Posted on 11/09/2003 2:02:46 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
CAJAMAR, Brazil -- Elias Antonio dos Santos is 40 but looks 60. With only a fourth-grade education and a checkered employment record as a shoeshine boy, moving man and foundry laborer, he has scrambled all his life to keep a roof over his family's head.
Like millions of poorly educated, impoverished Brazilians, dos Santos has always dreamed of a better life, a dream that invariably centers on owning a house and land.
Now he's closer to his dream than ever before.
An organizer for a Brazilian group called MST, the Portuguese acronym for "Landless Workers Movement," dos Santos joined about 300 other families last year in occupying a vacant, dusty tract about 20 miles north of Sao Paulo, Brazil's teeming industrial hub.
They are part of a growing wave of confrontational, sometimes violent land invasions by the poor across Brazil, a movement that has created a growing crisis for the new government of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva -- himself a laborer who rose from poverty.
With his roots in the labor movement, da Silva raised great hopes among the landless, who gave him their solid support and ended their invasions for several months after his January inauguration in the belief he would quickly answer their demands.
But da Silva has moved cautiously on the landless issue, prompting a new round of land invasions that have sometimes turned bloody.
Outraged landowners have banded together and hired armed guards to protect their property, while dozens of landless protesters have been killed in clashes with police and guards.
With each side dug in, the crisis seems on the verge of exploding.
"The law allows us to defend our land," said Marcos Menezes Prochet, head of a landowners group called the Union of Democratic Ruralists in the southern state of Parana. "We are the ones being attacked, not the opposite. What creates violence is not our armed guards, but the invasion of our lands."
Prochet's farm was invaded six years ago by peasants armed with guns, knives and agricultural tools, he said. The men held him hostage for several hours, then occupied his ranch for several months before he could win a court order to have them removed.
"This movement, MST, is not a social movement," he said. "They are a political, ideological movement and their goal is socialism, the expropriation of land with no payments to the owners, just like in Communist Russia."
The chasm between the two sides stems from one of Brazil's most intractable problems: the concentration of land ownership among a tiny elite, a problem inherited by in many Latin nations as a legacy of colonialism.
More than 90 percent of Brazil's private land is owned by just 20 percent of the people, while the poorest 40 percent owns just 1 percent of the nation's property.
Brazil's constitution seems to support both sides. Provisions allow the occupation of nonproductive lands, but other laws, as pointed out by Prochet, allow owners to protect their farms and ranches.
Brazil's first land reform effort began in the 1960s, but little was accomplished in the 20 years the country was under military governments. The MST group became active in the 1980s, when the military dictatorship was replaced by a democratically elected regime.
In recent years, the groups has become more confrontational as its focus moved from the countryside to the large cities, where the urban poor were recruited to join in.
The movement estimates that about 160,000 landless families are squatting on properties owned by others across Brazil, up from just under 100,000 families last year.
The increasing pace of the invasions has alarmed ranchers, agribusinesses and even foreign investors, who worry the conflict could spin out of control and threaten da Silva's government.
Da Silva has surprised many analysts by adopting moderate economic policies, but Prochet landowners are wary of the new president, even though he has not taken dramatic steps to fulfill the landless protesters' demands.
Carlos Guedes, da Silva's agriculture chief, said the administration is working as fast as it can with limited resources to solve the problems.
October 2003 - Washington Times - Chavez foes slam land grants - 'Agrarian Reform' and "Land Redistribution' in Venezuela***Under the law, the land distributed to the peasants is still owned by the state, and the government must encourage the formation of peasant cooperatives and collective farms, where the state is to provide housing, health care and education. The law also gives the government power to dictate how private land can be used, based on soil conditions and the country's food-security needs.
Critics argue that the law violates the right to private property and is a throwback to state-planned communist economies.
"The model of the collective farm doesn't respond to our reality," said Roque Carmona, founder of Campesino Alliance, a nonprofit organization that helps small-scale farmers. "It looks good on paper, nothing more."
Government officials maintain that the ban on giving up ownership of state property is an attempt to avoid the failures of past land reforms in Venezuela and elsewhere, in which small farmers who lacked credit or government support eventually had to sell their plots to large landowners.
They also argue that forming peasant cooperatives is the only way campesinos can compete with large agribusinesses.
