Reflections on rural violence in Latin america

Sociopolitical Violence in Latin America

Escalated to extraordinary heights in recent decades, particularly during the 20th century.
Violence primarily aimed at preventing the empowerment of subaltern classes and reinforcing the power of dominating classes.
Oppressive violence has extracted a high price from subordinate groups seeking basic human and democratic rights.
A significant proportion of victims and displaced populations come from rural areas.

Rural Violence: Economic, Social, and Political Origins

Analysis of rural society is crucial to understanding the origins of violence and finding resolutions.
The relationship between sociopolitical violence, agrarian structure, and state policy is essential to explore.
Agrarian reform and counter-reform experiences significantly impact rural conflicts and violence.
Countries without significant land reform are contrasted to understand the effects of land distribution.
Countries Examined: Chile, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Central American countries (Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador).
The study emphasizes the need for comparative studies to understand the causes, consequences, and resolution of violence.

Agrarian Structure and Rural Violence

Exploring the relationships between agrarian structure, agrarian reform, and rural violence in Latin America from a historical perspective.
Factors influencing conflicts and violence: political regime, market relations, technological changes, type of crop (e.g., coca), and actions of the state.
The influence of these factors varies according to the agrarian structure and social relations.
The impact of agrarian reforms and peasant demands on rural violence is examined through case studies.
Some countries implemented radical land redistribution (Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Peru, and Nicaragua).
Other countries introduced mild agrarian reforms (El Salvador and Colombia) or none (Brazil).
Major agrarian counter-reforms occurred in Guatemala and Chile, with expropriated land returned to former owners.
In Peru, the co-operative agrarian reform sector was sub-divided into private family farms, known as Parcelación or parcelisation.

Comparative Insights into Rural Violence

Presents initial comparative insights from various case studies, advocating for further comprehensive comparative analyses.
Acknowledges the lack of comparative studies in recent decades, with studies largely focusing on specific countries.
Comparative studies are believed to provide a wider analytical framework for a better understanding of the causes and consequences of rural violence.

Agrarian Structure and Social Origins of Rural Violence

Latin America’s potential for rural violence is largely rooted in its unequal and exclusionary agrarian socioeconomic system, as identified by José Carlos Mariátegui (1955: 27).
Addressing rural violence involves radically transforming the agrarian system to achieve greater equity and democratic participation.
Rural violence has multiple causes, but without solving the land problem, conflicts cannot be fundamentally resolved.
Recent pacification processes in Nicaragua and El Salvador have used land distribution to resolve armed confrontations.
After World War II, decolonization and the Cold War saw the peasantry playing a significant role in socialist revolutions in Third World countries.
Peasant movements, rebellion, and revolutions prompted scholarly attention, often accompanied by violence.
Although the peasantry paid a high price (loss of life, displacement, economic hardship), they rarely achieved their desired objectives.

Historical Context of Rural Violence

In some European countries, peasants achieved gains through violent struggles, such as the abolition of serfdom and land ownership.
In Latin America, the impact of violence on improving the condition of the peasantry needs examination.
Violence has often been directed against the peasantry to ensure subjugation and exploitation.
Rural violence has been endemic and persistent throughout Latin America's history.
The conquest and colonization by Iberian countries was a dramatically and violently episode.
The agrarian system emerging from Iberian colonization has been a major source of conflict and violence.
Large landed estates were established through violence, with peasant communities losing lands and being subjected to servile relations.
Landlords controlled vast latifundia or plantations, monopolizing best land and extracting economic surplus from the peasantry through tenant and labor relations.
Forced labor and slavery were common in the early colonial period.
Peasants paid rents in unpaid labor, produce, or money for access to land.
Indigenous peasantry was displaced and confined to marginal regions.

Evolution of the Agrarian System

The large landed estates (latifundia, hacienda, estancia, or plantation) dominated the agrarian economy and society from the colonial period to the agrarian reform period (1960s-1980s).
The emergence of lucrative export markets led to slavery for labor.
Violence was endemic in harsh labor systems, leading to indigenous and slave rebellions.
A second wave of exports (wheat and livestock) in the 19th century extended the estate or hacienda system.
Landlords expanded estates, transforming independent peasants into tenants or wage laborers.
Peasant protests focused on high rents, labor services, sharecropping agreements, and working conditions.
Indigenous communities struggled against land usurpation.
Peasant actions were generally peaceful (petitions, judiciary, strikes, land invasion, resistance).

