Is there any thornier issue for Brazilians than agrarian reform, or more difficult for an outsider to understand?
Perhaps the mind-bending legal issues surrounding the Ferronorte national railway system, currently outsourced to America Latina Logistica (ALL) present a situation of equal complexity, but agrarian reform has certainly generated more rivers of blood and intergenerational rage.
The United States created a reasonably workable system for settling its interior with the Missouri Compromise (my grandparents attended a land-grant university, Old Mizzou, that emerged from this system), and, with the exception of the terrible Range Wars of the late 19th century, managed to keep the emergence of feudal fiefdoms to a minimum. Until Texas ranchers discovered oil on their property and started palling around with Saudi princelings, perhaps.
I keep meaning to read up on and try to understand the issue. As I was reading this recent collection of essays on corruption of Brazil, down at the beach this weekend, I came across the following essay about grilagem (”land-grabbing,” according to my Webster’s Portuguese-English, or perhaps more creatively “claim-jumping”) as a democracy-killing manifestation of the privatization of the public sphere.
Grilagem often involves a significant amount of bloody bushwhacking and backstabbing, and the behavior of the Rural Benches in the federal congress, mentioned angrily here, certainly is a sight to be behold. These people are something else. A thundering herd of cattle-ranching Mussolinis.
I therefore translate to my notes pra inglês ver.
I also translate a note from Wikipedia (font of all practical wisdom and folly, indiscriminately mixed together and search-engine optimized) on an incident referred to in the brief essay — The Manioc Scandal — as well as some notes on the most pressing issue of this kind in São Paulo, and opposition to a recent legislative proposal to cut the Gordian Knot of title disputes going back to the Portuguese sesmaria …
Grilagem
Regis Moraes, In Avritzer, Bignotto, Guimarães and Starling (eds.), Corruption: Essays and Criticism. UFMG (Minas Gerais, Brazil), 2008.
It is a notorious fact that a significant portion of the lands “invaded” by the landless rural workers movements in the so-called Vale do Paranapanema in São Paulo are in fact tracts of lands that were previously “invaded” by those who now call themselves their proprietors: Public lands, squatted by noble and respectable gentlemen. With a little ingenuity and a lot of grease – bribes, that is to say – not to mention able lawyers and pliant judges and notaries, they have been able to “legalize” a number of these tracts, which they now defend against the so-called “enemies of the rule of law.”
I will translate a quick note on the Paranapanema issue below.
There is nothing exceptional about this situation. In the late 1960s, at the height of the military dictatorship, the federal chamber of deputies installed a parliamentary commission of inquiry to look into the sale of land to foreigners. The commission’s report was published under the headline “The sale of lands“ in The Amazon in Focus. It was not written by a leftist, or even by a moderate legislator from the loyal opposition, but by Haroldo Veloso, a former military officer and federal deputy for ARENA, the party of the military government.
Even issuing from a mutilated and coerced congress, and under the direction of the party of the generals, the commission accumulated enough data, testimony and documentary evidence to call into question a good part of the landholdings in the Amazon region. The list of barbaric practices was a long one: Claim-jumping, forgery, fake transactions, coercion, murder. To the surprise of some, these acts were not practiced by white latifundiários and their primitive gunslingers. They were the work of modern companies from the Brazilian Southeast – manufacturers, banks, corporations – with their well-trained, well-armed security teams and their well-dressed, well-fed lawyers. The Association of Amazonian Businesses, after all, was headquartered in, where else? São Paulo, and headed up by a São Paulo business executive. All of this, naturally, with extensive cover provided by the public authorities, the Executive, the Legislature and the “independent Judiciary,” which calls itself the last bastion of democracy and the rule of law.
This is corruption in its most primordial form, in the agricultural realm. It tells us much about the perversion of property rights, about the difference between what is and what only calls itself legitimate. It is the gap between the letter of the law and the facts on the ground.
