An Interview with João Pedro Stédile

Abstract

Introduction: Land reform in Brazil today is not just one of the most pressing needs to make a clearly bourgeois development viable but also (and in the first place) our country's oldest historical obligation. From the old promise held out in the times of the early colonial land grants, proprietorships, and slave plantations to its reappearance as a key motif in the popular rebellions under the Brazilian empire and in the settlements of Canudos (in the Bahian outback in 1896-1897) and Contestado (the no-man's land between the states of Parana' and Santa Catarina in 1912-1916), land reform has been regarded as one of the principal internal problems to be overcome, justifying and fostering the Brazilian military and paramilitary apparatus. In the twentieth century, history repeated itself, just as bloodily as in the nineteenth, and, since 1964, when the new military regime of President Humberto de Castelo Branco enacted the Land Tenure Statute, the state has itself assumed responsibility for carrying out land reform, depriving it, of course, of its most obvious political context. The cost-the very high costof the army's ruthless repression was the destruction of the great mass movements represented, principally, by the Peasant Leagues' and the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist party-PCB). The consequences of this were harrowing but not fatal. Despite its violence toward popular movements, the military regime lacked the courage to tackle the underlying problems that created the demand for land reform. The civilian governments that have been in power since 1985 have been equally timid, with the result that the question has transcended the transition from dictatorship to democracya transition that has been rather poorly defined in many other respects as well. The roots of the problem lie in a ruling class for which land speculation is the