Red April, the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) month of mobilization in defense of agrarian reform and in memory of the 27th anniversary of the Massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás, began this Monday (3). During the early morning, around 250 families occupied an unproductive area of Engenho Cumbe, in the city of Timbaúba (Pernambuco, northeast region of Brazil).
This was one of several actions - including other occupations, marches, tree planting, food and blood donation, blocking roads and a pedagogical camp in the “S curve” in Pará (where the Massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás took place) - planned for this month across the country.
The Red April, whose motto in 2023 is “Agrarian reform against hunger and slavery: for land, democracy and the environment”, will concentrate its main activities between March 17th and 20th. It was on April 17, 1996, in one of the most emblematic episodes of the fighting for land in the country, when police repression against a marching in Pará brutally murdered 21 landless workers and left another 79 maimed. The date became the International Day of Peasant Struggles.
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This year, the journey arrives in a context with three new ingredients. It is the first Red April under the new Lula administration (Workers' Party).“The new scenario we are seeing, after a long period of agrarian reform blockade, is one of dialogue with the Brazilian government”, assesses Ayala Ferreira, from the MST's national directorate.
Contemporary slavery gains space in the public debate, ever since the case of the 207 workers rescued from wineries in Rio Grande do Sul came to light. And landowners have been organizing themselves – especially in the extreme south of the state of Bahia – to contain, on their own, the advance of popular and indigenous movements that are fighting for the right to land.
She explains that this year's mobilization aims to present to society and to the federal and state governments that “to combat inequalities and hunger, it is necessary to have a policy to confront the concentration of land in Brazil and encourage the agroecological production of family farming".
Farmers against Red April
Ayala emphasizes that the current agrarian models in Brazil do not complement each other. “It is important for the Brazilian society to know that the Brazilian countryside is not a homogeneous space. Although there is a hegemonic project represented by capital and materialized in agribusiness, there is also a counter-hegemonic force that is family peasant agriculture, which tries very hard to exist and resist in this space”, describes Ayala.
For the leader, the fact that 33.1 million people are starving in Brazil is directly associated with the power and space that agribusiness has in the country. “There is, due to the intention of agribusiness, a substitution of crops for items needed to feed the Brazilian people, for the production of commodities, whose only purpose is export”, summarizes.
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The incompatibility between the models has been gaining new contours. For some time now, the MST and Pataxó indigenous peoples from the extreme south of the state of Bahia have denounced the organization of militias and groups of farmers in the region in a report to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH). In the document, they warn that twelve thousand Pataxó are living under a "low-intensity war" in southern Bahia with "attacks by farmers and militiamen".
In a video circulating on social media since April 1, landowner Luiz Uaquim (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party) places himself as one of the organizers of the group “Invasão zero” (“Zero Invasion”) which, along with other landowners, intends to prevent MST actions in the state. “The producers will change their way of acting”, says Uaquim: “It is a milestone in the history of the producer against the 'invasion' of land. Let's do the 'Yellow April'", he says.
Combating slave labor and protecting the environment
Even though we live 135 years after the formal abolition of slavery in Brazil, argues José Damasceno, also on the national leadership of the MST, “slavery is not eliminated just by signing laws: it is in the essence of the agribusiness model and rooted in the private property owner’s culture”.
The agro logic, says the MST leader, “was developed by attacking the forests, reserves, water, land and all animal, native and human biodiversity”. Therefore, he asks, “although the land is productive, is it fulfilling its social function at that moment? That's what we have to discuss."
“We have a big task ahead of us”, says Damasceno, referring to the movement, but also to society as a whole: “to embrace the debate on sustainable agriculture, which needs to fulfill its social function by producing healthy food and respecting the environment.This is where the essence of life for the planet’s next few million years lies.
Edited by: Flávia Chacon
