The peasants of Barro Branco repelled armed henchmen of the latifundium (big feudal landlords) on December 28. Gunmen with their identities concealed detained residents of the Camp and demanded the location of specific residents they called “bandits”, threatening to re-invade the Menino Jonatas Camp if the peasants resist. The Menino Jonatas Camp was recently re-established by the peasants of Barro Branco after it was attacked by the landlords’ gunmen. The peasants mobilized and drove off the gunmen, erecting barricades, shouting slogans of the struggle for land, and shooting off fireworks.
This is not the first time the peasants of Barro Branco have repelled attacks from the landlords, organized under the paramilitary group “Invasion Zero”, with tacit backing from the military police and the semi-colonial, semi-feudal Old State of Brazil. In September, the peasants defeated an invasion of their Camp by the paramilitary goons of the Old State in what they call the Fierce Battle of Barro Branco. The peasants of Barro Branco organized to seize their land from the latifundium with the League of Poor Peasants (LCP in Portuguese) under the slogan “Land to those who live and work on it!” as part of the developing Agrarian Revolution in Brazil.
Hundreds of peasants blocked a highway bridge on the border of Pernambuco and Bahia states, protesting against the power outages and water cut-offs with the slogan “Water is the blood of the peasant, and without it he cannot live”. The power companies claim the cut-offs are due to debt and lack of payments exchanged between public and private utilities companies, though the money is available to pay off the debts.
As the Agrarian Revolution deepens and spreads, the Old State and its paramilitaries have increased their repression. On December 19, a longtime peasant leader was assassinated in Paraná state. The police ruled her murder the result of a robbery, ignoring the long history of threats against her for struggling for the people’s rights against the land-grabbing Zattar timber company.
On December 9, peasants’ and people’s organizations attended a public hearing in Pernambuco state, where Barro Branco is located, to denounce Invasion Zero. Hundreds of peasants representing communities on the land of the bankrupt Frei Caneca sugar plant demanded to the representatives of the Old State of Brazil present that the land of the bankrupt plant be distributed to the squatting peasants, and demanded punishment for the Invasion Zero gunmen. The peasants denounced the inactivity of INCRA (the Brazilian land reform government agency) in the face of the latifundium’s attacks and the peasants’ need for land, with attendees proclaiming: “No police protect the people, they only protect the landowners”.
Brazil’s opportunist “left” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised to send the army to enforce peace after two Avá-Guarani indigenous children and 2 adults were shot by gunmen of the latifundium in Paraná state at the end of December. The shootings were the culmination of a series of attacks by gunmen against the indigenous community, destroying buildings, crops, water, and food supplies. According to the people of the indigenous community, the National Force was aware of the ongoing attacks, but did not act. A Nova Democracia reports that the army has clashed with indigenous people multiple times in 2024 across the country, acting in support of the latifundium’s attempts to evict peasants from the land, rather than defending them from the latifundium.
Also at the end of December, military police attacked the peasants of New Hope Camp in Nova Brasilândia, Mato Groso state. The police shot men, women, and children and confiscated peasants’ motorcycles as part of their ongoing attempts—carried out by gunmen and police both—to drive off the peasants from their land, in service to the big landlords.
On January 4, A Nova Democracia released an editorial commenting on the leader of the MST (Landless Workers’ Movement, a reformist organization part of the struggle for land) denouncing the opportunist government’s inaction in land reform. AND says this is an expression of the MST leader, Stédile, trying to appease his base due to the intensifying struggle for land, with the intensifying situation nationwide pointing the way to a revolutionary New Brazil: “Stédile, like the entire bureaucratic path that engages the peasants and the popular masses in general in the reactionary electoral dispute, is concerned with the radicalization of the struggle for land, in particular, with the episodes that express the escalation of a peasant war. Aware that the peasant masses—including the honest peasant leaders under the MST flags—are in need of a consistent and realistic political direction and that the land, as always, can only be conquered through force, Stédile sees himself as having a moral obligation to attack the government, even because, given the situation, remaining silent is demoralizing for an organization that raises the banner of ‘Popular Agrarian Reform’, which is still positive, considering those who have defended this up until now right-wing government.”
A hundred workers and students demonstrated against the “6×1 scale”—a constitutionally-set 44 hour, 6 day work week—in Recife, capital of Pernambuco state, on December 20. Demonstrators blocked main avenues and raised on one of their banners the slogan: “Down with the 6×1 scale! For the worker’s right to more rest, study and leisure!” Demonstrators denounced the “dirty election game” when the real fight is in the streets, denounced the labor minister for supporting the scale, and chanted “Damn the boss’s profits, I won’t give up my rest!” The 6×1 scale is a response of the Old State to the agonized bureaucrat capitalism in Brazil, hit by the global economic crisis of imperialism which tries to offset its crisis by squeezing the workers and peasants of the third world. As denounced by the Workers’ League of Brazil, the opportunist government of Luiz Inácio is giving into the demands of the IMF and continuing the policies of Brazil’s last president, the ultra-reactionary Bolsonaro.
The struggle for the right to education by education workers and students continues against the cuts by the Old State of Brazil. In mid-December, teachers and workers demonstrated against proposed budget cuts and restrictions of workers’ rights in Pará state, battling with the police to maintain the demonstration. In Rio de Janeiro, also in mid-December, teachers demonstrated demanding their salaries after multiple missed paychecks.
Teachers and students have been protesting since December in Goiânia, Goiás state, against the shutdown of dozens of local schools pushed by the government and against starvation wages for education workers, which the protesters say have led to multiple workers’ deaths.
At the end of last November, the 30th Meeting of Pedagogy Students from Paraná took place at the Federal University of Southern Border, Paraná, developing the links between the Agrarian Revolution in the countryside and the people’s movements in the cities. Students attended talks on the struggle for land and the indigenous struggle, including talks by representatives of A Nova Democracia on the Battle of Barro Branco and “the fierce class struggle that is unleashed internationally today due to the deepening of general crisis and decomposition of imperialism and the new period of revolutions that is opening, which is expressed today, mainly, in the regionalization of the war in the Middle East and in the Palestinian National Resistance”, according to the newspaper.
Photo: LCP and Barro Branco banners at a public meeting.
