(Interim Report)

National Report

on the Situation of Human Rights

and Agrarian Reform in Brazil

Presented on the occasion of the visit of Her Excellency Mrs. Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

São Paulo, Brazil, May 17, 2000

INDEX

Presentation

The Context: Background Information on Rural Brazil

The Current Agrarian Reform Policies of the Brazilian Government

Human Rights Violations in Rural Brazil

Violence in Paraná State

The Massacre at Eldorado dos Carajás

PRESENTATION

The Global Justice Center (Centro de Justiça Global), the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra) and the Movement of Landless Rural Laborers (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) have prepared this report for submission to Her Excellency the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs. Mary Robinson, on the occasion of her landmark visit to Brazil in May 2000. This report seeks to summarize the most recent trends in the struggle to achieve land reform in Brazil. It begins with an overview of the historic inequality of land distribution in Brazil and the current status of increasing concentration of ownership of productive lands. The report analyzes the failure of the Administration of President Ferenando Henrique Cardoso to implement meaningful land reform policies and analyzes the reactionary measures implemented in recent weeks. Among these measures are ones limiting lands which may be used for land reform and others restricting access to land and credit for those involved in the organized struggle for change. Even more worrisome in the context of civil and political rights are the repressive police measures implemented by the Administration to attack the landless movement, including revival of methods and legislation from the military dictatorship.

The report includes a summary of instances of extreme violence, in many cases orchestrated by the state, against landless rural poor, including torture, death threats, killings, beatings and arrest. It highlights abuses in the state of Paraná in Brazil’s more developed south (frequently believed less susceptible to severe rights abuse) where the state government has led a campaign of repression against the landless movement. Finally, the report summarizes the latest developments in the 1996 massacre in which police killed nineteen landless workers. The death toll from that incident now stands at twenty-one (two of those injured have now died); the report analyzes the failure and bias of the state justice system which has yet to prosecute those responsible.

In sum, the report seeks to set the record straight regarding agrarian reform—or better stated, the lack thereof—and the campaign of violence and repression that the Brazilian government has unleashed on the landless, appealing to both domestic public opinion and the international community.

Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Curitiba, Brazil, May 2000

THE CONTEXT: BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON RURAL BRAZIL

The concentration of land tenure in Brazil is among the highest in the world. Fewer than 50,000 rural landowners possess estates greater than one thousand hectares and thus control more than 50% of registered land. Close to 1% of rural landowners hold roughly 46% of all land. Of the 400 million hectares registered as private property, only sixty million hectares are used for planting crops. The remaining 340 million hectares are used for PECUÁRIA. According to figures from the Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, INCRA), there are nearly one hundred million hectares of unused land in Brazil.

According to the 1995 Census, there are nearly 4.8 million rural "landless" families, in other words, persons who live as renters, sharecroppers, or squatters or who hold rural properties smaller than five hectares. The Brazilian Constitution requires that lands that do not fulfill a social function must be expropriated for use in agrarian reform. Social function of land is determined according to the level of productivity, in addition to criteria that include respect for labor rights and the environmental protection.

Brazil produces just seventy-five million tons of grain per year. This number is one fourth the average level of other countries with similar, or inferior, climates and soil quality. According to the Agricultural and Cattle Raising Census, between 1985 and 1996, the number of acres with permanent crop growth fell by two million hectares while the number of acres with temporary crop growth fell by 8.3 million hectares. From 1980 to 1996, the area of lands cultivated fell by 2% while the population increased by 34%. In the 1980s, the Bank of Brazil (Banco do Brasil) invested roughly nineteen billion dollars in agriculture. Between 1994 and 1998, the average income of farmers fell by 49%,

The best lands in Brazil are employed in the cultivation of single crops for exportation: sugar cane, coffee, cotton, soy and oranges. At the same time, thirty-two million people experience hunger regularly in the country and sixty-five million are malnourished. Of these thirty-two million, one half live in rural areas. According to official statistics, close to thirty million people migrated from the countryside to urban areas in the period 1970-1990. The overall contingent of rural laborers fell by 23% from 1985 to 1996. Today, more than 77% of the Brazilian population live in cities.

