March 18, 1998]). In 2000, in response to MST demonstrations that disrupted the ceremonies commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of Brazil, Cardoso decreed that any occupied property would be ineligible for expropriation for two years and assigned federal police to protect federal buildings from occupation by demonstrators. The loss of government support for expropriations is also clear from the budget of INCRA, which fell from a peak of R$2.2 billion in 1998 to R$1.3 billion in 2000 (not adjusted for inflation [Ondetti, 2008: 183–184; Justiça Global, 2000: 30]). Beginning in 1998, the federal government announced a series of policies intended to circumvent the occupation movement while redistributing land through mechanisms that would not reward its political opponents. It


proposed to decentralize and marketize agrarian reform by giving authority over land transfers to state governments and creating a “land bank” that would finance the private purchase of land by individual small farmers. This and related programs, jointly dubbed the “New Rural World,” proposed to change the character of agrarian reform radically. Land reform would come to depend on the free market: with financing from the World Bank, the government would provide credit so that the landless could negotiate individually with landowners who wished to sell their property—farms would no longer be subject to expropriation against their will (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, December 29, 1998; Estado de São Paulo, April 2, 1999). If fully implemented, this new procedure would have put an end to mass occupations and undercut the land occupation movement. It would also have put individuals who acquired property at the mercy of their creditors. Implementation proceeded slowly in the last years of the Cardoso administration, but the cumulative effect of these policies was to inhibit activity to enforce land reform, leading to a drastic decline in occupations. Supporters of agrarian reform hoped that the end of the Cardoso presidency and the election of Lula in 2002 would initiate an increase in federal support for agrarian reform. In fact the Lula government has been more tolerant of occupations in practice, and they have increased (see Table 1), but it has not reversed Cardoso’s tightening of the rules. CONCLUSION In some ways, the movements for and against land reform are similar. Both choose their actions from two repertoires. They do so in tandem with each other and in interaction with state authorities. What determines the choice of repertoire in any instance is the level of the state to which it is directed. Against local authorities operating by premodern rules, they practice the targeted repertoire of action, which is ostensibly outdated. The similarity of their respective uses of the targeted repertoire leads some, especially government spokespersons and the media, to equate them rhetorically by charging both with “violence.” Some claim that cutting down fences and occupying land are a form of violence. Former Minister of Justice Jarbas Passarinho, arguing that one could support agrarian reform but still oppose the tactics of the movement demanding it, wrote in an opinion column in the Estado de São Paulo, “Isn’t an invasion in itself violent?” (Passarinho, 1997). Calling a land occupation an “invasion” and referring indiscriminately to violations of property and acts of physical violence against people alike as “violence” are common rhetorical moves designed to discredit the movement (Hammond, 2004). But violence perpetrated by land occupiers is rare, if by violence we mean attacks on persons with the intent of doing them physical harm. Not only do the acts of the land reform movement and its opponents differ, moreover; so do their structures. The MST and CONTAG, the second-most-active organization in land occupations, are organized nationally, while recent antiagrarianreform violence perpetrated by private parties is not apparently coordinated by any national organization as it was in the original UDR of the 1980s; it is


