We republish an unofficial translation of the Document that was first published by AND, that was send to us:
We received in our editorial office an important declaration from the National Commission of the Leagues of Poor Peasants about the electoral farce of 2022. We publish it in its entirety below:
Hundreds of peasants gathered in a popular assembly at Acampamento Tiago Campin dos Santos, Rondônia. Photo: Databank
Down with the electoral farce and the increase of the war against the peasants and the people. Forward the Agrarian Revolution!
Lies and dispute to see who is more servile to imperialism, the big bourgeoisie and the latifundia.
Only a colossal economic, political, military and moral crisis of decomposition of bureaucratic capitalism, in the midst of the general crisis of imperialism could make the hypocritical, cowardly and nauseating "debates" of this edition of the electoral farce receive the adjective of "democratic".
The maxim of the 19th century German reactionary, Otto Bismark, comes across as genius but is just simple observation: "One never lies so much as before elections, during a war, and after a hunt."
But it's not comical, it's tragic. When they talk about themselves the candidates, especially Luiz Inacio, the pelegão [corrupt unionist] Lula, and Jair Bolsonaro, the scoundrel, lie blatantly. They only come close to the truth when they attack each other, but they take every care to only attack each other personally and preserve the system of domination, exploitation and oppression that sinks the country in misery and blood. A system of which they are the most prominent traitors, and for which they deserve the hatred and repulsion of the great majority of Brazilians. For, outside of their own small circle of interest, the majority of the votes they will receive will come from those who reject the other and do not want the other to win.
In the very first "debate" Luiz Inácio repeated the lie already contested by the peasant masses and invalidated in an article based on facts, documents and numbers by the geographer, professor and researcher Ariovaldo Umbelino, that he would have been the president of the republic that most carried out "resolutions" of the agrarian reform. On the other hand, in the same event, Bolsonaro, the scoundrel, boasted to have been the president who had delivered more land titles, especially to women. The same Bolsonaro who declared war on the peasants at the agricultural fair in Ribeirão Preto in his first months in office, telling the big landowner who steal land from the Union that "My government belongs to you". And that during the "celebrations" of May 1st, 2021, speaking to the zebu cattle breeders of ABCZ, he made his intentions very clear to this bunch of parasitic bloodsuckers of the Nation, when he called the LCP "terrorist". And it is worth noting that none of the other participants in the farcical episode of the debate challenged these scoundrels. After all, the latifundium is "sacred".
The first big implicit lie, by both, is to try to pass the idea that the Brazilian State, through its successive governments, is meeting the historical demand of peasants for the right for land for those who live and work on it. Consequently, the Brazilian countryside would be at peace. The historical demand of the landless peasants, of the peasants with little land, or even of the middle peasants, would be being satisfied by the current governments that hold the terrible record of being among the five countries in the world where the concentration of land in the hands of a tiny minority, to the detriment of the immense majority of peasants, is greater.
Liars, bandits and scoundrels!
Manifestation during the 4th Congress of the LCP in Corumbiara, Rondonia. Photo: Reproduction
War in the countryside
So what we answer is: why the first measure of this reactionary government and of Bolsonaro's "death squads" was to arm the landowners and their hired guns and gunmen to the teeth? Why did he give them the government (speech at Agricultural fail)? Why are generals in charge of Incra and Funai? Why does the National Security Force, the praetorian guard created by Luiz Inácio, spend months filling hotels in the interior of the country where the peasant masses are fighting for land? Why have the conflicts in the countryside increased? Why have dozens of peasants, indigenous people and quilombolas been murdered with impunity, with Bolsonaro defending police murderers (exclusion of illegality)? Why are hundreds of peasants today political prisoners in Brazil, with the cowardly complicity of the silence of all this false leftist electioneering opportunist ? Why do popular lawyers have their houses invaded and their phones tapped and are criminalized and prosecuted? Why, if the fundamental problems would have been solved, have the peasants not stopped resisting, fighting and taking land for a single day? Why do thousands of small producers (like the milk producers all over Brazil) protest every year, closing roads and distributing milk to the people? Why are the "skulls", commonly used in massacres in the favelas, mainly against poor and black people, now spread all over the rural regions of the country? Why import modern counterinsurgent warfare equipment from the Zionist and terrorist state of Israel? Why have military exercises in the Brazilian jungles increased dramatically, under the leadership of the Yankees? Could it be that all this is happening because Luiz Inácio and Jair Bolsonaro have fulfilled their "constitutional" duty to carry out "agrarian reform"?
