BRAZIL

   
Letter From Rondônia
Part III: The Settlers
Norman Gall
 

Upon my arrival in Vila Rond6nia, several of the town’s leading citizens warned me not to walk the streets at night. The opening of BR-364, and the discovery of fertile soils beneath the jungle, have brought a hungry and desperate people to the town. The floating population of Vila Rondônia mills about the clapboard hotels and rooming houses that have proliferated on the west bank of the Rio Gy-Paraná, in direct view of the bars and brothels on the other side of the river. The town sprawls away from the river on both banks, along the path of BR-364, toward the giant palm and castanha trees that still stand in the charred remains of the jungle. The main centers of daytime activity are the market stalls and government offices that surround the old telegraph station—built on high ground early in the century—and the restaurants, bus stations, pharmacies, and furniture and appliance emporia that surround the broad plaza formed by the Petrobrás gasoline station that has just been expanded to include a restaurant and hotel. The leading furniture-appliance dealer said his sales volume has doubled in each of the past three years, even though appliance sales have been limited by the lack of electricity, except in the principal towns. The multiplication of pharmacies and private clinics is even more impressive than that of stores, bars, and hotels. The doctor and druggist, as well as the merchant and mechanic, have arrived in search of lifetime opportunities, keeping one eye on their respective professions and the other on the lookout for chances to trade and speculate in land. A new proverb of the Brazilian medical profession holds that the frontier physician will own his own private clinic, house, and car within two years and will become a fazendeiro, owning his own estate, within five. A few days before my arrival in Vila Rondônia last December, however, one of the town’s doctors was murdered in a dispute over a bad check and the doctor’s wife. The police arrested the accused killer, who himself was killed in jail a few nights later by a convicted murderer, who was allowed to escape. The police chief then received a death threat. He ordered two of the town’s four policemen, the only officials responsible for law and order over an area of several hundred square miles, to stand guard over him as he slept at a local hotel. A newspaper in the territorial capital of Pôrto Velho warned indignantly in a front-page editorial:

Conflict and violence have rapidly become legendary on the Brazilian frontier. Comparing this region with the American West a century ago, many Brazilians liken Vila Rondônia of the 1970s to Dodge City of the 1870s. Indeed, there are some similarities in the role of the floating population. Ellsworth, Kansas, for example,

The most conspicuous elements of Vila Rondônia’s floating population are the men who, during the dry season, are flown into the jungle to cut down the forest. Many of them are failed settlers who came to Rondônia for free land. Others are former seringueiros ("rubber gatherers") who came to the Amazon from the Northeast decades ago to cut rubber in the forest, then tried panning for diamonds and tin in the jungle streams, then worked on highway construction gangs and, finally, at the seasonal labor of slashing and burning the mata to clear hundreds of thousands of acres for cattle ranches owned by grupos fortes, syndicates of businessmen from São Paulo. Others of these seasonal laborers are displaced farmhands from southern Brazil whose jobs were eliminated by mechanization and by the switch from labor-intensive coffee cultivation to tractor-intensive farming of soybeans, wheat, and corn. "There are 80,000 farm-hands without work in Paraná," one of the recruiters told me,

and many of the municipal prefects in southern Brazil give them free one-way bus tickets to Rondônia. The trouble is that many of these men from the South can‘t resist work in the jungle. They may die of malaria or hepatitis. Many of them are drifters who go through life using nicknames and have no identity papers. When they finish the derrubada, the cutting of the forests, their hands are so swollen and calloused that many of them can‘t make a fist. When the plane takes them back to Vila Rondônia, they drink cachaça—raw, white rum—like they’re on fire. They’ll spend their season’s earnings in three days in the whorehouses across the river, then collapse in one of the hotels to wait for the next rainy season to end so they can go out into the jungle again. They accumulate large debts in the hotels, which the new boss pays off before they are flown again into the mata.