for the most part local and organized ad hoc to counter occupations one at a time. (The organization that took the name of the UDR in 1996 was limited to the Pontal do Paranapanema region of São Paulo, and the other newly formed militias mentioned earlier were threats rather than reality.) Both the MST and the retaliatory opposition play a double game, exerting legitimate political pressure on the one hand and acting directly and clandestinely on the other. But when the MST uses the latter methods, it relies on the power of numbers and internal discipline in confrontation with the state. Landowners use violence and intimidation, frequently backed by the power of the (local) state. Though the MST plans direct action in secrecy, it proudly takes responsibility for its actions, in line with the principle of civil disobedience (cf. Garcia, 2000).8 The opponents use secrecy to avoid detection and prosecution and do not usually acknowledge responsibility for acts of violence they have committed, even if their threats of violence are open. The UDR has been called an “uncivil movement.” Leigh Payne (2000: 1–2) identifies uncivil movements as sectors within postauthoritarian Latin American democracies that “resemble the authoritarian movements . . . that engaged in coups or coup attempts” and “use violence to expand their own political power and privileges while simultaneously eliminating the power and privileges of their adversaries.” In formally democratic systems, Payne says, these uncivil movements rhetorically embrace democratic legitimating myths at the same time that they recruit hard-core supporters of authoritarianism for paramilitary violence. This duality embodies the bifurcation between national and local political action. Uncivil movements appeal to a “modern pragmatic right-wing” (Payne, 1997). In 1998 the new UDR elected a woman physician as its president, a step taken, in the words of her predecessor, to counter the MST’s argument that the UDR is made up of “truculent landowners” (Folha de São Paulo via BOL, March 28, 1998). At the same time these movements mobilize a hard-core constituency not restrained by the democratic norms of fair play. The hard-core opponents of land reform may not consciously seek a return to an authoritarian past, but they are evidently prepared to mount opposition by all available means. Their collective action, accordingly, differs from that of the MST in significant ways. Land occupations attempt to get the law enforced, and occupiers do not seek to injure their opponents. Counterviolence has no equivalent legal justification, and its intentional immediate effect is to inflict physical harm. This is an important difference of legitimacy. The “violence” of tearing down a fence and invading private property is not the same as the violence of a massacre. Even if the MST adopts nonviolence for strategic as much as for principled reasons, its institutional weakness compared with the opponents of agrarian reform makes violence strategically unadvisable; if it often harmed people in the course of land occupations, repression would come crashing down on its head. In summary, then, land occupations and retaliation influence each other reciprocally. Their interaction follows a premodern pattern that responds to the lack of a modern, rational state structure in rural Brazil. The violence of opponents of agrarian reform responds to land occupations, and thus its frequency and location are functions of the intensity of land occupation activity. In this regard, it faces conditions similar to those faced by the MST itself and


chooses similar methods of collective action. The occupations and the retaliation differ in legitimacy, however: landowners inflict violence to protect privileges that have often been acquired illegitimately; land occupiers act to assert their rights and achieve justice in the countryside. NOTES 1. Contrary to appearances, “alleged suspects” is not redundant. Many observers claim that when the police admit to acts of violence, calling the victims “criminal suspects” is a post-hoc justification for routine violence against poor people. In two fortuitously videotaped 1997 inci dents of police beatings in slums of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the untrained observer might be forgiven for thinking that the victims looked less like criminal suspects than like ordinary people going about their everyday business (SEJUP News from Brazil 268, April 3, 1997; 269, April 16, 1997 [http:\www.braziljusticenet.org]). 2. The contradiction between universalistic claims and particularistic practices has characterized Brazilian political culture at least since independence, when a liberal constitution was superimposed on a social system that depended on slavery (see Costa, 1985: 53–77; DaMatta 1987; 1991: 136–197; M. de Souza, 1997). 3. Leandro Despouy, United Nations special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, concluded after a 2004 mission to Brazil that “in many interior cities, the close relations between judges and those who hold political and economic power affects the independence of the Judiciary and in part explains the high levels of impunity found in those cities” (Gallucci, 2004). 4. As Alston, Libecap, and Mueller (2000: 183) show, the division of jurisdiction between local and federal authorities and between civil and constitutional law is itself a stimulus to conflict: landowners can more reliably depend on the local courts to support them, and occupiers have an interest in promoting conflict to attract the attention of INCRA. 5. These figures can be compared with the minimum salary of R$180 in 2001 and R$200 in 2002. The minimum salary is an official government statistic meant to be equal to the poverty line and used to measure inflation and index pensions. It protects only the salaries of those whose employment is legally registered (com carteira assinada), and many of those working in the informal sector (more than half of the labor force) receive less. 6. Fazenda is best translated as “large agricultural property.” It may be a farm or a ranch, but neither term conveys the connotation of large size. 7. While I argue that violent retaliation is most common in the most economically and politically backward states, the high level of repression in Paraná constitutes an exception. Paraná is on the southern coast and is a highly urban and industrial state. The governor, Jaime Lerner, was internationally acclaimed for his progressive urban policies as mayor of Curitiba, especially his modernization of the public transportation system, but many people believed that the state’s record of abuse of land occupations followed his direction (Arbex, 1999). 8. The act of land occupation may not even be illegal as acts of civil disobedience normally are. Brazilian jurisprudence is not unequivocal on the point, but the Superior Justice Tribunal (in annulling the arrest warrants of José Rainha and others in 1997) decreed that “a popular movement with a view to enforcing agrarian reform does not constitute a crime against property. It is part of a collective right, an expression of citizenship, with a view to enforcing a program which appears in the Constitution of the Republic. Popular pressure is appropriate in a state governed by democratic law [estado de direito democrático]” (Superior Tribunal de Justiça, 1997; see also Tourinho Neto, 2000).

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