If it is very difficult for some to believe the masses, the honest intelligentsia, and the League of Poor Peasants, then let the old Federal Supreme Court (STF) answer them, as the civilian guardian of the old order (or guardian of the supposed Democratic State of Law, as the opportunists cluck). Because it was this rotten and decrepit institution which in the last period, suspended the expropriations, aswell as the deployments of elite troops and the murderous speacial units in the favelas, implicitly recognizing everything we put forward and using the pandemic as an excuse. The STF would not make this decision if it did not fear a much more violent and system threatening re-run the the 2013 and 2014 revolts, which put on the stoplight for imperialism, the big bourgeoisie and the latifundia. But that was only really applied in retaliation to Bolsonaro's attacks on this Court and in the face of the fierce and combative resistance of the masses (as occurred in 2021 in the revolutionary areas Tiago Campim dos Santos, Ademar Ferreira and Manoel Ribeiro, in Rondônia). But, even including this, did not prevent the massacres in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
And this bankrupt supreme court is acting in the same direction by torturing indigenous peoples by not burying the phantasmagorical thesis of the "Temporal Frame". The STF is not in session, doesn't vote, ask for an investigation, make a scene, which is contrary to the pressure of international public opinion. The position is sinister. If the governments had minimally complied with the constitution promulgated in 1988 and demarcated the indigenous territories the problem would not exist. Neither Collor, Itamar, FHC, Luiz Inácio and Dilma, Temer, and even less Bolsonaro did so. In fact, the STF gave this legal aberration from the "Temporal Frame" the character of possible "legality" to give the landowners in Congress time to enshrine it as law through constitutional amendment. Well then, don't all these events and measures, with the respective actions of the police forces, prove the main lie implicit in this filthy debate? For us, that is enough for now. But it is also our duty to invalidate each lie.
Children from the Manoel Ribeiro Camp in 2021, in Rondônia. Photo: AND Database
Neither "settlement", nor title, nor land
As for the titles, Bolsonaro lies as much as Lula about the "thousands of settled families". In the first place, when he refers to the titles, he implies that he is giving titles to small farmers. Of these announced titles, the vast majority, in terms of the amount of land titled, are for large landowners, each of which can legally claim up to 2500 hectares in Amazonia (when the land claimed by the land thief is bigger than this size, he puts it in the name of his children). And the requirement is some donation to his anti-communist preaching or LCP "delenda" campaign (Bolsonaro confirms that the MST is no longer a problem).
What the current government does with respect to the "settlements" in which peasants have been on the land for at least 20 years, and for which the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra) owes billions of reais in roads, credits, artesian wells, etc, etc., etc., is to give provisional titles, not yet definitive, that will have to be paid for, without notary registration, that ultimately serve to let the peasant farmer fall into the clutches of the banks and become even more indebted, in order to hand over the land to them on a plate.
And in relation to the areas already occupied and divided by INCRA itself in the last 10 years, and which have even less than the peasants mentioned above, what Bolsonaro is handing over are the infamous Concession and Use Contracts (CCU), for which the peasants have nothing and are captive to government programs that no longer exist since the times of Dilma Rousseff. If you want to see a peasant being humiliated is to arrive at the bank with one of these CCU's, be put in the last place in line, and leave after the manager says that he will have to wait for Incra to release the money…
This is the truth about Bolsonaro's land titles, a compensatory policy that disguises the war waged against peasants, indigenous people and quilombolas, with or without weapons, with the aim of concentrating even more land ownership in Brazil and handing over our riches to imperialism in exchange for crumbs. But there is nothing original about it.
Victorious retaking of the Santa Elina farm (Rondônia) in 2010. Photo: AND Database
Assembly to hand over lot certificates to struggling peasants from the Santa Elina farm (Rondonia) in 2010. Photo: Reproduction
Where it all began
It was Luiz Inácio, after the failure of the second National Plan for Agrarian Reform (II PNRA), the first of the PT government, (a constitutional obligation of any president of the republic), who first applied the method of manipulating the numbers, trying to pass land regularization (roughly speaking, land titles) off as agrarian reform. Professor Ariovaldo Umbelino reports:
"... The final results of the II PNRA indicate that in disaggration of the 448,954 Beneficiary Relations issued by INCRA in that period, there were only 163 thousand families referring to new settlements ... The remaining families were related to land regularization (113 thousand), land reorganization (171 thousand) and resettlements of people affected by dams (2 thousand)…"
Besides reaching a little more than 1/3 of the intended goal, having settled fewer families than the country-seller FHC, Luiz Inácio still gave "the cue" to those who would succeed him on how to serve the latifundium and deceive the masses, and the good apprentice Bolsonaro won't let him lie. And the legal handing over of public lands in Amazonia as Bolsonaro practices today (see above) also comes from the hand of Luiz Inácio, through Provisional Measure 422 of March 2008, which became Law No. 11.763 of August 1, 2008. It is a blatant affront to the Brazilian constitution (without any challenge by the STF) to allow thieves of public land to regularize their properties. Until then, whoever occupied vacant land would have the right to remain with a maximum of 300 hectares, the rest having to be confiscated by the State in order to settle landless families. Luiz Inácio increased this limit to 1,500 hectares.