But the perversion of ownership rights aside, there is a perversion of usage rights as well. Land acquired for one use is actually used for something else. The land that belongs to the Indian, but whose subsoil, with its minerals and gemstones, is exploited by a white man who greases indigenous leaders, who are easily infatuated with cars, gadgets and a certain standard of living. The land that belongs to the Indian, but has its surface torn up by logging companies, which also know how to grease Indian leaders into accepting the destruction of their forests, rivers, and hunting grounds. Land that should be used with special care, to avoid erosion, impoverishment and salinization of the soil, is used as a source of quick, vast profit by absentee landlords who lack any connection with or commitment to those who live there, like zombies in a dead world.
Land that receives credit in order for crops to be planted on it lies fallow, waiting for its price to rise, while the credit is used as a source of liquid cash for speculative investments. Needless to say, in order for this to take place, there are public agents who need to be paid off to cooperate in the fraudulent enterprise. Toward the end of the dictatorship, one such scandal was noteworthy for the crudity of the corrupt behavior involved and for its grotesque, almost cartoon-like quality. This was the so-called “manioc scandal.” This noble and heroic tuber, the savior of so many hungry Northeasterners, made fortunes for some and left many unsolved, unpunished murders in its wake. As in many such cases, throughout Brazil and throughout Brazilian history, those involved had taken out loans to plant crops, and then, when it came time to pay their debt, alleged they had lost their harvest and simply defaulted, invariably leaving the public treasury to foot the bill.
We have been watching a soap opera of this kind for decades, without many plot twists to alleviate the monotony: Nearly every year, some 500 major landholders, joined by another 2,500 lesser ones, pressure the federal government to “roll over” their debts … that is, to allow them to continue to live at the expense of the public treasury. To support this maneuver, they count on some 200 federal deputies, the so-called “rural benches,” who condition their votes in the parliament on the acceptance of this blackmail. How much does this con game yield? In 2007, the debt in question was between R$30 and R$40 billion. Of this sum, the 500 largest landholders accounted for nearly 80%. These 500 families, that is to say, “rolled over” an amount three times the annual budget of the Bolsa Familia family income subsidy, which aids 11 million families. Oddly, many of these “dynamic entrepreneurs” and their tame federal deputies and media condemn the Bolsa Familia as a policy that promotes “patron-client” relations with the poor, making them dependent on the government, and what is more, undermines their work ethic by removing the need to make an effort in order to survive. As you can see, even the vocabulary of this debate is corrupt.
The parliamentary maneuvering over the CPI da Terra — a parliamentary commission on agrarian reform — was just jaw-dropping.
Among other things, the Rural Benches demanded that the federal police investigate a news agency specializing in combating slave labor be investigated for subversion. Brasil de Fato.
These people believe the principle of droit du seigneur ought to rule labor relations. Any proposal that is one iota more liberal than that is a Communist plot.
Corruption, then, is easy to spot, so long as we have eyes to see and ears to hear. But the eyes and ears fed by satellite dishes and radio and TV waves are not the sorts of eyes and ears that hear and see.
The Manioc Scandal
Source: Lusophone Wikipedia (with some very bad grammar and spelling and a couple of non-existent factoids corrected for).
The Manioc Scandal was the largest financial scandal in the history of Pernambuco and occurred between 1979 and 1981 in the Banco do Brasil branch in Floresta, resulting in the misappropriation of 1.5 billion cruzeiros (R$20 million in current values) from Proagro, an agricultural incentive program created by the federal government in 1973.
The scam consisted of obtaining false documents in order to receive agricultural credits for the planting of manioc, beans, onions, melons and watermelons, using fake IDs, fictitious properties and nonexistent farmers. The loans were used for planting supposed crops (in fact, never planted) that were later alleged to have been destroyed by drought and no repayments were ever made. The damages were absorbed by agricultural insurance. There were 26 persons involved, among them the manager of the Floresta branch, Edmilson Soares Lins, as well as other Banco do Brasil employees, small and large farmers, and merchants and politicians from Floresta. The case ran to 70 volumes and some 20,000 pages, and was not resolved until just recently.
On March 3, 1982, prosecutor Pedro Jorge de Melo e Silva, in charge of the case, was assassinated in Olinda while buying bread.
