Everyone in the parish has some tie to the land, from families who’ve been farmhands for generations to others who’ve worked in the sugar mills or tried to make a go of it as sharecroppers. Not one owns a piece of land. The MST organizers told a packed hall about the movement’s successes: 250,000 families had acquired land in 2,600 settlements nationwide. The MST set up 400 cooperatives and developed 96 small to medium plants that produced fruit and vegetables, meat and dairy products, grains and sweets. The most profitable coop, Novo Sarandi in Rio Grande do Sul, was grossing $12 million a year, bringing its families an income ten times greater than the $75 a month on which most country people have to survive.
“The struggle isn’t only for land and bread,” said organizer Milton Soares. “It is for the minds of our children.” He told his audience about the settlements’ schools, where 95,000 children from first to fourth grade receive a basic education. Older children and adults attend classes to learn to read and write. “Wherever there is a camp of the landless, you will find teachers dedicated to planting the seeds for this priceless harvest.”
Luiz Alves de Sá, a sharecropper working a plot seven miles outside Rosário, was one of several people who stood up and spoke. He is a tall, scrawny mulatto, with thinning gray hair.
“I’ve been working ever since I was nine, and now at fifty-six I still can’t scrape together enough to buy a bicycle. I never went to school. I went into sharecropping slavery with my father. It’s like selling yourself to the devil. You never get out of debt. A landowner can come and pay what you owe and take you to his farm. They buy you and sell you over and over. You are degraded from people down to merchandise.”
Before the meeting ended, Luiz Alves de Sá and twenty-nine others declared their families ready to march with the Landless Army.
The invasion of Engenho Santo Tomás took place ten days later on April 9, 2000. The MST organizer, Milton Soares, and Padre Tôninho led the thirty families involved, including ninety-two adults and sixty-eight children. Tôninho was on good terms with the senhor de engenho, Clodomir Cavalcanti, and wanted to be present in case of a confrontation.
The Cavalcantis possess 25,000 acres in the valley occupied by Nicolau Gonçalves Cavalcanti in March 1545. The habit of dividing inheritances and lands among the heirs of senhores de engenho reduced the original holding three times that size. The Cavalcantis are major shareholders in the giant Usina Jacuribe refinery owned by a Dutch multinational group. Allied to this enterprise, Engenho Santo Tomás has 15,000 acres of cane under cultivation, producing one million bags of sugar annually.
The MST shock troops set their eyes on a 900-acre parcel a mile from the Casa Grande. This land, which abuts the old road between the engenho and Rosário, has a wild, deserted appearance like a small, overgrown jungle.
When Nicolau Cavalcanti first came to the valley, a Tobajara clan’s malocas stood here. Afterwards, the place became the stamping ground of the degredado, Affonso Ribeiro, and his numerous descendants. The old reprobate held court under some ancient trees, rejoicing in a Garden of Eden, where no free man needed to work. Generations of Affonso Ribeiro’s tribe squatted on this land, doing precious little until the last one drifted off. A thick matted plantation extends in every direction. Here, the Cavalcantis never grew one stalk of cane.
The church hall at Magdalena served as assembly point for the 160 insurgents. They gathered in the early hours of Sunday morning, April 9, bringing bundles of bedding and clothes, bags of food, pots and pans, farm implements, even small animals and crates of chickens. Three buses and four trucks stood ready to transport them to Engenho Santo Tomás.
The atmosphere was festive, with bold talk, laughter and camaraderie. Once they took the decision to invade, the MST organizers acted swiftly. They wanted to be on the march before word of their plans spread. When the opposition came, as inevitably it would, they planned to be on the ground and ready to resist.
At 2:00 a.m., Milton Soares told the families to board the buses and trucks. A handful of friends were present to bid them farewell. The engenho was only thirty-five miles from Rosário on the old road, but the journey they were embarking on could take them immeasurably farther than they’d ever been.
Padre Tôninho’s VW roared into life. Soares climbed in beside him. They rattled over to the head of the column. A defiant blast from the VW’s horn and they were off.