The clearing of the mata on anything like the present scale was impossible before the opening of roads and airfields in the Amazon, mostly during the past decade. Vila Rondônia has become the principal jumping-off point and base of logistical support for the single-engine planes and DC-3s that bring supplies and peons to the new fazendas being cleared in the northern jungle of Mato Grosso, in the region of the Rio Roosevelt, the river traveled and charted by Rondon and Roosevelt six decades ago. Over the past few years, some new technology has been introduced into the derrubada, such as motor-saws, defoliants first used in the Vietnam War, and the correntâo, a 100-meter chain pulled by 2 tractors to cut through the thickest undergrowth, accomplishing in a few days what 200 men could only do in a month. But the brunt of the work is still done by peons, contracted seasonally on a free-lance, piecework basis, bringing their own rudimentary tools into the jungle and being paid according to the area cleared. They first slash at the undergrowth with long-handled scythes, cutting the mata about four inches from the ground and severing the clusters of thick vines at shoulder height, then breaking the vines within reach into smaller pieces. The men work alone or in pairs, advancing outward in a circular path from a large tree chosen as a landmark, slicing the growth so that it falls inward to the clearing. A paste of dust and sweat is formed on their bodies and faces, which are covered, to the degree feasible, by full-length clothing and improvised bonnets cut from flour sacks to protect them from the cutting blades of sharp grass (capim cortante) and the bites of black flies and tachi ants. The peon brings with him as large a supply of his own provisions as he can into the mata, knowing that anything he buys out there will be discounted from his pay at exorbitant prices. He also knows that any illness or injury that befalls him in the mata can be remedied only at his own expense and that any time lost because of disability is his own problem. Moreover, the work goes slowly, taking about ten man-days to clear the undergrowth from an acre of land and another ten man-days for the felling of the big trees with axes. The carnage of the forest is left to dry for about two months, until August or September, when the big burn begins. After the holocaust is over, the mata is pocked with smoking battlefields that stretch toward every horizon, with the blackened carcasses of great trees strewn about the clearings like match-sticks. By that time, the peons have been flown back to Vila Rondônia to charge through their own devastation and await the next season in the hotels and pensions beside the river.

* * * * *

Oscarina came to Rondônia ten years ago from the drought-ridden hills of eastern Minas Gerais with her husband and ten children. They had come to seek free land on a government colonization plot, but she later separated from her husband and started working as a servant in town. Oscarina has since opened the Hotel Colorado and supports her family by maintaining peons and drifters in the hotel as a ready seasonal labor supply for when the rains end. She then receives a recruiter’s corn mission and payment of their hotel bills by serving as an intermediary in hiring out the peons to cut down the mata for cattle ranches being cleared from the jungle. She carries on this business by herself except for the help of a young cohort who performs chores around the hotel.

"I’ve lived with this kid for three years, that’s that," Oscarina said. ‘It was us who buried the peon they brought in shot up from the Fazenda Dr. João. Two of my peons died out there and this one was nearly dead when he arrived. When I got to the hospital he was already lying on a table in the morgue, as naked as a baby back in the Northeast. They say he was doing his necessities in the bush before dawn, and the others were afraid of the wildcats they have out there in the mata and saw some claws and shot first. But another person said they fought the day before over a drum of gasoline: one wanted him to drag over the gasoline and some tools, and the other didn‘t want to do it. People will fight over anything. The peon suffered for three days there in the mata, full of buckshot, but there was no airplane to bring him in. I bought some clothes and dressed the peon‘s body in the morgue. Dr. João, the landowner, said, ‘Bury him. I’ll pay the bills.’ The kid and I paid 8,820 cruzeiros in the hospital and buried the peon. I brought the hospital and burial bills to Dr. João. First he said he would sign a promissory note, and I was pleased. Then he said, ‘I’m going to analyze these bills. ‘He’s been analyzing these bills for six, eight months and he still has not paid.

"My eldest son died in the same stupid way. Two friends of his had fought down the line, in Vilhena, over a woman. They came to his house in the colonization project and started fighting again. He struggled with them to stop, but one of them fired his revolver and my son died later in the hospital. This was the same son who helped me with my husband. My husband had no control. He drank too much, no, still drinks, because he’s still alive. We came from the municipality of Governador Valadares in Minas Gerais, where it was so dry that we hardly could keep a cow. People paying crazy prices for land in the South heard that