Peasant Participation in Revolutionary Wars

The peasantry only participated in revolutionary wars in extreme cases (Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua).
The Great Depression of the 1930s and import substituting industrialization reduced the economic and political dominance of the landed oligarchy.
Eric Wolf distinguishes three phases in the history of peasant movements in Latin America, each linked to the development of the estate or hacienda system.
The third phase involves peasant struggles for agrarian reform, land invasions, trade union rights, and better wages.
These struggles are part of wider political change, with alliances with urban groups being vital for success.
Peasant struggles influence the direction of political changes.
Criticism of broad historical and theoretical frameworks has emerged since the 1980s, favoring local and actor-oriented studies emphasizing agency and identity.
New paradigms add fresh perspectives but should not detract from understanding broad patterns of development and change.
Comparative studies should avoid determinism and unilinearity, being sensitive to insights from post-Marxists and postmodernists.

Colonial and Postcolonial Agrarian System

The colonial and postcolonial agrarian system was exploitative and oppressive.
Peasants had major grievances, especially peasant communities who had lost their land.
The expansion of estates at the expense of community lands continued into the middle of the past century.
Tenants had grievances about high rents and precarious positions.
New conflicts emerged concerning low wages and harsh working conditions.
Unequal agrarian system was a breeding ground for violence.
The system was imposed and maintained violently, contested by those who were oppressed.
Peasants rebelled against oppressive agrarian relations (e.g., Tupac Amaru rebellion in Peru, slave revolts in the Caribbean and Brazil).

The Cuban Revolution and US Policy

The Cuban Revolution in 1959 and Cuba's alignment with the Soviet Union caused the US to rethink its policy towards Latin America.
The Cuban Revolution was interpreted as an agrarian revolution with prominent peasant participation.
US policymakers and Latin American elites feared the Cuban example, which might encourage further guerrilla movements and peasant insurrections.
The US administration under John F Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress.
The Alliance for Progress aimed to modernize Latin America through reforms to avoid socialist revolutions.
It encouraged Latin American governments to undertake agrarian reform programs, providing financial and technical assistance.
The traditional latifundist agrarian system was viewed as a source of rural conflicts, rebellion, and revolution.
Land redistribution and private family farming were believed to turn insurrectionary peasants into a conservative social force.

Questions about Agrarian Reform

Did peasant organizations, movements, and violence play a significant role in this process?
Did agrarian reform succeed in bringing about the social and political incorporation of the peasantry, reducing conflicts and violence?
Or, did agrarian reform open a pandora’s box, leading to further political and social instability and violence?
Experiences of Chile, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Central America are examined.

Chile’s Agrarian Reform and Counter-Reform

Chile illustrates the implementation of a relatively non-violent agrarian reform, despite its radical character.
It also demonstrates a clear case of a later agrarian counter-reform, imposed by an authoritarian state through state-directed violence.
During the agrarian reform (1964-1973), violent deaths did not exceed a dozen.
About half the country’s agricultural land was expropriated.
Many peasants took direct action to speed up expropriation by engaging in farm seizures, escalating from 13 in 1965 to 1278 in 1971.
After the military coup in 1973, fatalities rose into the thousands in the countryside.
Peasant activists, trade union leaders, beneficiaries of the agrarian reform, and indigenous people were the principal victims.
Torture, detention without trial, disappearances, imprisonment, terror became the norm.
It was a class war to destroy the peasant movement as part of the wider aim to crush any revolutionary movement.

State-Directed Violence and Land Redistribution

Violence was controlled from the top by the state, armed forces, and secret police under President General Pinochet.
The peasant movement was disarticulated, and peasant trade unions declined.
Landlords were forced to accept changes, with only part of their properties returned.
Over a third of expropriated land was returned to former owners, less than half distributed to agrarian reform beneficiaries, remainder sold to capitalists.
Almost half the former agrarian reform beneficiaries did not receive any parcela (family plot of land).
The parcelas resulted from privatization and subdivision of collectives and state farms.
Parceleros (owners of a parcela) were a minority; over half sold their parcela because they could not keep up payments or went bankrupt.
The parcelisation process stabilized the countryside.