It took three hours to cover the thirty-five miles. The old road was in poor condition. As they crawled up the heights south of the valley, one of the trucks slid into a ditch. The men and boys struggled for an hour to free it. The mishap didn’t dampen their spirits. Excitement rose as they drove on, singing MST songs and shouting slogans.
“Agrarian reform! When do we want it? Now!”
“Land! When do we want it? Now!”
At 5:00 a.m., the column drew up on the road next to the Cavalcantis’ property. The bus doors flew open and men, women and children poured out. Others jumped off the trucks, carrying sickles and machetes. They streamed across the road onto the vacant land.
Tôninho was at Soares’ side, as he led the occupation. In no time at all, men and boys were hacking away at the brush to make a clearing for the settlement. Women and children carried their possessions from the trucks and buses. The sense of urgency was real, for every minute counted.
The sharecropper, Luiz Alves de Sá, helped Soares cut down a long, thin tree, for a flagpole. They stripped its branches and planted it in a hole. Soares took out the MST flag and hoisted it to the top of the pole.
A cheer rose from all who lifted their eyes to the red banner floating against the sky.
Tôninho bade them join in a prayer of thanks and to ask for God’s protection.
When the worship ended, Luiz Alves de Sá said what was on everyone’s mind: “Nothing will get me off this land — my land!”
Tôninho was alone in the Casa Grande’s reception hall, waiting below the carved staircase. In the past, when he came to the engenho with Dr. Juraci, the Cavalcanti mansion had been locked up. A few times, he climbed inside and crept through the dusty rooms, amazed at their number and size. He’d gone into the chapel, where he’d seen a saint’s image revered by the family, a little Santo Tomâs with only stumps for arms. Later he learned that a Dutch soldier had committed this sacrilege in 1645, when the Cavalcantis resisted the Hollanders who ruled Pernambuco.
In the 1980s, after years of neglect, Clodomir Cavalcanti’s wife, Xeniá Freitas de Melo, restored the Casa Grande. Senora Xeniá came to Santo Tomás as a social worker in 1958, employed by Clodomir’s father, Durval Cavalcanti, to uplift the lives of the plantation workers. In 1960, Senora Xeniá triumphantly bettered her own fortune by marrying the senhor de engenho’s firstborn son.
Since becoming a parish priest at Rosário, Tôninho had come to the Casa Grande several times to say mass in the private chapel. The previous November, he celebrated the wedding of Clodomir and Xeniá’s third son, Darcy. — On this day in April 2000, when Clodomir Cavalcanti came to greet him, Tôninho’s reception was less cordial.
“Is this doing God’s will? Do you think it is right to disrespect the laws of Brazil?” Cavalcanti fumed. “This isn’t land reform. It is theft, plain and simple. It’s chaos and madness.”
“It is against God’s will to deny hope to the poor. For centuries, Brazil heard the Cry for Land. Until Sem Terra, nobody listened,” said Tôninho.
Clodomir Cavalcanti is president of the local Brazilian Farmers’ Association. The MST’s decision to invade Engenho Santo Tomás was a calculated one: Cavalcanti is an outspoken opponent of Sem Terra’s methods, but strongly condemns landowners who take the law into their own hands. In the past decade, 1,000 peasants have died in land conflicts, the majority killed by hired guns in the service of landowners. Rogue police enforcers have slain MST members, as happened in 1996 when nineteen landless citizens were butchered in a stand-off on a road at Eldorado de Carajás in the state of Pará: The attackers hacked peasan
ts to death with their own farm implements, and executed seven victims in cold blood.
“I’m not against land reform. The government has seized land for 300,000 families. I’ve no problem with this. I’m against people who think they’re above the law,” said Cavalcanti.
He would go to court to get the thieves kicked off Engenho Santo Tomás. “I can’t guarantee what others will do,” he added. He warned the young priest that other members of the Farmers’ Association might take action against the squatters to forestall further invasions.
On Wednesday afternoon, Padre Tôninho received word of an imminent assault against “Affonso Ribeiro,” the name given the new settlement by its founders. A Magdalena parishioner overheard men in a bar talking about a raid that night.
