This Land Is Their Land

Well, I've been away, ill, and lazy. Here's a big, picture heavy make-up post.

Last weekend – because the excursion only lasted from friday till monday – was something that will definitely be one of the more memorable components of the program in the long run, and a great experience in itself. Going to visit the MST was really something worth doing, and our follow-up was fascinating as well.

The first thing I noticed on our way on friday was the stark contrast between being within Fortaleza and without. For all the poverty present in places in Fortaleza, there is a veneer of development and order within all of it. As soon as we left the municipality, and even before we got into what would be described as the interior by locals, things looked different. In Caucacia, the small city that's just outside of Fortaleza, the roads were wretched, ridden with potholes, devoid of any attempt at vegetation, and often littered with garbage. It only got more intense as we left the cities and moved into the interior, and specifically the sertão, the hot, semi-arid region that makes up most of Ceará's backlands.

The sertão is lined with dry bushes and palm trees, but still feels desolate and withered due to its extreme dryness this time of year (as it only rains from february to may at most), and civilisation as we would think of it is rather lacking there. Houses are made of mud or, at best, clay bricks. Roads off of the major highways are lucky if they're paved. Water, where it occurs, is dirty and fiercely hoarded. Signs of the way the interior has been neglected to force people into the cities where they participate more in the games of wealth-extraction and aggregation is excruciatingly apparent. I couldn't help but recall my host brother's words: “I don't understand the MST here – the land is so dry and infertile, why would they want it?” Yet the land still has a rugged beauty, a charm that made being out there fascinating.

We rolled into the city of Canindé late in the morning; it was somewhat odd, since our visit came during the festival of St. Francis, to whom Canindé is a massively important pilgrimage site – but I'll discuss that in detail a bit later, since we had more activity in Canindé later. On friday, Canindé was a waypoint. We stopped in the monastery-run training centre we would be staying in there later on to meet an important figure in the MST leadership around Canindé, and get a preparatory lecture from him before we went to the settlement. The lecture was focused on the municipality of Canindé, working with a structure of zooming in from the macro aspects of our previous lectures that I found very apt. we talked about the pertinent issues in the region, including the control of water, the violent practices of the two families that are by far the biggest landowners in Canindé's area, and so on, so that we had a base of knowledge before heading to the settlement. After eating lunch, we continued on to the settlement itself. It involved a two-hour drive down an unpaved, rocky, steep road, which went to show just how harsh the conditions are out there – if someone gets injured, they have to be taken down that road on a motorcycle to Canindé, and bringing in supplies requires the same kind of arduousness.

Once we actually got to the settlement, we were greeted by a number of community members, including a small mob of children, as MST is very oriented toward settling full families. We had a little downtime when we got there, while things were being organised, and we began this by setting up hammocks in the building we had been given to use, which we later learned was previously the lodging for the fazenda's guards, who terrorized the workers there – and now serves mainly as an education centre. The settlement itself in this case was not immediately identifiable as an MST settlement: it looked like a normal fazenda, with farmhouses, animal corrals, and a reservoir being the main features. Because of the way the land was obtained (to be discussed), there are no signs of occupation or struggle – really, it could be taken for just another farm by an unwitting ubserver. Fortunately we weren't.

During this time, I semi-wittingly started a bit of a saga. I had brought a football (of the proper European kind, not the American nonsense) for a gift, but I'd brought it uninflated, and hadn't brought a pump or told the staff I might need one. Thus it stayed uninflated for a while. But when mentioning it I'd shown it for a bit, and the kids got excited. They first went to look for a pump in the immediate surroundings. Then they inquired in the closest houses. Eventually they got a pump, but it lacked a needle valve. One of the kids then asked his dad, who arranged to bring one when he returned for our upcoming meeting. Eventually, after a lot of community effort, we got the ball inflated, and played for a while in a wide open field alongside a whole lot of guinea fowl. That wasn't the end, though – I'll return to the topic soon enough.

After a bit of relaxation and pump-hunting, we got together for an introduction and some information on the circumstances surrounding the settlement. After some introductions and exchanges of thanks, we heard some key facts about the settlement. The history of the settlement, in brief, is that it was formerly an exceedingly brutal fazenda where a small number of families were practically enslaved – forced to work nearly constantly six days a week for the right to live on the land. At this time, the land was producing very little, and so the families got in touch with MST and with their help petitioned INCRA, the government's agrarian reform agency, to investigate it. This is how MST acquires most of their land: the law says that if land is being used to less than 50% of its productive ability, it must be used for the public good, which usually means giving it to local families. Through petitions and occupations, MST forces INCRA's hand and has them investigate specific plots of land, as there is an enormous amount of unproductive land in Brazil. At the time of the petition, 10000 MST workers were marching from Goiana to Brasilia, so the pressure was on INCRA. Thus the fazenda was handed over within a year, as opposed to the four years it can occasionally take. Now, 35 families live at Essetamene Cancima Nova, arranged as a communal MST operation.