Mr. Chavez has defended the law in terms of social justice and by appealing to the need for "food security," mandated by the constitution passed in 1999 during his first year as president.***
June 2001 - Venezuelan Land Reform Pits Rich Against Poor*** ``The incendiary rhetoric of the president has awakened a lot of hate within the country's impoverished classes,'' said Jose Ruiz, head of the ranchers association of Portuguesa state where a farmer was recently murdered by alleged land invaders.
``They call us land invaders, but we are not, we are the natives here,'' said Leon, standing outside his shack beside a red flag of Chavez wearing his trademark paratrooper's beret. ''The invaders were the ones who expanded the national park so we had no-where left to live.'***
July 2001 - Venezuelans Protest Kidnappings (Chavez suspends gun licenses--threats to jail militiamen)*** Ranchers living along the country's remote 1,400-mile border with Colombia face the constant threat of kidnapping and extortion by Colombia's leftist guerrillas who can cross the border. Common criminals and gangs often cooperate with rebels.
Earlier this year cattlemen proposed forming private militias to fend off local criminals and rebels from neighboring Colombia. The idea was abandoned as President Hugo Chavez suspended the issuance of new gun licenses and threatened to jail would-be militiamen.***
Much of the business - legal and illegal - is controlled by a population of 30,000, mainly Shia Muslim Arabs who fled the Lebanese civil war. They run their enterprises from the shabby shopping malls and chaotic streets of Ciudad del Este but usually live in the more affluent Foz. Among them is a small but dedicated hardcore of militant Muslims. For years, often under the guise of charitable donations, millions of dollars have flowed from the Triple Frontier to Hizbollah, the Iranian-backed militant Lebanese Shi'ite faction. Money was also raised for Hamas, the Palestinian extremist group.
Despite a limited crackdown and handful of arrests by the Paraguayan authorities, David Aufhauser, the outgoing United States Treasury Department official on terrorist funding, last month described the Triple Frontier zone as home to a "rich marriage of drugs and terror". A senior US State Department official said: "In terms of terrorist financing, the area is a black hole."
The money trail is complex and difficult to trace but The Telegraph has learnt that American intelligence officials have electronically monitored cash transfers via banks in Sao Paulo and North America to a web of accounts in the Middle East linked to Hizbollah and Hamas. They also disclosed that the US has been using satellites to monitor telephone conversations in the area after learning that Middle East terror suspects were dialling so-called switching stations in Foz or Ciudad del Este and giving a password to have their calls re-routed to their destination.
The procedure made calls impossible to trace and avoided triggering interception mechanisms. More than a dozen switching stations have been found and closed down in recent months. To the frustration of the US, cracking down on the terror financing operations has been much more difficult, especially as Paraguay and Brazil want to resuscitate tourism at the falls and to avoid losing the Arabs' business acumen.
Corruption is rampant and financial controls have been lax for so long that they verge on the non-existent. Money-laundering is conducted through myriad front companies, under-invoicing is endemic and the plethora of foreign exchange offices, money-wiring companies and commercial banks offer ample scope for moving large sums unnoticed.
A recent Brazilian customs investigation indicated the scale of illicit financial movements through the Triple Frontier. It concluded that between 1996 and 2000, an estimated $35 billion (£22 billion) had been moved illegally from Brazilian accounts held in Foz via a Paraguayan bank in neighbouring Ciudad del Este to New York. "It is easy to understand Ciudad del Este," said a lawyer there. "All you need to know is that everyone here is a bandit."***
***This movement, MST, is not a social movement," he said. "They are a political, ideological movement and their goal is socialism, the expropriation of land with no payments to the owners, just like in Communist Russia." The chasm between the two sides stems from one of Brazil's most intractable problems: the concentration of land ownership among a tiny elite, a problem inherited by in many Latin nations as a legacy of colonialism. ***
______________________________________________
That awful civilizing colonialism.
Mugabe Moves Into Cities To Seize Land Owned By Whites*** President Robert Mugabe's government has launched a new wave of land seizures targeted at white-owned land in Zimbabwe's urban areas, in violation of his own controversial private property confiscation laws.
A government programme codenamed Operation Clean Sweep is reportedly underway despite statements by President Mugabe that his land seizures ended last year.