Tôninho left immediately to warn the families. He took the main highway to Engenho Santo Tomás, which was half the distance; two miles from the plantation, an intersection led to the old road. He reached Affonso Ribeiro in less than thirty minutes.
There’d been three days of furious activity. Each family raised a single-roomed structure of branches covered with black plastic sheeting. Two thatched shelters housed a dispensary and schoolroom, where the children had attended their first classes that morning. Work had started on a communal vegetable garden, as well as the heavy labor of clearing the jungle for fields.
Milton Soares was away in Recife and had left Luiz de Sá in charge of security. There was no panic at the padre’s news. Luiz reminded everybody that at any sign of trouble, he would ring a bell to assemble around the flagpole. They’d stand together, men, women and children, to defend their land.
Tôninho was staying, too. He took a machete and helped cut tree branches and sticks to make a fence on the side of the encampment facing the road.
At 3:30 a.m., lookouts saw the lights of a car. Luiz ran to the bell and rang it. People began streaming to the flagpole. Those with children to wake took longer, picking up their smallest ones and running with them. Men, women, and teenagers held machetes and sickles. A few carried clubs made from tree limbs.
One after the other, five vehicles rolled to a stop and switched off their lights.
Tôninho had had his head down at a table in the schoolroom. He ran over to Luiz and together they did what they could to calm the people around them.
The siege of terror lasted three hours. Almost immediately, the hired intimidators started firing their shotguns into the air, blast after blast that tore into the night. In moments of silence, their voices carried to the camp, cursing the “communists” and the “red priest.” They exploded dynamite bombs beside the stick fence and set a section alight. There was the sound of breaking glass, from bottles of cachaça they emptied.
Just as it was getting light, a pick-up with six men in the back, stormed the gap blasted open in the fence and headed for the shelters. A seething crowd, brandishing farm implements and shouting defiantly, quickly surrounded the truck.
Only the pleas of Padre Tôninho averted a bloody confrontation. Both sides backed off, the men in the pick-up reversing out of the camp, half-drunk and vowing never to abandon their campaign for “justice.”
For another hour, the justiceiros stood around, talking and smoking, and continuing to hurl threats and insults across the fence. The defenders shook their fists and shouted back. Suddenly, the groups standing in the road broke up and swaggered over to their vehicles. A few more shots in the air and they roared off.
The defenders of Affonso Ribeiro gave a mighty shout. Husbands hugged their wives. Parents grabbed children and hoisted them on their shoulders for a victory march through the camp. It was not over, they knew, but they’d won the first battle. The soil they trod was a step closer to being their own.
Too late, Tôninho caught the glimmer of sun on the pick-up. The hitmen had pulled off the Rosário road, concealed the vehicle behind bushes and lain in wait for him. They fired five shots at the VW, shattering the windshield and blowing out its tires. The last Tôninho knew he was fighting for control, as the car spun off the road, hit a tree stump and overturned.
Clodomir Cavalcanti came down the highway ten minutes later and found him. He jumped out of his Mercedes and ran over to the wreck. Tôninho had cuts and bruises, but miraculously was otherwise unhurt. His rescuer used a tire lever to jimmy open the door and free him.
Twenty minutes later, Tôninho was in the Casa Grande at Santo Tomás, where Clodomir Cavalcanti insisted he rest, until the engenho’s doctor came to check him over. They were alone in the big house, Clodomir’s wife away on a trip.
Tôninho accepted Cavalcanti’s word that he had no part in the attempted assassination nor had he sent armed men to harass the squatters.
While they waited for the doctor, Clodomir remembered the priest’s grandfather. “Dr. Juraci tried to make a revolution that could’ve got him killed. It didn’t work. Instead, he came to serve the poor the best way he knew. They revere his name at Santo Tomás still.”
“That revolution didn’t begin with Dr. Juraci,” Tôninho said. “My grandfather, Antônio Paciência, died fighting in the same struggle at Canudos, and countless others, too, in every corner of Brazil where men and women dream of a better life. They are only asking what has been denied them for centuries: justice.”