New Agrarian Structure in Chile

A new agrarian structure emerged with estates either expropriated or transformed into modern capitalist farms.
The peasant farm sector doubled the areas under its control (Jarvis, 1992).
Neoliberal policies led to land concentration, but the agrarian system is less unequal and more flexible compared to pre-agrarian reform (Hojman, 1993).
Land conflicts and rural violence have abated after the transition to democracy in 1990 (Gwynne & Kay, 1997).
Mapuche indigenous communities have invaded farms, claiming ownership rights and demanding government expropriation.
The unresolved indigenous issue has resulted in the largest rural mobilizations since 1973.
The mapuche conflict arises from a lack of land and marginalization from economic growth.

Explaining Relative Absence of Rural Violence

An earlier article (Kay, 1980) explained the relative absence of rural violence in pre-1973 Chile in terms of its political system and patron–client relations between landlords and the peasantry.
Chile’s significant mining sector and early industrialization offered an outlet for rural poverty through rural outmigration.
Electoral reforms from the late 1950s allowed increasing peasant participation in the political system (Kaufman, 1972).
Political parties competed for the peasant vote, putting peasants’ demands on the political agenda.
Peasants did not need violent actions as legal channels were opened.
Peasant demands for land escalated during the Allende government, resulting in illegal farm seizures.
The Allende regime accelerated expropriation but was against farm seizures.
This drove landowners and middle-sized farmers into militant opposition, welcoming the military coup.
The agrarian reform destabilized the political system (Lehmann, 1992), but was not the key factor in Allende’s overthrow.
Allende’s aim to pursue a democratic transition to socialism, the economic crisis, and inability to control social movements led to his overthrow.

Peru's Violence Before and After Sendero Luminoso

In the early 1960s, rural conflicts and peasant demands for agrarian reform intensified in Peru.
Guerrilla movements appeared after the Cuban revolution.
The Trotskyist leader Hugo Blanco led a notable peasant movement in the valley of La Convención.
Tenants refused to pay rents and demanded expropriation.
The Belaúnde government acceded to demands by expropriating estates and redistributing land to former tenants.
President Belaúnde’s 1964 agrarian reform was designed for political purposes.
It was confined to areas where rural conflicts were most intense.
The government hoped to buy social peace and repress the guerrilla struggle.
General Velasco Alvarado’s radical agrarian reform (1969 to mid-1970s) led to further violence.

Opposition to the Agrarian Reform

Many peasants opposed the direction taken by the agrarian reform
There was resistance to the statist and collectivist character of the agrarian reform
Opposition by indigenous peasant communities protested their exclusion from the land distribution process
Peasants from these communities began to invade the newly created state or collective farms demanded that land be transferred to them.
Violent clashes ensued, resulting in many deaths and hundreds of wounded persons
Dissatisfaction among peasant community members or comuneros was exploited by the maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) organization
Peru is a tragic illustration of an agrarian reform policy which, while solving some problems, also opened the way for new grievances and conflicts in the countryside, thereby leading to the emergence of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement.
By destroying feudalist relations and the political and social power of landlords and capitalist farmers (referred to as gamonalismo), the agrarian reform left a power vacuum which the state and/or the peasant organizations were unable to fill.

Shortcomings of the Agrarian Reform

The collectivist character of the agrarian reform was not suitable for much of the country as it overlooked the importance of the estate’s internal peasant enterprises (tenants and sharecroppers) and did not adequately address the problem of the external peasant enterprises, ie the land shortage and historical grievances of the peasant communities (Kay, 1982).
This led to much disillusionment with the agrarian reform which, together with the power vacuum, offered the opportunity for the rise of Sendero.
It was only when peasants from indigenous communities revolted by invading land belonging to the reformed sector and the collective and state farms faced increasing economic difficulties that the government started to transfer some of the reformed sector’s land to peasant communities and to parcelise the remainder for the benefit of the existing beneficiaries, ie subdividing it into peasant family farms (agrarian reform parcelas).
However, these measures came too late and were also insufficient to prevent the rise of Sendero Luminoso.
While the peasantry had a secondary influence on the initial design of the agrarian reform, which was from the top down and of a state-capitalist, corporatist type, it nevertheless unleashed the largest peasant movement ever in Peruvian history, thereby significantly changing the outcome of the agrarian reform.
Despite all the agrarian reform’s imperfections and failings, some of which could have been avoided, it was a necessary and crucial step towards addressing the underlying causes of rural violence in Peru.

