Social Movement Consolidation and Strategic Shifts: The Brazilian Landless Movement during the Lula and Dilma Administrations

• Date: 01 July 2020
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20918590
• Author: Anthony Pahnke
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20918590

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 233, Vol. 47 No. 4, July 2020, 206–222

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20918590

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

206

Social Movement Consolidation and Strategic Shifts

The Brazilian Landless Movement during the

Lula and Dilma Administrations

by

Anthony Pahnke

During the center-left Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) governments

of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2002–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016), the Brazilian

Landless Movement took advantage of particular governmental changes—increased

access to education, improved small-farmer support programs, and expanded agrarian

reform development policies—to strengthen its leadership and organization. Instead of

expanding, the movement turned inward to address internal weaknesses. It benefited from

the PT’s ambiguous position with respect to the politics of agrarian reform. Since each

administration dedicated considerable resources to public policies that the movement

favored, neither government engaged in significant land redistribution.

Durante los gobiernos de Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2002–2010) y Dilma Rousseff

(2011–2016), ambos pertenecientes al centro-izquierdista Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT),

el Movimiento Brasileño Sin Tierra aprovechó cambios gubernamentales particulares,

como mejores programas de apoyo a los pequeños agricultores, mejor acceso a la educación

y políticas ampliadas para el desarrollo de reformas agrarias, para fortalecer su liderazgo

y organización. En lugar de expandirse, el movimiento se tornó hacia sí mismo para abor-

dar debilidades internas. Se benefició de la posición ambigua del PT con respecto a las

políticas de reforma agraria. Y dado que ambas administraciones dedicaron considerables

recursos a políticas públicas favorecidas por el movimiento, ninguno se abocó a supervisar

una redistribución significativa de la tierra.

Keywords: Landless Movement, Brazil, Workers’ Party, Education, Agroecology

Shortly before his successful bid to become Brazil’s thirty-fifth president in

2002, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose support for the Brazilian Landless

Movement dated to its emergence in the early 1980s, said that a Partido dos

Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) government would lead “a real agrarian

reform” through “expropriating large estates” (Silva, 1999). His statement car-

ried tremendous weight for the Landless Movement—the Movimento dos

Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement—MST) and its

many allies1— and the more than 1.5 million people who have been engaged in

a multidecade struggle for agrarian reform. While it worried Brazil’s economic

Anthony Pahnke is an assistant professor of international relations at San Francisco State

University and the author of Brazil’s Long Revolution: Radical Achievements of the Landless Workers

Movement (2018).

918590LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20918590Latin American PerspectivesPahnke / The Brazilian Landless Movement

research-article2020

Pahnke / THE BRAZILIAN LANDLESS MOVEMENT 207

elite, their concerns were assuaged when Lula selected the conservative busi-

nessman José Alencar Gomes da Silva of the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party—

PL) as his running mate and then issued a letter to the Brazilian people

emphasizing his commitment to free-market capitalism.

This ambiguity with respect to the Landless Movement and its struggle for

agrarian reform continued throughout Lula’s time in office. Various public

policies, among them the National School Food Program and the Food

Acquisition Program, which supported small rural producers, including many

movement members, received a significant amount of resources (Hespanhol,

2013; Peixinho, 2013). Additionally, the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e

Reforma Agrária (Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform—INCRA)

received considerably more financing and altered its strategic mission to

address problems of rural development (Oliveira, 2010).

Although these policy changes appeared to indicate commitment to agrarian

reform, Lula’s government redistributed less land than the previous govern-

ment of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Oliveira, 2011). Dilma Rousseff similarly

received critiques from the MST and its allies for her administration’s seeming

unwillingness to redistribute land (Nascimento, 2015). As the MST celebrated

its thirtieth anniversary in 2014, the total area expropriated for redistribution

was at a historic low (Arruda, 2014). Furthermore, the number of land occupa-

tions—the trademark tactic used by the movement to demand land redistribu-

tion—declined by 66 percent from 2004 to 2016.2 To clarify the dynamics of the

movement’s strategic engagement with the seemingly “friendly” PT govern-

ment, the MST leadership issued two notebooks for debate describing its resis-

tance during Lula’s and Dilma’s terms in office as “the accumulation of forces.”

In this article I argue that the ambiguity of PT governance offered the Landless

Movement the opportunity to strengthen its leadership and internal organiza-

tion. Seminal studies on the movement document its origins and organization

(Banford and Rocha, 2002; Fernandes, 2000; Wright and Wolford, 2003), while

subsequent scholarship analyzes the increase in its interaction with the Brazilian

government (Carter, 2015; Pahnke, Tarlau, and Wolford, 2015; Wolford, 2010).

This latter literature recognizes that interaction has not resulted in the move-

ment’s demise. Complementing these studies, I document how consolidation

resulted from the conditions in which the movement found itself while the

center-left PT was in power.

This article has six sections. In the first, I discuss the role of external condi-

tions in social movement theory and propose an alternative conceptual

framework to differentiate between governmental, economic, and state con-

ditions. The following sections employ this framework to describe the prob-

lems that the Landless Movement faced shortly before the election of Lula in

2002 and show how the Lula and Dilma governments contributed to the

movement’s efforts at addressing its weaknesses. The final two sections

describe the movement’s strategic shift to the accumulation-of-forces strategy

and its agroecology.

The research for this article took place from 2009 to 2016 and included semi-

structured interviews and participatory observation conducted in 2009 and

2011. I also analyzed newspapers, movement newsletters and training manu-

als, and legislation. I interviewed movement members and leaders, their