Clodomir Cavalcanti stood silently at a window of the Casa Grande overlooking the valley of his ancestors. In the distance, he could see the patch of jungle with the settlement of Affonso Ribeiro and the people who came to seek a new country. Not for the great men of the earth alone but all Brazilians.
Mariette da Silva Prado
On a night in March 2000, the mother of fifteen-year-old Carminha Nascimento reported to the police at Tiberica in São Paulo state that her daughter had been missing for sixteen hours. “She’s probably sleeping with some man,” a policeman told her. Another advised her to return to the police station in six hours if she had not found her child by then.
Irene Nascimento walked five miles in the rain to a house on the north of the city to seek help. She got there at 2:30 a.m. Despite the hour, Dona Mariette invited her in.
Mariette da Silva Prado listened to the woman’s story, and even before she finished, picked up the phone to the police. She let fly with a barrage of words, denouncing them and demanding that they look for Carminha, and keep looking until they found something.
Irene Nascimento was shivering with cold. Dona Mariette made her put on dry clothes, which came from her own wardrobe.
The two women kept a vigil for six hours. Irene often saw Dona Mariette in Riachuelo, the biggest of Tiberica’s favelas or shantytowns, but never spoke personally with her. Now she sat in her kitchen and talked about Carminha, who worked hard like her mother. Her daughter did washing for families in Pinellas, not far from Dona Mariette’s house. Carminha had a steady boyfriend, Ernesto Leal, a gas station attendant who was saving money for the couple’s wedding.
The vigil ended tragically at 9:15 a.m., when the police called to report that they’d found the young woman’s body at the Rio Ipê. She’d been raped and stabbed multiple times.
Mariette da Silva Prado was at Irene Nascimento’s side when she identified her child in the Tiberica morgue. Afterwards she sped across the city to the meeting of a human rights group, juggling a cell phone as she tore through the streets. Lunch followed with members of the powerful Clube das Monções, where the name of Dona Mariette had been anathema. The Clube still didn’t like her, but were respectful, like old dogs with wounds to remember.
At 3:00 p.m. she swept into the Casa dos Meninos, the House of Children, in the center of Riachuelo. The crowd of kids playing outside rushed to greet her, small hands grasping to touch her dress. She stayed in her office until 8:30 p.m., when she left for the Teatro Machado de Assis to see Pelago, a new play about a crooked union boss in São Paulo.
“Living is necessary,” Dona Mariette says, remarking on her staying power. “A great part of our lives, we need to work for food, for politics,
for solidarity. Working like a machine, I’m tremendously tired. Even super-tired I’m Brazilian. I find time just to enjoy living.”
Mariette da Silva Prado shares the zest for life of her bandeirante ancestors, pathfinders like the fearless captain of river convoys, Benedito Bueno da Silva, whose statue dominates the entrance to the Clube das Monções. — A great hero of the old dogs who bristle at the entrada of women like Dona Mariette. — She is bold and tough, and has patience and perseverance. Her tirelessness in pursuing her goals approaches a religious fervor, but she is not a demagogue. She can be warm and funny, and for all her toughness, she has a tender heart.
Co-workers at the Casa dos Meninos, founded by Dona Mariette in 1994, see her at the end of a day setting out with a carload of “her” children. The shelter regularly cares for 200 boys and girls, from toddlers to young adults. Moving among them, Dona Mariette appears to know every one by name. On nights when she drives a group to their homes, she rarely stops work before 10:00 p.m., taking time to chat with parents and others along the way.
There are people, Dona Mariette’s neighbors in Pinellas, for example, who’ve never put a foot in Riachuelo. They glimpse the red and brown canker when they take off or land at Tiberica Airport. They read stories in the Tribuna de Tiberica about drugs, shooting wars, blood and abject misery in the favelas. Sporadically, Tiberica’s military police put on a fierce show of storming the shantytown, but are as impotent as the Brazilian army that bogged down at the great fort of Riachuelo in Paraguay in the nineteenth century.
Her neighbors find it incredible that she risks her life going to the favela by day, let alone driving around in the dark. “I admire what she’s doing but one night she’ll be assassinated,” said a neighbor. “It will be one of her kids who pulls the trigger and ends her good work.”
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