The Rise and Fall of Sendero Luminoso

The disastrous violence unleashed by Sendero Luminoso was very expensive in terms of loss of human life and destruction of villages, communities and livelihoods, as well as provoking a massive displacement of rural people, largely to urban centers.
The slogan of the revolutionary movement throughout most of Latin America was ‘Land or Death’ during the 1960s.
In Peru hundreds of thousands of peasants and rural workers joined organizations which succeeded in pressurizing the state to expropriate hundreds of thousands of hectares.
While 166 people died between 1958 and 1964 as a result of clashes in the countryside, this is less than those who died in the first 10 days of August 1991.
While 166 deaths are 166 too many, this figure has to be compared with the over 20 000 people who died as a consequence of political violence during the 1980s (Degregori, 1992: 413).
Furthermore, it is estimated that, up to the early 1990s over 200 000 people have been displaced by the war unleashed by Sendero (ibid: 419).
But the agrarian reform cannot by itself be blamed for this violence as other factors contributed to it, such as Peru’s entrenched racism and marginalisation of its indigenous population.
It is these deep-seated resentments and frustrations, particularly of those comuneros who had become ‘de-peasantised’ and ‘de-indianised’, which Sendero was able to mobilise in the first stages of their violent trajectory from the 1980s to the mid-1990s (Favre, 1984).
Sendero Luminoso offered a new identity and mission to the sons and daughters of comuneros who, thanks to the various reforms of the Velasco government, had been able to improve their education and, in some instances, gain access to provincial universities, but had then been unable to secure an adequate job and were thus frustrated in their upward social mobility.
These youngsters became a fertile recruiting ground for Sendero which used them to gain access to, and support from indigenous communities.

Understanding Sendero Luminoso

Without this fatal flaw in the design and implementation of the agrarian reform, Sendero would never have been able to develop into such a deadly force.
In those areas where the agrarian reform did redistribute land to the peasant communities, either during the initial expropriation process or, more often, after comuneros had invaded the collective or state farms, Sendero was unable to make many inroads.
Those communities and reformed sector farms which were well organised and/or which had close links with urban-based political parties, largely of the civilian (non-insurrectionist) left, were best able to resist the incursions by Sendero (Degregori, 1992).
The agrarian reform in Peru was a major factor in the subsequent violence and a turning point in the country’s history.
It was an essential, though far from sufficient, step for beginning to resolve the agrarian and indigenous question which originated with the Spanish conquest and acquired new dimensions over the centuries.
The agrarian reform was a critical precondition for this historical task.
Sendero would never have been able to achieve such prominence and wreck so many lives if Velasco’s agrarian reform had put the peasant communities at its centre from the start, instead of only marginally incorporating them in the land redistribution process.

Factors Contributing to Sendero Luminoso's Success

The unresolved land issue of peasant communities.
Endemic racism as well as continuing discrimination against and poverty of indigenous groups.
A social and political vacuum arising from the destruction of the oligarchical order and the weakness of social and political institutions, in short a weak civil society.
A new type of young cadres had come into existence, composed largely of students, many of whom were sons and daughters of indigenous peasants, and whose possibilities for social advancement were restricted, creating a powerful resentment against the existing sociopolitical system.
The initial organisational and ideological capacity of Sendero’s leadership and its peculiar brand of maoism appealed to the socially excluded.
The state took inappropriate action to combat Sendero, which further aggravated the situation, for example, in a disastrous military response, using violent counter-terrorist measures, which involved mass violations of human rights.
In the years 1988 to 1991 Peru had the highest figure of ‘disappeared’ people in the world (Starn, 1996: 244).
Peasants were often caught in the crossfire of the battle between the Senderistas and the state violence of the armed forces and the police.
Some comuneros and communities at first supported Sendero, which tapped into their grievances and promised a new future.