There has been no official confirmation of Operation Clean Sweep but an analysis of new lists of properties published in recent days by the state press show that vast swaths of land in or near urban areas have been earmarked for compulsory seizure. ***
________________________________________________
The perils of designer tribalism***The Culture Cult is partly a brief for the Enlightenment values of universal culture and scientific rationality, partly an attack of the various atavisms that Sandall sees impeding the growth of those values. Its method is not systematic but exemplary. Sandall proceeds through a number of illustrative case studies. There are not many heroes in this book. One finds kind words for Ernest Gellner and for Karl Popper's book The Open Society and Its Enemies, written in the 1940s when Popper was in New Zealand. For the most part, however, The Culture Cult is a tour through an intellectual and moral rogues' gallery. There are suitably wry bits about anthropological fantasists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, anti-industrialist utopians like Robert Owen (founder of the New Harmony commune), and randy utopians like John Humphrey Noyes (founder of the Oneida Community). Sandall also devotes whole chapters to Isaiah Berlin and to the bizarre anti-free-market rantings of Karl Polanyi. It is useful to be reminded that Polanyi, writing in 1960, believed that "West Africa would lead the world" and that record-keeping with pebbles and rafia bags in eighteenth-century Dahomey rivaled the achievements of IBM.
Most of the figures Sandall deals with are familiar. Like Bruckner and many others before him, he singles out Rousseau and the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder as the spiritual grandparents of romantic primitivism. Rousseau contributed the hothouse emotional sentimentality, Herder the völkisch celebration of cultural identity at the expense of assimilation and a recognition of universal humanity. (As the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observed, "from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire, human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity.")
Sandall's real target is the assumption-common coin among anthropologists-that "culture" is a value-neutral term and that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it in 1951, one had to "fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically." In his book The Savage Mind-which argues that there is no such thing as the savage, as distinct from the civilized, mind-Lévi-Strauss spoke blithely of the "so-called primitive." (It is significant that Lévi-Strauss should have idolized Rousseau: "our master and our brother," "of all the philosophes, [the one who] came nearest to being an anthropologist.") One of Sandall's main tasks in The Culture Cult is to convince us that what Lévi-Strauss dismissed as "so-called" is really "well-called." Sandall does not mention William Henry's In Defense of Elitism (1994)-another unfairly neglected book-but his argument in The Culture Cult reinforces Henry's accurate, if politically incorrect, observation that
the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others-smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace. Some ideas are better than others, some values more enduring, some works of art more universal. Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study. Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal. . . . It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.
Henry's quip about the bone in the nose elicited the expected quota of outrage from culture-cultists. But the outrage missed the serious and, ultimately, the deeply humane point of the observation. What Sandall calls romantic primitivism puts a premium on quaintness, which it then embroiders with the rhetoric of authenticity. There are two casualties of this process. One is an intellectual casualty: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the truth about the achievements and liabilities of other cultures. The other casualty is a moral, social, and political one. Who suffers from the expression of romantic primitivism? Not the Lauren Huttons and Claude
Lévi-Strausses of the world. On the contrary, the people who suffer are the objects of the romantic primitive's compassion, "respect," and pretended emulation. Sandall asks:
Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all costs? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?
Sandall is right that the answers, respectively, are No, No, and No: "The best chance of a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job."****[full article at LINK]
The new land residents become, effectively, serfs on land they have no incentive to improve because they will not be allowed to profit from their improvement. Those without an agricultural bent cannot sell their land to gain a stake for starting a business or for getting themselves trained or educated and thus able to improve their lot. They cannot use the land to lever themelves out of rural poverty. After a redistribution the compassionate rulers wil make sure that the distribution remains fair by punishing those who might be more efficient and brighter and who manage to prosper more than their neighbors.
Zimbabwe -- Beware the U-turn***……….The key to understanding what Mugabe and his Zanu PF party are up to - for blacks as well as whites - is the word "leases." The ruling party moguls, security force chiefs and 54,000 others getting so-called "model 2" holdings, capable of being farmed on an individual basis, will not be granted the freehold their 5,000 white predecessors had (The first 2,900 seizure and eviction orders fell due on August 9 and scores of whites were detained over the past weekend for defying them, although their constitutional validity is heavily in doubt). At the first sign of political disloyalty the "new farmers", as Mugabe calls them, will be liable to instant eviction.***
I can't believe it when I read this stuff.
Meu coracao Brasileiro 'ta quebrando...
I would have sworn my heart was Brasilian but my soul was American. Now the heart is breaking but at last I still have my soul...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.