INCRA [National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform] was giving away 250 acres of land here in Rondônia for nothing. When people began coming to Rondônia from the South, there still was nothing here. The local people were mainly seringueiros who lived by cutting rubber and know nothing about rice and corn. When we came to Rondônia you couldn‘t find a leaf of corn to make a cigarette. The fertile plots in the big colonization project of Ouro Prêto still had to be cut from the jungle. My husband and I worked a year, two years, but he fought too much and was always drinking, so we never had enough for our own clothes. He beat me up when he was drunk, and my son, as he grew up, had a way of taking my side. One day my husband picked up our stove and hurled it at me. I am a country person, and I do not scare easily. But that time I was afraid and ran away. One day he said he was going to kill me. but by then my son had grown up and told him, ‘Look. Papa, you‘re not going to do this to Mama. Then my son told me, ‘Look, Mama, you‘re going to town to look for work. ‘I asked, ‘How can I leave my children? ‘He said, ‘We’re big now and we can help you. ‘So I worked as a housekeeper for eight months, then built a house of my own and started caring for peons. I earned enough to buy land of my own, a colony plot from Odete, whose husband had died of hepatitis. I sent peons to plant rice and corn, and this year I want to clear another 60 or 80 acres. But I don’t want to live there myself. Three years ago my other son died of hepatitis on our other plot. Another son got hepatitis when he went to spend his holidays there and almost died. He was saved by a very good doctor we have here in town. I don t know whether more people die of disease or violence in the countryside. Many people die in disputes overland. A few days ago a peon of mine died owing me 2,000 cruzeiros. I had urged him to go to the Fazenda Castanhal to derrubar, to cut down the forest. He had asked me to go with him to his plot to help him expel a poor old man who invaded his land. I told him, ‘I’m not going there and you shouldn’t go either. Boy, you have your family to take care of and you should come here to work. ‘But he said he was going, one way or another, to kill or be killed. One is very nervous inside the mata. He went there to kick out the old man, but the old man planted an axe in his head, splitting it wide open. The old man didn‘t run away. He came here to town and gave himself up to the police. He said he had spent three years struggling in the mata. Two of his children died there of malaria. He said he was fighting malaria himself. He said he had planted crops and endured lots of things and now that his plot was producing, someone came and wanted to throw him out."

* * * * *

The critical difference between violence on the Brazilian frontier and in the American West a century ago is the degree of conflict over possession of land. In Brazil this conflict over land occurs at virtually all levels of frontier society and in all areas of the frontier. Moreover, the violence has intensified sharply in recent years as the enormous government subsidies given both to mechanized agriculture and to private projects for Amazon development have inflated the price of land that was commercially worthless a short time ago. At the same time, the same new lands are being occupied by posseiros ("squatters"), many of whom were peons displaced by the government-subsidized process of agricultural mechanization in southern Brazil. In a pastoral letter on the growing problem of violence, the National Council of Brazilian Bishops in November 1976 offered this diagnosis:

The raging land speculation has led to an epidemic of corruption by state officials in selling public lands, by local officials in registering fraudulent titles, by federal officials in granting approval of projects that will bring a windfall in tax exemptions and subsidized public loans. The governor of Mato Grosso recently admitted that officials had sold off more land than this huge state contains. Both the economic and demographic pressures on the new lands have bred bloody conflict between landlords and posseiros, between posseiros and Indians, between posseiros and posseiros. This violence has been escalating sharply during the 1970s in the vast município ("county") of Barra do Garcas, roughly the size of Great Britain, in the northeast corner of Mato Grosso, where huge tracts of jungle and savanna were brought up during the 1960s by prospective cattlemen and speculators at a nickel or a dime an acre. Conflict in Barra do Garcas has been more widely noticed than elsewhere in Brazil because Catholic priests have denounced and documented it in the course of their defense of posseiros and Indians, leading to bitter recriminations between church and state over these issues. These recriminations intensified after two priests were murdered there in 1976 during disputes overland. On July 10 a German missionary, Padre Rodolfo Lukenbein, was killed by a mob of landowners, posseiros, and hired thugs who were trying to stop the surveying of the boundaries of the Bororo Indians’ territorial reserve, which they had invaded. Padre Lukenbein, director of an Indian mission of the Silesian order, had been instrumental in persuading the government to survey the Bororo lands. Three months later, on October 11, an elderly Jesuit, Padre João Bosco Penido Burnier, was fatally shot by a policeman in the village of Riberao Bonito as he entered the local jail to try to stop the torture and rape of two women who had been arrested a week before. The women were the sister and daughter-in-law of a posseiro whom the police unsuccessfully tried to arrest eight days before, precipitating a gunfight in which a police corporal was killed. The police had been used frequently by landlords to evict posseiros since 1972, when the business groups from southern Brazil began buying land in the area to clear large ranches.

Landowners denounce the posseiros as professional speculators who squat on a piece of property so they can be paid to move off. Defenders of the posseiros argue that in many cases landlords use arbitrary methods to evict squatters because their ownership titles are so defective that they could not be sustained in court. Apart from using the police, landowners employ thugs, called capangas, to get rid of squatters, which has one important drawback: after clearing an area of squatters, the capangas sometimes claim the land for themselves. One famous capanga of the region, Jorge Luis da Silva, has become a "landowner" in his own right, owning a private plane and bragging that the local judge was his business partner.

