Brazil's landless farmers are the shock troops in a South American revolution that's working

By TIM PADGETT /SARANDI

arcos Antonio Celso was just a boy when his family and hundreds of others took a desperate risk that changed the political landscape of Brazil. The group, which amounted to an infinitesimal fraction of the nation's millions of destitute landless farmers, gathered after midnight on Oct. 29, 1985, and illegally invaded 9,700 hectares of plantation land deep in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. The fertile but idle tract was being used for little more than a window view by one of Brazil's great absentee landowners, Bolivar Annoni. Once on the ground, the squatters set up a squalid camp and began planting soybeans and corn. They fended off armed attacks by police and hired gunmen--three peasants were allegedly murdered during the two-year struggle--until the federal government granted them title to the land in 1987 for use as an agricultural cooperative. (The owner received compensation.) Celso and the others began scratching out a meager livelihood. Even if they cheered for the underdogs, though, most Brazilians thought the radical venture would fail.

They're still waiting for that to happen. The Novo Sarandi Cooperative is expected to gross $12 million this year for its 1,432 members. Celso, 26, is now the farm quality-control director; Novo Sarandi needs one because its vegetable, dairy and meat products are marketed to multinationals such as Italy's Parmalat and Canada's Ceval, which deliver them throughout Brazil. The co-op also sells 10,000 kilos of smartly packaged herbal tea each month to urban Brazilians who once considered Celso's family to be communists. And families that formerly faced starvation on $50 a month now earn close to 10 times that amount.

Che Guevara posters still decorate the walls at Novo Sarandi, but they are mere decor. The paperwork that matters is the profit-and-loss statements that are strewn on co-op desks. "Che is a symbol of resistance for us, but the best revolutions aren't carried out with guns," says Celso.

Novo Sarandi is the advance guard of something extraordinary in Latin America: a leftist revolution that seems to work. Its shock troops are the members of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), better known by its Portuguese nickname, Sem Terra (Landless). Novo Sarandi was the first of hundreds of land takeovers orchestrated by Sem Terra across Brazil over the past 12 years, usually involving clashes with police and landowners. Such confrontations are still the organization's trademark, as it has swelled to some 500,000 adherents, making it the largest rural movement in South America. But Sem Terra has become much more than a combative juggernaut. "We aim to change Brazil into a great Novo Sarandi," says Sem Terra's co-founder, Joao Pedro Stedile. "We're a symbolic force that shows Brazilian society that it's possible to change." That force could be called "guerrilla capitalism." Stridently socialist in its public pronouncements, Sem Terra has also become a force for corporate entrepreneurship. Sem Terra factories, most of them small cooperative ventures, pump out brand-name products as diverse as rum and blue jeans. The movement's agricultural ventures are turning swaths of once unproductive soil into money spinners linked with foreign and domestic business enterprises. Says political analyst Bolivar Lamounier of Sao Paulo's Institute for Political and Economic Studies: "This movement uses violent rhetoric and tactics but implements common-sense solutions that until now have only been talked about in this country."

In the process of its evolution, MST has acquired a high degree of marketing savvy that has helped it turn the issue of land reform into the most urgent debate in Brazil. And in the surest sign of momentum, television stars, samba singers and others among the local glitterati trip over one another to support landless peasants. But the movement has drawn fire from President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who often criticizes MST for its extralegal tactics and what he calls its outdated "opposition to the capitalist system"--including his inflation-busting, free-market reforms, which are enormously popular with most Brazilians. Top aides concede privately, though, that Sem Terra's own popularity has made it possible for Cardoso to achieve more agrarian reform in the past four years than any Brazilian leader before him.

Now, after a decade of grass-roots organizing, Sem Terra is poised to play a more ambitious role--but one less assured of success. Among other things, the movement's leadership wants to organize urban poor such as the homeless in the same way it has organized the rural peasantry, turn to new targets for popular takeovers, aid other struggling land-reform movements in Latin America and even start up ecotourism ventures on the territory it has taken under its control. (Sem Terra has played a role recently in raids on supermarkets and other food sources, conducted by poor farmers and villagers in the drought-stricken northeast.) On the electoral front, it intends to test its strength against Cardoso by mobilizing support behind Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party in October's presidential race.

In Sem Terra's eyes, Cardoso should be a dream President. Since taking office in 1994, the onetime Marxist sociologist turned neoliberal has placed more than 170,000 landless families on expropriated plots, and plans to settle 300,000 families on the land by the end of his term next Dec. 31. Cardoso last year pushed through an unprecedented tax on idle land. At a land-reform ceremony in December, he declared that "today, the landowner's power is not what it was in the past." But for Sem Terra that is not enough. Like many leftists, Stedile cannot forgive Cardoso, once one of Brazil's most brilliant socialist thinkers, for turning rightward in the '90s. MST insists that his sweeping free-market reforms and privatization of state industry have cost peasants more than a million jobs.

The future, in short, promises confrontation and mobilization on an unprecedented scale. Already such critics as Roosevelt Roque dos Santos, head of Brazil's militant landowners group, the Democratic Ruralist Union (U.D.R.), have charged that the movement "doesn't want agrarian reform as much as it wants power." Even leftist politician Lula criticized Sem Terra leader Stedile for using radical rhetoric "that makes sense for a social movement but not for a political party."