The Shift in Allegiance and the Defeat of Sendero

Once the armed forces and the police abandoned their brutal counter-terrorist actions and started to change their attitude towards the peasantry by seeing them as possible recruits in the fight against Sendero, instead of as terrorists, the situation began to shift in favor of the state.
In the years 1983 to 1984 the number of civilian casualties caused by the military declined by more than two-thirds (Starn, 1996: 244).
When the balance of forces began to shift in favor of the state and the senderista peasants began to suffer heavy casualties, many active and passive supporters shifted their allegiance to the state or became neutral.
The increasing disillusionment and alienation of many people with Sendero’s dogmatism, rigidity and use of violence.
Sendero's ideological rigidity led the group to make mistakes and to be unwilling to learn from them, thereby losing support in peasant communities.
Senderistas closed rural markets, displaced the traditional leadership in the peasant communities and imposed their own young cadres as new leaders, used extreme violence in meting out ‘justice’ and used violence in an increasingly indiscriminate manner
This employing the same terrorist tactics which the military had used initially and which had claimed many innocent victims (Starn, 1996: 243).
The authoritarianism, dogmatism and brutal actions of Abimael Guzmán (Presidente Gonzalo, leader of Sendero), which in the end sowed the seeds of his capture by the security forces in 1994 and the demise of his organization..
The inability of Sendero to protect those communities which had been sympathetic to it from the counter-terrorist methods adopted by the police and the military also lost it support.

Factors Contributing to Sendero's Defeat

The existence or formation and development of the rondas campesinas in many highland communities.
The rondas are a sort of vigilante committee organized by members of the communities themselves.
They already existed in northern Peru before the emergence of Sendero and had been formed to prevent cattle rustling (Gitlitz & Rojas, 1983; Starn, 1991; Huber, 1995).
When the government realized that it could not defeat Sendero on its own it encouraged the formation of organizations similar to the original rondas, the so-called Civil Self-defense Committees (Comités de Autodefensas Civil, CDC) throughout the central and southern highlands.

The Role of Rondas Campesinas

‘The great paradox of the rondas is that, originating from the violence, they sowed the basis for peace’ (Pérez (1992: 474).
The changing strategy of the government and the military towards the rondas also contributed to Sendero’s defeat.
Instead of seeing the rondas as potential terrorist organizations sympathetic to Sendero the government began to realize that these were genuine grassroots associations which were attempting to defend the livelihoods of their members and compensate for the shortcomings of the state in terms of its inability to protect them against rustling and crime, to administer justice as they saw it and to provide essential services.
With the changing attitude of the government towards the rondas the military began to establish links with them and to provide them with weapons, albeit in limited numbers and of the most simple kind.

The Peasant Communities and End of Sendero Luminoso

The key actor behind the defeat of Sendereo Luminoso was the peasant communities who had also been its principal victims and who were initially victims of the security forces as well.
Once Sendero had been defeated and people could visit the areas which had been under its control again that the true extent of the havoc it had created became evident and the difficult task of reconstruction could begin (Wilson, 1997).
In the areas where Sendero had been most active, as in Ayacucho, the changes brought about in the countryside by the years of violence has been profound (Degregori, 1996).
Complete villages had been destroyed or abandoned and whole local economies and social networks disrupted or uprooted.
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had to abandon their social and economic development projects (Smith, 1992).
It will take many years of concerted efforts by the community, the government and NGOs to rebuild the economic and social fabric of these communities.

