Land Invasions, Agrarian Reform, and Related Issues – Folha de S. Paulo, April 21, 1986

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

Some people believe that taking action against the occupations of agricultural properties amounts to opposing land reform. I oppose both the occupations and the reform itself, and I am no less opposed to the conflation of these two completely different issues. In this case, the confusion is obvious.

1. Agrarian Reform (AR) is a legal procedure by which the Executive Branch decrees and distributes agricultural land based on law. If necessary, in the final stage, the Military Police are tasked with removing any landowners who are reluctant to leave land they had recently owned.

2. Unlike agrarian reform itself, land invasions carried out by groups of supposedly starving people—whose authenticity, incidentally, has never been proven—are clearly illegal acts. They are neither decided upon nor carried out by government authorities but by mobs assembled and driven to attack at the initiative of mere private individuals. In blatant violation of the law, these mobs invade any properties their instigators designate.

As we just observed, none of these shows that the invasions share any traits with the Agrarian Reform. From this perspective, they are actually the opposite.

Therefore, it is clearly inconsistent to claim that opposing invasions automatically implies creating obstacles to Agrarian Reform.

3. Incidentally, I believe that the opinions of Professors Silvio Rodrigues and Orlando Gomes regarding rural landowners’ right to defend themselves in the event of an invasion (which the TFP has been publicizing at the request of farmers) do not address the issue of agrarian reform but instead focus on the invasions themselves. Anyone who claims—like some leftist media outlets have been doing, with much fanfare—that fighting invasions amounts to blocking the implementation of agrarian reform would be accusing the government of being scandalously weak. Because then the government would be admitting its inability to carry out, through the legal means already in place, the agrarian reform it has proclaimed as a central part of its program. And, to hide this shameful weakness, the government would then, in a Machiavellian move, make itself an accomplice to disorder and violence. Conversely, those working to prevent occupations by alerting private initiative act as defenders of order and help the government fulfill its most immediate and essential mission: preventing violence.

4. By clarifying for landowners their rights and duties in the face of land invasions, the opinions in question are not fomenters of discord or conflict. They could not be more characteristic of order, nor more genuinely pacific. To accuse these opinions of leading to civil war is to deny the obvious. Civil war is ignited by those who preach and practice widespread violence, not by those who prevent violent invasions from becoming a fait accompli unpunished throughout the national territory.

Anyone describing a series of armed reactions by farmers defending their land as a civil war must assume a series of illegal invasions triggered these reactions. However, in such a case, the violence—the so-called civil war—would not have started with the reaction. Every reaction is, by its very nature, secondary: it presumes a primary act, namely the attack or invasion. Therefore, the civil war would have been initiated by the serial attackers or invaders. This is crystal clear.

5. It has been argued intermittently that land invasions are not illegal because modern socioeconomic realities have rendered the articles of the (1917) Civil Code, on which Professors Silvio Rodrigues and Orlando Gomes base their opinions, outdated. Claiming that the law can be repealed on this basis lacks legal support in Brazil.

Setting aside the weakness of this claim of obsolescence, it is also important to note how flawed the argument supporting it is. Sectors of the ecclesiastical and political left argue that the destitution of the alleged crowds of squatters would make the application of the legislation cited in the opinions in question harsh, even inhumane, given the current socioeconomic crisis.

First and foremost, one must argue that no solid scientific evidence has proven the existence of this widespread misery among the masses. The pro-land reform press loudly claims the existence of this misery. Making a claim is easy, but proving it is what truly matters. The proponents of the invasions offer no proof whatsoever. On the contrary, pro-invasion propaganda and the actual invasions suggest the opposite.

Let me clarify. First, it is important to distinguish between recognizing the existence of “pockets of poverty” in certain rural regions of Brazil and identifying the various members of these squatter groups as truly destitute. It is this latter group that I focus on here. As noted, no evidence has yet been provided to prove their destitution.

On the contrary, when it comes to land invasions, one fact is clear. Newspapers report little—if anything—about uprisings by starving rural workers who supposedly demand that greedy farmers, who pay them inadequate wages, share their land. Nor do they report uprisings against negligent farmers who leave large areas uncultivated—land that workers could potentially use. Based on my experience following news coverage of land invasions regularly, I have not seen a single such case. All of this suggests that, in agricultural labor relations, there is—at least in general—mutual satisfaction between employers and workers.

Almost all disturbances, looting, and acts of plunder are carried out by mobs of invaders from outside the farms. And let it be clear: I have not seen a single report of manual laborers siding with the invaders against the farmer.

Now, if the “pockets of misery” in national agriculture were so common and severe, surely the clever and quick-witted instigators of agrarian unrest would have already tried to exploit these “pockets” to turn them into strongholds of class struggle and social revolution within the farms.

All of this suggests that, even in the most pessimistic scenario, the impoverished masses will be little more than wandering groups of anti-government protesters.

However, no matter how numerous these hordes may seem (and there is no reliable data on their numbers), they cannot make up enough of the population to invalidate the legal rules that support the opinions.

6. Moreover, even if we were to accept, for the sake of argument, the validity of all the “indigent” people who comprise these hordes, the statutes of limitations in their favor could only be invoked if Brazil had no unclaimed land available for them to settle on.

Now, the collection of unclaimed lands belonging to the Brazilian State—about 50% of our continental territory—constitutes the largest unproductive estate on the globe, an area twice the size of the combined land areas of France, West Germany, Italy, Spain, and the British Isles. The ranks of the “agro-reformist” plunderers form a labor force undeniably capable of cultivating these lands. Such lands cry out, so to speak, for their hands. For what confusing—and never fully explained—reasons are these surplus hands not used on the surplus land? Why is this labor force employed as an instrument for plundering private property rather than cultivating the fertile, idle state-owned estates? Doesn’t the latter, even more than private property, have a social function to fulfill?

7. All of this explains why, from north to south, the Judiciary has been calmly and steadfastly applying the provisions of the Civil Code that are supposedly outdated.

Here we come to the end of the argument. If even the Judiciary, with its majestic impartiality, considers those legal provisions valid, who in Brazil has enough power to declare them invalid? Do they become invalid just because a small group of invasion apologists arrogantly claims they are? If so, Brazil would have descended into chaos…

8. All these considerations clearly show how easily the government could solve the problem of agrarian unrest. What the agrarian agitators should avoid is attempting to push the government toward a “solution” by loudly demanding that it limit the TFP’s freedom of speech—a right not denied even to communists in this open society.

On the day when an organization like the TFP—acting lawfully and in an orderly manner in all its activities, as proven by over 4,000 certificates issued by sheriffs, mayors, and other municipal authorities—could no longer exercise its right to defend Christian civilization in Brazil against socialism and communism (of which agrarian reform is an explicit goal and land invasions are a sneaky and condemnable way to get there), the political “opening” would have ended, and a red ideological dictatorship would already be taking root among us.