In 1999, 14,000 hectares of land seized from persons involved in the Manioc Scandal were appropriated for agrarian reform as the result of 15 lawsuits, while another 13 properties in Floresta were transformed into settlements for landless rural workers.
The regional federal prosecutor in Petrolina, Pernambuco managed to restore R$255,000 to the coffers of the Union that has been embezzled from Proagro, a program of the Ministry of Agriculture. The among had been held in an account belonging to Diormirna de Lima Ferraz, wife of Edinardo Ferraz, one of the principal figures in the scandal.
The case of Edinardo Ferraz is still open in the 20th Federal Bar of Salgueiro and his debt is currently reckoned at R$400,000. The regional prosecutor managed to locate three checking accounts held jointly with his wife. In 2003, the court froze and seized the R$255,000, and in early 2006, ruled that the money be returned to the federal treasury. Diormirna appealed, but her appeal was denied.
Federal attorney Érica Moura Freire, who led this case, argued that contracted in favor of Edinardo’s family, and therefore his wife was responsible for the debts of her husband.
The Paranapanema Conundrum
From an April 2007 interview in Consultor Jurídico — also a source to be taken with a grain of salt, by the way. See
For decades, the Pontal do Paranapanema and Vale do Ribeira regions of São Paulo state have been embroiled in land disputes among landholders, the state government, the landless rural workers movement (MST) and “claim-jumpers.” There has been a copious production of forged documents and many irregular land transactions. To contain these irregularities, the state has filed various law suits contesting the title of devolved public lands. The lawsuits have been grinding along in the courts for years and the few decisions that have been handed down have been contradictory.
In the view of Zelmo Denari, president of the Association of São Paulo State Prosecutors, the debate over title to these lands should be a thing of the past. The prosecutor argues that the productivity of this land should be the criterion used to maintain or remove landholders, and that the federal INCRA should be responsible for the issue.
“This situation is responsible for the economic backwardness of the two regions. The business sector lacks the confidence needed to undertake long-term projects in the area,” Denari says.
Now retired, Denari defend the state in various investigations into the ownership of land that had attracted the attention of “claim jumpers” and later the MST. In the course of his work, he observed that judges simply lack criteria for deciding such claims. The titles to these lands are extremely old and cannot be verified with any degree of confidence.
In an interview with Consultor Juridico, Denari said that Brasil has plenty of space for realizing agrarian reform and that the start of any real reform must come from the devolution of land to the public domain. But this does not happen, in part, because there is no money to pay landholders a fair price of the expropriations.
The retired state’s attorney also spoke of the state attorney general’s performance in claiming past-due taxes on these lands, which today total R$80 billion. In his view, only a third of this amount can be collected. Annually, the state attorney general manages to collect around R$600 million. …
In 2007, the state legislature proposed a measure to cut the Gordian Knot of this problem once and for all, in order to open up the region (good for industrial-scale sugar-cane cultivation) up to agribusiness.
One of its opponents, from the PSOL political party (closely associated with social movements like the MST) noted as follows:
Bill 578: “Legalizing The Land Grab”
State Bill No. 578 of 2007 allows for the sale of public lands without competitive bidding and authorizes the state to renounce its claim on “claim-jumped” land by permitting the normalization of title of lands in excess of 500 hectares, thus legalizing illegal latifúndio. If approved, the bill opens a loophole that would allow the normalization of title to 275,000 hectares that are currently the object of state lawsuits against “claim-jumpers.”
President of the Brazilian Association for Agrarian Reform (ABRA), Plinio de Arruda Sampaio, emphasized in a recent article that “with just 300,000 hectares of land currently in the hands of illegitimate landholders, the government could settle 1,500 of the 150,000 families that have lived for years camped on roadsides all over Brazil, waiting for land to work.”
Shantytown settlements stacked up into the hillsides along the state and federal highways is the saddest sign of this chronic malaise.
A real blight on the landscape. Shocking. Really makes you wonder, about the Brazilians, “Why can’t they get this problem solved?”
Filed under: Brazil, Organized Crime, Politics | Tagged: agrarian reform, fascism, feudalism, grilagem