Colombia's Enduring Violence

Colombia conjures up an image of perpetual violence, seen as the Latin American country where violence has been the most widespread and persistent.
Colombians refer to one of their historical periods from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, as ‘La Violencia’ (The Violence) (Fals Borda, 1969).
The 1980s and 1990s would be even more violent in terms of the greater intensity, variety, intricateness, and geographical reach of the violence, leading some authors to refer to it as ‘Las Violencias’ (The Violences) (Sánchez & Meertens, 2001: 194).
This has even led to the establishment of the specific profession of violentólogos (violentologists) in Colombia, who specialize in the study of violence (Sánchez & Avilés, 2001: 6).
The manifold aspects of violence in Colombia and its changing characteristics throughout the country’s history make it difficult to analyze and comprehend.
Violence in Colombia is a complex web of interacting, multifaceted and evolving factors, with multiple causes and manifestations.
Interpretations about violence in Colombia tend to differ more markedly than for other Latin American countries.
The state itself has been involved in many illegal acts of violence, perpetrated by the armed forces, the police, and paramilitary groups linked to the state.

The Land Problem and Violence in Colombia

Linkages between the land problem and violence in Colombia are complex.
Most authors agree that the land question is a major factor in explaining the country’s violent history.
Periodization of Colombia’s violence (Meertens, 1997):
- First period (1930s): Growth of peasant organizations and actions, particularly in coffee-growing areas.
- Peasants demanded the abolition of feudalist labor-services, the right to cultivate coffee, and property rights.
- The government enacted the Land Law (Ley de Tierras) in 1936 to modernize estates, provide land titles, and redistribute land.
- The legislation backfired, as landlords expelled tenants and the government did not confront them.
- Second period (La Violencia, late 1940s to 1960s): Dramatic escalation of homicides, with over 200,000 people killed between 1946 and 1966.
- The Conservative Party-dominated government unleashed repression against the peasant movement.
- Peasant organizations evolved into a guerrilla movement, targeting the government.
- The conflict became a struggle between the Conservative and Liberal parties.

Evolution of Violence in Colombia

Political banditry was part of an individual strategy tradition characteristic of small and medium coffee farmers.
Peasant movement had been fractured and disarticulated, thereby dissolving into factionalism, where peasants either supported conservative or liberal armed groups.
Third period (1970s): Less violent, with the agrarian system becoming more complex due to 'capitalism from above' and 'capitalism from below'.
Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (ANUC) declined, leaving a political vacuum occupied by guerrillas, drug traffickers, paramilitaries, and self-defense militia.
Fourth period (1980s and 1990s): Revolutionary guerrilla groups extended their reach, and drug dealers entered the scene.
Landlords and peasants are involved in coca growing, blunting class conflict.
The US government has exercised a growing influence on Colombia's coca policy, which has become increasingly militarized.
Legitimate social demands by the rural population have been portrayed by government propaganda as a drug issue, justifying repressive measures or ignoring the real crisis faced by the peasantry and indigenous groups.

Complexities of Violence in Colombia

As a result of the new complex of violence 25 000 to 35 000 people were killed annually during the 1990s.
About 13% of these violent deaths can be considered political.
While it is mutually convenient for the government of Colombia and the United States to attribute these principally to drug traffic, it is increasingly evident that much of it is, in fact, politically motivated; that, while some killings are obviously the result of guerrilla activities, far more are a consequence of state terrorism, perpetrated by the army or by para-military forces whom they sanction …
…counter-insurgency has generated almost three times as many casualties among non-combatants as among the guerrillas, and has created a refugee population of 600 000 internally displaced peasant families, drug traffickers have acquired 21 percent of the country’s arable land (Ross, 1997: 28, 30; the data refer to the early 1990s).

Displacement and Role of Political Actors:

1 200 000 people have been displaced by the violence (58% being women and girls), forcing largely rural inhabitants to escape to the cities (Meertens, 2001: 134).
30% of displaced people said they were fleeing from the guerrillas, 35% blamed paramilitary units and 15% claimed the army had forced them to move.
One of the key demands of the guerrilla rebels is agrarian reform, which continues to be a major aspiration of the peasantry and landless rural workers.
The class struggles for land resulted blurred by regional structures and the constant insertion in political conflicts of another kind, whose divisions cut across class lines (Meertens, 1997).
The drug mafia has penetrated the Colombian political system up to the highest level and has thus become a major actor in the country’s political conflicts.

