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They arrived before midnight, carrying machetes and hoes, hammers and scythes, with plans to seize the land.
When 200 activists and farm workers arrived, the farm was empty, overgrown with weeds, and the farm headquarters was empty, except for a stray cow.
Now, three months later, the village is bustling. On a recent Sunday, children ride bicycles on new roads, women work the soil for their gardens and men pull tarpaulins to shelters. About 530 families live in a camp in Itabela, a city in northeastern Brazil, and have come together to plow and plant fields with beans, corn and cassava.
The brothers who inherited the 370-acre farm want the squatters gone. The new tenant says it’s not going anywhere.
“Work is a process of struggle and confrontation,” said Alcione Manthay, 38, an effective camp leader, who grew up among many such people. “And there is no settlement if there is no occupation.”
Mrs. Manthay and other uninvited settlers were part of the Landless Labor Movement, perhaps the world’s largest Marxist-inspired movement operating in a democracy and, after 40 years of sometimes bloody land occupation, a major political, social and cultural force in Brazil.
The movement, led by activists who call themselves militants, organizes hundreds of thousands of poor people in Brazil to take unused land from the rich, occupy it and farm it, often as a large collective. He reversed, he said, the deep inequality caused by the uneven distribution of land in Brazil.
While leftists embrace their cause – the movement’s red hats depicting a couple holding aloft machetes have become commonplace in hipster bars – many Brazilians see them as communists and criminals. That creates a dilemma for the new leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a longtime supporter of the movement that is now trying to build bridges between Congress and the powerful agricultural industry.
In Latin America, other movements inspired by the principles of Marxism – workers rising up in the class struggle against capitalism – seek to overcome systemic inequality, but none approach the scale, ambition or sophistication of the landless movement in Brazil.
Group organizers and outside researchers estimate that 460,000 families now live in the camps and settlements started by the movement, representing an unofficial membership of nearly two million people, or nearly 1 percent of Brazil’s population. It is, by some measures, the largest social movement in Latin America.
Under the former right-wing president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the movement disappeared. Employment largely halted during the pandemic and then slowly returned in the face of opposition from Mr Bolsonaro and farmers who became more armed under more permissive gun policies.
But now, thanks to the election of Mr. Lula, a longtime political ally, the movement’s followers are seizing land.
“We voted for Lula, but not enough,” said João Pedro Stédile, the movement’s founder, in a message sent to members on Easter Sunday, announcing the “Red April” push to invade new lands.
There are 33 jobs in less than four months of Mr. Lula’s presidency, including eight in one weekend. Under Mr. Bolsonaro, there are about 15 occupations per year, according to government statistics. (About twenty years ago, when the land was less distributed, there were hundreds of invasions every year.)
Mr Lula has said little about the recent invasion, although two cabinet ministers have criticized him.
The recent occupation has sparked a counter movement: “Zero Invasion.” Thousands of farmers who say they don’t trust the government to protect their land, organize to confront the squatters and remove them, although so far, there has been no violence.
“Nobody wants to go to war, but nobody wants to lose their property,” said Everaldo Santos, 72, a cattle rancher who heads a local farmers’ union and owns a 1,000-hectare ranch near the Itabela camp. “You buy, pay, have documents, pay taxes. So you don’t allow people to attack and leave it there,” he said. “You defend what’s yours.”
Despite the aggressive tactics of the landless movement, Brazil’s courts and government have recognized thousands of settlements as legal under a law that says agricultural land must be productive.
The proliferation of legal settlements has turned the movement into a major food producer, selling hundreds of thousands of tons of milk, beans, coffee and other commodities each year, many of them organic, after the movement pushed members to ditch pesticides and fertilizers last year. The movement is now the largest supplier of organic rice in Latin America, according to the union of large rice producers.
However, opinion polls show that many Brazilians oppose the movement’s land occupation. Some of the more militant members of the movement have invaded active farms run by big agribusiness, destroying crops and even taking over the family farm of Brazil’s former president.
