A Cunning, Naive, and Laughable Little Ploy – Folha de S. Paulo, October 24, 1986

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

I have come across, here and there, statements by prominent farmers who, while opposing the expropriation — at a paltry price — of land already used for farming or livestock raising, nevertheless profess a general support for land reform.

Contradiction? No, they reply. They explain that they prefer to define agrarian reform exclusively as the compulsory creation of small settlements on idle land, whether privately owned or government-owned.

Almost everything about this stance strikes me as odd.

“Agrarian reform” is a term whose meaning has become clearly defined in everyday language since the 1960s, when the ideological and political struggle began on a national scale—an ongoing fight that is now reaching its peak.

For the “man on the street,” agrarian reform today signifies the immense transformation of the socioeconomic structure by which farming and livestock raising would cease to operate under the optional and somewhat haphazard coexistence of large, medium, and small properties, and would instead be reorganized into a vast, uniform network of “settlements.” In this new system, family-sized plots would be worked directly by “settled” families or through communal, self-managing labor under the overarching direction of state-run cooperatives.
Kolkhozes? More or less…

This complete overhaul of the structure is being implemented through executive decrees and the payment of small compensation to expropriated landowners. In other words, it is confiscation and therefore a serious violation of property rights.

This is what the “man on the street” currently perceives as agrarian reform.

The same occurs with a people’s language and customs. Both arise spontaneously, organically, and vitally from circumstances deeply rooted in reality. It is futile to attempt to change them through the arbitrary pressure of a minority or by government decree. The word house, for example, has a perfectly defined meaning in common usage. It would be pointless for a handful of politicians or grammar pedants to decree that it should henceforth be called, backward, esuoh. Or that it should refer exclusively to stores (Souza “House,” Mendes “House,” and so on) and no longer to buildings intended as a family’s residence.

Thus, I do not believe that an arbitrary “decree” issued by a few rural strongmen can cause agrarian reform to come to mean, in common parlance, a single, restricted type of transformation, rather than the immense and revolutionary change currently designated by that term. For example, the confiscatory expropriation of unused land — whether vacant or government‑owned — as well as private land merely awaiting cultivation.

This, then, is the narrow sense in which certain rural leaders believe they can persuade the public to accept their definition of agrarian reform. I understand that, in the minds of these rural mandarins, this semantic “trick” is meant to serve purely propagandistic ends. It would allow them to proclaim themselves supporters of agrarian reform and thus play—in the eyes of the instigators of rural unrest—the role they imagine to be sympathetic: that of good‑natured, accommodating figures, rather than firm defenders of their rights as landowners.

When controversies emerge over the confiscatory expropriation of lands already effectively used for farming or livestock, these mandarins could then oppose the unjust measure with all their might.

Their opponents would naturally point out that such a stance was contradictory, since these leaders had publicly declared their support for agrarian reform. The good‑natured and accommodating farmers would then explain, with a mixture of shrewdness and candor, that there was no contradiction at all. They had simply crafted a new, more restricted meaning for agrarian reform — one that would encompass only the expropriation of so‑called idle lands…

They honestly believed they could silence the radical land reformers, as if those reformers couldn’t see through their scheme and expose that these seemingly kind-hearted figures were just clever tricksters… and poorly skilled ones at that. And as if the Brazilian people were so naive as to fall for such a simple ploy.

So, the neo-land-reform advocates popping up here and there gain nothing from their petty tricks; on the contrary, they lose out because of them.

In the eyes of non-rural Brazil, the great moral strength of the farming class lies in their honesty and dependability. If they get caught red-handed using such a trick, the left will quickly turn against them with the most damaging propaganda tool: ridicule. Nothing will make up for that harm.

As a friend of the rural community—where I see the greatest moral strength of this poor country, even as moral reserves become more scarce and fragile—I hereby urge our farmers not to fall for this petty and useless little trick.

My role as president of the National Council of the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP) gives me a respected position to make this appeal to my friends in the farming community, as we at the TFP have been selflessly fighting against socialist and confiscatory agrarian reform for 25 years.