Elsewhere in the Amazon, in the south of the sprawling state of Pará, twice the size of Texas, an Alabama-born farmer, John Walker Davis, and his two sons were killed in July 1976 in an ambush by posseiros whom they were trying to evict from the 220,000-acre cattle ranch and timber reserve that the Americans had bought in 1964. In 1968, when Davis and his partners obtained clear title to the land, it was occupied by only a few posseiros, who moved off after being paid to leave. In 1973, a new highway bisected the property, enabling many more squatters to move in easily, leading to a long series of incidents. The opening of roads has given access to settlers of all kinds, setting the stage for a confused wave of land theft, speculation, and violence as well as a guerrilla insurrection in Pará that occupied a large number of government troops in the early 1970s. Only a small proportion of these incidents, however, has received public attention. In the remote state of Acre, more than 50,000 Brazilian peasants have been pushed across the border into neighboring Peru and Bolivia under pressure from corporate combines from southern Brazil that have bought large tracts of jungle. Many of the peasants were seringueiros who continued to collect latex from the rubber trees along the jungle rivers, gradually shifting to subsistence agriculture after the rubber boom collapsed and their bosses abandoned the area. In the past, these seringueiros were included, by custom rather than law, in the price of rubber-producing areas being bought and sold, in much the same way that Indian serfs in Peru and "souls" in czarist Russia changed hands with the sale of estates. But new ways began to prevail after Acre’s state government began promoting outside investment and the federal government began providing large subsidies for Amazon development. Between 1971 and 1976, the price of land in Acre increased a hundredfold in real terms, although the cost of surveying in the jungle was so high that the boundaries of most tracts remained vaguely defined. Peons were brought in from southern Brazil in buses and jet planes to cut down the jungle for the grupos fortes. Capangas came with them to ride herd over the peons and get rid of the families of seringueiros and squatters that were living on the land being cleared. Occasionally there were killings of squatters or capangas when eviction was resisted.

The 40-year-old archbishop of Acre, Dom Moacyr Grechi, has been drawn so deeply into these conflicts over evictions that he has become chairman of the Land Commission of the National Council of Brazilian Bishops. "I was a friar before I became a bishop five years ago, and I never was especially involved in social and political questions," the lean, bespectacled churchman told me.

I am from southern Brazil, where I had not seen the kind of violence that goes on here. But people kept coming to me with stories of how they had been treated. Houses and crops have been burned. Families have been driven off the land at gunpoint by the capangas. Half of Amazônia is being burned away so a savage brand of capitalism can try its hand at raising cattle at government expense. It was a powerful chain of events that challenged my conscience and forced me to take decisions I never had expected to take. Millions of people in Brazil are without land, and they live in total insecurity. Until recently, the capanga was unknown here in Acre. Today they have become a kind of rural police. Beatings and deaths go unpunished. Here in Acre there are few legitimate land titles, no documentary chain of ownership, only judges and notaries to be bribed. Why does the government give loans and tax incentives to companies with no title for the land they buy?

Both the Brazilian and American frontiers have seen intense agrarian unrest. Both have been plagued by the violence of a large floating population, though the United States has seen little of the Brazilian brand of bloodshed over the possession of land. While subsistence farming has been practiced widely in both countries during the clearing of the forests, most North American settlers consolidated their landholdings rather quickly and moved into commercial agriculture. Agrarian unrest in the United States a century ago focused almost entirely on getting a larger share for the farmer of the market value of his product. The villains of the American farmers’ protests were not landlords and capangas, but eastern bankers and railroad magnates, whose high interest and freight rates prevented settlers from investing in new land and equipment and from transporting their grain economically. While land speculation has been rife on both the Brazilian and American frontiers, it was moderated in the United States by the availability of free 160-acre tracts under the Homestead Act of 1862. While developers and speculators tried to form huge estates on the American prairie a century ago, not unlike the fazendas being cleared today in Mato Grosso, Acre, and Pará, they failed because of a shortage of productive farmhands and heavy economic penalties for underutilization of land. According to Paul W. Gates, a leading historian of U.S. land policy:

Unlike Brazilian posseiros, American tenants and squatters could vote and serve on juries, which won them much better treatment at the hands of government. As in Brazil, American squatters were the vanguard of the frontier, settling their homesteads long before the arrival of lawyers, surveyors, and public administration. To protect their squatters’ rights on the public domain, early settlers in the American West formed Claim Clubs, a kind of local association that today almost certainly would be regarded as subversive by Brazil’s military regime. After traveling in the back country of Wisconsin in 1835, a Methodist preacher told how these Claim Clubs worked:

They had, in the absence of all other law, met and made a law for themselves... there was an understanding in the country, equivalent to a law of the land, that the settlers should sustain each other against the speculator, and no settler should bid on another’s land. If a speculator should bid on a settlers farm, he was knocked down and dragged out of the [land] office, and if the striker was prosecuted and fined, the settlers paid the expense by common consent among themselves. But before a fine could be assessed, the case must come before a jury, which of course must be selected from among the settlers.... These things being understood no speculator dare bid on a settlers land, and as no settler would bid on his neighbor, each man gets his land at [official] price, $1.25 pr. acre.

