LATIN AMERICA	JANUARY 19, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 2
	For Brazil's Glamour Set, It's the Crusade of Choice By JACK EPSTEIN /SAO PAULO oreign celebrities worry about saving the Amazon rain forests, but for Brazilian artists, musicians and the glamour set, the landless-peasant movement is the crusade of choice--and a lucrative media industry in itself. Last April the country's most popular composer, Chico Buarque da Holanda, released a CD about the Sem Terra movement, which was marketed alongside a book-length photo essay by renowned photographer Sebastiao Salgado. The joint venture, called Terra, is expected to earn $2 million worldwide for the MST. A few months later, about 20 of Brazil's most famous country-folk singers joined for a We Are the World-style recording session dubbed Ze Rainha, in support of MST leader Jose Rainha, who many believe was wrongly convicted last summer of murdering a landowner. This month top samba singers like Djavan and Beth Carvalho are producing an album of songs sung in MST squatter camps. Revolutionary chic may be a dead letter elsewhere in Latin America, but in Brazil, Sem Terra has given cultural stars both a cause and a spotlight. In return, they have given the landless-peasant movement invaluable cachet. "They are fundamental for us," says MST leader Joao Pedro Stedile. "They reach the public's soul." It has less to do with trendy radicalism than with lending the landless "credibility," insists soap-opera star Paulo Betti, who sparked the trend 13 years ago when he huddled with thousands of landless farmers who took over a large ranch in southern Brazil. A big reason Betti did it, he says, was to "make it harder for the police to attack." The participation of cultural figures in the struggles of the landless hasn't cut back noticeably on the bloodshed, but it has added some significant markers to Brazilian culture. After police gunned down 19 MST activists in 1996 in the northern state of Para, architect Oscar Niemeyer, the avowed communist who designed Brazil's futuristic capital, Brasilia, built a monument on the site of the slaughter. Filmmakers have flocked to the movement: four documentaries about MST were shot last year alone. The most widely bruited about was Rose's Dream by acclaimed director Tete Moraes, a film that returns a decade later to the lives of the same MST squatters whom Moraes examined in her 1987 international-award-winning documentary Land for Rose. Television--specifically the wildly popular soap operas known as telenovelas--have given the movement its most powerful support. A drama called Rei do Gado, a sexy indictment of the country's unjust land distribution, aired each night for eight months in 1996 and 1997 and became one of the most successful telenovelas in history. "Its high ratings, thank God, meant viewers were rooting for the landless," said Rei do Gado writer Benedito Rui Barbosa. Some MST leaders and members, have become celebrities in their own right. Stedile has been invited to parade with top samba schools at next month's carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, while Rainha, who is free while his case is being appealed, last month hobnobbed with Danielle Mitterrand, the widow of the former French President, after receiving a human-rights award in Paris. Without question, however, the most famous member of Sem Terra is Debora Rodrigues, 29, who once drove a tractor on an MST commune. That was before she appeared on the October 1997 cover of the Brazilian edition of Playboy, and in considerably more detail inside. The feature, titled "The Prettiest Landless Worker in Brazil," sparked the hottest issue in years. Sem Terra leaders speedily disavowed their unclad follower, but the rest of Brazil hasn't. Rodrigues has since acted in a telenovela, written a column for another national magazine and now co-hosts a network television variety-game show called Fantasia. "How can I not be associated with MST when kids on the street still call me Landless Debora?" she asks. "I will continue to talk about agrarian reform." And so will scores of other celebrities.
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