An extremely important victory for the peasant cause: the first expropriation in Brazil due to ecological considerations! The Plantation Nova Alegria (“New Joy”) in the municipality of Felisburgo, in the Jequitinhonha Valley of the state of Minas Gerais, was expropriated on the 20th of this month and the victory was pronounced today in the Movement’s website here.
According to the superintendent of our national agency for land reform (INCRA), Gilson de Souza, “the fact that the decision was based on an environmental crime does not make any less relevant” other criminal factors that support the expropriation, especially “the massacre that took place there in 2004. Five people were murdered and thirteen wounded on orders of the landowner.” The landowner, Adriano Chafick, is being charged not only for ordering the massacre but also for murder in the first degree since he was there with the gunmen at the moment of the murders.
As I have argued in previous posts (and in all my recent work), such expropriation on grounds other than productivity are extremely important for the articulation and definition of the SOCIAL FUNCTION OF PROPERTY. As the superintendent said, “To ignore the social function of a piece of real estate is a disrespect on behalf of the owner against the Federal Constitution.”
Here is an excerpt from the news release from the MST website:
“O fato de a decisão ser pautada na prática de crime ambiental não tornamenos relevante o massacre ocorrido na área em 2004. Cinco pessoasmorreram e 13 ficaram feridas a mando do proprietário da fazenda”,argumenta o superintendente do Incra. Além de ser apontado como mandante,o dono da fazenda, Adriano Chafick, é, segundo o superintendente, acusadode ser o execu tor do massacre, uma vez que estava junto com ospistoleiros no momento dos assassinatos.
Essa desapropriação, afirma Souza, é uma importante inovação porque buscao cumprimento da função social do imóvel. “Desconsiderar a função socialde um imóvel é um desrespeito do proprietário contra a ConstituiçãoFederal”, argumenta Souza.
My own personal story was also blessed with an important step forward today: today I finally received a positive response and an invitation from the coordinator of the Education of the Countryside program to meet with some organizers of the MST at their office here in Brasília, and once there I was invited to visit a settlement in the Pipiripau basin here in the Federal District (DF), some 15 miles outside of Brasília.
As my luck would have it, I will be going with a member of the Movement who works here in the national office with programs of international exchange in South Africa. He has been hosting a sociologist from Johannesburg and two Brazilian sociologists from the Federal Fluminense Universtity (i.e., of the state of Rio de Janeiro), so I will have very interesting and informative company on this visit. The contacts with the sociologists from Rio will be useful for me next month when I go through their own state, and the company of the African sociologist will provide an important international context to the conversations.
Topping off the good news, the member who hosted me in the office today is from Rio Grande do Sul, so he gave me some important pointers for when I get to Porto Alegre next Monday and, most importantly, he will be contacting the Movement’s office there ahead of time to give them a heads up about my visit next week.
Such personal contacts are important, especially in the South right now, where State repression has been extremely harsh and, just this past month, turned extremely violent. In conjunction with the encampment here in Brasília (and other simultaneous actions nationwide), a group of landless peasants in São Gabriel (RS) were attacked by the police, who murdered Eltom Brum da Silva with a shot on the back, using a weapon outlawed for use in civil disputes (i.e., he was murdered as though in a military operation). This same month in this same city, where the Mayor has been forcefully opposing the Movement, other landless peasants were arrested and tortured with the School of the America’s techniques employed during the military dictatorship.
Clearly, then, we are moving forward, but still against extremely violent resistance, and there is still a long way to go…
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