We also touched on some issues that affect the settlement. Chief among these is land depletion – the land in the sertão has a quite low capacity, and often when fazendas are expropriated they are very depleted and hard for families to sustain themselves on. This is particularly problematic considering that fazenda owners are paid for land and improvements thereof expropriated, which can give them an incentive to have INCRA expropriate it. Combined with the constant instability of water, this leads to some troubling situations where the survival of settlers is concerned.

The night rounded off with what the settlers referred to as a mistico, basically a cultural evening. It started with a number of skits, readings, and songs related to the struggle, mostly performed by the settlement's children, and eventually turned into a couple guys playing guitar and triangle. Fun was had. The night itself turned out to be pretty interesting: the building we were using was quite open, and the sertão gets cold and windy at night – it's a desert, after all. Underestimating this, several us made the mistake of hanging our hammocks outside. Besides them acting like sails and flapping loudly even when we were sleeping in them, it was freezing. Sleep was not very doable. Eventually, some of us gave up and crawled into our bus, which worked out alright, really. A lesson was learned that night.

In the morning, one we'd all recovered, we went on a bit of a tour. We saw the way the fazenda is laid out, the animal facilities, the reservoir (which serves as the main way water – though not potable water – is available during most of the year), the barn – which was formerly a centre of worker abuse on the land – and some additional houses. Most importantly, we saw cistern constructions in various stages of progress, a critical issue on the settlements. Cisterns are the primary way families can gather drinking water in the rainy season, but they are expensive and their size is limited. Thus, getting grants from the government for them and using water efficiently are hugely important on the settlement.

After some coconut-tree hijinks, we headed back to the central buildings. We had a bit of downtime, which I personally used to play some football with the kids – who were by this time completely enthralled by the ball and starting to ask me about it. We had a get-together with music, readings, thanks, and so on after lunch, at which we exchanged both thanks and gifts, and that was it. We left soon after, but not before group pictures and not before I could formally give the ball to the kids of Cancima Nova, no doubt amusing them for quite a while to come. The visit, incredibly short as it was, felt truly rewarding.

But we weren't done with MST yet. We'd seen a taken-over fazenda with a good deal of infrastructure in place; we were off to see the encampments more typically associated with MST. Whereas a settlement is a crucial institution for building communities that can sustain themselves, the encampments are where the heart of MST's struggle takes place. By camping just outside a fazenda in unbelievably rough conditions, MST pressures both the owner and INCRA to get it expropriated. They also prepare a group of families to take the land as soon as it becomes theirs. In this way, the core battle of MST is fought. Many occupations are accosted by violence from the fazendeiras and the military police. Many have casualties from exposure and lack of clean water. Many are frustrated by fazendeiras putting up the appearance of using land for cattle ranching. But many more succeed and push land reform further in rural Brazil. We saw a successful one, close to Canindé. Its situation is a bit different: it was established after the fazendeira himself called in INCRA to judge his land unproductive. The MST camped in order to prepare and to accelerate the process, which ended up finishing in six months – pretty much record time. There are issues, though: the biggest is that the fazendeira negotiated a strip of choice land, including the one house on the fazenda, for himself. Nonetheless, the incredible turnover to MST was heartening. Seeing the encampment, though, was intense: it consisted mainly of plastic-and-palm-leaf structures with no drainage or ventilation, and thinking about how families sometimes have to live in them for two years under constant threat from fazendeira thugs made me really appreciate the depth of the struggle. We didn't spend much time on the encampment, but it was enough to have some serious implications.

After that, we had a similarly interesting time in Canindé, but this is already a bit of a literary dreadnought so I intend to make that a new entry. Anyway, MST was a phenomenal experience. Given the amount of discussion, abstraction, and working with movement leadership involved in grand struggles we do, it was eye-opening to go to MST locations and seeing the palpable, small-scale victories they have achieved in their struggle to affect real people's daily lives. It was also extremely heartening. Seeing the difference that can be made made a huge difference.