The absurd change in the land law imposed by the government of generals and the fascist Bolsonaro, one more of their demagogueries, which assumed objective is to speed and make less bureaucratic the concession of land ownership, will aggravate still more the land struggle in the countryside.
The Provisional Measure (MP), n. 910-2019, signed by Jair Bolsonaro, was published on December 10th and refers to landholding regularization all over the national territory. The measure involves all federal public land that is not in use, while the previous law only comprised the Legal Amazonia area. The concession of title deeds to the occupants becomes a decision of the Economy Ministery with the support of the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarain Reform. (Incra).
Officially, one projects that around 600 title deeds of rural properties will be distributed for those who occupy the public lands and the settled peasants of the “agrarian reform”. But would that be the disposition of the title deeds?
A representative of the National Commission of the Poor Peasants League (LCP) in an interview to AND affirmed that maybe this is the greatest theft of land in the recent history in Brasil. He declares as well that the possibilities of any poor peasant or landless peasant to be beneficiaries dissolve before the conditions imposed by the old State.
Requirements for regularization
The possible area for occuption – that used to be of 300 hectares (ha) – was increased, in 2017, for 1,5 thousand ha and the present value is now 2,5 thousand ha. This means that a person can, according to these new parameters, to hold 2,5 thousand football fields in lands. The comprovation of occupation for those who fit those parameters is, for example, a statement of the occupant, not being necessary anymore a monitoring visit. Nevertheless, the parameters to be declared a holder are not easily affordable, as in the case of the requirement of the condition for comproving of “practice of effective culture, occupation and direct and peaceful exploration, by him/herself and their predecessors”. This has to be made by remote sensing whose values are around R$150.000 for a plot of land of 2,5 thousand ha, as it has been observed in a service under a bidding process to the State by a private enterprise, in 2017. Consequently, the access to the service, necessary to regularize the land plot, is available to those who have available cash, that is, landlords and bureaucratic capitalists.
Another parameter that, besides uncertain, is a possible generator of future conflicts, is the requirement of a registration in the Environental Rural Register (CAR). This registration is highly questionable, for CAR is based in a self-statement that enables to declare a landplot already registered. Presently, there is in CAR 10 million of superposed hectares. Over more 4 million registered, approximately 3,7 million (95%) of registered real estates have a kind of overlapping with other estates. From these, around 24,8 thousand are in Indigenous Certified Lands or Unities of Preservation of Integral Protection ( mainly landowners illegal occupation).
The new law also makes possible the land tenure for those that have occupied it since 2014 and, in case of direct sale, by the maximum value of the bare land, the occupation may have happened till December, 2018. The limit date was previously 2008.
This lowering of the date demand means the legalization of already findings to date as for instance the illegal occupation of indigenous lands. In accordance with a research accomplished at the end of 2019, the increase of illegal occupations in indigenous lands by registered persons was 111 and, only from January to September, 2019, this number reached 160 occupations.
‘Peaceful and gentle’ occupation
The Secretary for Land Affairs of the Ministery of Agriculture, Nabhan Garcia, affirmed, when spreading the MP, that who deserves to regularize the land is “the one who has been for more than five years living, working, producing in a gentle and peaceful way. He deserves it”.
This statement is not only in the speech of this secretary who has already been a “ruralist” leader but it is also present in different articles of the new legislation where it is stated that one of the prerequisites for those who require the land ownership is “ peaceful and gentle occupation: the one exercised without opposition and in a continuos manner”.
This measure, part of a corporatice project to have the peasant mass submitted in anorganized way by the old State, tries to isolate peasants off their struggle organizations.. Still, in an interview to AND , the representative of the LCPs declares:
“ – They say that the land occupation has to be gentle and peaceful and which land occupation is considered peaceful and gentle? None of them. No judge considers the land tenure by the peasants peaceful and gentle. This is one more element to attack the peasants and to deceive an opposing party saying” no, you do not have the right”. Concretely, it finishes with the possibility of more than 300 million ha, public land, to be passed to their real owners, the peasants, indigenous people and quilombolas”.
And the demagogy will be followed by repression as the LCPs representative affirms:
-“The despair and aggressiveness of this measure corresponds, from the point of view of the struggle, to the declaration of war with the Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO). This sort of measure would not be possible there were not the Armed Forces in the country” – he finishes.
Rondonia’s case and the land invasion by the landownership
Measures like this that supposedly increase the access to the land for the small peasants and the landless people,in general, only reproduces the landownership and the poverty conditions of the peasants. A case in point is the colonization in Rondonia.
With the creation of the Rondonia state an intense process of colonization started. The fascist military regime, in the 1970s, launched the National Programme of Integration (PIN) that, according to the geographer, Ariocaldo Umbelino de Oliveira, aimed at regularizing and facilitating the land monopoly by large agricultural corporations and foreign enterprises for the extraction of vegetal and mineral raw material, associated to the purpose of “relieving the social tensions” caused by land occupations by the peasants all over the country.
During this process, landownership monopolies and peasants have settled down in the region. However, the priority was for those who had conditions to accomplish loggings, that is, available capital for boosting the undertakings ( landlords and the bureaucratic capitalism corporations and capitalists). For the landownership, it was enough to declare that nobody claimed legally the area that was handed over to them. Furthermore, the expansion has also occurred through appropriation of lands, through document forgery, falsification of numerous titles to the land.
According to the researcher, the process of favouritism towards the landlords has also hapenned through coercionary actions by the State or through the armed actions undertaken by the large owners against the small and middle peasants. The support to the peasants by Incra, on the other hand, was slow and restrict.
The researcher, Ellen Cristina Francisco, analysing Rondonia state, shows that, from the “Terra Legal” programme, 2010, ( base of the law proposed by the fascist Bolsonaro), it is possible to verify an increase of 133% of registers of great properties, the numbers from approximately 54,7 million ha to around 127,7 million ha of the total area under the landownership control, from 2003 to 2010.
