Challenges Facing Latin American Peasant Movements under Progressive Governments and New Right-Wing Parties: The Case of Brazil

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20946408
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20946408

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 234, Vol. 47 No. 5, September 2020, 94–112

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20946408

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

94

Challenges Facing Latin American Peasant

Movements under Progressive Governments and

New Right-Wing Parties

The Case of Brazil

by

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa

Translated by

Patricia Fierro

This article analyzes the dilemmas faced by peasant movements in Brazil during the

"progressive governments" and the return of the right to power. To this end, it analyzes

the case of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in two scenarios of recent polit-

ical history. The first is that of the progressive governments, characterized by a simultane-

ous opening of public space and public policies to popular movements, although at the

same time and contradictorily, also to the private sector linked to financial and transna-

tional capital. The second scenario is that of the rise of the far right to power, first through

a parliamentary coup d’état, and then by an electoral process.

O artigo analisa os dilemas enfrentados pelos movimentos camponeses no Brasil

durante os “governos progressistas” e no retorno das direitas ao poder. Para tanto, se

analisa o caso do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) em dois cenários

da história política recente: o primeiro, no marco dos governos progressistas, caracterizado

por uma abertura do espaço público, no campo das políticas públicas, aos movimentos

populares, ainda que ao mesmo tempo e de maneira contraditória, também ao setor privado

vinculado ao capital financeiro e transnacional. O segundo cenário é o da ascensão, medi-

ante um golpe de Estado parlamentário, seguido de processo eleitoral, da direita ao poder.

Keywords: Progressive governments, Peasantry, Agrarian issues, Public policy, Brazil

With the advent of the twenty-first century, Latin America entered a new

period in the struggle for democracy and for alternative social projects. In

regional geopolitics, two major groups of hegemonic dispute by leftist popular

movements emerged: the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra

América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—ALBA), whose

political vanguard was represented by Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia,

and Ecuador—countries that proposed a radicalization of social and political-

economic change in the transition to socialism, with the refounding of the state

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa is a professor in the graduate program in sociology at the Federal University

of Ceará and in the Crateús Faculty of Education at the State University of Ceará and coordinator

of the research group “Social Thought and Epistemologies of Knowledge in Latin America and

the Caribbean.” Patricia Fierro is an American Translators’ Association–certified translator living

in Quito, Ecuador.

946408LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20946408Latin American PerspectivesBarbosa / Challenges Facing Peasant Movements in Brazil

research-article2020

Barbosa / CHALLENGES FACING PEASANT MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL 95

and greater popular participation—and the group of the “progressive cycle,”

Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, which proposed a sort of state

capitalism with social-democratic tendencies and some degree of redistribu-

tion of wealth. In both groups the dispute over hegemony was conducted

through institutional means, and popular movements played a central role in

the pressure for a popular democracy. The formation of an institutional left bloc

seemed favorable to a refounding of the state and the strengthening of regional

political hegemony and to dialogue with the political platform of the ALBA and

Mercosur, especially in the establishment of international cooperation based on

sociocultural integration and political-economic relationships between Latin

American and Caribbean countries. There was also a geopolitical reorganiza-

tion of the region in the discussion of projects aimed at national-popular sover-

eignty in the face of U.S. imperialist domination and its impact on the

militarization of countries such as Mexico and Colombia, as a strategy for

regional control.

However, after the first decade of the twenty-first century the weaknesses of

the political postulates of a refounding of the state were evident in the perspec-

tive of a popular project and the political game of the leftist bloc. The countries

of the progressive left and of members of the core of the ALBA such as Bolivia

and Ecuador in fact promoted neoliberal policies and reconfigurations of the

pattern of capital accumulation by dispossession or plunder (Harvey, 2004), cul-

minating in a new cycle of dependent capitalist development in the region, char-

acterized as the “era of financial servitude” (Oliveira, Braga, and Rizek, 2010).

This was a consequence of the organic, structural crisis of capitalism on a global

scale and the need for a new expansion cycle for investment of the surplus of

accumulated capital. In this scenario, it was up to the state to regulate the artic-

ulated processes of accumulation by plunder through agribusiness, mineral and

water extraction, and wind power, among other things. At the same time, the

political coup in Honduras in 2009 inaugurated the use in the Americas of the

U.S. tactic hybrid warfare (Korybko, 2018), with the objective of blocking the

advance of the institutional left bloc, especially the Bolivarian nucleus, to regain

political hegemony in the region. Tactics were deployed for the return of right-

wing movements to power, with coups in Paraguay (in 2012) and Brazil (in 2016)

and attempts in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Although the popular bloc advanced with regard to a political agenda for the

expansion of social rights in this period, it is worth asking to what extent a

profound transformation has been consolidated in Latin American nation-

states in the sense of breaking with the historical hegemony of the agrarian

oligarchies and the dependency of the economy and confronting the patterns

of accumulation of transnational capital that threaten the sovereignty and ter-

ritories of rural people. Did they manage to refound the state, establishing a

new institutionality through radical political, economic, and cultural reform

that incorporated the demands of popular organizations into the core of democ-

racy? The turn to the right in Latin America reveals the loss of hegemony and

political leadership of the progressive left, which in fact is following the trend

of the left around the world. The return of right-wing movements also took

place via the electoral route: Maurício Macri (Argentina), Sebastián Piñera

(Chile), Iván Duque (Colombia), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).