Homeless join month of protests in Brazil

The Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) blocked three access roads into Sao Paulo on Apr. 25, continuing a month-long struggle during which they have invaded a large number of buildings and unoccupied urban sites in several state capitals. In greater Sao Paulo, the movement's actions escalated on Mar. 16, when about 500 families occupied an area of almost 13 million square feet in Itapecerica da Serra, a municipality of 160,000 located 24 miles from Sao Paulo's city center. The invasion had grown to some 3,000 families, a total of 12,000 people, camping in shelters made of bamboo and black plastic sheeting. The MTST and other organizations demanding housing, like the National Union for Popular Housing and the Downtown (Sao Paulo) Homeless People's Movement, stepped up their mass protests this month, holding street marches and rallies in front of government buildings and occupying abandoned old buildings. The MTST's activities have expanded the traditional "Red April," when social movements take action to commemorate International Day of Peasant Struggle on Apr. 17 and the national Indigenous People's Day on Apr. 19. This year these actions extended over several weeks, and in the case of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) are still continuing. "Red April" gets its name from the red flags that are the hallmark of MST demonstrators and carried prominently in their marches. "The biggest social movement in Brazil today is the Landless Movement [MST]," which is campaigning to accelerate the agrarian reform. It joins forces with other movements with common aims, such as protesting social injustice, Breno Bringel, a political scientist and visiting researcher at Campinas University, said in an interview. Apart from the landless MST and the homeless MTST, who are "revitalizing urban protest," organizations of indigenous peoples, garbage pickers and people affected by dams are also active, he noted. There are also organizations fighting for education or health; youth culture groups, such as hip hop; and the Afro-Brazilian movement, Bringel said. Social movements emerged as political actors in Brazil during the 1970s, when they "organized opposition to the military regime," developing new forms of grassroots organization. In the 1980s they acquired new dimensions, going on to claim social rights like the rights of women, the environment and sexual and ethnic minorities, he said. But in the 1990s, with the advance of free market policies, "the influence of organized social movements declined. They lost ground to non-governmental organizations, as public criticism of the system ebbed away," Bringel said. "The demonstrations this April are seeking to break the state-market-service sector tripod, while rejecting policies based on welfare or charity," and they signal a return to the fundamental demand for social transformation, said Bringel, who holds a doctorate in the theory of social movements. The growing strength of social movements, which played an important role in the Brazilian elections "by cementing the forces of the left," contrasts with the crisis in trade unionism which has been exacerbated by the rise in unemployment, the growth of the informal labor market, and the "flexibilization and increased precariousness of labor relations," he said. The fundamental contradiction between capital and labor has been displaced outside the factory, with "workers being excluded or rejected by the formal employment structures," said the academic. "If they do not adapt, trade unions with a vertical structure will only plunge deeper into crisis, because of their disconnection from the new realities," he predicted. The high level of social unrest this April is also a response to political circumstances in Brazil, as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who began his second four-year term on Jan. 1, has belatedly only just completed the appointment of his ministerial cabinet, historian Dulce Pandolfi, head of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis, said in an interview. The trend is for social movements to take more of a leadership role, in Brazil as well as in other countries, because of their "broader and more horizontal action," which makes them capable of responding to more tenuous demands, such as those of the informal economy and of segments of the population lacking many effective rights, like people living in favelas (shantytowns), Pandolfi said. Whereas trade unions are very much tied to negotiating salary issues for those who have jobs, the social movements have "novel" ways of organizing in networks that are horizontal and flexible, equipping them for confronting "more complex relations between social classes," she said. That is the sort of outcome achieved by, for example, an initiative from Rio de Janeiro for the "right to the city," which mobilizes homeless people, favela dwellers and other sectors, such as people concerned about public security, or about recreational and cultural areas, to participate, she said. The MST, which has multiplied the number of its occupations of land considered unproductive, and has even invaded land belonging to the army, has recently abandoned its previous willingness to negotiate with the Lula administration. For years, it considered Lula an ally, but impatience with the slow pace of agrarian reform has led to an apparently confrontational attitude now. "The dozens of demonstrations this April do not indicate a growth of the grassroots movements, but rather greater indignation among activists" in response to the slow implementation of the ongoing agrarian reform, Joao Pedro Stédile, one of the national coordinators of the MST, said in an interview. "The MST's struggles provide a kind of education for the masses, by showing disorganized and apolitical sectors that struggle is the only way to improve people's lives," Stédile said. Indeed, the acronym of the MTST and its way of operating, by occupying buildings but then pulling out if the courts order them to do so, are very similar to those of its rural counterpart.