But Sem Terra is still riding a big wave of popular sympathy. The main reason is that Brazil may be the most unjust country in the world in terms of the gap between its small, rich elite and its poor rural masses. Ever since a handful of privateering "captains" were granted chunks of territory the size of small nations after the 16th century Portuguese conquest, Brazil has suffered from radically skewed land distribution. Today less than 3% of the population holds nearly two-thirds of the nation's half a billion arable hectares. Some 4.8 million Brazilian rural families--roughly 25 million people--eke out a meager existence as temporary laborers or slash-and-burn farmers in the interior. At the same time, more than 60% of the land is unplanted--used, if at all, for ranching or tax write-offs.

Landless rural workers suffer under conditions of appalling poverty and, often, of cruelty at the hands of local landlords and labor bosses. "Many of them don't experience animal rights, let alone human rights," argues Sem Terra's co-leader, Gilmar Mauro, 30. Those problems have been the subject of reformist anguish for centuries and, in fact, Sem Terra is a spin-off of the Roman Catholic Church's efforts in the 1960s and '70s to tackle the problem. When many of Brazil's priests became preoccupied with the leftist dogma of liberation theology, more pragmatic young Catholics formed MST in 1984. Among them was Stedile, 44, an agrarian economist who is considered the brains behind the Sao Paulo-based movement. He was joined by fiery Jose Rainha, 37, a land-invasion commander whose conviction last June for the 1989 murder of a landowner and his bodyguard is being appealed.

Sem Terra demands a high degree of self-reliance from its members. Landless farmers who want to take part in land invasions are expected to ante up for such necessities as food and transportation. That commitment is a major reason why MST takeovers prove to be tenacious. Sem Terra has successfully settled 200,000 landless families on 7 million hectares of forcibly sequestered land. More than 50,000 other families are currently camped outside idle plantations around Brazil, waiting their turn. Chances are usually high that it won't be peaceful when their turn comes. Bloody clashes between MST squatters and police are regular fare on Brazil's nightly newscasts. The Catholic church estimates that almost 1,000 land-related killings have taken place since 1985. Although the rate of bloodshed is starting to slow down, human rights groups report at least 15 people have been killed so far this year.

Sem Terra's next planned target is government-owned banks. MST leaders say occupation of the institutions is the only way to get Brazil's sclerotic financial bureaucracy to free up promised government funds for agricultural projects. Last December MST militants armed with spades and scythes stormed a branch of the Banco do Brasil in the remote southern town of Teodoro Sampaio, demanding the release of $3.5 million in funds. The bank had to close its doors a week before Christmas, which angered many residents. "This is one reason why people have strong reservations about Sem Terra's long-term sustainability," says an analyst at the World Bank, which is involved in a $120 million pilot land-redistribution program with Cardoso's government.

Nonetheless, Sem Terra's approval rating remains high for now, largely because of the growing business benefits of the land grabs. An array of taxpaying MST enterprises last year produced revenues of at least $50 million, comparable to those of many midsize corporations. At Novo Sarandi, revenues were expected to leap from $8 million to $12 million in 1997. Sem Terra's flagship co-op, Coagri, in Parana state, earns more than $20 million a year; another, Coperjus, in Santa Catarina state, has even begun exporting its Terra Viva brand herb tea to Spain and Germany. Sem Terra also boasts an underground national radio network, and runs a rum distillery in Bahia state that has helped revive the local sugar cane industry. Brand-name jams and pickled vegetables from a Sem Terra factory in Rio Grande do Sul have become so popular that the plant is set to double production. Stedile attributes Sem Terra's success to its emphasis on education. Its college in the southern town of Veranopolis, built in 1995, has graduated 150 students.

Most of the profits from Sem Terra ventures are reinvested or used to pay peasant workers' salaries. Contributions from the more affluent MST rank and file account for about 60% of Sem Terra's more than $20 million estimated annual operating budget. Other money comes from taxes MST levies on its businesses, plus a controversial but voluntary contribution by most Sem Terra farmers: 2% of the federal agriculture loans they receive once they have title to invaded land. The rest is donations by city governments, nongovernmental organizations like churches, and even the European Union. MST leaders insist that because their state chapters are financially autonomous, they can't offer precise national budget figures. This is despite the fact that all money is supposed to move through the National Association of Agricultural Cooperation (ANCA), the legal entity created to receive MST funds. That has left the door open for critics like the landowner organizations, which charge that MST leaders illegally funnel federal loan contributions into personal accounts. "They use public money to buy tractors to invade private property," says the U.D.R.'s Roque. Landowners also accuse MST of extorting money from local governments. But less partisan observers are unconcerned. "They have receipts for everything," says Manoel Cordeiro, hired to audit Novo Sarandi's use of an $80,000 Lutheran Church donation.

MST leaders say that much of the revolutionary rhetoric is motivational window dressing. "Any struggle has to be linked to the heart," says one. And the group's success helps draw foreign sympathy. Last March, Belgium gave the movement its King Baudouin Award for development.

Sitting with her three children on the porch of their small wooden house in Novo Sarandi--the first home anyone in her family has ever owned--soy farmer Salete Grasselli, 35, recalls life before the 1985 invasion. "There were a dozen of us living in my father-in-law's wooden shack, always worried we'd have to leave and work somewhere else." The risk they took 13 years ago, she insists, "was better than dying of hunger." Whether their new life is communist, capitalist or a strange mix of both doesn't matter to her. She now owns a little piece of the Brazilian dream.

--With Reporting by Jack Epstein /Veranopolis and Sarandi