Brazil's Landless Peasant Movement

The principal protagonist in the countryside over the past few decades has been the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Rural Workers Movement, which has some 500 000 adherents, making it the largest peasant movement in South America.
It has spearheaded over 1000 land invasions or farm seizures, demanding the expropriation of the land occupied which is generally unused land belonging to the landlords’ estate.
The MST is a combative and well organised group whose strategy is to occupy uncultivated farmland.
Land inequality is particularly acute in Brazil, where only 4% of farm owners control 79% of the country’s arable land (Veltmeyer et al, 1997).
Brazil has 2.5 million landless peasants.
A variety of peasants are involved in these land occupations, mainly rural semi-proletarians or proletarians, such as wage workers, squatters, sharecroppers and tenants (Petras, 1998a).

MST's Actions and Government's Response:

The landless peasants had pressurised the government through direct action, which included blocking highways and sit-ins at local offices of the state’s agrarian reform institute (INCRA), to settle over 120 000 families on land since the beginning of their actions in the mid-1980s (Veltmeyer et al, 1997: 181, 192).
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso settled 285 000 landless peasant families on expropriated plots and aims to grant formal titles to a further 400 000 families who have been occupying land abandoned by previous owners.
There have been many casualties as landlords and their hired gunmen (pistoleros) acted with impunity.
Many protestors also died and were wounded in clashes with the militarised police.
Estimates suggest almost 1000 land-related killings have taken place since 1985 (Padgett, 1998: 32).

The Battle for Land:

Peasants from northern Pará state blocked a highway in Eldorado de Carajás to draw attention to their demand for the right to settle on idle farmland nearby, The state government responded with busloads of heavily armed military police.
After the cops fired a volley of tear gas, the peasants charged, waving machetes, hoes, scythes and a few pistols. The police opened fire with automatic weapons. The result was nineteen demonstrators died and 40 more were wounded by the police fusillade.
The MST leadership is aware of the need to forge linkages and make alliances with urban organizations in order to extend public support for their goals.
It has developed connections with the urban left and the Workers Party (PT), thereby being part of a wider project of social and political transformation.
In the last presidential elections in 1998 the MST mobilized support behind Luiz Ignácio da Silva (nicknamed Lula) who came second in the presidential race.
The MST is the most dynamic, creative, inspiring and influential political movement in today’s Brazil (Hammond, 1999).
The actions of the MST illustrate how old-style class struggles, though with some new features, have resurfaced in the contemporary world.

Agrarian Reform and Violence in Brazil:

Except for Argentina, Brazil was the only country in Latin America which by the 1990s had not yet undertaken any significant agrarian reform.
This lateness can be explained by the political power of landlords, who were able to block any earlier attempts at agrarian reform, and by the state’s decision to open the Amazon region for colonisation, thus relieving some of the pressure for land from the impoverished mass of landless peasants.
This colonisation of the pioneer frontier provided a temporary ‘safety-valve’ by releasing the social tensions in the countryside as it provided possibilities for movement and improvement for some rural workers.
Much of the violence in the frontier region resulted from actions of landlords and other capitalists, who claimed the land colonised by the pioneer peasants (the posseiro) as their own and often expelled them by force, especially after they had cleared the land.
Certain major development projects also resulted in violence because of the forced displacement of populations and negative impact on the livelihoods of the local population and on the environment (Hall, 1989).
The lack of an institutional infrastructure in the frontier region also meant that violence was often used to resolve conflicts rather than the legal or administrative mechanisms of the states.
Violence was also used as a means of social control and in particular for dominating labour.
By preventing the intensification of conflicts in the region of origin of the migrants the colonisation created new conflicts and violence in the frontier region (Foweraker, 1981).
The widespread violence in rural Brazil is an expression of the struggle for land and survival by the rural poor.
Agrarian reform is still a major issue in Brazil, is crucial to tackling rural poverty and is one of the root causes of rural violence.

The Chiapas Rebellion in Mexico

The Chiapas peasant rebellion led by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), which burst onto the political scene on 1 January 1994, may not seem to support the idea that rural conflict and violence are more likely to occur in a highly inegalitarian and exclusionary agrarian system.
After all Mexico had the first and most significant peasant and agrarian revolution in postcolonial Latin America.
Most extensive agrarian reforms took place in Mexico.
With the modernization of agriculture and the vast irrigation projects