Brazil landless chief vows protests to push Lula
Natuza Nery | Brasilia, Brazil
30 August 2006 11:35
LINK: http://lanr.blogspot.com/2006/09/brazil-landless-chief-vows-protests-to.html
The leader of a militant Brazilian peasant organisation says it will take to the streets to force President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva toward more social and land reform if he wins re-election in October.
Joao Pedro Stedile, chief of the Landless Rural Workers Movement, said that if Lula stuck with the fiscally conservative policies he has followed for the past three years he would lose his grass-roots political base.
Lula must not remain a hostage to the Congress, where his party lacks a majority, if he wins the October 1 vote as is widely expected, Stedile said.
"We want to revive mass mobilisation and class struggle," he told Reuters in an interview. "The government will only change if the pressure comes from the streets."
The MST, one of Latin America's largest leftist organisations, follows a strategy of staging land invasions to push for land reform in this country where 1% of the population owns 47% of the land.
Such actions have alarmed big landowners and the business community. Lula, long considered an ally of social reform movements, rode into office in 2003 promising to create jobs, grant property to landless workers and deliver more services to Brazil's hungry and poor.
But he has moved his Workers' Party toward the political centre and followed a tight fiscal policy that has pleased investors but disappointed some in his grass-roots base.
"We have a big cooking pot ready to boil. The MST wants this government to abandon its neoliberal policies and adopt measures to a project of national development," he said.
Stedile said Lula had managed to deliver more resources to small family farmers but he railed against his failure to advance land reform.
"The government hasn't come close to its goal of settling 400 000 families in four years. They say they've settled 280 000 families but it's not true. They've settled 150 000 at most, and half of that was done by the MST," he said.
Stedile said he continued to pin his hopes on Lula, who comes from a poor family from Brazil's north-east and worked in a car factory in São Paulo as a young man.
"Lula has the sensibility of a social reformer because he comes from that arena. With pressure he'll change, or at least, he'll remain an ally of social movements," Stedile said.
Stedile expressed little fondness for Heloisa Helena, an outspoken leftist who is running for president on a Socialist Party ticket. He said she has no social base. He also described Lula's closest rival, Geraldo Alckmin of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, as utterly lacking in charisma. - Reuters
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