Inequality fights back... the MST

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Today we went and visited an encampment of the MST or Movimento Sem Terra (“landless movement”). The site we visited was located in the Sao Paulo state an hour outside of downtown Sao Paulo (the largest city in all of Latin America). Just an hour out of downtown and you are in the hills that were deforested and reforested with eucalyptus for export in a cycle that began nearly 500 years ago with the settling of the Portuguese. It is in these hills that an area the size of 120 regulation futebol fields that had been unproductive for over thirty years was occupied by a group of former favella residents over five years ago. Twenty five families currently live in homes fashioned out of timber, plastic tarps, and other waterproof oddities. These families farm the land, growing yucca root (the staple food crop for the majority of the world), bananas (to rehydrate soil that was dehydrated by centuries of eucalyptus growth), sugar cane, corn, native fruit trees, beans, lettuce, and medicinal herbs (and I don’t mean marijuana). Recently this group acquired two young pigs they hope to breed to create a pork supply.

While waiting for lawyers to argue to the government the legitimacy of this group’s claims to settling this portion of land (a law was passed during the military dictatorship in the 1980s legitimizing the expropriation of unused, private land for social cultivation) the residents are developing natural, organic farming techniques including the construction of an all natural greenhouse and the reforestation of the hillsides with native fruit trees.

Like all land occupations lead by the MST, these families worked for months to personally provide transportation and materials needed to establish overnight this camp. Several children run around the dirt paths and still others arrive by means of municipal bus from school. The MST encourages the completion of primary and secondary education in the Brazilian public school system, and they have been remarkably successful. The graduation rate among the MST community is well over 90 percent, over three times the national average. Public education is supplemented by instruction at the camp to “neutralize” the children’s education.

“Public school teaches the history of the oppressors,” explains in Portuguese XYZ, our twenty three year old guide who joined the MST after high school five years ago. “The schooling provided at the camp is the history of the oppressed” focusing on the histories of the poor Brazilian, the black Brazilian, and the native Brazilian. In their school house constructed by timber with open walls and a blue tarp roof, the group encourages an open discussion between students to address these two, often conflicting histories.

The MST is not associated with any political party or government faction and allies itself with any group seeking to promote agrarian reform be it a conservative governor in Parana State or Bolivian President Evo Morales. The MST is a revolution, explains our guide. This is a revolution very different from, however, the common revolutions of Latin America—instead of climbing out of the forests with guns and violence, these people are climbing into the hills to escape the violence and farm. This revolution will be won by vegetables.

Amazingly, the people in this and every MST encampment are virtually self-sufficient. Moving from the cities and back to the land, the reverse of the trend that has swept Brazil in the last fifty years, these farmers grow enough in the beginning stages of occupation to healthily supplement the government’s monthly per family bundle of necessary food items to meet the UN’s minimum caloric intake. Ironically, this bundle of food items can only be picked up at a location 400 kilometers away from where this MST camp is located, a distance that requires the rental of a bus with a pay tag of near 1,200 reais after paying the fees associated with driving on the privatized highway system. People in this camp must take occasional day jobs each month to create the money needed to pay for this bus. If the government decides, however, that this piece of land meets the necessary qualifications for expropriation (as the MST lawyers certainly hope they will) the government will give the group a large, several thousand dollar loan with a long time frame for returning the money. With these funds the group hopes to expand their organic farming greenhouses and hog production to be able to sell both their produce and hogs to the neighboring communities and begin generating a profit that enables them to be fully self-sufficient.

While they don’t identify themselves as socialists, the MST encampments practice a certain level of socialism in creating a little bubble world in which the members of a camp live. There is theoretically total equality (gender and racially) in the camps as well as a full participatory democratic structure of governing. Each camp has several different councils established, from health to safety to recreation and these councils are formed by elected officials for which every group of twenty families has one representative. The councils rotate frequently with the end goal that everyone in the camp has served on every council at least once, eventually. To further the bubble effect, the MST encourages virtual isolation from the world outside of their communal farming camp.

“Life here is bad,” says our guide, who, though stumbling for words quickly corrects himself to say that life here is good, but hard. The MST encourages youth to continue to higher education to become the lawyers and doctors that the MST desperately needs to further their cause and help the nearly half a million members gain land. The talk of this camp is the long anticipated forthcoming return of a young person who is just now finishing six years of medical study in Cuba. Because the Brazilian government does not recognize the free medical training offered by the Cuban government, and because many Brazilians can not afford medical schools in Brazil, the only jobs for these doctors upon return is often in a social group like the MST.

For as difficult as life is in this camp, the conditions here are far superior to many of the favellas that these settlers are fleeing where more people die every year from violence than cancer and cardiovascular disease combined. Though there is no electricity, this camp has dammed a mountain creek to create a system of PVC piping that brings fresh water down the hill to the plants and near the homes. But if life is challenging for these families, their demeanor would never suggest it.

Welcoming and warm several of the women have prepared a feast of rice, beans, lettuce, fried yucca, tomatoes, and spaghetti for us. The children here all appear healthy and beautiful as they fly their kites and play together on the hillside. One man tells us how he no longer has a television as he did when living in the favellas, but it doesn’t bother him, because everything here is so beautiful that all he needs to do is sit outside and watch the hills.

Life here really is beautiful. The success of the MST will truly be determined as how successful they are at retaining youth who choose to continue the farming tradition as opposed to moving into the urban areas. Information regarding this success should become available sometime in the next few years as the first full generation of those brought up in MST camps graduates from high school and has the opportunity to taste the world. Despite the bad press this organization receives from the middle and upper classes and their media (like in the Newsweek-esque magazine, Veja), I think the power this organization has had to change the lives of t

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Comments

[JohnWBrooks]

silly ^_^