At the time, Professor Ariovaldo said: "... Thus, in total, an area of almost 183 million hectares of public lands would be handed over to the Landgrabber (Big landowners, emphasis added)..."
Treason to the peasants of the agent of imperialism Luiz Inácio, the pelegão Lula
The gravedigger of the "government's agrarian reform" was him, Luiz Inácio. He claimed that in Brazil there was space for the small peasant and the latifundium. He called the owners of the latifundium heroes. He did not criticize (as he had promised) FHC's provisional measure that prevented the inspection of occupied lands. He played a key role in the discourse of criminalization of the peasant movement, when being President of the Republic, José Sarney President of Congress and Gilmar Mendes President of the STF, in unison with these creatures, he affirmed that the action of the masses of peasants of Pernambuco who reacted to an attack by gunmen and eliminated three of them was a crime, saying in a statement to the press monopoly: "And don't tell me that it was legitimate selfdefence.”
Lula created the Agrarian complain office to attract the peasants to the negotiating table, co-opting the most docile leaders and delivering to the military police extermination groups or to the gunmen the names of those who would not surrender. He created the National Security Force that since then has acted fundamentally against the revolutionary peasant movement. He sent the Army and the National Force to combat the LCP and the peasants who seized the slaveholding latifundium Forkilha, in southern Pará, from one of the founders of the UDR, Jairo Andrade, in the largest military operation in the region after the campaigns against the glorious Araguaia Guerrilla. Also in Pará, together with Ana Júlia Carepa (PT), he legalized thousands of hectares of land for loggers in Santarém, promoting false peasant settlements.
And it was under the PT government that LCP leaders and activists and masses of the militant peasant movement were brutally murdered. All this hatred of Lula and his PT against the LCP is for two reasons: 1) it is to flatter the latifundia, that is, the "elites" they claim so much about, a cheap staging to pass themselves off as "leftist", and 2) because the revolutionaries unmask him and his party. But Luiz Inácio also acted against the indigenous peoples by refusing to demarcate their sacred and legitimate ancestral territories. And against the remaining quilombolas he acted co-optingly and tried to play masses against masses (quilombolas vs. combative peasant movement).
The Agrarian Revolution will sweep away all this garbage, destroy the latifundium and give the land to those who work it!
For all this, it is not surprising that the accusations and exchange of insults between Luiz Inácio and Bolsonaro are of the type "more of the same". It is a somewhat apocalyptic picture for the unaware, but we are at the end of the times of bureaucratic capitalism and imperialism. What is at stake is not saving this false democracy based on the concentration of land ownership, on primary production for export, on the handing over of natural wealth to imperialism, and on the welfare crumbs, harness and lead for the people. This bureaucratic capitalism has no salvation, but if it is not overthrown it will continue to inflict with misfortune our people and the Nation. Brazil is not a country in which the political system is doing badly, the economy is doing badly, and the latifundium (baptized agribusiness) is doing well, as some people believe. The latifundium is "doing well" because Brazil is doing badly. And the latifundium is doing "well" because the imperialist plan for this banana republic in the post-cold war world order is to deepen our never broken condition as a semi-colony.
If at times when the crisis was milder, the electoral farce achieved only rickety and ephemeral results, this time it will be worse. The crisis will worsen, misery will increase, the war against the people will be intensified, repossessions of property will increase, and massacres will be committed much more than the ones that already occur and this will disgust everyone. In the face of this, all these lies are going to be refuted by lightning strikes when the people burst their patience, which has already passed its limits.
This is reality. Ultimately, the big beneficiaries of the electoral farce are imperialism, the big bourgeoisie and the latifundia. To vote for anyone is to vote for this system and not realize that it is rotten, asking to be overthrown and that the masses fight and can win. The peasants of Rondonia demonstrated this by defeating the blabbering scoundrel in peasant battles in 2020 and 2021 in Rondonia. Battles that the press monopoly tried to hide in order to protect the landowners who steal the land from the Union and are predators of nature, which this same press, with Network Globo at the head, demagogically claims to defend.
Let us raise our red flags even higher! The Agrarian Revolution will take place!
Don't Vote! Fight! Long Live the Agrarian Revolution!
National Commission of the Leagues of Poor Peasants - Brazil
September 2022
The police tries to make an illegal eviction of the camp Manoel Ribeiro in Rondonia on orders of the Latifundia Photo: AND Database