According to the 1995 Census, there are twenty-three million workers in rural Brazil, yet only five million are classified as rural salaried workers (either permanent or temporary). Close to 65% of salaried rural workers do not have formal labor contracts ("carteira assinada" in Brazilian terminology) and only 40% of these workers have year-round jobs. Many of these laborers toil as much as fourteen hours per day. In this context, women and children are the most vulnerable. The greater part of rural women work double shifts, in agricultural and housework. Many women and children that labor in rural areas do not receive any compensation. A study based on a 1995 report demonstrated that nearly four million rural children between the ages of five and fourteen work in the countryside in the southern, southeast and northeastern regions of Brazil, representing some 11% of the population group. Only 29% of working children receive any monetary compensation. Among children between the ages of five and nine years, only 7% receive compensation. A very large number of rural children have no access to school and, among adults, the level of illiteracy in some regions reaches 70%.

According to the 1996 Agricultural and Cattle Raising Census performed by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, IBGE), there has been an increase in the concentration of land tenure in the past two decades. In 1970, estates of less than one hundred hectares represented 90.8% of rural properties and constituted 23% of the total area. In 1996, this figure fell to 89.3% of estates and 20% of total area. In contrast, in 1970, estates with areas greater than 1,000 hectares represented 0.7% of the total number of properties and accounted for 39.5% of the total area. In 1996, these estates accounted for 1% of the number of properties and 45% of the total area. Between 1985 and 1996, the number of rural properties fell from 5,801,809 to 4,859,865, a reduction of 941,944. This decrease is equal to 61% of the total area of lands producing grain in the 1997-1998 harvest. Between 1994 and 1998, 400,000 small farmers lost their lands and 800,000 rural laborers lost their jobs.

At present, agricultural properties with declarations as to their extent may be divided in the following manner:

4.3 million with areas less than 100 hectares

470,000 with areas from 100 to 1,000 hectares

47,000 with areas from 1,000 to 10,000 hectares

2,200 with areas greater than 10,000 hectares

According to the 1996 Census, production level may be divided in the following manner:

properties with areas smaller than 100 hectares account for 47% of the total value of agricultural and cattle raising production;

properties with areas between 100 and 1,000 hectares account for 32% of agricultural and cattle raising production

properties with areas between 1,000 and 10,000 hectares account for 17% of this production

estates with areas greater than 10,000 hectares account for 4% of this total production

With regard to the distribution of laborers, one finds:

properties with areas smaller than 100 hectares account for 40.7% of laborers

properties with areas between 100 and 1,000 hectares account for 39.9% of laborers

properties with areas greater than 1,000 hectares account for 4,2 %of laborers

The figures above demonstrate that a process of agrarian reform is of fundamental importance to address serious economic and social problems facing Brazil.

THE CURRENT AGRARIAN REFORM POLICIES OF THE BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT

The Brazilian Government has failed to implement Article 11 (2) (a) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which requires states-parties:

To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

In response to recent political pressure created by rural laborers and subsistence farmers throughout the country, the federal government announced, on May 4, 2000, a package of measures related to agrarian reform. To demonstrate the importance attached to these measures, the presidential palace itself (Palácio do Planalto) released the package in a press conference attended by the Secretary General of the Presidency and the Ministers of Justice and Agrarian Development.

On May 5, 2000, organizations of rural laborers, gathered principally by the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST), the Unitary Workers’ Central (Central Única dos Trabalhadores), Contag, the Movement of Small Farmers, MPA), the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, CPT), the Movimento of Persons Affected by Dams (Movimento dos Atingidos pelas Barragens, MAB), the Southern Front for Family Agriculture (Frente Sul da Agricultura Familiar) and the Movement for the Liberation of the Landless (Movimento de Libertação dos Sem Terra) released a note regarding the governmental measures. That note criticized the manipulative nature of the Government’s agrarian reform. These groups demanded an effective policy of agrarian reform in Brazil, in combination with a new agricultural policy directed towards the nation’s interests and the democratization of such policies.

