Porto Alegre and COCEARGS

The city of Porto Alegre seems a typical big city with its tall buildings, busy streets and graffiti on the walls downtown (some illegible tags, and others are political stencils against racism, sexism, the fascist governor, the bureaucracy in Brasilia, etc). The city seems to have lost its leftist streak, however, having elected rightist representatives and executives lately (an inversion with the currently leftist countryside which used to be the bastion of rightist politicians). It is quite easy to get around town by bus or downtown on foot, if one doesn’t mind the constantly wet weather that is causing serious flooding problems throughout the state.

The Central Cooperative of Settlements of Rio Grande do Sul, COCEARGS (Cooperativa Central dos Assentamentos do RS), hosts the main office of the MST in that state, right in downtown Porto Alegre. Originally a very small office of the Central Cooperative alone, half the adjoining office spaces in that building’s floor have since been occupied by the MST in place of a public finance institution that shut its doors and left its employees jobless (who, then, helped the MST organizers occupy the vacant spaces). Nowadays, the total space includes room for finance, education, cooperation and production, mass movement and several other sectors of the Movement, as well as a cafeteria and kitchen large enough for all office workers to take their meals in common right there where they work.

This occupation is maintained through arduous negotiations with the state, which demands the evacuation of the Movement organizers or the payment of unmanageable rent and overdue fees, while the organizers negotiate and renegotiate payments in terms of community services in their own areas of rural extension programs and food donations from their own agrarian reform settlements for the federal government’s “Zero Hunger” program (of food donations for families in extreme poverty).

COCEARGS was my point of contact once I arrived in Rio Grande do Sul, and although my two contacts arranged in Brasília weren’t there to receive me when I first arrived, a member of the directory of the movement in that state, Janaína, received me and set up my visits throughout the state. She became an invaluable companion during my time in the South and since…

Most workers at the office are encamped somewhere throughout the state (and freed from their camp responsibilities by collective decision of their camp peers in order to take on office duties in the capital) and live in a residence hall of the Movement itself elsewhere in the city, while some live in nearby settlements and drop in and out to carry out organizational duties at the state level, and a smaller number still live on their own account nearby. The residence hall is quite large, with apartment spaces for more permanent residents as well as larger rooms with bunks to receive organizers, militants and select visitors on a more temporary basis. There are also common spaces for storage, cooking and sharing meals.

All in all, the Movement has strong roots in the city, even while the main functions carried out there are administrative and organizational in support of a much stronger and wider presence throughout the countryside of the state. After a few hours in the city, I soon left for the countryside by bus and only passed through the city on my way from one settlement to another, and then to participate on an ongoing mobilization at a government bureaucracy’s regional headquarters (to be described in a later entry).