Adital/Rogeria Araujo
November 11, 2003
This Monday, November 10, more than 1000 rural workers will be leaving Goiania and walking to Brasilia. This march, organized by the Landless Workers Movement (MST) is going to the national capital to pressure the government to approve the National Agrarian Reform Plan.
Gillmar Mauro, MST's national coordinator, believes that this is a very important step for changing and improving life in the countryside. He states that this is a struggle of the movement that will not tolerate interference from any government or political party! He also believes that the Lula government represents an advance for rural workers, and that never before has a President allied with Agrarian Reform ascended the ramps of the Presidential Palace.
His assessment of the government up to now is not positive. "The assessment is negative, we are very clear on that. The government advanced a little on the issue of settlements, on the creation of mechanisms for disappropriation and so forth. Our expectation is that the National Agrarian Reform Plan will be discussed beginning next week." With the Plan, one million families all over the country will be settled.
Active for almost twenty years, the MST is one of the best known civil organizations in Latin America. Gilmar Mauro participated recently in the Brazilian Social Forum I, that took place in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais.
Adital: What did the directors of the MST think of the move to allow the planting of genetically modified soybeans for the next harvest? Gilmar Mauro: The MST is radically against the liberation and planting of genetically modified crops in Brazil. Our understanding is that there has not been sufficient research, or better, there are studies that prove their negative impact on the environment and on health. It is very clear that there is a monopoly on the part of economic groups that want to control seeds, which are patrimony of humanity.
Adital: What is your assessment of the 11 months of Lula's government: Gilmar Mauro: It is not positive, the assessment is negative, we are very clear on that. The government advanced a little on the issue of settlements, on the creation of mechanisms for disappropriation and so forth. Our expectation is that the National Agrarian Reform Plan will be discussed beginning next week. It has provisions for the settling of one million families in the next four years if the plan is discussed by the government and approved. Then we would be creating the conditions to improve conditions in the rural areas, generating more than 3 million jobs. It is the chance to begin a process here in Brazil of distributing income and wealth, beginning with land.
Adital: What is your assessment of INCRA after the exit of Marcelo Resende? Gilmar Mauro: INCRA continues to be frozen, as I see it, very bureaucratic and slow. If we truly want to see the face of Brazilian agriculture, INCRA must move much quicker.
Adital: The MST is a model for organization all over Latin America. How does the movement deal with this? Gilmar Mauro: We have never wanted and have never been presumptuous enough to believe that we are the main organization, etc. We have the humility to understand that there are various important organizations in Latin America, and that, together with them, we are building the CLOC (Latin American Rural Organization Coordinating Office), and together with others, have put together the Via Campesina, understanding that we must escape the logic of social and political protagonism. I see it more as a participative form, a network. This will permit us to share experiences as equals. And, above all, for unified concrete actions. And so we believe that we are only one more organization, among many, with the task of building unity.
Adital: According to the MST web page, 44 assassinations in rural areas have been registered in 2003. Since 1987, 137 MST workers have been assassinated. Have these crimes decreased? What is the situation? Gilmar Mauro: Unfortunately, they have not decreased. But I believe that we are going to resolve the violence in the Brazilian countryside when we resolve the problem of the large landholdings, that are the source of the violence, not only of the physical violence of assassinations, but also of children dying of hunger, the destruction of the environment, the swelling of the large urban centers. The fundamental reason in this country is that the elites suffer from mental monoculture and, for this reason, leave Brazil in the misery in which it is found today.
Adital: A number of organizations have expressed their disappointment with Lula's government. But the MST seems to maintain a stable stance with the present presidency. In one interview, President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva stated that the MST's agrarian reform is not the government's agrarian reform. What do you think of this? Gilmar Mauro: The government's agrarian reform is not the MST agrarian reform. We are very clear on this, and for this reason maintain autonomy in relation to other organizations and political parties as well as to the government. The government may also be transitory. Obviously, the government must have its own agrarian reform project that is different from ours. This is normal, natural. We want that the issue of land not be a mere object of the market. This may differ from the thinking of the government or alt least from the context in which the government finds itself. And we will continue fighting for our ideas, also understanding the limitations under which we still may not implement our project. However, the advances that we have had in Lula's government are important, although obviously insufficient for what we are trying to achieve.
Adital: Doesn't this pressure that the MST has been exerting help to destabilize Lula's government? Gilmar Mauro: No, no, I don't think so. We don't believe in change from the top down. Neither from Lula, nor from anyone in the MST who happens to be president on paper. That is not how to change the structures of this country, from above. It is a process that needs to be built. And how can it be built? By dialogue and the participation of the people. The struggle is for the people to be the historic actor in these changes and to put pressure, even in contraposition to the oligarchy of this country that is not dead and will come out with a counter reform of its own. Either we have the strength to push Lula's government to make the reforms, or the right will have the strength to impose a rhythm of continuism in Brazil.
Adital: Do you think that the movement is already being better understood by society after so many years of work? Gilmar Mauro: There is still a lack of understanding. But this is part of the Brazilian historic political culture. If you look at the bourgeoisie, in Brazil's 500 years, it has never let go of bourgeois radicalism and has never allowed access, not even to the petty bourgeois. It builds an upper class unity. The bourgeoisie has a grudge against the people, and this is expressed in the social means of communications. The MST will be twenty years old next year, and its survival for this twenty years is in itself a great victory and is part of this cultural change that we are helping to build in Brazil.
Adital: In the same way that the MST is organizing, the land owners are also seen to be organizing, through various mechanisms, including with collusion of the government. How is this relationship? Gilmar Mauro: The land owners have always been organized and have always run things in this country. Either through the government, through brute force or through the legal system. What must be said is that for the first time we are managing, through a President who is allied to Agrarian Reform, to have a turn and a voice in this country. The landowners will continue to fight us and we will continue organizing people and we believe that we are the majority of the people and one day we will win.
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