On the ground, the conflict pits hundreds of thousands of impoverished farm workers and networks of leftist activists against wealthy families, large corporations and many small family farms.
Conservative lawmakers accused Mr. Stédile, the movement’s co-organizer, of inciting crime by citing new occupations, and have opened a congressional investigation.
A day after Mr. Stédile called off the invasion, he joined Mr. Lula on a state visit to China. (The government brought in representatives from several large food manufacturers.)
Mr. Lula has long had close ties to the movement. Brazil’s first working-class president, he supported it in his first administration twenty years ago. Later, when he was imprisoned for corruption charges which were later dropped, the activists of the movement camped outside the prison for all 580 days of imprisonment.
Inequality in land ownership in Brazil is rooted in colonial-era land distribution policies that consolidated land in the hands of powerful whites.
The government tries to balance the balance by confiscating the fertile and unused land and giving it to the needy. The landless movement has sought to force such relocation by seizing unproductive land.
Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, a professor at the State University of São Paulo who has studied the movement for decades, said that the government has legalized about 60 percent of the occupation of the movement, a level he attributed to the success of the organizers in identifying unused land.
But critics say the government is encouraging the invasion by rewarding squatters with land, rather than forcing them to stand in line, like others who have to go through bureaucratic channels to claim property. Movement leaders say they are seizing land because the government will not act unless pressured.
That is what the people who camp in Itabela want.
The residents of the camp have different paths, but they all have the same goal: their land. A homeless man came with his belongings in a cart. A middle-aged couple left the shack on the farm where they worked, to chance on themselves. And newlyweds making minimum wage decided to squat because they thought they wouldn’t be able to buy land.
“This city is not good for us,” said Marclésio Teles, 35, a coffee picker standing outside a shack built for his family of five, his disabled daughter in a wheelchair next to him. “A place like this is a peaceful place.”
That peace almost ended a few weeks ago.
The brothers who inherited the land from their father in 2020 successfully petitioned a local judge to have the tent demolished. They argued that the land was productive and therefore should not be turned over to the colonists. Activists of the movement admit that there are still some cows on the land, which they try to keep away from the new crops.
The police then evicted the residents, joined by dozens of angry farmers, and were met by around 60 camp residents, some of whom were carrying farming tools.
However, instead of fighting, residents fought back by singing the songs of the landless movement, Ms. Manthay said. The police, worried about a clash, paused the eviction.
The movement’s lawyers have since appealed and asked for a permanent settlement on more than 2,000 hectares owned by the brothers. The state agency said the government should analyze the demands of the movement. The case is still pending.
“If they remove us, we will occupy them again,” Mr. Teles said. “The struggle is constant.”
About 90 minutes down the road, there is a window on the future: a settlement of 5,000 hectares that was declared legal in 2016 after six years of occupation. 227 families there each have 20 to 25 hectares, spread over the hills of farmland and cattle grazing. They share tractors and plows, but use their own parcel farm. Together they produce about two tons of food every month.
Daniel Alves, 54 years old, used to work in other people’s fields before he started squatting on this land in 2010. Now he grows 27 different crops on 20 hectares, showing bananas, peppers, bright pink dragon fruit and Amazon fruit cupuaçu – all organic. . They sell their products at local fairs.
He said he remains poor – his shack is covered with a tarp – but happy.
“This movement is taking people out of poverty,” he said.
His granddaughter, Esterfany Alves, 11, follows him around the garden, petting the donkey and picking ripe fruit. He attended a public school in a settlement partially run by the movement, one of about 2,000 movement schools in Brazil.
The school made protests part of its curriculum and taught students about farming, land rights and inequality.
In other words, Esterfany said, school has taught him “about struggle.”
Flavia Milhorance and Lisa Moriconi contributed reports from Rio de Janeiro.
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