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Battles Over
Land Sharpen in Brazil’s Amazon Region
by Gerry Foley /
March 2005 issue of Socialist Action
The murder of an American nun in the Amazon on
Feb. 12 has brought to a head a growing land war in Brazil. Dorothy Stang,
age 74, had been a decades-long
campaigner against the destruction of the
Amazonian rain forest. She was shot down in cold blood by hired killers
near the town of Anapu in the Amazon region.
Reuters reported on Feb. 22 that Brazilian
soldiers had captured three suspects in the contract murder. It noted:
“Rayfran das Neves Sales … confessed to shooting Stang earlier this week
and named others involved.”
Agricultural land is a battleground in Brazil,
which has one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world. The
big landlords hire bands of killers, and the murder of peasant activists
has become a regular feature of Brazilian political life.
Paradoxically, these murders have increased under
the Lula regime since the victory of an ostensibly left ticket encouraged
the peasants but the government has done little or nothing to protect them
from the landlord gangs or to meet their demands.
The land question has actually sharpened in
recent years because of the boom in soybean exports, which has been
bringing enormous profits to landowners. It has led to a rush by the
agricultural magnates to increase their holdings and the land under
production.
The land-reform program of the Lula government,
like that of its neoliberal predecessor, is based on the idea that unused
land can be given to the peasants.
Actually, the neoliberal regime gave a lot more
land to peasants than the Lula government because that was before the
soybean boom. Now the landowners are not willing to concede any land to the
peasants, and they resist their demands with all the means at their command—in
particular, death squadrons.
In the Amazon, the soybean gold rush has come up
against the world environmental movement and the defense of indigenous
peoples whose lives are bound up with the forest. Over 20 percent of the
rain forest has already been destroyed.
An Associated Press dispatch of Feb. 22 pointed
out: “The survival of the Amazon
rainforest is key to that of the planet. The jungle is sometimes called the
world's ‘lung’ because its billions of trees, spread over an area 11 times
the size of Texas, produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere.”
The international environmental movement has
succeeded in focusing enough attention on the rape of the Amazon that the
murder of an activist nun who had been fighting it created an international
scandal. It forced the Lula government to act for the first time. Thus, the national government sent the
army into the region and apparently captured the killers. Typically the
local police are in the pockets on the landlords.
Lula was forced to go further. He created
conservation reserves in Anapu and environmental protection zones in three
other Brazilian states. Associated Press
reported: “He ordered a six-month moratorium on
new logging, land-clearing, and development on a tract of land in the state
of Para almost the size of
Portugal.”
However, the contradictions of the Lula regime
remain acute and will undoubtedly continue to sharpen. Agricultural exports are the locomotive
of the Brazilian capitalist economy, and the Workers Party government has
been throwing all of its historical socialistic principles overboard to
avoid conflict with big business.
Only mass mobilizations independent of the
government and the Workers Party can force this regime to jostle the
capitalists that it has been so anxious to conciliate.
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