It is very revealing to compare the squatters’ Claim Clubs in the American West in the 1830s with the eviction of squatters around the same time in the hinterland of São Paulo State by the holders of new crown grants:

Today, a century and a half later, the Brazilian frontier is experiencing vastly greater demographic pressure on the wilderness, with no institutional arrangements for equitable distribution of its resources. The states of the Brazilian frontier show high levels of human fertility, equivalent to those during the settlement of Siberia, Australia, and the American West a century ago, a short-term response to the economic opportunity of mankind’s incursion into a new field of natural resources. The main engine of demographic pressure in Brazil’s new areas, however, is the agricultural mechanization that has displaced small farmers and peons in the more densely populated regions. Brazil’s military regime clearly prefers, and subsidizes, the formation of export-oriented cattle ranches in the northern and western states, in much the same way as Australia preferred huge sheep estates to small farms during her settlement period. The large volume of Brazilian government money being lavished on agrobusiness has weakened the already precarious situation of the squatter and small farmer, whose primitive farming techniques and lack of capital tend to limit productivity and hasten soil depletion, reinforcing the urge to move on. When they reach the frontier with all their possessions piled in a truck, they often have sold their last homesite, or have been evicted, making it impossible for them to turn back.

Unlike the American West, where the treeless prairies permitted quick and cheap surveying and the granting of clear titles to rectangular farming areas, the forests of the Brazilian frontier have made the topographer’s work dangerous and costly. Nearly all this vast area has remained un surveyed, because, until recently, the land was economically useless and showed no prospect of producing enough to compensate for the expense of sending a team of men into the mata for weeks or months at a time. In the confused and bloody history of the settlement of the Brazilian sertão, rival claims to the same land were often settled by violence rather than by reference to ambiguous statutes or to boundaries that were never drawn. Indeed, usurpation has been deeply ingrained into frontier culture. In 1850 a speaker in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies explained that "the task of defending a great expanse, and defending it without any title," induced would-be landlords to "make use of lesser men, the so-called capangas, and with them they intimidate and commit violence in order to usurp lands or defend lands already usurped.... This really has been the principal cause of the demoralization of people in the interior, the lack of security that everyone experiences there."

Under today’s pressures for settlement in Amazônia, especially in traditional rubber-producing regions such as Rondônia, the problem of ascertaining legal rights to land has become much more volatile and complex. A 1964 law, passed shortly after the seizure of power by the present military regime, says posseiros cannot be evicted summarily if they live and work on a piece of land for at least a year. These squatters’ rights, however, are often swept aside by landlords; indeed, the law itself gives the landlord a strong incentive toward violence in order to avoid long and costly judicial procedures to get rid of posseiros. On the other hand, the legal rights of landlords in Rondônia are almost as precarious as those of squatters. The relatively few who cannot support their land claims with authentic documents cannot produce clear title deeds but only a chain of legal possession based on "concessions" and "exploitation rights" granted by state governments to rubber barons at the beginning of the century. These rubber concessions, however, were extremely elastic, since possession was defined by force and real economic power lay in controlling jungle rivers and the junctions of rivers, the only routes by which rubber could be exported and supplies brought to the seringueiros’ isolated huts. Land rights in the jungle during the rubber boom resembled those of the cattle industry on the Great Plains of the United States before the introduction of barbed-wire fencing in the 1880s. Until then, "the land had no value, the grass was free, the water [to sustain cattle] belonged to the first corner," with cattle empires formed through control of river access, in the same way as rubber empires were formed in Amazônia. After the collapse of the rubber boom, many of these seringais were abandoned, just as the influence of the federal government was expanding. Today the federal government has prior ownership rights to all land within 150 kilometers of Brazil’s borders and within 100 kilometers on both sides of all planned and existing federal highways. In Rondônia, the control of federal lands has been assigned in INCRA, laying claim to more than 60 million acres, mainly for colonization schemes that threaten to be overwhelmed by the pressures of private interests seeking large tracts of cheap jungle land and of tens of thousands of new posseiros moving into Rondônia each year.

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