Missing among these measures was any increase in funding for agrarian reform. Below, we report the annual budgetary allocations for the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária, INCRA) during the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso:

1995: 1.3 billion Brazilian reais

1996: 1.4 billion Brazilian reais

1997: 2.0 billion Brazilian reais

1998: 2.2 billion Brazilian reais

1999: 1.3 billion Brazilian reais

2000: 1.3 billion Brazilian reais

The announced measures include the criminalization of laborers who engage in occupations of rural properties and public buildings with threats to their possible receipt of land title, as well as the criminalization of the leaders of the landless movement by the use of the National Security Law (Lei de Segurança Nacional), a remnant from the military dictatorship.

The leadership of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) in the Chamber of Deputies (the federal lower house) released its analysis of these measures:

I . Through the 38th edition of the Provisional Measure No. 2.027 of May 4, the Administration has added to existing agrarian legislation the following measures:

By means of the first article of the Provisional Measure which alters Decree-Law No. 3.365/41, the Administration decided that there will be no compensatory interest when a property subject to expropriation possess a measure of land use and efficiency of use equal to zero.

The incidence of compensatory interest on expropriated properties for agrarian reform constitutes an extreme immorality. To eliminate this possibility only in the case of properties deemed totally unproductive represents an artifice designed to support the Administration’s deceptive public opinion campaign. Paragraph (1) of Article (1) of the previous versions of the Provisional Measure, even when they manipulated the basis of compensatory interest, associated with the counterpart ceasing profit, required that these moneys be designed to compensate the loss of income produced by the property. Thus, the novelty of the announcement was already contemplated in the prior versions of the Provisional Measures due to the fact that when there would be no income from properties with no production.

In practice, the Provisional Measure will have no effect since a given landowner will need only cultivate a handful of lettuce plants to justify compensatory interest payments. The uselessness of this Measure is explained by the ongoing process of substitution of expropriation with land purchase and sale mechanisms in the context of so-called market agrarian reform undertaken by the Administration.

In its second article, the Provisional Measure adds article 95-A to the Lands Statute (Estatuto da Terra), instituting the rural leasing program, in the context of agrarian reform.

In fact, this article institutes yet another instrument of the "new agrarian reform" under the control of large landowners. Leasing is not a novelty. Since the Lands Statute, leasing has been practiced in such a fashion have led to the exploitation and misery of rural workers.

The novelty introduced by the Administration comes in a paragraph included in the article that prohibits expropriation of properties involved in the leasing program as long as the properties are leased. Until this change, article 30 of Decree Law 59.566 of November 14, 1966 provided only that in the case of partial expropriation of a leased property, the lessee would be guaranteed the right to a proportional reduction in rent or to rescind the lease. Thus, the generals of the military dictatorship were not as daring as our current civilian President.

The Provisional Measure, in additional to clearly violating the Constitution, by increasing by means of a provisional measure cases of "insusceptibility" to expropriation established by Article 185 of the Constitution (small, medium and improductive properties), expresses the anti-agrarian reform nature of the package of measures and reinforces the pro-landowner bias of agrarian legislation. Now, a landowner need only register his property with the rural leasing program to guarantee that his lands will never be expropriated.

Article 4 of the Provisional Measure inserted text (paragraphs 6, 7, 8 and 9) to the Agrarian Law (Law No. 8.629/93). Through the first two paragraphs the Administration determined that "the rural property subject to occupation or unmotivated invasion due to agrarian or land conflict will not be inspected [for agrarian reform purposes] for two years following the termination of the invasion." In the case of reoccupation of such a property, this period is doubled.

This is a recycled measure in that Article 4 of Decree No. 2.250/97 establishes that a "property that is the subject of occupation will not be inspected [for agrarian reform purposes] until the occupation has terminated."

As in the previous example, in addition to an attempt to intimidate the struggle for agrarian reform, this article clearly violates the Constitution, given that without inspection, there may be no expropriation. As we saw above, the Constitution does not permit this possibility of immunity to expropriation of rural properties.

Paragraphs 8 and 9 establish that the entity, organization, corporate body, social movement or society (a significant juridical effort to include the MST) that directly or indirectly assists, collaborates, creates incentives for, incites, induces or participates in invasions of rural properties or public properties either in rural or land conflicts, in a collective nature, shall not receive, by any means, public funds. Should such funds already have been disbursed, authorities shall have the prerogative of retaining such moneys or rescinding the relevant contract, agreement or similar instrument.

