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Posted on July 1, 2005
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This March for the Agrarian Reform is just a town in motion. Participating are six pregnant women, children breastfed, and this child who did not know if choosing the role of model…
and the one of photographer (she shot about twenty photos, this is the best):
up to the teenagers, which you can see late afternoon nicely dressed up, with greased hair.
and finally the patriarch, Luiz Beltrami, 97 years old.
Miriam, on the picture below on the left, comes from the Sao Paulo state. She marches easily, as if the prominent belly does non exist. She tells, amused, that eight months ago there was the evacuation of the encampment where she and her husband were living. A pacific evacuation, that is without any violence from the Police, which was there with horses, dogs, helicopters. But the group of the evacuated encampment has occupied a day ago another fazenda, whose owner, full of debts with the banks, seems to be willing to deal. It can happen that a big land owner with some thousands of square miles inherited by the great-grandfather, who most of the times just killed some native people or put a fence, leaves the land unproductive. With a big capital in their hands, the owners can contract huge debts with the banks: if the Movement finds situation like that, occupies the land which must, under the Brazilian Constitution, be expropriated. Expropriate means that the state pays the owner a fair price, the market price, for that land. So the land owner turn to be much more reach after the occupation than before.
The opposition towards the agrarian reform turns out to be, then, a mainly ideological matter. People with improductive land do not lose any money because an occupation, people with productive land are not targeted by the movement actions. Why avoid the agrarian reform, then?
Lucien and her husband (right) come from north-east, Bahia state. With the other little son, one year old, they have endured seven pacific evacuations and one, about a month ago, violent –that means that the dogs have bitten, the horses have kicked, the policemen have beaten. “Are you not afraid to be pregnant when you have the possibility to be in such a situations?” I asked. “What can I do? Should I refuse to have children just because I am a Landless Worker?”
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