One sees an effort to include in these repressive measures the struggles of rural laborers, whose means of pressure, such as the occupations of unproductive properties, have been recognized to be legitimate by the federal Superior Court of Justice (Superior Tribunal de Justiça, STJ). One sees as well that the Administration has extended a measure of exception (the Provisional Measure) to the entire public sector, in other words, including public, state and municipal powers.

The restrictions on access to public funding for workers’ organizations have the clear and "heinous" goal of suffocating economically these groups as a strategy to impose on them control by the government. Indeed, more than these organizations, the victims of these policies are the families of rural laborers settled in agrarian reform projects.

Included in Article 2-A in the Agrarian Law, disposition that, in the case of fraud or simulation of occupation or invasion by the landowner or legitimate occupant of a property, an administrative sanction of 50,000 UFIRs (approximately US$ 30,000) and the cancellation of the rural property in the National System de Rural Registry.

The fact of this addition is that it is just now that the Administration has decided to take steps to create disincentives to the widespread and notorious fraudulent practices by large landowners.

As part of the process of "decentralization" (euphemism for the effort to de-federalize agrarian reform) the Administration has promised to send to Congress a bill to provide states with authority to execute agrarian reform, parallel to federal measures in this regard. The text of the bill has not been made available to us. Among the promised measures is redistribution of Agrarian Reform Titles (Títulos da Dívida Agrária, TDA) to the states. The Lands Statute (1964) provided legal instruments for states and municipalities to complement federal efforts through agreements to implement agrarian reform. In fact, the Administration seeks to implement its strategy of rendering agrarian reform non-obligatory, transferring financial and political costs to states and municipalities.

The Administration announced that, through a Provisional Measure, it will extend the period of receipt of TDAs for up to fifty years. Mere window dressing. Only by means of constitutional amendment may the actual limit of up to twenty years be modified in compliance with Article 184 of the Constitution.

The Administration will send to Congress a bill transferring services (read administrative costs) and the collection of the Rural Territorial Tax (Imposto Territorial Rural, ITR) to the states who must create funds to finance agrarian reform.

With this measure, the Administrate tends toward the creation of rural anarchy in the country. Symptomatically, the Administration disregards the environmental and land-related dimensions of the ITR and seeks to value the financial dimension of the tax that. This financial element, however, is unlikely to have even a remote effect in practice given the greater power exercised by the large land estates and their owners in the power structure of the states.

II. Measures in "Defense of Public Order"

The Ministry of Justice will take strong measures to prevent, through the deployment of the Federal Police, disorder and eviction actions in all properties of the federal government, without prejudice to actions that may be taken by the States;

The Administration announced the creation of the Division of Agrarian and Land Conflicts within the Federal Police in Brasília and within the States;

Police inquiries already in course and new inquiries will be thoroughly investigated.

The police have reinstituted the use of the Law of National Security (Lei de Segurança Nacional, LSN), a remnant from the military dictatorship. On May 16, 2000, for example, police authorities in Paraná state charged nine landless laborers under theLSN, whose provisions include a sentence of up to three years for the vague offense of "threatening the established order"

These measures constitute, in our opinion, the thrust of the treatment dispensed by the Administration to grass-roots movements, based on intimidation. These steps modify the Administration’s intervention in the agrarian context. The Cardoso Administration seeks to free itself by transferring responsibilities to states and municipalities as the measures commented above demonstrate. However, the Administration decided to maintain within the federal sphere repression of those who fight for agrarian reform. In this regard, the Administration is motivated as much by its need to demonstrate to conservative sectors its continued authority as by its failure to obtain the uniform support of the state governments for its repressive and authoritarian convictions.

Strictly speaking, when the government authorizes anticipatory action of the Federal Police to prevent threatened and actual occupations of public buildings, it announces the intervention of the federal government in the public security systems of the states. Specifically, with the creation of the Division of Agrarian Conflicts within the Federal Police, the Administration appears to be signaling the creation of a new Department of Social and Political Order (Departamento de Ordem Política e Social, DOPS,) a political police division created during the dictatorship (1964-1985). In addition, the resumption and intensification of police inquiries of actions by rural laborers seek to intimidate by criminalizing the leaders of social movements in the country.

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